Oedipus, Odysseus, Catastrophe
How can Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of Enlightenment help us think about climate change?
Freud annuls a central delusion of bourgeois ideology, the distinction of private and public, when he insists that 'from the very first individual psychology […] is at the same time social psychology' (GPE, 627). The psychoanalytic subject is not a sealed system, an autonomous citadel, upon which an external reality simply acts; the Other — the social — is always already in our heads, whether as 'model', ‘object’, 'helper' or ‘opponent’ (GPE, 627). In Freudian psychoanalysis, the terror and the rage of the Oedipal drama is the ‘minimal script’ (in Mladen Dolar’s words) of the negotiation that the psyche must do with the social order in which it is constitutively entangled (FP, 17). It is the patriarchal father who torturously dissolves the child's Oedipal desire for their mother and forces this ‘original attachment’ of both sexes to ‘succumb to repression’, dragging this drama — the primordial, undeclared war that the patriarchal family wages against its offspring — towards its painful close (DEC, 661). This agony petrifies the social order within the child by instituting the ravenous, compulsive super-ego inside their psyche. This ‘heir’ of Oedipus, as the mental instantiation of social power, completes the turbulent psychical topography posited by mature Freudianism, the super-ego, ego and id doomed to an endless storm of conflict and discord (EI, 638).
Freud, crucially, also asserts that masculinity and femininity, as well as socially sanctioned adult sexualities, are the residues of this pain. Indeed, the Oedipal father institutes the rigid distinctions that exist between men and women — or rather, those that become men and women — within the confines of the social order by brutally repressing polymorphous bisexuality. This perverse pleasure before any submission to civilisational taboos constitutes the sexes' infantile unity. However, the normality imposed by the repression of the Oedipus complex, as a function of the paternal law, is fundamentally precarious. Freudian psychoanalysis is, at its essence, a painstaking intervention in a symbolic economy that extends from speech to the antecedent systems of signification generally known as the body, the dream, the fantasy and the symptom — the psychoanalytic revolution is the restoration of the dignity of language to them all. These formations are a distorted, sometimes excruciating, surface geography of the buried unconscious — the repressed wishes of the ‘little human animal’, in Althusser’s fine phrase, that the Oedipal father forcibly humanises as either a masculine or feminine subject (FM, 163).
As Jacqueline Rose emphasises, this discourse of the unconscious — precisely as a rupture, a gap, in the psychic life traumatically divided by the brute force of repression — produces a dogged ‘resistance to identity’ (FD, 91). The articulations of the unconscious (Rose points to dreams, slips and marginalised ‘forms of sexual pleasure’ in particular) inescapably haunt masculinity and femininity alike, and so expose their radical fragility (FD, 90-91). Oedipus as the agonising positioning of men and women within the social order is thus, in a very profound way, a failure — this subversive return of the repressed does not occur merely in isolated cases, but universally, everywhere. For me, then, the enduring political value of Freud’s Oedipal narrative is that it — breaking from a metaphysics of essence — recasts gender (and sexuality) as the ultimately brittle results of the child’s traversal of a ‘long and torturous path’ (as Juliet Mitchell says), as indissolubly bound up with the incorporation of the violence of the patriarchial social order within them (PF, 17, 28). This is a sharp political edge of Freudian psychoanalysis, despite the questionable priority that the penis and castration have in its fundamental story, either as repressive threat or mortifying discovery.1
But Deleuze and Guattari — those partisans of schizoanalysis — scorched Freudianism's theoretical and therapeutic commitment to the Oedipal matrix in their fiery Anti-Oedipus, a book published in the aftermath of the failed May 1968 student and worker uprising in Gaullist France. In this text, Deleuze-Guattari charge that the high priests of psychoanalysis — for the schizoanalysts, the successors to Nietzsche’s ascetic priests; Anti-Oedipus, Antichrist — enforce desire’s confinement, its repressive territorialisation, within the ‘holy triangle’ of ‘daddy-mommy-me’ (AO, 51, 55).2 Deleuze and Guattari are careful to emphasise, however, that they are not claiming that Freud, or psychoanalysis, somehow invented the Oedipus complex — which ‘would be' nothing less than ‘absurd’ (AO, 121). Instead, Deleuze-Guattari assert that it was the patriarchal nuclear family, the social institution to which the ‘psychical repression’ of the capitalist mode of production is entrusted, that channelled the flows of desire into the libidinal cage whose name is Oedipus, and so the suffering ‘subjects of psychoanalysis arrive Oedipalised’ and passionately, desperately clamour for it as soon as they collapse onto the couch, tears streaming down their faces (AO, 121). The psychoanalytic priest, who merely represents or stages this libidinal entrapment, happily obliges, and thereby ‘legislates’ and ‘reinforces’ the collapse of desire and subjectivity into the Oedipal drama, the inner struggle that structures the patriarchal-capitalist family cell (AO, 121).
