زبان اصالت در ایدئولوژی آلمانی

by Theodor W. Adorno, سیاوش جمادی (Translator)

در دوره ای از تاريخ آلمان كه فراورده های دورانساز فرهنگ و انديشه در زمينه ای لگد مال از بربريت و جنون دو جنگ و در متن ويرانی خرد و از هم پاشي حيات ، پيدا و شكوفا شده بودند ، بانيان مكتب فرانكفورت نگاه خود را به خوداين زمينه ، يعنی به كشف تلبيسی معطوف كردند كه در جهان اين جايی و اكنونی ، بربريت و فرهنگ ، جنون و بخردانگی ، و والاانديشی و دون كنشی را اين چنين همنشين و همداستان می تواند كرد .....ـ

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Politics, Sociology, Cultural, German Literature

446 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.

Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.

Reviews

[Mesoscope · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a special affection for this book, which cogently diagnoses a phenomenon with which I am all-too-familiar, living as I do in Northern California.

Adorno criticizes "jargon," a misuse of language peculiar to the German Existentialists. Jargon is the use of rarefied terminology for the putative purpose of introducing new distinctions into language. It involves using common terms in unusual ways or the abundant creation of neologisms.

The use of jargon is closely tied to the concept of authenticity, crucial to the Existentialists since Heidegger. "Authenticity" refers to accord between a thing's appearance and its essence. The tone of moral approval should not be missed.

Ever an austere critic with an eye for bad faith, Adorno problematizes the concept of authenticity by calling into question how one adjudicates between the authentic and the inauthentic. All too often, Adorno suggests, something is deemed "authentic" if it displays the surface tropes of authenticity that are accepted by a small subculture which regards itself as existing in a privileged position to make moral judgments.

The work of thinking through authenticity is rare, but the process of judging in terms of the category of authenticity is all too common. Such judgments frequently signify little more than a self-aggrandizing belief in one's privileged insight or perspective.

The true function of authenticity's jargon is not to introduce meaningful distinctions, but to broadcast one's allegiance to a privileged, closed group by using its special terms - a group that can be trusted to make judgments in matters of human importance. The ubiquitous showiness of jargon and the vacuous quality of its distinctions are ample testimony to this self-evident function.

The irony of the situation - that the way people use the jargon of authenticity is precisely opposed to its professed values - is not lost on Adorno. Jargon is a facile, shallow, unreflective way of thinking and communicating that frequently shows one to be more concerned with status than actual insight. A true language of authenticity seeks first and foremost to communicate.

Existentialism's jargon has persisted in California culture far more than its ideas. I see the lineage as this: German Existentialism permeates Gestalt psychology, and passes from there into the Human Potential movement through EST and countless Esalen workshops, and now through Landmark and similar organizations. Jargon is part of the air we breath in San Francisco, and I was amazed to find this obscure book, written decades ago, that diagnosed the phenomenon with such precision.

[Tijana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adorno - sušti otrov od čoveka. Kako je zao, kako je samo zao prema Hajdegeru! Ali sasvim opravdano.

Dakle, za knjigu koja je gola filozofska polemika (i to o filozofskom usmerenju o kome pojma nemam) ovo je beskrajno zabavno štivo. Adorno secira "uzvišeni" a suštinski lažni i isprazni filozofski žargon Hajdegerovih epigona (taj deo je i danas koristan za suočavanje sa bilo kojim pseudonaučnim i pseudofilozofskim jezikom) i onda se postepeno prebacuje na kritiku samih Hajdegerovih stavova. Ono što je meni kao laiku najlepše jeste uočljiva emocija: Adorno se, naime, beskrajno nervira zbog sitnih i krupnih stvari podjednako, toliko da u pojedinim momentima prosto vidim kako je morao da prekine s pisanjem rečenice (zakučaste! sintaktički zeznute! konjuktivne i sa duplim negacijama!) i da popije Ranisan ili makar čašu hladne vode.

Što, nažalost, ne znači da je ovu knjigu lako čitati, 5-10 strana dnevno i toliko. Ali vredi truda.

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part of the continuingly relevant subgenre of fascists wtf, this text works in parallel with Loewenthal’s work on rightwing agitators in the US during the 40s and Neumann’s analysis of the Third Reich and Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason arguments, here focusing on rightwing language as it appears in the academic work of right-existentialism, particularly Heidegger (with asides about Jaspers, Kierkegaard, and others).

We should cross-reference this critique, also, with JLN’s Banality of Heidegger and Derrida’s Of Spirit and Aporias, which crush the H-Bomb under his own weight; Adorno is similarly effective in this argument. The editor’s introduction finds that

Adorno’s reconstruction of Heidegger’s philosophy attempts to show that it becomes an ontology that retreats behind, rather than overcomes, the tradition of transcendental philosophy. In the universalization of transcendental subjectivity into Dasein, the empirical is totally lost and, as Adorno claims, an essence-mythology of Being emerges. This is exemplified in the claim that the primacy of Dasein is a realm beyond fact and essence and yet one which maintains itself as an identity. (xvi)

Adorno himself notes that it’s “nothing new to find that the sublime becomes the cover for something low” (xxi)—the goal of all coarse propaganda, in particular for the Third Reich. He explains however that “Contemporary German ideology is careful not to pronounce definite doctrines, such as liberal or even elitist ones” (id.), which is similar to the analysis in Neumann’s Behemoth. Rather, “socially necessary Schein, appearance” (id.) is what matters. This necessity is borne out by an abiding kierkegaardian practice: “they were less interested in the specific doctrine, the truth content of revelation, than in conviction” (3); those who “hesitated before Kierkegaard’s leap” were insufficiently “authentic” (id.). (“The old Protestant theme of absurd belief, grounding itself in the subject, converted itself from Lessing to Kierkegaard into the pathos of existence” (29).)

Right existentialists are “anti-intellectual intellectuals” (4), the “authentic ones” (id.), laden with “dark drives” (5) prior to 1933, but also with a “sacred quality” (id.) in their colloquy—a “cult of authenticity” (id.)—their “thought accommodates itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal. The authority of the absolute is overthrown by absolutized authority” (id.), which is similar to the Frankfurt analysis of Luther’s ‘freedom,’ which allegedly exists internally despite the severity of external constraint. That is, Dasein arises out of the testifying of the human, which is authentic when occurring “through the freedom of decision” (128). However, “apart from the right to come into one’s own, self-control is hypostasized. No end to controls is sought; rather, the controls are carried over into the Being of Dasein. This is done according to the hoary custom of German Idealism. By that custom one should not speak of freedom without adding that it is identical to duty” (129). This culminates in the phrase “sacrifice shall make us free” (132).

