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

Ausdruck kommt, in sehr entrückten Zeiten als die Schrift entstand, von größer
Bedeutung für das Schreiben gewesen ist. Die Schrift ist so, neben der Sprache,
ein Archiv unsinnlicher Ähnlichkeiten, unsinnlicher Korrespondenzen
geworden. 384
The notion of sinnlose Ähnlichkeit is crucial for Benjamin, and it is also crucial
for Adorno (who speaks of much the same thing under the heading of “affinity”) because
it is this primordial similarity between words and things, and its survival in language, that
affords language its expressive power, through which alone the non-conceptual can be
exhibited in the constellation. The case of graphology is helpful for understanding how
much is involved in this idea. The handwriting in a piece of script contains indications of
the being of the writer, her unconscious attitudes and desires. Similarly, thinks
Benjamin, language in general contains traces of the being of natural things. Just like the
linguistic expression of an individual expresses her unconscious being, human language
in general expresses the unconscious history of humanity, which is a history of nature
because it is an archaic memory of the unity between things and their expression in
mimicry. Nonsensuous similarity is therefore a relation between explicit meanings in
language and an unconscious meaning in which the unity of word and thing is preserved.
Was nie geschrieben wurde, lesen.’ Dies Lesen ist das älteste: das Lesen vor
aller Sprache, aus den Eingeweiden, den Sternen oder Tänzen. Später kamen
Vermittlungsglieder eines neuen Lesens, Runen und Hieroglyphen in Gebrauch.
384 Benjamin, Walter, “Über das Mimetische Vermögen,” in Gesammelte Werke II (Frankfurt am
Main: Zweitausendeins, 2011), 447. English translation by Edmund Jephcott in “On the Mimetic Faculty,”
in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2 (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1996), 722:
Graphology has taught us to recognize in handwriting images that the unconscious of the writer
conceals in it. It may be supposed that the mimetic process which expresses itself in this way in
the activity of the writer was, in the very distant times in which script originated, of utmost
importance for writing. Script has thus become, like language, an archive of nonsensuous
[sinnlose] similarities, of nonsensuous correspondences.
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