Adorno

A Theory Devoured by Thought 433

frequently punctuated by laughter and applause.^116 At the centre of his
linguistic analysis were those highly marketable exclusive terms and
phrases such as ‘in the decision’, ‘commission’, ‘appeal’, ‘encounter’,
‘genuine dialogue’, ‘statement’, ‘concern’, ‘commitment’, but also lines
of poetry such as Rilke’s famous verse about ‘poverty as the great in-
ward gleam of the spirit’.^117 Since this jargon amounts to a German
ideology that has somehow infiltrated language, it must be analysed
linguistically. ‘The fact that such language has become an ideology unto
itself, socially necessary illusion, can be demonstrated by the contradic-
tion between what it says and how it says it.’^118
This was the programme that Adorno implemented in detail. In the
first sections he unmasked the jargon as a rhetorical technique that
stood in the way of a critical scrutiny of content because the words were
said to be what mattered, the things that could not be interrogated
existentially. The jargon that arose hand in hand with a resurrected
metaphysics of origins presented itself as a form of compensation for
the real losses of meaning to which the individual was forced to submit
in the administered world. It is suggested that, by turning the language
of the depths into the language of higher realms, by immersing oneself
in an archaic language, it would be possible to conjure up the spirit of
a truly human existence. In fact, the jargon fills the breach created by
the disintegration of language,^119 and as such it is the complement to the
positivist view of language that permits language only as an instrument
of meaningful signs. Adorno also used Heidegger’s own texts to illus-
trate the nature of the jargon, showing that in his case it was a style
‘that aimed, synthetically, to create a primal sense for pure words’.^120
Thus Heidegger was said to have packed commonplace turns of phrase
into the universal concepts of his philosophy in order to create the
impression of magical participation in the absolute. At the same time,
however, the nullity of human existence was raised to the level of
an essential category so that the destinies of individual human beings
appear worthless.
It is these passages on Heidegger that exemplify Adorno’s original
intention. This linguistic criticism was intended as merely the first step
in a comprehensive critique of Heidegger for which The Jargon of
Authenticity was to be no more than ‘a kind of propaedeutic’.^121 But
since these sections had become so voluminous, and since they had
a different character from the as yet uncompleted Negative Dialectics,
Adorno decided to publish them on their own.^122

The fat child

Greyness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbour the

concept of different colours, scattered traces of which are not absent from

the negative whole.^123