purpose, since by reducing what is non-identical in the object to itself, it ultimately comes away empty-handed. For Adorno, the experience of this contradiction sparks off a further movement of reflection, to a position in which the non-identical is no longer viewed as the isolated particular which it is forced back into being by identity-thinking. The particular is now seen as standing in a pattern of relations to other particulars, a historically sedimented 'constellation' which defines its identity. 'What is internal to the non-identical', Adorno writes, 'is its relation to what it is not itself, and which its instituted, frozen identity withholds from it . . . . The object opens itself to a monadological insistence, which is a consciousness of the constellation in which it stands . . . .' ³² This consciousness, in its turn, can be expressed only through a 'constellation' -- as opposed to a hierarchical ordering -- of concepts, which are able to generate out of the differential tension between them an openness to that non-identity of the thing itself, which would be 'the thing's own identity against its identifications'. ³³ There is for Adorno, in other words, no necessary antagonism between conceptual thought and reality, no inevitable mutual exclusion of Knowledge and Becoming. The problem is posed not by conceptual thought as such, but by the assumption of the primacy of the concept, the delusion that mind lies beyond the total process in which it finds itself as a moment. The characteristics of reality which post-structuralist thought ontologizes are in fact merely the reflection of a historically obsolete imperiousness of consciousness, a lack of equilibrium between subject and object. 'What we differentiate', Adorno writes, 'will appear divergent, dissonant, negative for just as long as the structure of our consciousness obliges it to strive for unity: as long as its demand for totality will be its measure of whatever is not identical with it.' ³⁴

One way of summarizing the argument so far would be to say that, for Adorno, the compulsive features of identity are inseparable from its internal contradictions: identity can become adequate to its concept only by acknowledging its own moment of non-identity. In the more naturalistic of the French thinkers influenced by Nietzsche, however, this logical dimension of the critique of consciousness is entirely absent. The ego is portrayed unproblematically as the internally consistent excluder of the spontaneity and particularity of impulse, with the consequence that opposition can only take the form of a self-defeating jump from the 'unity' of self-consciousness to the dispersal of intensities, or from the Oedipalized subject to a metaphysics of 'desiring

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