Their method is linguistic, relying not only on “noble nouns” but also “it even picks up banal ones, holds them high and bronzes them in the fascist manner which wisely mixes plebeian with elitist elements” (6-7). It further “uses disorganization as its principle of organization” (7).The objective is to “make believe that the existence of the speaker has communicated itself simultaneously with his subject matter and has given the latter its dignity” (8-9), a basic cultish mechanism: “without this surplus of the speaker the speech would already be inauthentic” (9)—appealing to the aristotelian ethos almost exclusively, uninterested in the rigor of logos. This should sound very familiar in the Age of Trump, incidentally. Ultimately “nihilism turns into farce, into mere method, as has already happened to Cartesian doubt” (28).

Right existentialism prefers a “theatrical effect” (10), achieved through use of figures “drawn from a no longer existent daily life,” which are “forever being blown up as if they were empowered and guaranteed by some absolute which is kept silent out of reverence” (11)—an indication that eidos zoe that are long overcome by events have been summoned from the ancient world for redeployment. The overall process “defames the objectivity of truth” (16)—“communication turns into that transpsychological element which it can only be by virtue of the objectivity of what is communicated; in the end stupidity becomes the founder of metaphysics” (id.).

And we see the class basis for all of it: “jargon likewise supplies men with patterns for being human [i.e., Agamben’s eidos zoe], patterns which have been driven out of them by unfree labor” (17). We see further that “through this delusion [that the proletariat, threatened by immediacy of losing their jobs, is something special in class society] the superstructure made them toe the bourgeois line, while in the meantime, thanks to a lasting market boom, that superstructure has become the universal ideology of a society which mistakes itself for a unified middle class” (20).

We see Griffin’s concern from Modernism and Fascism in the notion of a “Being of the sheltering space of shelteredness is simply derived from the necessity that man should ‘make for himself’ such a space” (34)—which signifies when one is concerned with “the fear of unemployment, lurking in all citizens of countries of high capitalism” (id.). “Everyone knows that he could become expendable”; “everyone sees that his job is disguised unemployment” (id.)—this leads to everyone feeling “threatened by what sustains them” (35). He both has “nothing to lose” and is subject to the “overadministrated world of today” (id.); it is the conjunction of “Jaspers’ ‘existence welfare’ and social welfare—administered grace” (id.). The normal fascist inclination is present here: “set back the clock politically and socially, to bring to an end the dynamism inherent in society which still, through the administrative measures of the most powerful cliques, appears to be all too open” (36)—familiar from Neumann’s Behemoth.

All that said, Heidegger’s complaining about ‘metaphysics’ rests upon a fatal ambiguity: “On the one hand metaphysics means involvement with metaphysical themes, even if the metaphysical content is contested; on the other hand it means the affirmative doctrine of the transcendent world, in the Platonic model” (31); when the “theological freeing of the numinous from ossified dogma has, ever since Kierkegaard, involuntarily come to mean its partial secularization” (id.), it is easy to see how Heidegger’s complaint registers unhelpfully across the board. This secularization is eerily familiar: “jargon becomes surprisingly similar to the habitual practices of advertising” (43)—and we should recall the use of Le Bon’s work made by the fascists.

Perhaps the most important insight here is the placing of Heidegger in relation to the ancients:

With the assertion of meaning at all costs, the old antisophistic emotion seeps into the so-called mass society. Ever since the victory of Plato and Aristotle over the Socratic left, that emotion has dominated the official position of philosophy. Whatever refused subjection to it was pushed off into powerless undercurrents. Only the more recent positivism has made sophistic motives reputable by its alliance with science. The jargon struggles against this alliance. Without judgment it hands down the judgment of tradition. The shame of the sophists, opposed by Plato, was the fact that they did not fight against falsity in order to change the slave society, but rather raised doubts about truth in order to arm thought for whatever was. (44)

The ‘socratic left’ is a cool idea, but Adorno doesn’t develop it further, instead focusing on the antisophistic ideas of right existentialism:

the antisophistic movement misuses its insight into such misconstructions of free­ wheeling thought--misuses them in order to discredit thought, through thought. This was the way Nietzsche criticized Kant, raising the charge of over-subtle thinking in the same tone as that adopted magisterially by Hegel, when he spoke of ‘reasoning.’ In the modish antisophistic movement there is a sad confluence: of a necessary critique of isolated instrumental reason with a grim defense of institutions against thought. The jargon, a waste product of the modern that it attacks, seeks to protect itself--along with literally destructive institutions--against the suspicion of being destructive: by simultaneously accusing other, mostly anticonservative, groups of sinful intellectuality, of that sin which lies deep in the jargon's own unnaive, reflective principle of existence. Demagogically it uses the double character of the antisophistic. That consciousness is false which, externally, as Hegel says, without being in the thing, places itself above this thing and manages it from above; but criticism becomes equally ideological at the moment when it lets it be known, self-righteously, that thought must have a ground. (45)

Helpful to conceive of right existentialism as a waste product of the bourgeois society that it attacks. Meanwhile, the “authentic ones defame sophistry, but they drag its arbitrariness along in their programs” (46). This is no mistake, insofar as “the bourgeois form of rationality has always needed irrational supplements, in order to maintain itself as what it is, continuing injustice through justice” (47)—this is “the working atmosphere of authenticity” (id.).

One such supplement is that “the liberalism that hatched the culture industry produced forms of reflection that are encountered indignantly by the jargon of authenticity, although it is itself one of them” (49). It is in these regards a critique of capitalism from the Right: liberalism’s ‘leveling’ in exchange relations is “described as violence, in the manner of elites which claim that ‘prerogative’ for themselves” (104). We note that the development of communication industries is merely “innumerable technical intermediations” (76), prostheses that shorten “routes between the whole and atomized individual subjects” fashioned by power (id.).

Heidegger is needlessly pedantic, of course: philosophy, to him, “is a danger to thought. But the authentic thinker, harsh toward anything so modernistic as philosophy, writes: ‘When in early summer isolated narcissi bloom hidden in the meadow, and the mountain rose glistens under the maple tree’” (52); Adorno identifies in this “outmoded language” an “expressive ideal” in intentional archaism (id.). Heidegger contends that philosophical work “belongs right in the midst of the labor of farmers” (54), though Adorno quips that “one would like at least to know the farmers’ opinion about that. Heidegger does not need their opinion” (54). We see the proto-NSDAP ideas, similar to Gobineau’s, regarding Heidegger’s opinion that “one’s own work’s inner belonging, to the Black Forest and its people, comes from a century-long Germanic-Swabian rootedness, which is irreplaceable” (id.). Adorno replies that “The small farmer owes his continued existence entirely to gracious gifts from that exchange society by which his very ground and foundation, even in appearance, have been removed” (55). That the farmers are forced to remain in specific ‘rooted’ conditions “gladly makes a virtue out of necessity” (56); Heidegger “praises them in the name of a false eternity of agrarian conditions” (56)—a jargon of ‘rootedness’ easily exposed as fascism’s attempt to fix an extinct eidos zoe as an eternal condition.