Should the patient attempt to emancipate themselves from the libidinal shackles of Oedipus, psychoanalysts have the numbers for the repressive arms of the state in their phonebooks. The patient is thus condemned by the psychoanalytic priest that purports to cure them, or if necessary ‘the cop or the asylum’ that are the psychoanalyst’s blunt cudgels, ‘to always respond daddy-mommy and to always consume daddy-mommy’ (AO, 81, 89, 95, 120). For Deleuze and Guattari, the ultimate political effect of this is that the psychoanalyst trains their patient — by reinscribing Oedipal repression, the ‘yoke of mommy-daddy’, within them — for domination by other social forces, to make them fight for, even love, this domination — fascism being ‘the extreme consequence’ (Dolar again) (AO, 50; FP, 23). Reich’s interrogation of the German masses’ enthusiasm for Nazi politics in the Mass Psychology of Fascism — a book whose basic conceit is that the ‘authoritarian family' of the Oedipus complex prepared the German masses for a raving Führer and a rampaging SS — thus anticipates the fundamental political intervention of Anti-Oedipus (MPF, 30).3
However, decades before Deleuze and Guattari's acidic polemic against the high priesthood of psychoanalysis and their attack upon its repressive recodification of Oedipalised desire, there was Oedipus’ displacement in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. This textual movement facilitates Adorno-Horkheimer's own reckoning with fascism, an alternative to the account developed in Deleuze-Guattari (and their predecessor Reich). Adorno and Horkheimer lived through the bloody failure of revolution in their native Germany, and were witnesses to what filled the void of this failure — the flaming torches, red banners and smashed windows, the pitiless wars and gas chambers. For Adorno and Horkheimer, Marxist political economy — as traditionally conceived — was simply not up to the task of explaining why a world that had been promised an end to bondage and terror by Enlightenment instead received Auschwitz (and, one might add, Hiroshima).
As exiles in the United States of the culture industries, Adorno-Horkheimer slide from tragedy to epic in their bid to develop a more adequate understanding of what had happened, why ‘the fully Enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant’ (DE, 2). Homer’s The Odyssey is civilisation’s ‘basic text’ for Adorno and Horkheimer, not Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex — the case for Freud as early as 1897, as his famous letter to Wilhelm Fliess testifies; Freud's conception of Oedipus only achieved its theoretical maturity in Infantile Genital Organisation (1923) and Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (1924) (DE, 57). In quite decisive senses, Odysseus and Oedipus are the legends, the literary achievements, which dramatically articulate the theoretical universes of Adorno-Horkheimer and Freud. (Justin Clemens, in the Badiousian register of his Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy, profiles psychoanalysis as the anti-philosophical ‘interruption’ of science with literature (PA, 13).)
Adorno and Horkheimer maintain that Odysseus’ perilous return to his native Ithaca — the Greek campaign against Troy having concluded, the city massacred and plundered — dramatises man’s primordial struggle with the natural world; the mythical antagonists that confront him are reinterpreted into incarnations of outer nature. Adorno and Horkheimer cast Enlightenment as the absolutely ancient ‘world-historical project of the human species’ (Albrecht Wellmer’s phrase) to liberate itself from fear of and enslavement by an overwhelmingly powerful outer nature (CTS, 132). Enlightenment, then, is not simply the ideology of the bourgeoisie that, in temporary alliance with the nascent proletariat, overthrew monarchical feudalism on both sides of the Atlantic — and founded the imperialisms that to this day condemn the wretched of the Earth to poverty and death, those languishing on the other side of patrol boat and barbed wire. The Odyssey is therefore an expression, an articulation, of Enlightenment’s fundamental core.
