barbarism brought about by National Socialism shows, Odysseus' cunning [List], the origin of Western ratio, has not been able to overcome humanity's original fear of the other. The Jew is the other, the stranger; the one who is human and subhuman at once. Whereas Odysseus' cunning consists in the attempt to appease otherness via a mimetic act by becoming like it - Odysseus offers the Cyclops human blood to drink, sleeps with Circe, and listens to the Sirens - Fascism, through projection, makes the other like itself:

If mimesis makes itself like the surrounding world, so false projection makes the surrounding world like itself. If for the former the exterior is the model which the interior has to approximate [sich anschmiegen], if for it the stranger becomes familiar, the latter transforms the tense inside ready to snap into exteriority and stamps even the familiar as the enemy. ³⁶

Western reason, which originates in the mimetic act to master otherness by becoming like it, culminates in an act of projection which, via the technology of death, succeeds in making otherness disappear. '"Ratio" which suppresses mimesis is not simply its opposite; it itself is mimesis - unto death'. ³⁷

In one of the notes appended to the text, 'The Interest in the Body', Adorno and Horkheimer write:

beneath the familiar history of Europe runs another, subterranean one. It consists of the fate of those human instincts and passions repressed and displaced by civilization. From the perspective of the fascist present, in which what was hidden emerged to light, manifest history appears along with its darker side, omitted both by the legends of the national state no less than by their progressive criticisms. ³⁸

This interest in the subterranean history of Western civilization is no doubt the guiding methodological principle for the subterranean history of Western reason which the main body of the text unfolds. The story of Odysseus and that of the Holocaust, the myth which is Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment which become mythology are milestones of Western history: the genesis of civilization and its transformation into barbarism.

Yet Adorno's and Horkheimer's relentless pessimism, their expressed sympathy for the 'dark writers of the bourgeoisie' - Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Mandeville - and for its nihilistic critics - Nietzsche and de Sade - cannot be explained by the darkness of human history at that point in time alone. As they themselves acknowledge in their 1969 Preface: 'We no longer hold unto everything that had been said in this book. This would be incompatible with a theory which ascribes to truth

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