Iaan Reynolds, PhD

My current book project studies the influence of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology on Theodor W. Adorno’s critical theory. As I have argued in a few recent articles, the idea that Adorno rejects phenomenology outright only partially helps us understand his engagement with this tradition, since aspects of Husserl’s work find their way into his mature critical theory in a modified form. When we consider his work as an engagement with phenomenology, we notice striking resemblances between the various critiques of phenomenology that Adorno developed over forty years and internal criticisms of Husserl that have animated the more recent phenomenological tradition, for example by figures such as Emmanuel Lévinas, Trần Đức Thảo, and Frantz Fanon. Attention to Adorno’s work is important for today’s discussions of political or critical phenomenology, I argue, because his critical theory understands itself as an intensification of phenomenology’s attention to experience, with the social and political aim of giving voice to suffering. This emphasis leads Adorno to model his negative dialectics as an inverted mirror-image of Husserl’s search for foundations. In place of phenomenology’s aspirations to become “first philosophy,” Adorno’s project understands itself as a non-methodical “last philosophy” — a project of aesthetic education through which we actively modify our capacity for sensibility.

Through a close reading of Karl Mannheim’s early explorations in the sociology of knowledge, my first book argued for Mannheim’s relevance for contemporary social and political theory. As a philosophical project of self-reflection, the early sociology of knowledge was distinctive for its blend of Marxist social theory and phenomenological investigation. Mannheim’s way of combining structural sociological analysis with attention to lived experience is particularly valuable for today’s attempts to relate thought to its social conditions, whether these are found in contemporary ideology critique, in feminist standpoint epistemologies, or in other versions of critical social philosophy. Addressing many of the prominent criticisms of the sociology of knowledge, I showed how the struggle documented in the early days of Mannheim’s project – against social critique’s tendency to obscure its own perspective – provides the best standard by which to assess its own limitations.

• Reviewed by Cara S. Greene here.