To characterise Odysseus’ triumph over his foes, the victory of Enlightenment over nature, Adorno-Horkheimer supplant the Marx that they assess to be inadequate with one of their dark thinkers of the bourgeoisie, Nietzsche. Indeed, the Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil and Twilight of the Idols — not the Marx of Capital — is the really decisive point of reference; as Gillian Rose remarks, Dialectic of Enlightenment derives primarily ‘from an interpretation’ of Nietzsche (and not Weber) (MS, 23). As is well-known, Nietzsche asserts that absolutely nothing corresponds to the disguised fictions, the useful errors hardened into truths, of concepts, logic and numbers, that these are instruments to master a roiling chaos, to quell the animal anxiety that this disorder provokes (BGE, 33-34; GS, 219; WP, 13, 280, 284). Rewriting this Nietzschean contention, Adorno and Horkheimer portray Enlightenment — qua world-historical project, not class ideology — as a subsumption of the whole of outer nature into a universal identity through a process of conceptual abstraction, effacing everything which resists the dead sameness of the concept. The fundamental consequence of this process is ‘that nothing may be identical with itself’, that everything be, along with everything else, infinitely repeatable and exchangeable (DE, 12). The world thereby becomes a manipulable fabric of 'conceptual mummies' (to use the appropriate Nietzschean language) — nature is reduced to a simple matter of technical administration, a ‘substratum of dominion’ towards which man ‘behaves [like] a dictator [does] towards other men’ (TI, 45; DE, 9). And so, the animal fear of the natural world, as well as man's enslavement by it, is overcome.
For Adorno-Horkheimer, the ‘cunning’ of Odysseus, his achievement of rational-technical control over the natural world which threatens to engulf and extinguish him, consists in calculated sacrifices of his animal existence, exchanges he makes with his mythical foes, the embodiments of nature (DE, 50). In this way, Homer’s The Odyssey illustrates that the world-historical project of Enlightenment, the fundamental story of the West, is inextricable from the debasement and mortification of inner nature, instinctual life; this ‘substance […] is dominated, suppressed and dissolved’ — ultimately, forgotten (DE, 54). To translate this back into the Nietzschean terms with which Adorno and Horkheimer represent Enlightenment, the imperialism of conceptual identity simultaneously reaches into inner nature; Enlightenment is a 'mimesis unto death', ultimately making us like the natural world we administer with our technology — to conceptually 'kill' and 'stuff' (Nietzsche’s fitting words) the outer world is, necessarily, to do the same to oneself (DE, 55; TI, 45).
Whereas for Freudian psychoanalysis the torturous Oedipal drama is the decisive event of the child's psychic and sexual life, Adorno-Horkmeimer contend that the ‘fearful things’ Odysseus does to himself ‘recur in every childhood’ (DE, 33). Adorno and Horkheimer even genealogically index subjectivity itself to this instinctual violence, the 'introversion of sacrifice' that is civilisation’s — and the individual’s — history (DE, 55). On this point, Adorno-Horkmeimer remix — as an extension of their Nietzschean narrative of Enlightenment — Freud’s ambivalent assessment of civilisation as material progress and physical security at the cost of immiserating renunciation of satisfaction of the aggressive and sexual drives, his specification of the fundamentally antagonistic relationship that the individual has with social reality (CD, 33-34, 51).4 For Adorno and Horkheimer, then, the ‘self’, which is doomed to painfully resist the rapture of collapse into the nature from which it is wrenched, is the precarious result of Enlightenment (DE, 33). Here, Adorno and Horkheimer refer to Odysseus’ command that his oarsmen — whose ears are plugged with wax — lash him to the mast of his ship as it is in rowed past the symphony of Sirens. The Sirens’ beautiful song promises to Odysseus the truly extravagant jouissance of self-annihilation; the tight binds digging, slicing into his skin, his flesh, exemplify the agony of self-preservation.5
As many commentators have already remarked, such as Joel Whitebook in Perversion and Utopia (Amy Allen has an alternative view in Critique on the Couch), Adorno and Horkheimer’s genealogical account of subjectivity seems to impose this fundamental aporia: the alternative of a subject or self whose inner nature has been mutilated by identity, or a Dionysian drowning into outer nature. What is crucial, however, is that the mediation of inner nature by history, the hardening of the instincts into a rigid, deadened form, explains for Adorno and Horkheimer the secret warping of Enlightenment in the direction of gas chamber (and atom bomb), why its gleaming promises of liberation and sovereignty are monstrously false. The ossification of the nature within us, the birth of subjectivity Odysseus models, is the ‘nucleus’ or ‘germ cell’ of the brutal enthronement of ‘means as ends’, mastery for its own sake; ‘the telos of the outward control of nature [and] the telos of man’s own life is distorted and befogged’ by a dead inner nature — instincts for human progress and freedom are degraded and discarded (DE, 54-55). This mortified instinctual life is, as Adorno remarks in his Minima Moralia, the fundamental pathology of the human being — the supposed ‘health [which] resembles the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating’, the final twitches of bodies with holes through their heads (MM, 59).
