Adorno’s intensive criticism of phenomenology is well known, his entire early period during the 1920s and 1930s being marked by various polemical engagements with Husserl. This engagement finds its peak during his work at his second dissertation project in Oxford, a dissertation that was supposed to systematicaly expose the antinomies of phenomenological thinking while particularly focusing on Husserl’s concept of “eidetic intuition” or “intuition of essences”. The present paper will take this criticism as its starting point in focusing on two (...) highly specific aspects of Adorno’s interpretation: the opposition between eidetic intuition and the traditional theories of abstraction and its relationship to genetic phenomenology. In light of this criticism I subsequently show: 1. that, in his later work, Adorno’s understanding of eidetic intuition undergoes a significant revaluation; 2. that he reappropriates key elements of the eidetic method in his own procedure of physiognomic analysis, and 3. that his account of physiognomics is relevant for addressing the aforementioned incongruities of phenomenological eidetics itself. (shrink)

Pre-theoretical experience and the lifeworld are traditionally seen as a key reference for phenomenology. In the present paper I intend to point out their relevance for critical theory as well. To this extent, I start off with a brief overview of phenomenological approaches to pre-theoretical experience and their relationship to empirical research. In sketching out some of the overlaps between phenomenology and early critical theory in this regard, I then specifically focus on Adorno’s reflections concerning the role of an extended (...) concept of experience in both his sociological and his philosophical work. Outlining Adorno’s methodological appropriation of “unregimented experience” in the guise of what he terms “physiognomic interpretation” – a procedure intended as a corrective to both rigorous empirical research and philosophical aprioric reasoning – I try to show wherein Adorno’s own approach to the pre-theoretical diverges from phenomenology. Finally, I conclude with some reflections concerning the different functions experience acquires in traditional phenomenology and critical theory. (shrink)