Abstract

This essay stages a dialectical confrontation between Adorno–Horkheimer on one hand and Benjamin–Badiou on the other against the background of the former's reductive portrait of Ulysses in Dialectic of the Enlightenment, which depicts him as a proto-bourgeois archetype of profit-seeking and acquisitive ethos. In sharp contrast, Walter Benjamin's allegorical materialism foregrounds, by dialectical illumination, hieroglyphic traces of Homeric virtues. These, I argue, are sustained and further amplified by Alain Badiou's topological ethics and loop-politics.