objects, along with the other characteristic oppositions of metaphysical thought, are in some sense -- which he finds rather uncomfortable to expound -- the 'effects' of a higher principle of non-identity for which his most common name is 'différance'. The result is a final philosophical position remarkably reminiscent of pre-Hegelian idealism. Since absolute difference, lacking all determinacy, is indistinguishable from absolute identity, Derrida's evocations of a trace which is 'origin of all repetition, origin of ideality . . . not more ideal than real, not more intelligible than sensible, not more a transparent signification than an opaque energy', ³⁸ provide perhaps the closest twentieth-century parallel to the Identitiitsphilosophie of the younger Schelling.

It appears, therefore, that Derrida's attempt to develop a critique of the self-identical subject which eschews any naturalistic moment results in a position no more plausible that Lyotard's monistic metaphysics of libido. Although Adorno did not live long enough to confront Derrida's position directly, his likely response to current comparisons and inter-assimilations of deconstruction and negative dialectics can be deduced from the critique of Heidegger's thought -- undoubtedly the central influence on Derrida -- which threads its way through his work. Heidegger is correct to suggest that there is 'more' to entities than simply their status as objects of consciousness, but -- in Adorno's view -by treating this 'more' under the heading of 'Being' he transforms it into a self-defeating hypostatization:

By making what philosophy cannot express an immediate theme, Heidegger dams philosophy up, to the point of a revocation of consciousness. By way of punishment, the spring which, according to his conception, is buried, and which he would like to uncover, dries up far more pitifully than the insight of philosophy, which was destroyed in vain, and which inclined towards the inexpressible through its mediations. ³⁹

For Adorno, whatever experience the word 'Being' may convey can be expressed only through a constellation of entities, whereas in Heidegger's philosophy the irreducibility of a relation is itself transformed into an ultimate. In the evocation of a Being which transcends the subject--object distinction, 'the moment of mediation becomes isolated and thereby immediate. However, mediation can be hypostatized just as little as the subject and object poles; it is only valid in their constellation. Mediation is mediated by what it mediates'. ⁴⁰ Mutatis mutandis, one could also argue that Derridean différance is necessarily differentiated by what it differentiates. While it is true that nature and culture, signified and signifier, object and subject would be nothing without the difference between them, this is not sufficient to ensure the

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