Odysseus’s trick on Cyclops prefigured the loss of identity under Enlightenment language.

Evidence

Anticipations of this decline of language were evident in the cultural document Horkheimer and Adorno chose to study in their first of two excursuses in the Dialectic, Homer’s Odyssey. The trick Odysseus played on Cyclops by calling himself “No-man” was also a denial of his identity, which to the primitive, pre-Enlightened mind of the giant was the same as his name. Ultimately, however, the trick was on Odysseus, since Western man had in fact lost his identity, as language capable of conceptualization and negation had been replaced by language capable only of acting as an instrument of the status quo. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 792

Categorization

• SHARE: For someone interested in Homer and the Frankfurt School — the reading of the ‘No-man’ ruse as identity-loss joke played on modern man.
• FICTION: The idea that a naming-trick (calling oneself ‘No-man’) paradoxically causes real identity loss is a sly premise for a story about language and self.
• XREF: connects to: Being named Nobody makes Odysseus countable as nonexistent to the Cyclops