The Jargon of Authenticity

The Jargon of Authenticity is Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of German existentialism. As an expression of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, Adorno’s critique is a Hegelian-Marxist response to the existential rejection of critical reason. Although this analysis focuses upon twentieth-century German existentialism, especially its post–World War II diffusion, the basic concern is its notion of subjectivity. That is, Adorno’s critique is itself an attempt to transcend and include in the perspective of critical reason the truth of the existentialist concern for the fundamentalness of human subjectivity. Dialectically conceived “subjectivity” is historically formed and yet not reducible to historical determinations: history subjectivity is reconstructed from the framework of reflective critique in that the limits of constitutive synthesis establish the range of possible experience.