Oshrat Silberbusch

This chapter, centered on Negative Dialectic, explores the paramount role of suffering in Adorno’s notion of the nonidentical—the suffering of the torturable body, and as its historical paroxysm, the suffering of the victims of the Shoah. A look at Adorno’s reading of Aristotle shows that for Adorno, philosophy has been marred from the very beginning by a double allegiance: to affirmativity and identity. Adorno’s negative dialectic counters philosophy’s affirmative essence and the identity thinking it is bound up with by searching for ways to give the nonidentical a voice. The chapter analyzes Adorno’s concept of the Hinzutretende and its connection to resistance, explores the relationship between his philosophy of the nonidentical and German idealism, and examines Adorno’s dialectic of theory and praxis by analyzing his relationship with the German student movement.

This chapter retraces the development of the notion of nonidentical in Adorno’s early work. Dialectic of Enlightenment relates how enlightened reason, in its effort to overcome myth, disqualified everything that did not meet its newly enthroned criteria of verifiability, univocity, non-contradiction and, last but not least, identity. Minima Moralia explores the implications of “identity thinking” in the private sphere. This chapter examines Adorno’s claim that enlightened reason is amoral, and shows how his analysis of phenonema such as the withering of experience, the fungibility of modern man, antisemitism, and the rise of totalitarianism, relate to his notion of the nonidentical, which Adorno will develop in its full theoretical scope only in his later work.

Adorno’s philosophy of the nonidentical grows out of the tension at the heart of rational thought: between the subject’s need to identify and conceptualize, and the object’s own objectivity, the nonidentical that is erased in a thought cut to fit. Our conceptual framework makes us all “identity thinkers”—we identify every object we perceive as an instance of something, thereby eliminating what makes that object unique. This brief chapter introduces Adorno’s claim that the implications of this epistemological shortcoming are far-reaching, and very concrete. For him, social structures of domination, the withering of individual experience, social ills such as bigotry, racism, authoritarianism, political polarization, and ultimately even genocide, all hark back to identity thinking and the nonidentical, and with it to the most fundamental underpinnings of constitutive subjectivity.

The epilogue looks back at the picture of the nonidentical that emerges from this book, and at what connects the different dimensions of this rich notion. Reflecting on Adorno’s quest for transcendence and on his abhorrence of analytic thought that cuts it off, it paints the gesture of the nonidentical as that of a certain epistemic modesty, an acknowledgement that there is more to the world than what we can grasp, combined with a firm ethical stance. The epilogue cites the “feeling of the world” that Adorno ascribes to aesthetic experience as an adumbration of non-conceptual cognition, and underscores the importance of feeling in Adorno’s epistemology.

This chapter explores Adorno’s aesthetic theory. It looks at his claim that “writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” in its relationship to art’s fragile, double-edged autonomy, and examines his theory of mimesis—a non-conceptual affinity between subject and object that, expelled by identity thinking, has found refuge in art. Through a close reading of Adorno’s reflections on natural beauty, aura, the sublime, and on the not yet fully rationalized child, the chapter examines his intuition that the aesthetic is crucial in any attempt to integrate the nonidentical into reason. Finally, a study of Adorno’s writing style and an excursus on his critique of Heidegger show how Adorno demarcates his own dialectic of form and content from what he views as Heidegger’s self-serving manipulation of the preconceptual.

This book focuses on a central notion in Theodor. W. Adorno’s philosophy: the nonidentical. The nonidentical is what our conceptual framework cannot grasp and must therefore silence, the unexpressed other of our rational engagement with the world. This study presents the nonidentical as the multidimensional centerpiece of Adorno’s reflections on subjectivity, truth, suffering, history, art, morality and politics, revealing the intimate relationship between how and what we think. Adorno’s work, written in the shadow of Auschwitz, is a quest for a different way of thinking, one that would give the nonidentical a voice – as the somatic in reasoning, the ephemeral in truth, the aesthetic in cognition, the other in society. Adorno’s philosophy of the nonidentical reveals itself not only as a powerful hermeneutics of the past, but also as an important tool for the understanding of modern phenomena such as xenophobia, populism, political polarization, identity politics, and systemic racism.