A similar term of art in Heidegger is ‘Man’ (which is something we note in Ayn Rand’s similarly dreadful work): “In that situation the categories of the jargon are gladly brought forward, as though they were not abstracted from generated and transitory situations, but rather belonged to the essence of man, as inalienable possibility. Man is the ideology of dehumanization” (59). To wit, “past forms of societalization, prior to the division of labor, are surreptitiously adopted as if they were eternal” (59). It’s just warmed over bourgeois false consciousness—what obtains today must obtain forever:

This is what debases the appeal to an inalienable essence of Man which has long been alienated. It was not Man who created the institutions but particular men in a particular constellation with nature and with themselves. This constellation forced the institutions on them in the same way that men erected those institutions, without consciousness. (62)

Easy enough to see that “such universal humanity, however, is ideology” (66). Plenty more, such as an analysis of the jargon terms commitment (69 ff.), encounter (78 ff.), cooperation (79 ff.), commission (83 ff.), inter alia.

A cool critique that presages Derrida a bit:

Latently, the salvation formulas of the jargon are those of power, borrowed from the administrative and legal hierarchy of authority. The bureaucratic language, seasoned with authenticity, is therefore no merely decadent form of the appropriate philosophical language [cf. JLN here about H’s introduction of a banality into philosophy], but is already pre­formed in the most notable texts of that philosophy. Heidegger's favorite "first of all," that has its roots as much in didactic procedure as in a Cartesian first-and-then, leads thoughts along on a leash […] The pedantry, in addition, is repaid by a side result: that it simply never arrives at what philosophy promises. That all goes back to Husserl, in the course of whose extensive preliminary considerations one easily forgets the main thing though critical reflection would first come to grips with the very philosophemes that fastidiousness pushes along in front of it. […] The administrative offices, in Kafka's world, similarly shirk decisions, which then, ungrounded, suddenly catch up with their victims. The reciprocity of the personal and apersonal in the jargon; the apparent humanization of the thingly; the actual turning of man into thing: all this is the luminous copy of that administrative situation in which both abstract justice and objective procedural orders appear under the guise of face-to-face decisions. It is impossible to forget the image of those SA-men from the early period of Hitler's rule. In them administration and terror found themselves visibly joined; the folder of documents above, and below the high boots. (82-83)

That may be the knockout punch, maybe. Though “fussy attention to individual words, as they were lexically handled in the days of pre-Heideggerian idol-phenomenology, was already a harbinger of bureaucratic stocktaking” (86-7), we also see that “intangible administrative purpose” slips into official discourse, which “acknowledges that administration is its essence” (91); attentive readers of Agamben will note the conjunction with the fifth volume of Homo Sacer. For right existentialists, “all content is bracketed, as it goes in administrative German” (92)—Husserlian reduction as the philosopheme suited to the heavy hand of the state.

As though all that were not bad enough, we know “in the Hitlerian realm that the goal of this language is at one with the state of affairs which it indicts” because “Heidegger believes that under the domination of the They nobody needs to take responsibility for anything” (102). Adorno diagnoses this as what “came to pass under National Socialism, as the universal Befehlsnotstand, that state of emergency which torturers later use as their excuse” (103)—Dasein critically as one long state of exception, within the meaning of Schmitt, and then Benjamin, and now Agamben.

Two philosopher’s objections, both individually fatal: “The concept of the ontological cannot be attached to a substratum, as if ontological were its predicate. To be a fact is no predicate which can attach itself to a concept; and, since Kant’s criticism of the ontological proof of the existence of God, any philosophy should be careful not the affirm this” (118), and “Heidegger secretly reinstates the creator quality of the absolute subject, which was supposedly avoided, as it were, by starting with mineness in each case. The notion of the double character of Dasein, as ontic and ontological, expels Dasein from itself. This is Heidegger’s disguised idealism” (120-21)—simultaneously begging the question and falling into absurdity, Heidegger’s original contribution to the history of logic. But Heidegger has other errors:

Heidegger does not linger over the fact that, in his ontological determination of care as ‘that which forms the totality of Dasein's structural whole,’ wholeness was already stipulated, through the transposition of the individual existent into Dasein a wholeness which he then fussily proceeds to uncover. (145)

It gets dumber insofar as “death, the negation of Dasein, is decisively fitted out with the characteristics of Being” (147): this is because death is irreducibly one’s own, for which there may be no subrogation, “the impossibility of having a proxy in death” (148)—Heidegger as a death cultist, then. It is perhaps similar to Moretti’s thesis that the German tragic vision considers crisis as the moment of truth. That said, “insofar as death is absolutely alien to the subject, it is the model of all reification” (152), which in Heidegger’s hands “becomes an exegesis of the futile joke: Only death is free and that costs your life” (id.). Adorno thinks that the “protestation against the sublimating of death would have its place in a criticism of liberal ideology” (155)—but instead “Heidegger does the same thing as fascism: he defends the more brutal form of Being, negative as it may be” (id.). In a “philosophical Freudian slip, Heidegger himself defines the ontologizing of death insofar as death, in its certainty, is qualitatively superior to other phenomena” (156)—becoming “an accomplice of what is horrible in death.” Right existentialism’s jargon of authenticity advances the “dignity of being, and not of men” (161)—and “in dignity a feudal category is mediated which bourgeois society presents posthumously for the legitimation of its hierarchy” (162), and “Kantian dignity finally disintegrates into the jargon of authenticity” (id.).

Plenty more. Recommended for Frankfurt Marxist types.

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half mislead me to believe the text would withhold a frontal attack on the Ur-Authentic Heidegger himself, it being more directed at his legion followers, many of whom are rightfully criticized for their hollow deployment of idiosyncratic jargon to affect a tone of theological solemnity, or authenticity, as it were. (Does anyone even still read Jaspers?)

This anticipation was swiftly dispelled as Adorno launches into a 60-odd page diatribe against the prophet of Being in his trademark sardonic style (worth reading just for the memorable quips), taking him for a crypto-fascist whose fortress of opacity belies a pernicious logic of bureaucracy and culture industry sloganeering.

In Heidegger's defense -- and I am sympathetic to him while admitting many jabs here to be valid -- his thought did bespeak a certain allegiance with the project later taken up by the Frankfurt School, albeit under radically different terms. Both existentialism and critical theory broadly seek a determinateness of subjectivity. But where Adorno, operating from a Hegelian framework, locates the disjunction of the contemporary subject concretely within the brute calculus of post industrial capitalism, that is, under the particular conditions of a historical situation, Heidegger is after the fundamental horizon of historicity itself.

And he is indeed attentive to the effects of modernity on subjectivity -- the adoption of his notorious lexicon may be viewed, generously, as an attempt to stave off an ossified Romanticism. To avoid invoking a stale notion of pure interiority one must approach the matter of the subject circumspectly, within the distance afforded by the written word. Whether or not Heidegger went too far in this regard is a matter of one's taste for poetics.