This 'health unto death', having colonised the deepest abysses of the individual, is why domination over external nature prefigures, and is actually continuous with, domination in social relations (MM, 62-63). As Adorno and Horkheimer declare, this domination is what men necessarily ‘learn from’ their despotism over the natural world — the rational-technical ‘organ of domination’ that is the Enlightenment murderously turns against the subject it promised to free (DE, 8, 44). If, in Marx, capitalism contains or creates within itself a particular positive dialectic — namely, its self-negating preparation for emancipatory socialist transformation — Adorno and Horkheimer locate a cataclysmically negative dialectic in Enlightenment as world-historical process. For Adorno and Horkheimer, Nietzsche, with his malevolent glorification of ‘the powerful and their cruelty’, saw in human history what Marx did not — Nietzsche’s maliciousness gives expression to the unity of domination and Enlightenment, demystifies and exposes the ammoral and genocidal inner solidarity ‘of power and reason’; this is Nietzsche’s thoroughly paradoxical tenderness and compassion (DE, 97, 119). Ultimately, the internal collapse of the basic project of humanity into pure terror and universal enslavement can be thought of as the supreme revenge of a charred inner nature, with the higher aims of progress and freedom burned out of it in the very formation of the subject, of the ego. Adorno and Horkheimer, in the end, posit a line from Odysseus to Hitler: the extermination camp is the apocalyptic apotheosis of domination as an end in itself — the ash that blackened the skies of Nazi-occupied Europe was the supreme testament to Enlightenment’s self-destruction.6
But the whole ‘world of torture’ that Adorno took Auschwitz to epitomise outlived the storming of Berlin; for Adorno, the ‘horrifying reports’ of the United States’ imperialist massacre in Vietnam testified to this — as did, more recently, those from Iraq (M, 101). We still live on a terrestrial hell where (in Adorno’s words) ‘there are far worse things to fear than death’ — but now it is being choked and boiled to death by climate change (MM, 38). The Great Barrier Reef is becoming a pale corpse; loggers and fascists are eating away at the Amazonian Rainforest; crops in Africa and Asia are turning to sand; and so on. We, constitutively mutilated subjects, are destroying the planet, the nature from which we arose, to endlessly perpetuate the order of global capitalism — ‘the greatest force for exploitation that has ever existed’, as A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens observe (WE, 4-5). This extreme form of domination, in the era of ecological collapse, is the revenge of scorched nature onto complete self-immolation. Before long, the corpses of an Enlightened humanity will not even fertilise the Earth, for nothing green will grow — only an ashy, blank stone, silently being dragged around a lonely star, will remain.
Now, in my experience, a lot of the Australian climate movement (I presume it is similar in the U.S. and its other vassals) is excessively detained in a rhetorico-political concern with belief in the science — as if the executive committee of Australian capitalism simply needs to be brought into contact with reputable scientific studies. In the first instance, it is the fact that the state is (as Marxism insists) a perverted creature of the bourgeoise — rather than mere scientific ignorance — that explains the murderous inadequacy of Australia’s climate policy; everything else is secondary to this brute fact. But nonetheless, I want to ask whether staving off the worst of ecological collapse could not be further energised by a recovery of Adorno and Horkheimer’s fundamental political insight that the repression and effacement of inner nature occurs simultaneously with the destructive domination of outer nature. The critical theorists' overthrow of Oedipus with Odysseus ultimately demonstrates that, by subjecting the external environment to ourselves, the human species is destined for an ultimate catastrophe, its utter annihilation. Climate collapse, the final destruction of a vengeful nature, is the eclipse, the suicide of a fully Enlightened humanity — there is absolutely no metaphor here. The political memory of the nature within us — for Adorno-Horkheimer, this is the condition of a new concept of Enlightenment (to which they remain stubbornly committed) that would be genuinely emancipatory, that has substantive aims aside from perpetual domination — may be a powerful resource in the fight against climate change and the fascism it will bring, as well as that which is already here, in the toxifying, infectious air we breathe, in the pink matter encased by the bone of our skulls.
