logical priority of non-identity over identity which is crucial to Derrida's whole philosophical stance. The distinction between his position, according to which 'subjectivity -- like objectivity -- is an effect of différance, an effect inscribed in a system of différance', ⁴¹ and that of Adorno, is clearly revealed by the following passage from Negative Dialectics:

The polarity of subject and object can easily be taken, for its part, as an undialectical structure within which all dialectics takes place. But both concepts are categories which originate in reflection, formulas for something which is not to be unified; nothing positive, not primary states of affairs, but negative throughout. Nonetheless, the difference of subject and object is not to be negated in its turn. They are neither an ultimate duality, nor is an ultimate unity hidden behind them. They constitute each other as much as -- through such constitution -- they separate out from each other. ⁴²

By this point it will be clear that the frequent attempt of post-structuralist thinkers, and of literary and political commentators influenced by post-structuralism, to oppose the Nietzschean critique of identity to the coercive totalizations of dialectical thought is beset with intractable difficulties. Adorno, no less than recent French thought, criticizes Hegel's dialectic as being in many ways the most insidious, most ineluctable form of identity-thinking. Yet, at the same time, his deeply dialectical sensibility perceives the self-defeating dynamic of a blunt prioritization of particularity, diversity, and non-identity. The dissolution of the reflective unity of the self in Deleuze or Lyotard leads only to the indifference of boundless flux, or to the monotonous repetition of intensity; while in Derrida's work the jettisoning of the materialist ballast of the Nietzschean and Freudian critique of consciousness results in the installation of différance as the principle of a new kind of 'first philosophy'. For Adorno, by contrast, non-identity cannot be respected by abandoning completely the principle of identity. 'To define identity as the correspondence of the thing-in-itself to its concept', he writes,

is hubris; but the ideal of identity must not simply be discarded. Living in the rebuke that the thing is not identical with the concept is the concept's longing to become identical with the thing. This is how the sense of non-identity contains identity. The supposition of identity is indeed the ideological element of pure thought, all the way through to formal logic; but

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