Adorno is nevertheless far better positioned than his interlopers to deal with the concrete forces governing the erosion of cultural forms. But philosophy is not team sport, and one may appreciate the insights of thinkers at odds with one another (be they Schopenhauer and Hegel, or Russell and Nietzsche) -- unless, that is, one claims membership to a cult of jargon.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been getting unnecessarily analytical in recent reviews of dystopian fiction, always a sign it's time to read some philosophy or critical theory. Lars Iyers' My Weil reminded me that doing so is fun. I consider it important to read things that I find very hard to understand; in this case, a critique of philosophers that I mostly haven't read. I picked The Jargon of Authenticity off the library new acquisitions shelf, knowing nothing about it except that Adorno seems to be increasingly quoted as relevant to the present time. That was also my experience a decade ago when I read (and understood about a fifth of) Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life.

The first page of the introduction to The Jargon of Authenticity went down like a lead balloon. A major risk of reading any 19th or 20th century philosophy is that it will probably have a recently-written introduction with the density of cold cement. Sometimes this will take longer to get through than the book itself. My faith in the translator was also shaken by a footnote on page 6: 'To occur' our rendering of sich ereignen has been chosen for lack of an English verb corresponding to the noun 'event'. The verb is eventuate, my man! Despite these challenges, and Adorno's blithe assumption that the reader knows exactly who he is talking about when he critiques 'the authentic ones', persistence was rewarded. I appreciated what I could grasp. For example, on words and language:

Words' own meanings weigh heavily on them. But these words do not use themselves up in their meanings; they themselves are caught up in their context. This fact is underestimated in the high praise given to science by every pure analysis of meaning, starting with Husserl's, especially by that of Heidegger, which considers itself far above science. Only that person satisfies the demand of language who masters the relation of language to individual words in their configurations. Just as the fixing of the pure element of meaning threatens to pass over to the arbitrary, so the belief in the primacy of the configurative threatens to pass into the badly functional, the merely communicative - into scorn for the objective aspect of words. In language that is worth something both of these elements are transmitted.

First published in 1964, The Jargon of Authenticity is concerned not merely with philosophical abstractions but their uses in the destructive authoritarian German politics of the early twentieth century. Sometimes this is made explicit, but mostly it is heavily implicit:

In the jargon, finally, there remains from inwardness only the most external aspect, that thinking oneself superior which marks people who elect themselves: the claim of people who consider themselves blessed simply by virtue of being what they are. Without any effort, this claim turns into an elitist claim, or into a readiness to attach itself to elites which then quickly gives the axe to inwardness. A symptom of the transformation of inwardness is the belief of innumerable people that they belong to an extraorinary family. The jargon of authenticity, which sells self-identity as something higher, projects the exchange formula onto that which imagines that it is not exchangeable; for as a biological individual each man resembles himself. That is what is left over after the removal of the soul and immortality from the immortal soul.

Adorno complains that Heidegger and others present their philosophy of authenticity (his phrase) as authoritative and scientific, which conceals its ideological bias and cultural grounding. He sharply makes the point that there is really no such thing as pure, primal philosophy:

This cannot be avoided and has to be taken into consciousness. In the universally mediated world everything experienced in primary terms is culturally performed. Whoever wants the other has to start with the immanence of culture, in order to break out through it. But fundamental ontology gladly spares itself that, by pretending it has a starting point somewhere outside. In that way such ontology succumbs to cultural mediations all the more; they recur as social aspects of the ontology's own purity. Philosophy involves itself all the more deeply in society as it more eagerly - reflecting upon itself - pushes off from society and its objective spirit.

About twenty years ago I read a book about the slippery concept of authenticity, Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life, which gave an economic rather than philosophical critique. This is the closest I could find to an explanation of why Adorno attaches this label to the loose philosophical group he critiques:

Thus industriousness is the substantivisation of those characteristics that apply to all industrious people, and which they have in common. By contrast, however, 'authenticity' names no authentic thing as a specific characteristic but remains formal, relative to a content which is by-passed in the word, if not indeed rejected by it - even when the word is used adjectivally. The word says nothing about what a thing is, but questions the extent to which the thing realises what is posited by its concept. The thing stands in implicit opposition to what it merely seems to be. In any case the word would receive its meaning from the quality which it is a predicate of. But the suffix '-keit', '-ness' tempts one to believe that the word must already contain that content in itself. The mere category of relationship is fished out and in its turn exhibited as something concrete.

In the final few pages, Adorno concludes that the jargon of authenticity is fundamentally inhumane and that, 'its dignified mannerism is a reactionary response to the secularisation of death'. I'll admit that I didn't understand all the nuances of his beef with Heidegger, Jaspers, et al. Yet The Jargon of Authenticity was still much more fun to read than Ascension.

[Richard Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book a long time ago and it has sat on my bookshelves unread. I bought it for that most trivial of reasons - I simply liked the title and at that time did not realise really what I was buying. Now I have finally got round to reading it.

This is essentially a long essay in which Adorno castigates the use of language, terminology or jargon in a vacuous or negative way. Although his sights are firmly set on Heidegger and some of his followers, there is a wider lesson to be learnt from this book about the invention and misuse of jargon.

It's not always an easy book, and requires some awareness of Heidegger to get the most from.

One caveat - I read this in English translated from the German. It seems a good translation, but if one is going into the nuances of the use of jargon then I think one has to be wary than any translation is always going to lose or change some of the original meaning.

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

After WW2, Germany regained its economic strength but never its spiritual and especially its philosophical might. Instead of creating great philosophy again, the meek and broken Germans just keep apologizing continuously. Their Nazi past, the war atrocities, their defeat, but also books like this are responsible for this situation. In fact cheap and personal attacks like this book and second-hand philosophers like Adorno stood for the post-war official German philosophy.

The funny thing is that French and American intellectuals/academia now speak in this Hegelian-Marxist jargon that centers on a dialectic that can bring together and mediate everything that can be put in the same sentence. Mao used the same type of dialectical discourse to justify whatever he did.

Despite their controversial nature, fundamental and deep thinkers like Heidegger will continue to remain relevant in the future; while only someone interested in the history of the Frankfurt School will return to guys like Adorno. Just as a simple rebuff against the arguments in this book: Heidegger was never an existentialist, even if he inspired a lot of them. This book also indicates the source and format of a recent reemergence of attacks against Heidegger and his ideas these days – like those of Wolin.

If your perspective is flat and limited, you just adhere to any ideology that happens to be around you and adopt its language, while also rejecting all other ideologies as evil and their discourse as empty – and this applies to both left and right ideologies.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Favourite Martin

You either love Martin Heidegger or you hate him.

Those who love him embrace him with a messianic fervour that excuses otherwise aberrant behaviour (like anti-Semitism and Fascism) in the quest to salvage something of his philosophy (ostensibly of care).

Of those who hate him, I can't think of anybody more concerted than Theodor Adorno.

The Ringleader

Heidegger is just one of the targets of "The Jargon of Authenticity". Karl Jaspers also features. However, it quickly becomes apparent that Heidegger is the ringleader around whom the others revolve, and Adorno becomes more and more hostile towards him as the book progresses.

