CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

Importantly, however, language after the fall retains constitutive traces of its
origin in the language of names. The original meaning that perfectly named the
particular is not completely lost but rather becomes fragmented and dispersed among
different concepts. As Fred Rush puts it, “[o]ur connection to this first state [original
language] is not entirely sundered…. Both Benjamin and Hamann believe that profane
language (as well as profane history) bears traces of ‘pure’ language prior to the Fall,
dispersed throughout the several languages.” 353
The remnant of the original language of names is the symbolic (as opposed to the
communicative) function of language. “Es ist nämlich Sprache in jedem Falle nicht
allein Mitteilung des Mitteilbaren, sondern zugleich Symbol des Nicht-Mitteilbaren.”
[For language is in every case not only communication of the communicable but also, at
the same time, a symbol of the noncommunicable.] 354 Whereas a sign is only arbitrarily
linked to its object, in the symbol, the word is a constitutive component of a whole, of
which the referent is another component. In the symbol, thing and word are tightly
connected; each is ontologically complete and intelligible only in relation to its
complement. Part of the being of the thing is its linguistic symbol, and part of the being
of the symbol is the thing; the two are incomplete without the other. When language falls
into the disarray of its merely communicative function, the reality of the thing is broken.
Nature is incomplete without expression, and words are incomplete without an intrinsic
353 Rush, Fred, “Jena Romanticism and Benjamin’s Critical Epistemology,” in Walter Benjamin
and Romanticism (London: Continuum, 2002), 131.
354 Benjamin, Walter, “Über Sprache Überhaupt und Über die Sprache des Menschen,” in
Gesammelte Werke I (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 2011), 219. English translation by Edmund
Jephcott in “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings,
vol. 1 (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 74.
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