In the two “excurses” on The Odyssey and the Marquis de Sade, Horkheimer and Adorno replace conventional philosophical exposition with provocative interpretations of literary works. This rhetorical strategy is deliberately unsettling: By connecting Homer to capitalism and Kant to de Sade, the authors challenge familiar distinctions between civilization and barbarism, morality and domination. The structural parallel dismantles the liberal assumption that reason inherently fosters morality, suggesting instead that pure rationality is readily co-opted by totalitarian systems that treat human beings as raw material for domination.

The Odysseus excursus develops the theme of How Enlightenment Reverts to Myth through allegory. The authors present the epic’s protagonist Odysseus as the prototype of the bourgeois individual, demonstrating how early subjectivity is forged through a calculated renunciation of nature. Rather than battling mythical forces with physical prowess, Odysseus relies on cunning and self-denial to navigate encounters with figures such as the Lotus-eaters, forcing his crew away from the temptation of narcotic oblivion in his quest to make progress. These calculated sacrifices illustrate that the unified self does not exist prior to its struggles but is consolidated through a rigid resistance to instinct and natural dissolution. By suppressing his own immediate desires, Odysseus survives and asserts dominance over his environment by becoming a man with “a heart in [his] breast which nothing enchants” (56). Horkheimer and Adorno thus reinterpret the apparent triumph of reason as a form of self-mutilation, reinforcing The Corrosive Effect of Instrumental Reason and Domination. This dynamic establishes the foundational argument regarding the dialectic of Enlightenment: The very process of mastering nature requires the suppression of human nature.

The episodes with mythical monsters further allegorize the transition from mythical thought to instrumental reason through the structural evolution of language. When Odysseus tricks the Cyclops Polyphemus by naming himself “Nobody,” he exploits the gap between a word’s literal designation and its intention. This separation anticipates nominalism, the view that universal concepts are names rather than independently existing realities. Odysseus’s stratagem transforms language from a magical invocation, where word and object are identical, into a formalized tool for manipulation. By fulfilling the letter of the mythical contract while subverting its spirit, he reduces natural powers to manageable, calculable entities. This highlights how enlightened rationality neutralizes the terror of the mythic world, paving the way for a formalized, scientific worldview where language functions merely to categorize and exploit raw material for the sake of self-preservation.

The authors’ interpretation of the Sirens episode gives their Homeric argument a social and economic dimension. Bound to his ship’s mast, Odysseus’s calculated survival strategy represents the foundational separation of art from labor. He experiences the beauty of the Sirens’ song without being able to act upon it, while his crew must row in deaf obedience with wax plugging their ears. Horkheimer and Adorno turn the scene into an image of the capitalist division of labor: The workers are denied sensory experience to ensure uninterrupted productivity, while the manager or owner experiences beauty without being able to participate in it. This interpretation demonstrates how domination impoverishes the dominator as well as the dominated. Both classes are damaged, although not equally. By neutralizing art into powerless contemplation and reducing labor to unreflective compulsion, the allegory anticipates the text’s broader critique of The Role of the Culture Industry in Mass Deception, where aesthetic experience is divorced from freedom and truth.

The second excursus radicalizes this critique by aligning Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy with the libertine writings of the Marquis de Sade to expose the ethical void at the core of Enlightenment thought. The authors note that both Kant’s categorical imperative and de Sade’s character Juliette demand strict apathy toward emotion and the mastery of inclinations. Juliette applies Kantian reason efficiently but without empathy or compassion, exposing the inherent danger of instrumental reason. Because Enlightenment reason seeks only systemic unity and self-preservation, it remains indifferent to substantive moral goals. Once rationality is stripped of objective values, the highly organized sexual violence in de Sade’s work functions as a logical extension of Kantian schematism, where individuals are reduced to interchangeable parts within a machinic system. 

The text bridges the archaic and modern eras by locating the systematic oppression of women and minorities within reason’s inherent hostility toward unmastered nature. In The Odyssey, female figures are bifurcated into the controlled domesticity of Penelope and the conquered instinctual threat of Circe, whose power is reduced to contractual exchange. In de Sade’s novels and Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, this patriarchal subjugation mutates into an explicit ideology wherein the strong hold a natural right to injure the weak. The authors argue that women and marginalized groups, such as Jews, face violent persecution because their historical defenselessness visibly reminds the powerful of the nature they themselves had to repress. By connecting ancient patriarchal exchanges to modern fascist ideologies, the analysis demonstrates how civilization’s drive to domesticate the natural world inevitably produces systemic violence.

The aesthetic distance employed in Homer’s narration of violence serves as a final metric for the coldness of enlightened rationality. The impersonal description of the maidservants’ execution in The Odyssey describes the women in terms of physical objects. Yet Homer’s observation that the women’s feet kicked out “not for very long” simultaneously forces awareness of the victims’ suffering (61). De Sade’s Juliette similarly approaches atrocities with a clinical, unillusioned calmness. The aesthetic composure of the epic and the logical precision of the libertine both reflect a systemic apathy that prioritizes order over empathy. Through these deliberately extreme readings, the authors argue that civilization’s apparent refinement rests on cruelty and violence. The critical lens encourages readers to recognize the potential alliance between rationality, power, and brutality.