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

particular object is preserved in ordinary language and thus in conceptuality generally.
The first development is the theory of ideas presented in the introduction to Benjamin’s
(unsuccessful) Habilitation dissertation, the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel (written
in 1925, about nine years after the essay on language), and the later materialistic
interpretation of the naming power of language that undergirds Benjamin’s theory of
mimesis, especially as it is explained in his 1932 essay “Über das mimetische Vermögen”
[“On the Mimetic Faculty”].
In the Trauerspiel, Benjamin more fully develops an account of how the power to
name is preserved in language (that is, the power to express the object in the object’s own
terms and therefore to have a robust and not arbitrary relation to the object). Recall that
the fall of language consists in that the original unity of the name becomes fractured into
general concepts, and, with this, the content once indivisible in the name and having a
one-to-one correspondence with the thing is broken. But, in its broken form, it remains in
the word. The meaning in the name is not annihilated but rather fragmented. So, for
example, with regard to the name ℵthat expressed the object a, after the fall of language
ℵ has been broken but its semantic one-to-one attachment to a survives in fragments
scattered over a set of concepts C that all in some way or other relate to a, though none of
them fully corresponds to a, and even the set C fails to corresponds because it expresses
content that goes beyond a (that does not apply to a).
Is it then possible for words, now corresponding to general concepts, to become
once again united in the name? That is, would it be possible to reconstruct the name ℵ
by reuniting the fragments of it that are scattered over the set of concepts C, and
attempting to reconnect them in just the right way, so that they jointly reconstitute the
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