Abstract
I argue that the reflections on language in Adorno and Heidegger have their common root in a modernist problematic that dissected experience into ordinary experience, and transfiguring experiences that are beyond the capacity for expression of our language. I argue that Adorno’s solution to this problem is the more resolutely “modernist” one, in that Adorno is more rigorous about preserving the distinction between what can be said, and what strives for expression in language. After outlining the definitive statement of this problematic in Nietzsche’s early epistemological writings, I outline Heidegger’s solution and subsequently Adorno’s critique of Heidegger. Finally, I argue that situating Adorno within the modernist problem of language and expression is crucial for making sense of his philosophy as a form of critical theory.
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Notes
von Hoffmannsthal (1951, pp. 7–22). Hereafter cited in the text as B.
Joyce (1963, p. 213).
Taylor (1989, p. 469).
Sources of the Self, p. 476.
Adorno (1966, p. 44). All translations from this work are my own. Hereafter cited in the text as ND.
Heidegger (1993a, p. 424).
Nietzsche (1979, p. 51). Subsequently cited in the text as PT.
“A stimulus is felt; transmitted to related nerves; and there, in Übertragung, repeated, etc.” (PT, 50).
Adorno (1970, p. 47).
Heidegger (1962, p. 218). Hereafter cited in the text as BT.
For Kant, this integration occurs through the assumption of a transcendental concept of the purposiveness of nature, by which the attunement of sensuous content and conceptual activity in the aesthetic judgment undergirds the cognitive assumption of an integrated system of knowledge about nature. See, in particular Kant 1974.
Heidegger (1982, p. 17).
The Basic Problems of Phenemonology, p. 78.
Lafont (2000, p. 70).
Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure, p. 104.
Polt (1999, p. 18).
Adorno (2002, pp. 66–79). The discussion in the rest of this paragraph follows the argument of lecture 5.
Heidegger (1993b, p. 198).
Pippen (2005, pp. 104–105).
Bernstein, I think, misses this to some extent in his sympathetic and deeply sophisticated account of the ethical basis of Adorno’s thinking, in Bernstein 2001. It is not so much, I would suggest, that the concept becomes blind to the pain of injured bodies (although, of course, that is a consequence of the estrangement of our language). The original ethical impulse is implicit in language itself, it is the very striving of language to “give voice” to experience, its responsibility to the world.
Pippen (2004, p. 426).
Habermas (1984, p. 385).
References
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Bernstein, J. M. (2001). Adorno: Disenchantment and ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action, vol 1. (trans. Thomas McCarthy). Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson) (p. 218). San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row.
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Nietzsche, F. (1979). Philosophy and truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s notebooks of the early 1870s (Ed. and trans. by D. Breazeale) (p. 51). Atlantic highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Pippen, R. (2004). A short history of nonbeing. Critical Inquiry, 30(424–428), 426.
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Foster, R. Adorno and Heidegger on language and the inexpressible. Cont Philos Rev 40, 187–204 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-007-9050-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-007-9050-9