Method and its other: Adorno’s challenge to phenomenology

This paper reads Adorno’s engagement with Husserlian phenomenology as a resource for recent discussions on phenomenology and social critique. Transcendental phenomenology’s inability to develop an adequate account of society, according to Adorno, comes from its methodological compulsion to ground its knowledge in first principles. This leads it to produce a socially necessary illusion of society as a harmonious community of monads. If this “first philosophy” produces an inverted image of society, however, learning to see the resulting pseudos is a task for which there is no step-by-step formula. In contrast to Husserl’s construction of society as a harmonious community of monads, Adorno’s critical theory sees society as a negative totality, and he claims that doing justice to this contradictory social object involves breaking the compulsion to system and method as philosophical guidelines. After reviewing how Husserl’s conception of method reflects in his account of the social world in the first section, we will examine Adorno’s criticism of this aspect of transcendental phenomenology in the second. The third and final section begins to outline Adorno’s alternative to Husserlian phenomenology: a fragmentary “last philosophy” that works to disclose the negative social totality through a conceptual reflection on the individual moments of suffering composing it.