Abstract

This essay traces how experiences of childhood and exile attain systematic meaning in Adorno’s critical theory of language. Adorno is shown to model the child’s understanding of language after Proust’s novel Á la recherche du temps perdus. Both focus on the names of places the child takes to be saturated with particular experiences and attributes a promise of renewed happiness. For Adorno, such an idea of language poses a challenge to the current rule of abstract conceptuality, unable to grasp such experiences. While just like Proust, he considers it retrospectively, Adorno writes in exile, that is, in a situation of the loss of his own language. Such loss must be interpreted not just in life-historical but in systematic terms as well: Firstly, in terms of a theory of language, insofar as the child’s understanding does not comply with the demands of conceptual thinking. Secondly, in terms of social theory, insofar as an emphatic reference to names has become problematic in the face of processes of economic standardisation and political abuse. And yet, Adorno’s Proustian reflections amount to a linguistic effort to recover with conceptual resources the experiences the names promise the child.