The opposition of the stable to the chaotic, and the domination of nature, would never have succeeded without an element of stability in the dominated, which would otherwise incessantly give the lie to the subject. Completely casting away that element and localizing it solely in the subject is no less hubris than absolutizing the schemata of conceptual order . . . . Sheer chaos, to which reflective spirit downgrades the world for the sake of its own total power, is just as much the product of spirit as the cosmos which it sets up as an object of reverence. 30
Adorno's argument is that pure singularity is itself an abstraction, the waste-product of identity-thinking.
Two major implications of this position are that the attempt by post-structuralist thought to isolate singularity will simply boomerang into another form of abstraction; and that what it mistakes for immediacy will in fact be highly mediated. These pitfalls are clearly exemplified by Lyotard's working through of the 'philosophy of desire' in Économie Libidinale. The notion of a libidinal band composed of ephemeral intensities is an attempt to envisage a condition in which, as Nietzsche puts it, 'no moment would be for the sake of another'. But if every moment is prized purely for its uniqueness, without reference to a purpose or a meaning, to a before or an after, without reference to anything which goes beyond itself, then what is enjoyed in each moment becomes paradoxically and monotonously the same: in Lyotard's work of the mid-seventies any action, discourse, or aesthetic structure becomes an equally good -- or equally bad -- conveyor of intensity. Furthermore, Lyotard's own evocations betray his ostensible intention, since they make clear that such 'intensities' cannot be reduced to pure cathexis, but are symbolically structured, coloured by remarkably determinate situations:
The slow, light, intent gaze of an eye, then suddenly the head turns so that there is nothing left but a profile, Egypt. The silence which settles around her extends to great expanses of the libidinal band which, it seems, belongs to her body. Those zones also are silent, which means that dense, inundating surges move noiselessly and continually to 'her' regions, or come from these regions, down the length of slopes. 31
It is important to note that Adorno does not avoid these difficulties by espousing a Hegelian position. He agrees with Hegel that, as a unity imposed on particulars, the abstract universal enters into contradiction with its own concept -- becomes itself something arbitrary and particular. But he argues that even Hegel's solution -- an immanent, self-realizing universal -- fails to challenge the primacy of the universal as such. Identity-thinking, even in its Hegelian form, defeats its own
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