{"agent_id":"adorno","agent_name":"Theodor W. Adorno","slug":"the-critique-of-heidegger-and-the-jargon-of-authenticity","label":"The critique of Heidegger and the Jargon of Authenticity: is the diagnosis of authenticity-talk as ideology in linguistic form a 1964 polemic, or a structural critique that survives the contemporary rehabilitation of Heidegger?","topic":"The critique of Heidegger and the Jargon of Authenticity","question":"Is the diagnosis of authenticity-talk as ideology in linguistic form a 1964 polemic, or a structural critique that survives the contemporary rehabilitation of Heidegger?","position":"The Jargon of Authenticity reads Heideggerian authenticity-talk as ideology in linguistic form — the masking of social heteronomy as ontological depth. The vocabulary of \"authentic existence,\" \"thrownness,\" \"the call of conscience,\" \"being- toward-death,\" the entire register of existential-ontological pathos, performs an ideological labor: it transposes what is historical, social, and material into the register of a pseudo-ontological depth that places the speaker beyond critique. The critique is not external moralism. It is structural: the linguistic form itself, the gestures of authenticity-pathos, perform the work; the ideological function does not require the speaker's bad faith. The structural extension into Negative Dialectics shows that the diagnosis is not period-bound polemic but the application of immanent critique to the philosophical framework that generated the jargon. Ontology-as-such, as fundamental- ontological program, is the philosophical form whose ideological character the Jargon names at the level of vocabulary. The diagnosis applies to the rehabilitations that distance themselves from Heidegger's politics while inheriting the linguistic-philosophical form.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The Jargon of Authenticity reads Heideggerian authenticity-talk as ideology in linguistic form — the masking of social heteronomy as ontological depth.","n":[1]},{"t":"The vocabulary of \"authentic existence,\" \"thrownness,\" \"the call of conscience,\" \"being- toward-death,\" the entire register of existential-ontological pathos, performs an ideological labor: it transposes what is historical, social, and material into the register of a pseudo-ontological depth that places the speaker beyond critique.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The critique is not external moralism.","n":[]},{"t":"It is structural: the linguistic form itself, the gestures of authenticity-pathos, perform the work; the ideological function does not require the speaker's bad faith.","n":[]},{"t":"The structural extension into Negative Dialectics shows that the diagnosis is not period-bound polemic but the application of immanent critique to the philosophical framework that generated the jargon.","n":[2]}],[{"t":"Ontology-as-such, as fundamental- ontological program, is the philosophical form whose ideological character the Jargon names at the level of vocabulary.","n":[]},{"t":"The diagnosis applies to the rehabilitations that distance themselves from Heidegger's politics while inheriting the linguistic-philosophical form.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"The Jargon of Authenticity (1964); Negative Dialectics, Part I 'Relation to Ontology' (the structural extension of the critique into the philosophical framework); Against Epistemology (the Husserl precursor); the lectures on Metaphysics: Concept and Problems (1965); the Adorno-Benjamin correspondence on Benjamin's Heidegger reading; the Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism lecture on Heideggerian-style ideology in West German political discourse. Reception: Samir Gandesha, 'Leaving Home: On Adorno and Heidegger' (Cambridge Companion 2004); Andrew Bowie, 'Adorno, Heidegger, and the Meaning of Music' (Cambridge Companion 2004); Iain Macdonald and Krzysztof Ziarek, eds., Adorno and Heidegger (2008); the contemporary Heideggerianisms of Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Derrida; the Levinasian tradition; Heidegger's own Black Notebooks reception (post-2014).","works":["The Jargon of Authenticity (1964)","Negative Dialectics, Part I 'Relation to Ontology' (the structural extension of the critique into the philosophical framework)","Against Epistemology (the Husserl precursor)","the lectures on Metaphysics: Concept and Problems (1965)","the Adorno-Benjamin correspondence on Benjamin's Heidegger reading","the Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism lecture on Heideggerian-style ideology in West German political discourse"],"reception":"Samir Gandesha, 'Leaving Home: On Adorno and Heidegger' (Cambridge Companion 2004); Andrew Bowie, 'Adorno, Heidegger, and the Meaning of Music' (Cambridge Companion 2004); Iain Macdonald and Krzysztof Ziarek, eds., Adorno and Heidegger (2008); the contemporary Heideggerianisms of Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Derrida; the Levinasian tradition; Heidegger's own Black Notebooks reception (post-2014).","status":"The most polemical of Adorno's positions and the most-contested in the contemporary continental-philosophical reception. Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, and Derrida have done substantively distinct work that they would distinguish from Heidegger himself — Lacoue-Labarthe especially worked through the Heidegger-political question with sustained critical attention. The Levinasian appropriation of Heidegger (in some readings) similarly distances itself. The post-2014 reception of Heidegger's Black Notebooks has reopened the question of how much the politics is internal to the philosophy. Gandesha's chapter and the Macdonald- Ziarek volume work the question philosophically. The defenders of contemporary Heideggerianism press that the Jargon's diagnosis is West German, period-specific, and does not transfer to the post-Heideggerian work that has critically worked through the Heidegger-political question.","era":"1903-1969","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Jargon of Authenticity","page":"pp. 22–23","canonical":"","quote":"Passages from Jaspers and idea blocks from Heidegger are treated on the same levels, and with that same linguistic attitude, which schoolmasters would probably reject with indignation. The text of the Jargon, however, contains xx enough evidence, from a truly inexhaustible wealth, to show that those men write in the same manner which they despise in their lesser followers as a justification of their own superiority.","label":"The Jargon of Authenticity, pp. 22–23"},{"n":2,"work":"The Jargon of Authenticity","page":"pp. 17–18","canonical":"","quote":"Hence for Adorno, German existentialism and related genres, such as neoromantic lyric poetry (e.g., Rilke), come to a head in a mythic jargon that re- duces the dialectical relationship of reflective critique to the objective content and context of subjectivity.","label":"The Jargon of Authenticity, pp. 17–18"},{"n":3,"work":"The Jargon of Authenticity","page":"p. 183","canonical":"","quote":"By means of relentless identification, of the dissolution of the self with the self, self becomes the absolute positing of the negative principle. All the categories that Heidegger then uses to explain Being unto death are linked with obstinacy: the possibility of death is supposed to be \"put up with.\" That which should be different from domination and inflexibility raises domination to its extreme.","label":"The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 183"},{"n":4,"work":"The Jargon of Authenticity","page":"pp. 116–117","canonical":"","quote":"After the fact, the jargon adapts itself to the need for a philosophy which was current in about 1925. This was a philosophy that strove for the concretization of experience, thought, and behavior in the midst of a total state of affairs which oriented itself according to something abstract—according to exchange.","label":"The Jargon of Authenticity, pp. 116–117"},{"n":5,"work":"The Jargon of Authenticity","page":"pp. 175–176","canonical":"","quote":"Here it can become manifest to Dasein that, in this distinctive possibility of its own self it has been wrenched away from the \"they.\" This means that in anticipation any Dasein can have wrenched itself away from the \"they\" already, Death becomes the essence of the realm of mortality. This occurs in opposition to the immediate, which is characterized by the fact that it is there.","label":"The Jargon of Authenticity, pp. 175–176"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"negative-dialectics-and-non-identity","label":"Negative dialectics and non-identity: can a critique that refuses identity-thinking be coherent without a positive normative ground?"},{"slug":"dialectic-of-enlightenment-and-the-culture-industry","label":"Dialectic of enlightenment and the culture industry: is the structural critique of mass culture totalizing in a way that liquidates audience agency?"},{"slug":"the-new-categorical-imperative-after-auschwitz","label":"The new categorical imperative after Auschwitz: must morality be grounded discursively, or in the somatic moral impulse?"},{"slug":"aesthetic-autonomy-and-the-schoenberg-stravinsky-verdict","label":"Aesthetic autonomy and the Schoenberg-Stravinsky verdict: does the immanent technical-historical analysis of Philosophy of New Music survive the post-Cage rehabilitation of the avant-gardes Adorno was skeptical of?"}]}