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 โjargon of authenticityโ cloaking its idealism in an aura of pseudo-concreteness and neo-romantic kitsch. Even in the straitened rationalism of Husserlโs phenomenology Adorno saw a vain attempt to break free from the prison-house of consciousness.
โGordon, in a detailed, sensitive, fair-minded way, leads the reader through Adornoโs various, usually quite vigorous, rhetorically pointed attacks on both transcendental and existential phenomenology from 1930 on...[A] singularly illuminating study.โ
โRobert Pippin, Critical Inquiry
โGordonโs book offers a significant contribution to our understanding of Adornoโs thought. He writes with expertise, authority, and compendious scholarship, moving with confidence across the thinkers he examines...After this book, it will not be possible to explain Adornoโs philosophical development without serious consideration of [Gordonโs] reactions to them.โ
โRichard Westerman, Symposium