Adorno’s Nonidentical and Derrida’s Differance: For a Resurrection of Negative Dialectics

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The virulent anti-Hegelianism of French poststructuralism and its (difficult) confrontation with Jurgen Habermas has long obscured the closeness of Jacques Derrida’s differance to Theodor W. Adorno’s Nonidentical. Taking the overarching theme of identity and difference as a guide, we can peel apart what unites and separates these two thinkers. In so doing, certain de-realizing effects of Derrida’s entrapment in signs reveal themselves. By contrast, Adorno’s social and cultural diagnosis, when extrapolated to a post-Fordian context is astonishingly fruitful. Attempts to trivialize negative dialectics as a model of intellectual self-understanding from a past age or as an esthetic reserve of ways of life are untenable.