Against Epistemology: A Metacritique (Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie)

The central argument is that epistemology's foundationalist project—the attempt to ground knowledge in a self-certain, sovereign subject—is both philosophically incoherent and practically dangerous. Adorno rejects the entire tradition that runs from Descartes through Kant to Husserl, in which the subject is posited as the ultimate source and guarantor of knowledge. He calls his method a 'metacritique': rather than refuting Husserl's phenomenology from the outside, he enters its internal tensions and shows how its quest for apodictic certainty betrays the concrete experience it claims to secure . The book's provocative claim is that this epistemological ambition, the 'lordship of the subject,' leads in practice toward domination and, as Adorno put it, toward fascism .

Adorno treats Husserl's phenomenology as the most advanced and rigorous expression of bourgeois idealism's attempt to secure knowledge through the subject alone. In the preface and throughout, Husserl is presented as the culmination of a tradition, not an isolated target. By demonstrating the antinomies internal to Husserl's most sophisticated foundationalism, Adorno aims to show that the failure is structural rather than accidental—that no epistemology organized around the sovereign subject can succeed . Husserl is thus the concrete model through which a broader critique of Western metaphysics is mounted, which is why the book is subtitled 'Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies.'

The manuscript was originally written in Oxford between 1934 and 1937, during Adorno's first years in exile, and was subsequently reworked in Frankfurt in 1955–56 before its publication in 1956 . This long gestation means the book sits between Adorno's early philosophical formation and his mature critical theory. It anticipates many themes that became central to his later work, particularly Negative Dialectics: the critique of identity thinking, the attention to non-identity, and the suspicion of systematic closure . Readers coming to Adorno through Negative Dialectics will find in Against Epistemology the earlier, more focused rehearsal of arguments that the later work would expand and transform.

Willis Domingo's translation was published by MIT Press in 1982 (with a 1983 edition date in some records) and remained the only English version for decades . It made available a text that had influenced Habermas and Marcuse and that anticipated the critiques of foundationalism later associated with Rorty and Derrida . A review in the Quarterly Journal of Speech noted that the book 'appears in retrospect as a prophetic voice,' praising Adorno's critiques of Husserlian doctrines such as monadological consciousness and the transcendental ego . The translation was reissued by Polity in 2013, indicating its continued relevance, though readers should be aware that Domingo's rendering mediates Adorno's dense German prose for an English-language audience .

A common misreading treats the book as a straightforward refutation of Husserl, a polemic that seeks to replace phenomenology with Adorno's own positive alternative. This misses the meaning of 'metacritique.' Adorno does not offer a new foundational epistemology to replace Husserl's; he practices immanent critique, showing that the contradictions Husserl encounters are generated by the epistemological project itself. Another misreading assumes the book is merely a preliminary sketch for Negative Dialectics. While it anticipates the later work, Against Epistemology is a sustained and distinctive engagement with phenomenology in its own right, and its detailed analyses of Husserlian concepts—evidence, intuition, constitution—have no direct equivalent in the later book.