original form, according to which all leaves are woven, drawn, circumscribed, coloured, curled, painted, but by clumsy hands, so that no example emerges correctly and reliably as a true copy of the original form . . . . The overlooking of the individual gives us the form, whereas nature knows no forms and no concepts, and also no species, but only an X, which is inaccessible and indefinable to us. 26
It is precisely such a view of the deceptive identity forged by concepts, as we have seen, which motivates Lyotard's evocation of the ineffably singular points of intensity which constitute the libidinal band, or Foucault's reluctant but repeated recourse to an uncapturable prediscursive spontaneity -- whether under the title of 'madness', 'resistance', or 'the body and its pleasures'.
Nietzsche's account of the manner in which real, particular leaves come to be seen as poor imitations of the concept 'leaf' captures precisely that process which Adorno refers to as 'identity-thinking'. 'The immanent claim of the concept', Adorno writes, 'is its ordercreating invariance over against the variation of what is grasped under it. This is denied by the form of the concept, which is "false" in that respect.' 27 However, Adorno does not believe that this situation can be remedied simply by counterposing the contingent and particular to the universality of concepts. Rather, he argues, the assumption that the 'non-identical' left behind by the concept is merely an inaccessible and undefinable X, the belief that 'nature knows no forms and no concepts', is itself the result of the primacy of the universal in identity-thinking. Adorno's philosophical effort is directed towards moving beyond the split between bare facticity and conceptual determination, through an experience of the contradiction which that split itself implies. Nonidentity, Adorno suggests, 'is opaque only for identity's claim to be total'. 28 Thus, in the Introduction to Against Epistemology (Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie), a series of critical essays on Husserlian phenomenology, Adorno employs the following passage from The Twilight of the Idols to demonstrate that Nietzsche 'undervalued what he saw through':
Formerly, alteration, change, any becoming at all, were taken as proof of mere appearance, as an indication that there must be something which led us astray. Today, conversely, precisely insofar as the prejudice of reason forces us to posit unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood, being, we see ourselves caught in error, compelled into error. 29
Against the bent of this text, which is characteristic of both Nietzsche and his post-structuralist followers, Adorno insists that
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