Abstract

Situating my discussion within the so called “linguistic turn” in the Frankfurt School tradition, I demonstrate that Adorno, even prior to Habermas, already engaged with the nature of language in some of his early essays, Theses on the Language of the Philosopher and The Actuality of Philosophy, as well as in the late radio lecture Why still Philosophy. What is shown in this reconstruction is that Adorno’s engagement is informed by an attempt at a revaluation of the language of philosophy, a revaluation that has significant consequences for a global understanding of how we conceive the world of objects, in general, and how philosophy’s configurative use of concepts could be seen as a way of “disclosing” uncharted possibilities of the non-identical, in particular. While Adorno did not present a systematic and clear philosophy of language, his critique of language can be construed as an “implicit” philosophy of language.