Adorno's own -- by dismay at the failure of an attempted political realization of reason, that Adorno discovers a hidden history of subjectivity, an evocation of the pain of the process of individuation, which is betrayed by logical incoherence. 'Early romanticism', Hörisch argues, 'discovers suffering as the principium individuationis and as the "secret of individuality", which transcendental philosophy can only conceal at the cost of becoming entangled in unavowed contradictions. The pain of individuation derives from the inscription of a compulsory identity which passes itself off as an a priori structure of reason . . . .' ²³ Both aspects of this critique will be of crucial importance for Adorno: the demonstration of the structure of contradiction which both splits and constitutes the subject, and the sensitivity to the repression of inner nature which is demanded by the forging of such a subject. Adorno's critique of the modern subject, therefore, is as implacable as that of the post-structuralists, and is based on not dissimilar grounds: yet -- in contrast to Foucault, Deleuze or Lyotard -- it does not culminate in a call for the abolition of the subjective principle. Rather, Adorno always insists that our only option is to 'use the force of the subject to break through the deception of constitutive subjectivity'. ²⁴ In order fully to understand the reasons for this difference of conclusion, we must turn to Adorno's account of the relation between concept and object, universality and particularity, and its opposition to that of Nietzsche.

From the very beginning, Nietzsche's work is haunted by a sense of the inherent fictionalizing and fetishizing tendencies of language and conceptual thought. In his early essay "'On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense'", Nietzsche remarks:

Every word becomes immediately a concept through the fact that it must serve not simply for the absolutely individualized original experience, to which it owes its birth, that is to say as a reminder, but must straightaway serve for countless more or less similar cases, and that means must be matched to purely dissimilar cases. Every concept arises through the equating of what is not the same. [Jeder Begriff entsteht durch Gleichsetzung des Nichtgleichen.] ²⁵

Throughout Nietzsche's work such remarks on the 'coarseness' of language, on the indifference to differences entailed by the use of concepts, are to be found. 'Just as it is certain', Nietzsche continues,

that one leaf is never quite like another, so it is certain that the concept leaf is constructed by an arbitrary dropping of individual differences, through a forgetting of what differentiates; and this awakens the idea that there is something in nature besides leaves which would be 'leaf', that is to say an

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