"Jargon" is a philosophical analysis of alleged flaws in Heidegger's philosophy as well as a literary analysis of the language used by Heidegger to promote his ideas. Thus, it's concerned with both what Heidegger has to say and how he says it:

"The jargon of authenticity is ideology as language, without any consideration of specific content."

Adorno starts with a story about a number of people active in philosophy, sociology and theology some call "the Authentic Ones".

The story sometimes sounds like a myth, so it's difficult to tell whether it's true or not. However, it describes a dynamic of Heidegger's strategy that is consistent with some of my own personal observations, so I'll give it some credence, at least on a metaphorical level.

Publish or Perish

"Being and Time" originated in a desire to publish a philosophical work, so that Heidegger could obtain an academic position. Hence its ambition and the exaggeration of its claims, and the fact that, having won his position, he never returned to finish the schema of the greater work.

The tone of the work is that there was once an ancient understanding of "Being", which has since been forgotten. Heidegger's role is to reconstruct a remembrance of being and beings past. Thus, his strategy is to place himself in the role of an oracle or a medium between the truth and us. To the extent that he speaks on behalf of the truth, he speaks on behalf of God. Thus, he assumes the hubris of religion to elevate his own authority and credibility.

The word of the preacher is presented "as if his and God's were one without question".

I've always wondered whether Heidegger was more in the business of hermeneutics than actual philosophy. He was trying to find lost meaning, i.e., meaning that had been lost or obscured over time. He was reading the same words that others before him had read, only his interpretation differed.

Putting Themselves in the Right

Adorno makes the same point:

"What 'the Authentic Ones' fought for on a spiritual and intellectual plane, they marked down as their ethos, as if it elevated the inner rank of a person to follow the teaching of higher ideals; as if there was nothing written in the New Testament against the Pharisees."

[It's interesting that one of the connotations of "Pharisee" is a hypocritically self-righteous person.]

Adorno mentions that "people of his nature" have a tendency called "putting-themselves-in-the-right". Religion tends to the absolute.

The authentics were "anti-intellectuals" who embraced a hodge podge of religious and philosophical ideas.

Adorno claims that, in philosophy, Heidegger's use of the word "authentic" "moulded that which the authentics strive for less theoretically; and in some way he won over to his side all those who had some vague reaction to that philosophy”:

"Through him, denominational demands became dispensable. His book acquired its aura by describing the directions of the dark drives of the intelligentsia before 1933 - directions he described as full of insight, and which he revealed to be solidly coercive. Of course in Heidegger, as in all those who followed his language, a diminished theological resonance can be heard to this very day. The theological addictions of these years have seeped into the language, far beyond the circle of those who at that time set themselves as the elite."

So, step one in Heidegger's employment strategy was to attach himself and his ideas to an elite who would carry him to his destination (whatever the denominational differences in detail).

Sacred Language

Adorno describes the language of authenticity as "sacred":

"The sacred quality of the authentics' talk belongs to the cult of authenticity rather than to the Christian cult, even where - for temporary lack of any other available authority - its language resembles the Christian. Prior to any consideration of content, this language moulds thought. As a consequence, that thought accommodates itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal. The authority of the absolute is overthrown by absolutised authority."

Now, step two in Heidegger's career path involves the embrace of Fascism:

"Fascism was not simply a conspiracy - although it was that - but it was something that came to life in the course of a powerful social development. Language provides it with a refuge. Within this refuge a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were salvation."

True and Revealed Language

So Heidegger co-opts and appropriates both religious and political power in order to promote himself and his hermeneutics.

He uses a combination of noble and banal words, "holds them high and bronzes them in the fascist manner which wisely mixes plebeian with elitist elements:"

"Elements of empirical language are manipulated in their rigidity, as if they were elements of a true and revealed language. The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.”

Elsewhere I've suggested that Heidegger was like an ambitious architect who needed to sidle up to the Nazi Party in order to have the vision of his plans realised. His embrace of Fascism (like his embrace of the religious Authentics) was a calculated part of a strategy for self-advancement.

While he appealed to revelation, he was also chronically addicted to authority:

"If one adds to a statement that it is 'valid', then whatever at a given moment holds good, whatever is officially stamped, can be imputed to it as metaphysically authorised. The formula spares people the trouble of thinking about the metaphysics which it has dragged with it, or about the content of what has been stated."

The Suggestion of Theology

Adorno considers that this practice "secretly warms up irrationalism...in the end stupidity becomes the founder of metaphysics...Theology is tied to the determinations of immanence, which in turn want to claim a larger meaning, by means of their suggestion of theology."

"The jargon...marks the adept, in their own opinion, as untrivial and of higher sensibility."

So the appeal to religious and political authority is designed to acquire status and power for the speaker, even if they are merely "bleating with the crowd".

The jargon both joins the speaker with and separates the speaker from the crowd:

"The formal gesture of autonomy replaces the content of autonomy."

The jargon results in a pseudo-individualising:

"It seems to be invented for those who feel that they have been judged by history, or at least that they are falling, but who still strut in front of their peers as if they were an interior elite.

"They let themselves be confirmed in this attitude by a uniform mode of speech, which eagerly welcomes the jargon for purposes of collective narcissism."

"They usurp for themselves the charisma of the leader."

The jargon becomes a symbol of solidarity within the elite:

"One can trust anyone who babbles this jargon; people wear it in their buttonholes, in place of the currently disreputable party badge.

"Even those who are not sheltered are safe as long as they join the chorus.

"...they actually find something like contact, comparable to the feeling in the fraudulent National Socialist Volk-community which led people to believe that all kindred comrades are cared for and none are forgotten: permanent metaphysical subvention."

Adorno believes that the jargon is an ideological distraction from the political action that is needed to overcome the status quo:

"Nothing is done in any serious fashion to alleviate men's suffering and need. Self-righteous humanity, in the midst of a general inhumanity, only intensifies the inhuman state of affairs. This is a state of affairs which necessarily remains hidden to those who suffer here and now. The jargon only doubles the hiding cover."

A Small Divinity

Heidegger leaves Man with "the stale reminder of self-identity as something which gives distinction, both in regard to being and meaning. This unlosable element, which has no substratum but its own concept, the tautological selfness of the self, is to provide the ground, which the authentics possess and the inauthentics lack. The essence of Dasein, i.e., what is more than its mere existence, is nothing but its selfness: it is itself."

As Heidegger says:

"Man is he, who he is, precisely in testifying to his own Dasein."

Adorno refers to this as a cult of selfness.

It's possible to construe Heidegger in terms of how the subject once thought of itself, " a small divinity, as well as a lawgiving authority, sovereign in the consciousness of its own freedom".

"He has to puff himself up into selfness, in the way the futility of this selfness sets itself up as what is authentic, as Being."

Adorno concludes that Heidegger failed to see that the dignity he was striving for "contains the form of its decadence within itself," which becomes apparent when "intellectuals become accomplices of that power which they don't have and which they should resist.”

