"On Epic Naïveté”

“On Epic Naïveté” (1943) is a short but dizzying fragment from Adorno’s “Excursus I: Odysseus, or Myth and Enlightenment” that never found its way into the final version of The Dialectic of Enlightenment.1The fragment, a self-contained essay, is continuous with the larger work’s critique of Enlightenment reasoning but is more focused in its approach, in addition to showcasing a hauntingly beautiful reading of epic imagery. In its methodological gambit, the essay resembles a piece of classical philology, though in the way it draws philosophical conclusions based on close readings and on highly focused Ansatzpünkte it more closely resembles Erich Auerbach’s critical reading of Homer from the year before, “Odysseus’ Scar.”2 Perhaps a still closer parallel stylistically speaking would be the “parody of the philological method” that Adorno detects in Walter Benjamin’s “allegorical” philosophical writing.