written appreciatively on Walter Benjamin, whose borderline position between the political and the mystical he clearly finds sympathetic. ³ On the other side, contemporary German inheritors of the Frankfurt School, including Habermas himself, have begun to explore the internal landscape of post-structuralism, and to assess the points of intersection and divergence with their own tradition. ⁴

In the English-speaking world, it is the relation between the characteristic procedures of deconstruction developed by Derrida and the 'negative dialectics' of Adorno which has attracted the most attention: a common concern with the lability and historicity of language, a repudiation of foundationalism in philosophy, an awareness of the subterranean links between the metaphysics of identity and structures of domination, and a shared, tortuous love--hate relation to Hegel, seem to mark out these two thinkers as unwitting philosophical comrades-in-arms. However, up till now, the predominant tendency of such comparisons has been to present Adorno as a kind of deconstructionist avant la lettre. ⁵ The assumption has been that a more consistent pursuit of anti-metaphysical themes, and by implication a more politically radical approach, can be found in the French Heideggerian than in the Frankfurt Marxist. It will be the fundamental contention of this essay that, for several interconnected reasons, this is a serious misunderstanding. Firstly, although there are undoubtedly elements in Adorno's thought which anticipate Derridean themes, he has in many ways equally strong affinities with that mode of recent French thought which is usually known as the 'philosophy of desire'. It is only the exaggeration of the constitutive role of the language in poststructuralism, it could be argued, and a corresponding antipathy -even on the intellectual Left -- to the materialist emphases of Marxism, which have led to this aspect of Adorno's work being overlooked or underplayed. Secondly, from an Adornian perspective, it is precisely this lack of a materialist counterweight in Derrida's thought, the absence of any account of the interrelation of consciousness and nature, particularly 'inner nature', which can be seen to have brought forth the equally one-sided reaction of the philosophy of desire. From such a standpoint, different post-structuralist thinkers appear as dealing, in an inevitably distorting isolation, with what are in fact aspects of a single complex of problems. Finally, Adorno's concept of reconciliation, while far from immune to criticism, cannot be regarded as a simple 'failure of nerve' on his part, even less as an invitation to 'totalitarianism', to be contrasted with the harsher, less compromising vision of post-structuralism. It is rather the logical consequence of the attempt to think beyond a set of oppositions which -- in their Nietzschean provenance -- remain vulnerably brittle and abstract. In

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