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The paragon of polemic. Adorno directs his inimitable prose and prowess toward his lifelong bete noir, and the result is philosophy written in fire.

[Buck · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish Adorno didnt structure his writing like one huge unstructured blog post.

Other than that, Adornos point is simple here(and repeated constantly, to its detriment as a 180 pg book). The ideology of authenticity is the ideology of a hypostasization of a fundamentally empty and formalistic concept of the subject. What existentialism ends up doing is ontologizing what are symptoms of a specific social and historical configuration, that being the age of Hyperbureaucratized Capitalist Modernity.

Given its aversion to making any claims that touch upon the empirical(psychology/sociology/anthropology), german existentialism sought to re-affirm an irreducible and non-conceptual selfhood of experience which is not graspable by the positivistic paradigm of sciences, what Adorno incisively posits however, is that this form of thought is only capable of doing this by mythologizing the mere form of language and of the banal immediate givenness of life. Such a prioritizing and fetishization of the "particularistic" is symptomatic of a society where the richness and meaningfulness of everyday social life is emptied out, leaving the only line of defense a pseudo-stoic "cult of inwardness" which is without content and hence just the reapparation of the bourgeois view of the worker.
In its critique of the liberal mantras of progress and of cosmopolitanism, german existentialism affirmed an theodicy of Lack, in other words, Man became defined by need and its dreadfully isolating and individuating finitude, affirming a solipsistic subject whose only salvation was an "authenticity" that being emptied out of content and rational mediation, implicitly advocates Violence and the fascist courage of sacrifice for "unnamed cause".

All in all, the thought of Heidegger makes the marxist problem of reification(elucidated at the turn of the century by Lukacs in "History and Class Consciousness") into an ontological problem of a subject regardless of historical circumstance, Adorno seeks to find the kernel of a rational and utopic imaginary within the uncritical ideological manifestations of the bourgeois subjects of self-abnegation and anxiety present within the existentialist concept of Man. Within the fetish of indeterminacy and non-conceptualized experience, there lies within Heidegger the signal of an emancipative content that is concealed within the Enlightenment paradigm of the subject who renunciates all his concrete convictions in the secularization of religiosity as a "lifestyle" and"soldierly discipline".

The key is to see the necessity of the emergence of Existentialism in the 20th century as a byproduct of a concrete social structure of precariousness where work and the bureaucratic busyness of life seep our freedom away within the veneer of the compulsion of routine. Existentialism is the ideological opposition(but ultimately reaffirmation) of this condition by flipping its principle as a potential avenue of Freedom of subjects posited will, this however ultimately is reappropriated under the logic of exchange, "authenticity" becomes a ritual status symbol, something that can be sold and uttered in the most hypocritical manner. All because this formalistic notion of the subject is a disguised form of the commodity form onto the labourers life.

I wish Adorno dedicated more of the text to examining Heidegger like near the end, which is where his critiques really shine on a philosophical level. And shine a light unto what I consider to be Heideggers most mistaken early inclinations(sublimated or eliminated later on in the Post-Kehre writings). If you have read other more central works by Adorno like the Dialectic of the Enlightenment the themes here are very much repeated and may not need to delve into this work. If you are interested in an immanent critique of Heidegger i do highly reccomend it, even Heideggerians may spot the internal aporias and inconsistencies which Heideggers Eigentlichkeit ends up mired in and how it enters into opposition with his attempted escape from Cartesian ontology.

I would argue that Heidegger's later work is an attempt to think of a determinateness of subjectivity a la Frankfurt school but within a more poetical stylization and particularistic analysis of our subjection to language and historicity. Heidegger is not as much of the Fatalist that Adorno paints him to be in his critique of Being and Time, and Heidegger carefully has suspicions about the empty voluntaryist fetish that arguably became the marketable exchangeable object of Sartrean "absolute freedom". What Heidegger is more suspicious of than Adorno is the possibility of a Harmonious social totality, wherein Adorno's utopic register enters and is used as the end result of immanent critique of a present historical situation. Heidegger is interested in the horizon of historicity as something we can't just merely will or think our ways out of, and that the positivity allowed in the indeterminate horizon of the future has to be constructed through a dynamical reappropriation of what is present of the past today. Lightly echoing a Benjaminean sentiment but without messianic connotation. One could argue this is just Heideggers attempt to preserve his nostalgic rural romanticism through a self-aware examination of anachronism as a force of opening up our future possibilities.

Even with all of this, Adornos critique of Heidegger mostly hit the mark, but it would have been a better read if it wasnt mired by such a repetitive and informal style of writing.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heidegger did not think of himself as an existentialist. His publishers would put on the book jacket 'the existentialist Heidegger', but inside the book Heidegger would explicitly disavow the existentialist (My 1960 reprint of 'Intro to Metaphysics' does just that!). Hubert Dreyfus in his course said Sartre took one sentence from division two of 'Being and Time' and wrote an incoherent 400 page plus book ('Being and Nothingness') from that. I tend to agree with that.

Adorno purposely misunderstands Heidegger's 'authenticity' to the point of conflating ontic with ontology, existential with existentiell, and dasein with culture.

For Heidegger in the end being a Nazi was the culmination of authenticity, so even Heidegger botches what it meant. Kierkegaard as quoted in this book advocates for the elimination of the subjective in order to get at the true self (btw, a Gnostic belief!). Adorno will say Heidegger does not want Husserl's Cartesian duality and makes dasein the world as a result (by all means, read Husserel's 'Idea', the must read phenomenology book imo, no check that, Gadamer's 1960 book 'Truth and Method' is the must read phenomenology book and it marks their last hurrah).

With Adorno, one always seems to get a spattering of the 'culture machine', and some neo-conservative non-identity as the real identity stuff with fetishization and reification in the manner of Marx as he would filter Hegel. With this book one gets a skewed and summary presentation of 'Being and Time' for those who are too lazy to read it for themselves.

We can't get at 'why is there something rather than nothing' (Heidegger's favorite question), nor do we understand what it means to be free in a world where nature just happens while we are within nature and as mentioned in this book as he trivializes Heidegger's ontological formulation for being as idle chatter, curiosity, ambiguity, attunement with the world, distractions from the they, and our own dasein as care. The author seemed to assume away who we are and never really would just say that dasein is just that which takes a stand on its own understanding (dogs don't, machines don't, so far, only humans ask the question why are there stars and why are we here. We take a stand on our place in the universe. That is what dasein does). Yes, our ownmost being is a being unto death but we still are part of the world and the world is part of us and Adorno at times is conflating when he should be explaining all in order to obscure through his own discourse that does not reveal.

