This theory paradigm, known as 'the critique of instrumental reason', leads to a radical alteration of the procedures of immanent and defetishizing critique, while the third function of a critical theory namely, crisis diagnosis - disappears.

The text in which this new paradigm of critical theory is most explicitly developed, and which contains in nuce much of the theoretical position of the Frankfurt School after World War II, is Dialectic of Enlightenment. The Dialectic of Enlightenment is an elusive text: ³² a substantial part of it was composed from notes taken by Gretel Adorno during discussions between Adorno and Horkheimer. Completed in 1944, it was published three years later in Amsterdam and reissued in Germany in 1969. More than half the text consists of an exposition of the concept of the Enlightenment, with two Excursuses, one authored by Adorno on the Odyssey and the other authored by Horkheimer, on the Enlightenment and Morality. ³³

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In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer maintain that the promise of the Enlightenment to free man from his selfincurred tutelage cannot be attained via reason that is a mere instrument of self-preservation: 'The worldwide domination of nature turns against the thinking subject himself; nothing remains of him but this eternally self-identical "I think" that should accompany all my representations., ³⁴ In order to ground this thesis, they investigate the psychic archaeology of the self. The story of Odysseus discloses for them the dark spot in the constitution of Western subjectivity: the fear of the self from the 'other' - which they identify with nature - is overcome in the course of civilization by the domination of the other. Since, however, the other is not completely alien, but the self as nature is also other to itself, the domination of nature can only signify self-domination. The Homeric self, who distinguishes between the dark forces of nature and civilization, expresses the original fear of humanity in being absorbed by otherness. Myth, relating how the hero constitutes his identity by repressing the manifoldness of nature, also expresses the obverse side of this story. Humanity pays for overcoming the fear of the other by internalizing the victim. Odysseus escapes the call of the Sirens only by subjecting himself willingly to their torturing charm. The act of sacrifice repeatedly enacts the identity of humans with the darker forces of nature, in order to allow them to purge the nature within humanity itself. ³⁵ Yet as the regression from culture to

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