to be the grave diggers of their fathers’ weakness and cunning. 68 But that is not all. Enter the Nazis as man-eating Cyclopes, and Odysseus, “who calls himself Nobody for his own sake and manipulates approximation to the state of nature as a means of mastering nature, falls victim to hubris .” Unable to stop talking, he invites death by tauntingly revealing his true identity to the blind monster and his wrathful divine protector. That is the dialectic of eloquence. From antiquity to fascism, Homer has been accused of prating both through his heroes’ mouths and in the narrative interpolations. Prophetically, however, Ionian Homer showed his superiority to the Spartans of past and present by picturing the fate which the cunning man—the middleman—calls down upon himself by his words. Speech, though it deludes physical force, is incapable of restraint. . . . Too much talking allows force and injustice to prevail as the actual principle, and therefore prompts those who are to be feared always to commit the very action that is feared. The mythic compulsiveness of the word in prehistory is perpetuated in the disaster which the enlightened world draws down upon itself. Udeis [Nobody], who compulsively acknowledges himself to be Odysseus, already bears the characteristics of the Jew who, fearing death, still presumes on the superiority which originates in the fear of death; revenge on the middleman occurs not only at the end of bourgeois society, but—as the negative utopia to which every form of coercive power always tends—at its beginning. 69 It may not be entirely clear how the loquacious progenitors of “totalitarian capitalism” bring about their own destruction; how deserved—considering their tendency “toward the extermination of mankind”—that destruction may be; or where the modern Cyclopes not blinded by Odyssean reason can possibly come from. But perhaps this was never meant to be history, anthropology, or even moral philosophy. Perhaps this was self-critical theory. Perhaps this was their way of saying, with Brenner, that their function was “to recognize and admit,” through speech incapable of restraint, the “meanness” of their ancestors “since the beginning of history to the present day, and the faults in [their] character, and then to rise and start all over again.” They did claim to hope, after all, that “the Jewish question would prove in fact to be the turning point of history. By overcoming that sickness of the mind which thrives on the ground of self- assertion untainted by reflective thought, mankind would develop from a set of opposing races to the species which, even as nature, is more than mere nature.” 70