I'm definitely not a Nazi or a Fascist and Heidegger was wrong to think our authenticity was best outsourced to a monster such as Hitler, but Heidegger's philosophy is worthy of consideration beyond what this book suggests or how Heidegger actually practiced it in his life. I would suggest read 'B&T' (three or more times!) and you will start to see that authenticity is not jargon.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, Adorno, who sometimes flirts with jargon of his own or at the very least uses cluttered language, relentlessly attacks and eviscerates the thought of existentialists. From the very first sentence with its use of the cloying term "gathering" ("In the early twenties a number of people active in philosophy, sociology, and theology planned a gathering"), Adorno hones in on Heidegger as the primary perpetrator. And from that very first sentence, the acid and bile flows freely and bitingly to the end, often highlighting the empty rhetoric used by Heidegger to puff up "Being" into a whole lot of nothing. Heidegger might counter that that is precisely what he is saying: "Being" or what he terms Dasein is nothingness or that its meaning is simply that it is meaningless. For Adorno, this is the height of sophistry, which is intelligence made brutal. Heidegger and other existentialists might champion the simplicity and poetry of people close to the soil such as farmers, but this comes with a heavy and brutal hand. In the end, Adorno's critique boils down to this: Heidegger and those who followed him sought to overcome the 'idle chatter' and stupidity of the 'elite masses' (which Heidegger termed "the They" in Being and Time), but the attempt to do so only ended up with producing another version of 'idle chatter': the jargon of authenticity. And the implied second part of the critique: we become mystified and seduced by such 'jargon' at our own peril.

Highly recommended for people intrigued by Heidegger, but also suspicious of him.

[Virga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Puiki knyga. Autentiškumo žargonas, sukurtas filosofų, yra ideologija, pasislėpusi kalboje - tą Adorno parodo analizuodamas Heideggerį. Labai įdomu - Heideggeris pats kiek įmanoma bandė vengti bet kokio socialinio ir politinio kalbėjimo, bet tada (netyčia ar tyčia, to niekas nebesužinos) sukūrė kalbą, labai parankią radikaliai ideologijai. Knyga keičia Heideggerio supratimą, plečia ideologijos sampratą, ir leidžia atpažinti autentiškumo žargono panaudojimą daug kur, buity taip sakant.

[Scribe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really sure how to rate this one, so going down the middle. I guess I glossed over the blurb and wasn't expecting it be an out-and-out critique/criticism of Heidegger's Exisentialism, so obviously I'm not the target reader.

That said, the critique was pretty fascinating in places, especially around the beginning (e.g. on the role of jargon devoid of reality) and toward the end (e.g. the paradox of defining oneself as existing alongside "death"). It seems like these key points are still (more) relevant today as we continue to struggle with a more mediated, structured society still bound by fairly modern-industrial paradigms.

But I drifted off in the middle - the book felt more like a ranting blogpost by a very clever, but very grumpy old man at times. Short enough to put up with, but a little too convoluted and negative to really hold my interest.

Give this one a go if you're into this kind of thing, I think :)

[Thea · Rating 5 out of 5]

It sounds obnoxious, but this book really changed my life. This guy's books are usually impossible to read without three reading guides and a scholar to explain to you what's going on - but this book is actually quite easy to understand, and even helped me to understand his overall philosophy and what critical theory actually is.

It's basic idea is that political economy affects how we feel - and that capitalism gives people the blues. Really really profound blues. That idea really blew my socks off because it's a pretty touchy feely theory in a field (i.e. political philosophy) that usually tries to leach feelings out of everything, and because I've found it to be so true in my own life.

And now as I writer, what I write about is how the political culture we live in affects how we love each other. So really I'm just a copy-cat.

[Rambling Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't score this properly without reading more German philosophy.

3 stars

[Tim Verleg]

Door de veelheid aan specifieke inhoud, waar veel informatie voor vereist is, is het een lastig werk. De grote lijnen blijven echter goed volgbaar en zijn zeer interessant. Mooi om gelezen te hebben in combinatie met Zijn en Tijd, waar dit werk vanuit een geheel ander, kritisch perspectief aandacht aan geeft. Toch vond ik het qua leesbaarheid soms moeilijker dan Zijn en Tijd zelf.

[Abdullah Başaran · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have no idea about whether Adorno could have changed his attitude or not if he had read the interview which was published in Der Spigel after Heidegger's death. However, i am able to specify that Adorno had critisized Heidegger and the other existansialists very well. Even though he had some redundant worries, we can see easily this attitude to Holocaust's dull.

In addition, I am glad because Kaan H. Ökten, the translator of "Being and Time" in Turkish, recommends this book in his brand-new book, named "Heiddeger'e Giriş (Introduction to Heidegger)".

The book must be read for to recognize the conflict between Heidegger's dilemmas and Adorno's very strong critiques.

[Jennifer Scappettone · Rating 3 out of 5]

The bitterer Adorno with particular bones to pick against German existentialism. Worth it for several delectable sentences parodying Heidegger's farmers, characterizing mediation, and describing employment in an economy of pumped-up production as disguised unemployment.

[Leonard Houx · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book--and its critique of Heidegger--is brilliant. For just a moment, Heidegger scholars should forget the ad hominem attacks on his politics and sit down and read this book. Why don't they? Are they scared of reading it?

[Jack Theaker · Rating 2 out of 5]

No idea what was going on here other than any claims of authenticity are fascist I think that’s the general point. “Jargon” was used as a propaganda tool referring to stuff simple and romantic in order to espouse some idea of purity in regimes of the early 20th century.

[Oğuzcan Önver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alman İdeolojisi üzerine sahici bir helalleşme, insanlar eski sevgilileriyle bile böyle güzel helalleşemiyor ne yazıkki.

[Jude Nonesuch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Need to commit to doing these reviews when I actually finish reading the book in question. Anyway, this is well interesting – I found it pretty hard going the first time I started it, but like a few other books (Ulysses, for example) I felt I was “getting it” as I went along much more once I started it a second time – I think reading the introduction certainly helped! At least you then know generally what to expect as the general topic.

So, that’s probably the first thing to address in the review. Like, on the one hand, it’s pretty niche, and pretty back-dated: this weighty language of self-actualisation and relations-between-men that served as an attempted rehabilitation of ‘German-ness’ post-war, which, if you weren’t or never had been a German post-war, you’d probably have little reason to care about.. But: two things come from this. Firstly, you easily get the idea of the kind of thing being talked about, of words emptied of their relationship to other words and standing in for themselves only, and all the extrapolations from this and the relation to bureaucracy and inhumanity all work and feel important and relevant beyond the narrow specific setting; that is, the critique of language has quite a solid theoretical basis that could be redeployed in other similar circumstances; and secondly, ultimately the book is really aimed at dismantling the philosophy of Heidegger, and this ‘jargon of authenticity’ is just the road into the topic, the sort of lie-0f-the-land where the critique takes place; & so, if you know that’s what you’re aiming at (from, for example, having read the introduction), it kind of motivates you to take this problem of post-war Germanic jargon seriously and to follow where it’s leading.

