machines'. In the work of Jacques Derrida, by contrast, a complementary one-sidedness occurs: the naturalistic dimension of Nietzsche's thought is almost entirely excluded in favour of an exploration of the contradictions implicit in the notion of pure self-identity. Derrida, in other words, shares a penchant for dialectics with Adorno, is sensitive to the unexpected ways in which philosophical opposites slide into one another, but fails to link this concern with an account of the natural-historical genesis of the self.

The implications of this failure can perhaps best be highlighted by comparing Adorno's and Derrida's critiques of Husserlian phenomenology. Like Merleau-Ponty, whose account of the relation between consciousness and nature bears many affinities to his own, Adorno contests the very possibility of Husserl's transcendental reduction:

The idealist may well call the conditions of possibility of the life of consciousness which have been abstracted out transcendental -- they refer back to a determinate, to some 'factual' conscious life. They are not valid 'in themselves' . . . . The strictest concept of the transcendental cannot release itself from its interdependence with the factum. ³⁵

It is important to note, however, that Adorno speaks of 'interdependence': he by no means wishes to effect an empiricist or naturalistic reduction of consciousness. Rather, his argument is simply that 'the mind's moment of non-being is so intertwined with existence, that to pick it out neatly would be the same as to objectify and falsify it'. ³⁶ Adorno, as a materialist, argues for the anchoring of consciousness in nature, while resisting any attempt to collapse the dialectic of subject and object into a metaphysical monism.

In Derrida's thought, however, the possibility of the transcendental reduction is never questioned as such. Rather, deconstruction incorporates the transcendental perspective, in an operation which Derrida terms 'erasure', but which -- in its simultaneous cancellation and conservation -- is close to a Hegelian Aufhebung. Thus in Of Grammatology Derrida suggests that there is a 'short-of and a beyond of transcendental criticism', and that therefore 'the value of the transcendental arché must make its necessity felt before letting itself be erased'. ³⁷ What this operation implies for Derrida is not the insistence on an irreducible break between facticity and the transcendental, which metaphysics has always dreamed of overcoming, but rather a 'reduction of the reduction', a shift to the level of what he explicitly terms an 'ultra-transcendental text'. For Derrida the incoherence of the concept of self-presence on which Husserl's theory of transcendental subjectivity is based reveals that the transcendental subject and its

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