Taking On the Stigma of Inauthenticity: Adorno's Critique of Genuineness

search for authenticity, nearly everywhere we find it in modern times, writes Marshall Berman in his book on Rousseau, The Politics of Authenticity, is bound up with a radical rejection of things as they are. ... desire for authenticity has emerged in modern society as one of most politically explosive of human impulses.1 Even those with less radical agendas, like Sigmund Freud, have been seen as sharing same desire. According to Lionel Trilling in his classic study Sincerity and Authenticity, Freud's insis tence on tragic dimension of human condition intention of sustaining authenticity of human existence that formerly had been rati fied by God.2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Trilling added, dreaded the inauthenticity