So, that’s the second interesting thing about this book: like it is very consciously in a purely “essayistic” way: there are no chapters, no sections; no headings, no waypoints; the writing follows its own thought to wherever it leads itself (or, at least, is written so as to seem as though that is what’s going on). So this I think is clearly a part of Adorno’s idea of “immanent critique”, and is his way of avoiding ‘systematic’ theories or the impulse to systematise. Yet, on the other hand, there is very much a “plan” (if not a “structure”) to the essay and this was clearly very deeply considered; the way it proceeds from addressing in turn various words from the jargon, onto Dasein and all the Heidegger stuff, culminating in the role of death in his philosophy (– more on which later!). That is, just because the paragraphs don’t have titles naming their topic, it doesn’t mean that you don’t get a similar effect when reading in any case: usually once you’re a couple of words into a paragraph you sense “ah, the topic has shifted to ––this––”. I suppose the difference is that there’s no claim to have exhaustively surveyed every category and sub-category – that ‘lie-of-the-land’ analogy does quite well here again – the essay is simply a path that’s taken, there’s no claim to have mapped out the entire territory. Still from a reader experience point-of-view a heading or two would help you keep track of where you’ve got to — the absence of any such can seem a little self-conscious, is what I mean.

Also something that might help in terms of the first thing I addressed in this review — on about page 100 there’s, finally, an actual (satirical) example of ‘the jargon’: the “Gestanzte Festansprache” (which, I would translate on the lines of the title of the Ira Gershwin collection: “Lyrics on Several Occasions” [more literally: “Template Event-Speech”]), which you might benefit from reading at the beginning rather than when the section on the actual jargon itself closes and the focus turns to Heidegger! What I mean is, how deliberately this is placed where it is shows up the self-consciousness of the planning – in fact is perhaps or presumably intended to do just that! I mean overall I think it’s a cool thing.

So the language-critique stuff is super-interesting, and really makes me wonder how much further this has been taken – sure I’m far from widely read in this area but I’m not really aware of people referring back to this – like, the idea of the “constellation” of a word sounds very much like post-structuralism to me, but I’ve never heard of people linking Adorno and post-structuralism? To what extent has this been done? The other language-critique thing which comes to mind but which I know even less about is “late Wittgenstein” — has anyone done a ‘for Dummies’ survey of the commonalities/differences between these three approaches?

On the other hand a lot of the Heidegger stuff, being that kind of ‘refute in its own terms’ kind of thing, is quite heavy and situated in arcane points-of-logic and so on so I felt somewhat like I was skimming — not least as I have no time for taking Heidegger seriously enough to really ‘grip’ any of the weighty ideas or wev. Still the overall point comes across: the claim of Dasein as a concept that precedes conceptualisation, or thereabouts. It (— in a way that reminded me of Foucault’s “History of Sexuality vol. 1”) really starts to pick up in the last 25 pages or so, though, especially once death comes into it. This (again happening after one of those obvious ‘chapter breaks’) is where he really starts lacing into Heidegger and his philosophy and it really carries the interest along; a lot of the “argument” can still remain pretty obscure mind..

One last thing to mention is how it would appear the copy-editor gave up reading after 100 pages or so.. just typos thrown in here and there throughout the last third of the book.

Anyway overall, quite cool, a bit hard work, not my most fun book but a good one nonetheless.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though largely an attack on Jaspers, this book is really an outright assault on existential decisionism and it emotive justifications from Jaspers to Heidegger. Adorno is ruthless in exposing the poverty of thought of the existential movement and its a-historicism which results in a rootlessness that can in theory (as well as in fact) lead to ethical and political catastrophe.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adorno's three pages on Rilke would be worth reading the book even without its devastating account of bureaucratic authenticity and its serious reckoning with Heidegger, and are probably the last thing anyone need ever say about Rilke.

[Nated Doherty · Rating 3 out of 5]

this guy is such a grumpy old man...but he's also very smart. The books pretty specific to a certain period of German history, but the points it makes can be extended beyond, I think. I don't think i understood it fully, but what I got was good.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

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A bucking-bronco ride beside a steam of consciousness…with interesting sightseeing available for the reader who remains in the saddle…
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[Kev Nickells · Rating 5 out of 5]

So there's rarely a bad time to have a go at old Teddy Adorno. For all his reputation as writing densely I tend to find him witty, acerbic, sharp. He does whip through subjects and it's fair to say there's a lot of context that he applies.

My reason for picking this up now is that I think he's always useful for understanding fascism. His opprobrium here is on the sort of cant that is repeated and termed 'authentic' despite that never quite being constituted. I've read reviews that suggest this isn't primarily directed at Heidegger but I can't help but feel that Adorno's principally aimed at the problems of 'ontology', the circularity of Dasein's constitution, and the (absolute) dissociation of Heidegger's metaphysics (if we can call it such) from the complexity of the fabric of social relations.

No great surprise then that part of this is a valorisation of dialectical thinking. I'd say it's important to note that in times of fascism there's a heightened danger of 'absolutisms' - I'm thinking of today's blood and soil and of course the blood and soil of 30s/40s Germany. The jargon of authenticity, arguably, haunts the current 'debate' of trans people - one side, a fascist minority doggedly repeating cant-mantras of a kind of primordial state (which of course sounds very Heidegerrian), the other recognising that the nature of gender is more complex than a kind of interstitial ontology.

I'd like to return to this - I'm conscious that Adorno is always a lot more wiley and complexly enmeshed than a single reading permits. But insofar as I read Being and Time recently, and fascism is everywhere, it's a lush wee extended essay on the disgraceful circularity and seduction of specific patterns of thoughts around 'authenticity'.

[Zbigniew Zdziarski · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was refreshing to see a philosopher of repute calling out other contemporary philsophers for the BS in their writings. I'm a big fan of Martin Heidegger but he is notorious for writing in a way that could be considered as manipulation: obtuse language that says everything but on closer scrutiny turns out to say absolutely nothing at all. Heidegger's Letter on Humanism (his response to Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism) is a perfect example of this. Flowery and poetic language that draws you in like a Siren but as Adorno says, there's nothing there. Jargon upon jargon. Just because it looks beautiful and inspiring doesn't mean there's any substance to it. Good on you, Adorno.

Sartre, Foucault, de Beauvoir - they're all guilty of using jargon and "shallow advertising language" to get their points across.

I took off two stars because, firstly, even with his BS I do believe Heidegger has done a lot of good for philosophy. Credit needs to be given where credit is due. Secondly, what Adorno proposes in his philosophy is not something I agree with either. Reading him is like reading Marx's Manifesto. The Manifesto has a fantastic (if not the best) criticism of capitalism but what he proposes as an alternative is appalling.

[Jonatan Södergren · Rating 3 out of 5]

In his critique towards German existentialism, Adorno points out that spirit akin to utopia symbolizes ”the traces of messianic light in the darkened world” (p. 41) whereby the archaic is often mistaken for the genuine. I once wrote an article where I tried to conceptualise the jargon as a structure that institutes its on social imaginaries whereby certain gestures are endowed with performative authenticity. While Adorno never outlines the characteristics of the jargon, he illustrates how its spirit has become merely another way to conceal the alienation produced by the subject’s reification in capitalist production.