operations.' ²⁰ He ostensibly adopts a position in which discourses are entirely constitutive of their objects. And yet the contradiction persists, since it is inherent in his attempt to develop a non-dialectical form of critique. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, for example, the oscillation between the epistemological and the ontological occurs in the form of an opposition between the apparatuses of sexuality and a tentatively -- but persistently -- evoked pre-discursive 'body and its pleasures'. ²¹ Foucault is able to avoid this dilemma in his final publications only by returning to a notion of self-constitution and self-reflection which he had denounced up until this point as illicitly Hegelian. One of the fundamental tenets of post-structuralist thought is tacitly abandoned when Foucault reinstates a relation between knowledge and its object internal to consciousness; when he inquires: 'By means of what play of truth does man offer himself to be thought in his own being when he perceives himself as mad, when he considers himself as ill, when he reflects on himself as a living, speaking and labouring being, when he judges and punishes himself as a criminal?' ²² This is an unmistakably 'revisionist' retrospective.

Having explored this fundamental difficulty of the post-structuralist position, I would like now to introduce the comparison with Adorno. One obvious point of entry would be the fact that both the poststructuralists and Adorno owe an enormous debt to Nietzsche, and in particular to his sense of the costs imposed by the forging of a self-identical, morally responsible subject, perhaps most vividly conveyed in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals. However, as I have already suggested, the full import of these parallels has been misunderstood, because of a failure to appreciate the gap between the general philosophical projects within which they occur. One of the most important distinctions in this respect is that Adorno is not content with a Nietzschean--Freudian, naturalistic critique of consciousness, but takes up the discovery of the early German Romantics that the philosophy of pure consciousness is internally incoherent. In an illuminating article, Jochen Hörisch has shown that the original antecedents for Adorno's acute awareness of the loss of spontaneity imposed by the formation of the modern autonomous individual, his sense that the identity of the self must be coercively maintained against the centrifugal tendencies of impulse, can be traced back beyond Nietzsche to the critical engagement with Fichte's philosophy of Schlegel and Novalis. It is here, in thought partly inspired -- like

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