Gordon, Peter E. - Adorno and Existence

November 01, 2016

Peter E. Gordon, Harvard University Press. November, 2016.
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From the beginning to the end of his career, the critical theorist 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 Husserl’s phenomenology Adorno saw a vain attempt to break free from the prison-house of consciousness. Read More...

	Peter E. Gordon Amabel B. James Professor of History, Harvard College Professor, Faculty Affiliate, Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures, & Department of Philosophy Peter Gordon specializes in modern European Intellectual History from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. He works chiefly on themes in Continental philosophy and social thought in Germany and France in the modern period, with an emphasis on critical theory, Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School, phenomenology, and existentialism. Read More...

Peter E. Gordon

Amabel B. James Professor of History, Harvard College Professor, Faculty Affiliate, Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures, & Department of Philosophy

Peter Gordon specializes in modern European Intellectual History from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. He works chiefly on themes in Continental philosophy and social thought in Germany and France in the modern period, with an emphasis on critical theory, Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School, phenomenology, and existentialism. Read More...