of existence, for direct unification with circumambient nature, with the earth and mud. Of all the senses, that of smell—which is attracted without objectifying— bears closest witness to the urge to lose oneself in and become ‘the other.’ ” Marcel Proust could not have said it better. 65 If one were to use a similar procedure in an attempt to examine Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s struggle with their own Jewishness, the most appropriate symptom would probably be their analysis of Homer’s Odyssey , which they, revealingly (and apparently without the benefit of reading Ulysses ), considered to be the foundational story of the modern self, “the schema of modern mathematics,” the Genesis of the all-enslaving Enlightenment. Odysseus, they claim, is “the prototype of the bourgeois individual” who forever betrays himself by tricking others. Physically weaker than the world he confronts, he “calculates his own sacrifice” and comes to embody deception “elevated to self-consciousness.” The hero of “sobriety and common sense” as the highest and final stage of mythological cunning, he restrains himself “merely to confirm that the title of hero is only gained at the price of the abasement and mortification of the instinct for complete, universal, and undivided happiness.” “Mutilated” by his own artifice, he pursues his “atomistic interest” in “absolute solitude” and “radical alienation,” with nothing but the myth of exile and family warmth to keep him afloat. In other words, he has a pronounced “Semitic element”—especially because “the behavior of Odysseus the wanderer is reminiscent of that of the casual barterer” who relies on ratio in order to vanquish “the hitherto dominant traditional form of economy.” 66 The wily solitary is already homo oeconomicus , for whom all reasonable things are alike; hence the Odyssey is already a Robinsonade . Both Odysseus and Crusoe, the two shipwrecked mariners, make their weakness (that of the individual who parts from the collectivity) their social strength. . . . Their impotence in regard to nature already acts as an ideology to advance their social hegemony. Odysseus’ defenselessness against the breakers is of the same stamp as the traveler’s justification of his enrichment at the expense of the aboriginal savage. 67 Odysseus the clever barterer is thus the prototype of “the irrationalism of totalitarian capitalism, whose way of satisfying needs has an objectified form determined by domination which makes the satisfaction of needs impossible and tends toward the extermination of mankind.” Marx and Freud meet Sombart (again). The theorists of “bourgeois self-hatred” and capitalist domination appear