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 exist
entialist 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 h
is colleague Walter Benjamin described it, which clouded existentialists' though
t.
He argued that its use undermined the very message for meaning and liberat
ion that it sought to make authentic. Moreover, such language - claiming to addr
ess the issue of freedom - signally failed to reveal the lack of freedom inheren
t in the capitalist context in which it was written. Instead, along with the jar
gon of the advertising jingle, it attributed value to the satisfaction of immedi
ate desire.
