432 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
shepherds have now died out and are only rarely encountered even
in the Black Forest.’^106 Adorno thus attacks a linguistic practice ‘that
surrounds itself with a halo’, so as to give itself ‘the appearance of
something loftier, more metaphysical’.^107 Immediately following his
lectures in Frankfurt and Paris, Adorno wrote The Jargon of Authenti-
city in order to explain even more clearly the nature of the counter-
enlightenment against which we ought to be on our guard. This book,
which he wrote between 1962 and 1964, was not concerned to deploy
dialectics in order to undermine Heidegger’s ontology, even though it
might have given that impression, since the term ‘authenticity’ was
in fact a key concept of Being and Time. His criticism was directed
exclusively at the lofty tone that predominated in postwar Germany
until well into the 1960s, the inflated pathos that was the essence of
the Heideggerism that was mechanically imitated by ‘the mass of
authentics’.^108 Adorno was undoubtedly able to distinguish between
Heidegger’s substantive philosophy and his apologists and imitators who
made use of his ‘existential’ language. According to Adorno, Heidegger
was ‘not the matador of such political strategies of the jargon and in fact
takes care to avoid their crassness.’^109 The situation was otherwise
with the writings of Karl Jaspers and Otto Friedrich Bollnow, who had
become fashionable exponents of existentialism. It was mainly their
writings from which Adorno quoted in order to demolish the wide-
spread jargon of authenticity – which he described as ‘the Wurlitzer
organ of the spirit’.^110 This polemic was evidently not without its effect.
In a letter to Herbert Marcuse on 15 December 1964, he wrote: ‘Ernst
Bloch phoned to say that because of the “Jargon” Bollnow is having a
nervous breakdown. Let him.’^111
At least one element of Heidegger’s thought was not alien to Adorno
- this was his condemnation of the modern will to power. But even so,
if you take the first part of Negative Dialectics into account (the ‘Rela-
tion to Ontology’), he does not have a good word to say about him.
Heidegger, who was fourteen years older than Adorno, appears to have
simply ignored this attack from Frankfurt.^112 At any rate, there is no
known public comment on Adorno by Heidegger; nor did the two ever
have a proper meeting in postwar Germany,^113 although they had once
been introduced to each other, in January 1929, in the house of Kurt
Riezler, the university registrar.^114
Adorno provided a first foretaste of his polemic in November 1964,
when he gave a reading at an evening event organized by Suhrkamp
Verlag. This consisted of extracts that then appeared in advance in the
Neue Rundschau. The same month saw the publication of The Jargon of
Authenticity, with a dedication ‘For Fred Pollock for 22 May 1964’ and
a motto from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable: ‘Il est plus facile
d’élever un temple que d’y faire descendre l’objet du culte.’^115 The
Cantate Hall in which the Suhrkamp readings were traditionally held
was full, with every seat taken. On this occasion, Adorno’s reading was