Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment

Socrates spoke with everybody, bar none. I spoke with a Jew in shul about how he went about the marketplace questioning people. And he got a twinkle in his eye and asked, “Why does this cost this much?” thus playing into the stereotype about Jews and money, and simultaneously overturning the myth. For surely Socrates asked about weights and measures, and the scales are the art of justice.

Marx put his finger on something in writing about the difference between use-value (Wert, or worth) and exchange-value (Tauschwert, or that which has the equivalent worth for the sake of exchange). For if Jesus, a Jew, is worthy of being acclaimed as a god, then in practice any Jew is exchangeable for him. This is the sense in which Adorno sees art as the placeholder for use-value. Modern art abstracts away from its roots in depictions of the Crucifixion, and strives to become autonomous in the same way that Western secularism abstracts away from its roots in Christianity, reiterating the attempt of the latter to abstract itself away from Judaism as bodiless spirit. But Guernica has cash value, just as the market puts a price on the head of the laborer, of whom it is just as well him as another, as Molly says of Bloom in Ulysses.