Introduction

'Actually, philosophy that is not philosophy of language cannot even be conceived of today.' What might surprise philosophically minded readers about this sentence is not so much its content as its author: Theodor W. Adorno. More than fifty years after this sentence was uttered, the power of philosophies influenced by the linguistic turn, which presumed that all the problems of philosophy could be solved by linguistic analysis, has significantly declined. This is indicated not least by the fact that the linguistic turn was followed by several other turns. Language, however, is still one of the most important fields of philosophy. Whilst not all the problems of philosophy can be solved entirely through reflections on language, one cannot solve philosophical problems fully without reflecting on language. Adorno's utterance is thus not to be understood as a completely dated expression, one of times long past, but rather as an indicator of a philosophical sensitivity to language that has not yet received the attention it deserves.

The irritation sparked by the association of the citation with its author is primarily caused by the fact that Adorno's philosophy has been interpreted in many different ways — for instance, as dialectical negativism (Theunissen), as Freudian-Marxian materialism (Schmidt), as an outdated philosophy of consciousness (Habermas), or even as theory-turned-aesthetics (Bubner) — but never as a novel and original contribution to the philosophy of language. The interest in Adorno's philosophy of language has heightened significantly in recent years, particularly so in the English-speaking world; yet neither there nor in the German-speaking world, where there has been only sporadic publications on Adorno since the 1980s — or elsewhere in the philosophical world — has there emerged a differentiated and interpretatively diverse field of research.

One of the motivations to engage with Adorno's philosophy of language has been to refute — or at least limit — Habermas's claim about the exhaustion of the paradigm of philosophy of consciousness within Adorno's philosophy, which served as a justification for the linguistic and pragmatic turn in critical theory. Almost every text begins with a presentation and a critique of the consequences that Habermas's critique had for the reception of Adorno's philosophy of language. This move is hard to criticise. After all, it is doubtless correct that the model of critical theory that Habermas develops in his Theory of Communicative Action, which is essentially a language and action-theoretical account, has somewhat obstructed the view on Adorno's work on the philosophy of language. Since its publication, Habermas's work has set the direction for critical theorists who want to engage with language. The one exception concerns the sphere of aesthetics and philosophy of art, where Adorno's work on language has long been regarded as an important point of reference. Habermas's diagnosis of the differentiation of Adorno's work into theoretical philosophy regressed into mere exercise, into a practical philosophy that could not ground its normative foundations without lapsing into performative contradictions, and into aesthetics which attributes cognition (Erkenntnischarakter) to art, has become a template for the reception of the latter's work. Adorno's philosophy of language, which, from Habermas's standpoint, is conducted in terms of a philosophy of consciousness, falls between the cracks if it is regarded as paradigmatically different to Adorno's philosophy as a whole.

Hence, a temporary bracketing of Habermas's judgement seems appropriate if one is to approach Adorno's philosophy of language properly today. Habermas's theory should not conversely be rejected altogether, thereby concealing the existing accordance between Adorno and Habermas. The point is simply that in giving a coherent representation of Adorno's philosophy of language, Habermas's criticisms of Adorno must also be put to the test. To date, however, the move to analyse Adorno's philosophy of language outside of the Habermasian lens has paradoxically led almost exclusively to varying collections of different motifs and aspects of the former.

In this book, I have made productive the certainly undeniable difficulties which a mediation of these existing moments into a coherent theory involves. Indeed, Adorno's extant work on language has a fragmentary character, and he forwent entirely any prolonged, systematic philosophical study of language. On the other hand, one finds in every area of Adorno's philosophy a central place for reflections of the philosophy of language, which makes it possible to see how these reflections relate to each other.

It is here that the question of Adorno's 'philosophy of language' suggests itself. Initiated by Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, the linguistic turn set out to solve problems confronting the philosophical tradition after the decline of the persuasive force of metaphysics, by means of analyses of linguistic forms. In Wittgenstein's words, the primary aim was to dissolve the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language, which drove it to metaphysical speculations. The aim was thus to help reason understand that words were not simply names for objects. For instance, the meaning of a predicate of a sentence must not be equated with the object that the nominalisation of the predicate denotes. The critique of metaphysics by early analytic philosophy did not confront the...