Thanks to Serene Richards for looking over this prior to publication. The (sort of) sequel of this article is my Athens to Auschwitz.
Not to mention the fact that, for many, all Oedipus (and, by extension, Freud and psychoanalysis) means is fuck mummy, kill daddy.
In Organs without Bodies, Žižek strikingly proposes that the Oedipus complex as envisioned by Freudian psychoanalysis — though particularly in Lacan’s rerendering — is ultimately the ‘exact opposite’ of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘flat, totally homogenous image’ of it as the incarceration of desire in the holy triangle of daddy-mummy-me (OWB, 63, 74). Indeed, Žižek takes Freud and Lacan’s Oedipus to name, precisely as the ‘symbolic castration’ which simultaneously tears the child from psychic oneness with the maternal figure and leaves a mortified young body in its wake, the traumatic dislocation of desire into the wider social field, a shattering deterritorialisation that constitutes desire inside language — or, more exactly, the differences and the spaces from which linguistic meaning derives (per de Saussure) (OWB, 74). Of course, Lacan maintains that these gaps constitute the fundamentally intersubjective site of the unconscious. It is not simply, therefore, monstrous spectres lurking deep inside the subject’s head, forbidden, lustful and murderous thoughts about parents; Lacan's famous slogan, the unconscious is structured like a language, articulates the exteriority of the unconscious to the individual human being.
Recall Foucault’s own political assessment of psychoanalysis as an institution in History of Sexuality 1: there, he reduces it to a tentacle of biopolitical domination; on the Foucauldian picture, the psychoanalyst’s discursive exhortation to confess one's sex is tactically aligned with the wider political apparatus of sexuality. The interesting point, of course, is that Foucault’s genealogy aims to marginalise, rather than totally eliminate, the conceptual category of repression at work in Deleuze-Guattari (and Reich, who is explicitly critiqued by Foucault).
For Adorno (and Marcuse, who develops an entire political project on this basis), the refusal to dissolve this ‘contradiction’ was Freud’s crowning theoretical achievement, the radical insight of this ‘bourgeois thinker’ (as Russell Jacoby quotes) (SA, 27-28). This, I think, is another political merit of Freudianism, in addition to its anti-metaphysical conception of gender and sexuality. Conversely, actually existing psychoanalytic therapy, as the empire of the ego-psychologists Lacan would later articulate his return to Freud against, is savagely denounced by Adorno (and, again, Marcuse) for repressively promoting ‘adaptation’ to an unfree society — for imposing its health unto death (MM, 58, 63-64). The Frankfurt School thus introduces a useful distinction between psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytic therapy, which can potentially help us in assessing the virulent critiques of psychoanalysis as a political institution prosecuted by Deleuze-Guattari and Foucault.
Dolar emphasises in A Voice and Nothing More that Adorno-Horkheimer’s presentation of Odysseus’ struggle against the Sirens also functions as the ‘very model’ for the division of labour, art and work, in capitalist society (VNM, 171). The (proletarian) oarsmen are excluded from an ecstatic enjoyment of the Sirens’ song by the wax stuffed into their ears; (bourgeois) Odysseus, by contrast, is enraptured by an ultimate aesthetic experience as the lashes slice into his bound body. Art exists beyond the brutal ‘economy of work and survival’ to which the oarsmen are condemned, and so is doomed to a fundamental political ‘powerlessness’ (VNM, 171).
Adorno and Horkheimer do clarify that a particular mutation in the introverted sacrifice that is dialectically bound up with the whole of civilisational history intervenes in the preparation of this auto-annihilation of Enlightenment. Their fundamental formula for anti-Semitism is that the mutilated inner nature from which subjectivity arises is ‘projected’ onto the Jews, who are seen as the very incarnations of difference and non-identity; this is the basis of the anti-Semite’s murderous rage (DE, 187-88). The ‘deeply imprinted schema’ of anti-Semitism is therefore not reducible to its directly economic or religious genealogies and functions — though Adorno and Horkheimer do, in recognition of their (if epiphenomenal) reality, profile these (DE, 171).