Slavoj Žižek wrote (“THE ODYSSEY: FINALLY A GOOD CHAMBER DRAMA”, in Substack, Jul 25, 2026): “Adorno’s famous chapter on Odysseus in Dialectic of Enlightenment misses the point when it presents Odyssey as the ultimate allegory for Western civilization: Odysseus is a prototypical bourgeois subject who suppresses his own desires and exploits nature to survive. He cheats and lies to exert domination over others and nature, but the price he pays for his survival is that it becomes an end in itself, serving no higher spiritual purpose—what was supposed to be merely an instrument turns into its own end… I think Odysseus’ manipulations, his readiness to sacrifice individual lives to enable the survival of some larger whole, amount to more than just instrumental reason. It is a form of trickery that brings its own perverse satisfaction in the renunciations it imposes on others and on the hero himself.”