Summary of Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (Cultural Memory in the Present)

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#1 The Odyssey is a prime example of the intertwinement of myth and rational labor. It illustrates the dialectic of enlightenment, as it shows clear links to myth, but it also contradicts those myths. The epic creates a universality of language, but it also disintegrates the hierarchical order of society.

#2 The German late-Romantic interpretation of antiquity, based on the early writings of Nietzsche, recognized the element of bourgeois enlightenment in Homer. However, they saw this element as both positive and negative, and tried to liquidate it.

#3 The most prominent and therefore the most impotent of the esoteric apologists of German heavy industry, Rudolf Borchardt, prematurely breaks off his analysis in the service of repressive ideology. He fails to recognize that the primal powers he extols themselves represent a stage of enlightenment.

#4 The Odyssey is closer in form to the picaresque novel. The hero’s peregrinations from Troy to Ithaca trace the path of the self through myths, a self that is infinitely weak compared to the force of nature and still in the process of formation as self-consciousness.

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