Adorno and Existence

From the beginning to the end of his career, the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno sustained an uneasy but enduring bond with existentialism. His attitude overall was that of unsparing criticism, verging on polemic. In Kierkegaard he saw an early paragon for the late flowering of bourgeois solipsism; in Heidegger, an impresario for a jargon of authenticity cloaking its idealism in an aura of pseudo-concreteness and neo-romantic kitsch. Even in the straitened rationalism of Husserls phenomenology Adorno saw a vain attempt to break free from the prison-house of consciousness. Gordon, in a detailed, sensitive, fair-minded way, leads the reader through Adornos various, usually quite vigorous, rhetorically pointed attacks on both transcendental and existential phenomenology from 1930 on[A] singularly illuminating study. Robert Pippin, Critical Inquiry Gordons book offers a significant contribution to our understanding of Adornos thought. He writes with expertise, authority, and compendious scholarship, moving with confidence across the thinkers he examinesAfter this book, it will not be possible to explain Adornos philosophical development without serious consideration of [Gordons] reactions to them. Richard Westerman, Symposium