On victimhood, rationality and freedom

There were several points i Wai Chee Dimock's article which resonated Jame's criticism of capitalism, which we read last week, but placing the emphasis, as I understood it, on the individual internalization of both master and slave, punisher and pardoner - which, as he states, create an eternal, self-perpetuating loop that, as the quote from Lacan at the end of the article shows - leads to alienation. This idea of the alienated, self-sufficient man falls in line with Adorno and Horkheimer's criticism of the enlightenment, of the rational man, who, like Dimock describes Ahab, becomes his own worst enemy. In their "The dialectic of enlightenment" they say that the enlightenment's inner dynamic drives us to barbarism, and they offer a philosophical dissection of the logic of enlightenment which can produce nothing but the iron cage, much like Ahab is described by Dimock and James.
Their critique of rationalism, or the negative dialectic of enlightenment, is in many ways the critique in the paper of the syntax of vengeance that motivates and eventually leads to Ahab's doom.
Adrono&Horkheimer discuss what they call instrumental reason, which implies that simply having a goal already employs a certain value structure, but it does not contain a value structure that is fundamentally humanistic. Instrumental Reason is employed to achieve what Freud defined as control of nature and eventually lead to repression and thus suffering. Like Ahab, and even Ishmael in this sense, there is no social thought - each man is directed toward an end, regardless of the moral value fo this goal. Ahab is the man of enlightenment, as he is seen by Dimock, in the sense that he is a calculated and rational man, who, like Adorno's example for the man of the enlightenment (Ulyssus) has forgone any sense of pleasure in his life for the sake of work, or one would say - self-sacrifice.
But while Adorno and Horkheimer were optimistic in the sense that they saw this Ahab type of man, this self-contained, auto-erotic man, as a product of the rational, capitalistic society- which could be liberated from his self-inflicted cage of suffering and repetitive mode, Dorick's Ahab remains doomed, whether by his name or his narcissistic "circuit of identity."
I found it interesting that the article opened with the notion of an external empire - a country or nation state - and moved from the external authority and dominator to the internalization of this totalizing and damning form, as manifested and described in Ahab.
The second article, Getting inside heads, which described yet another aspect of this desire to dominate nature, through taxonomy, categorization, dissection and personification, could be seen as yet another side of the rational endeavor, whose' goal is detached from humanistic value. Yet it also describes the psychoanalytic goal of mapping out the unconscious and releasing the grip and damning effect of repression so as to liberate the subject from his own enslavement.