Binding: Paperback
Description: Theodor Adorno was no stranger to controversy. In The Jargon of Authenticity he gives full expression to his hostility to the language employed by certain existentialist thinkers such as Martin Heidegger. With his customary alertness to the uses and abuses of language he calls into question the jargon or 'aura' as his colleague Walter Benjamin described it which clouded existentialists thought. He argued that its use undermined the very message for meaning and liberation that it sought to make authentic. Moreover such language - claiming to address the issue of freedom - signally failed to reveal the lack of freedom inherent in the capitalist context in which it was written. Instead along with the jargon of the advertising jingle it attributed value to the satisfaction of immediate desire. Alerting his readers to the connection between ideology and language Adorno's frank and open challenge to directness and the avoidance of language that 'gives itself over either to the market to balderdash or to the predominating vulgarity' is as timely today as it ever has been.
Title: The Jargon Of Authenticity
Author(s): Adorno Theodor
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Barcode: 9780415289917
Pages: 176 Pages
Publication Date: 9/5/2002
Series: Routledge Classics
Category: Social Theory