Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity

2. Taking on the Stigma of Inauthenticity: Adorno’s Critique of Genuineness

c h a p t e r 2 Taking on the Stigma of Inauthenticity: Adorno’s Critique of Genuineness Martin Jay To know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic.1 paul de man ‘‘The search for authenticity, nearly everywhere we find it in modern times,’’ writes Marshall Berman in his book on Rousseau, The Politics of Authenticity, ‘‘is bound up with a radical rejection of things as they are . . . the desire for authenticity has emerged in modern society as one of the most politically explosive of human impulses.’’2 Even those with less radical agendas, like Sigmund Freud, have been seen as sharing the same desire . According to Lionel Trilling in his classic study Sincerity and Authenticity, Freud’s insistence on the tragic dimension of the human condition ‘‘had the intention of sustaining the authenticity of human existence that formerly had been ratified by God.’’3 Nietzsche, Trilling added, dreaded ‘‘the inauthenticity of experience, which he foresaw would be the consequence of the death of God.’’4 These testimonials to the power of authenticity as the reigning value of a society bereft of divine sanction and dissatisfied with the false comforts of modern life can be seen as symptomatic documents of the 1960s and early 1970s, at least in the American context. They can, in fact, be seen to represent the culmination of the powerful impact on American culture of Sartrean existentialism, which functioned to reinforce native inclinations, stemming from certain strains in evangelical Protestantism and the frontier experience, toward relying on individual responsibility in the face of 17 18 Adorno’s Critique of Genuineness conformist pressures from the outside.5 At a time when moral relativism appeared hard to overcome, authenticity also seemed to lend at least a measure of value to whatever beliefs were held with special intensity and fervor. Indeed, if recent books like Alexander Nehamas’ Virtues of Authenticity and Geoffrey Hartman’s Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity are any indication, the positive glow surrounding the word ‘‘authenticity’’ remains strong into our own century.6 And yet at virtually the same time as Americans like Berman and Trilling were identifying authenticity as the highest value of their age, Theodor W. Adorno was writing an uncompromising attack on what he dubbed ‘‘the jargon of authenticity’’ as the latest version of ‘‘the German Ideology .’’7 This text of 1967, one of the most excoriating polemics he ever wrote, was directed largely against Heidegger, Jaspers, Buber, and other German existentialists, with an occasional nod to Sartre and a recognition that the roots of the jargon lay in the Weimar Republic rather than the postwar era. It is particularly noteworthy that Adorno, who took so much from Freud and Nietzsche and was no less adamant than Berman’s version of Rousseau in radically rejecting ‘‘things as they are,’’ nonetheless reckoned authenticity on the side of the conformists rather than the rebels, and identified it as a particularly German rather than American ideology. What is perhaps even more striking is his having anticipated the argument of The Jargon of Authenticity while he was still in his American exile, in one of the most trenchant aphorisms of Minima Moralia, written in 1945, called ‘‘Gold Assay.’’8 In what follows I want to focus on the implications of this aphorism and argue that it was the indispensable link between Adorno’s later attack on German existentialism and an earlier essay by his great friend Walter Benjamin, his celebrated ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’9 which even more than the critique of Kierkegaard in Adorno’s 1933 Habilitationsschrift provides the key arguments for his attack on authenticity.10 First, several etymological observations are in order (even as we acknowledge Adorno’s own skepticism about placing too much faith in the origins of words). Authenticity (Authentizität in German) is derived from the Greek autos or ‘‘self’’ and hentes or ‘‘prepared,’’ and implies something done by one’s own hand and thus providing a reliable guarantee of quality. In German, the more common word is Eigentlichkeit, whose root is in eigen, which is the perfect participle of a verb, defunct in modern usage, for ‘‘having’’ or ‘‘possessing.’’ As a result, it suggests proprietary ownership, including of the self. A third term, Echtheit, comes from a niederdeutsch 19 Martin Jay term echact, which means following the law, an origin that alerts...