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The concepts of identity and nonidentity were central to Theodor Adorno's postwar writings. In Adorno's thought, the concept of identity carried logical, subjective, and objective valences, relating to persons, objects, and statements. But identity also governed over the whole. Adorno defined his own critical theory in terms of the "identity of identity and nonidentity." 1By this he described the outcome of a process by which subjects think through (identify) the aspects of thought that are "nonidentical" to themselves--that are more or less than what they claim to be--either because these harbor hidden premises, or because their very use entailed them in a web of other concepts. In his formal philosophy, Adorno used the concept expansively, writing about the nonidentical relation existing between ego, id, and superego; the nonidentity of Kant's transcendental ego with the empirical self; the nonidentity of a psychological mode of analysis and a sociological one; the identity and nonidentity of subject and object, of immanence to appearance, and of concepts to the material world. Though explicitly invoking German idealism and its heady tradition of the dialectic, Adorno intended the "negativity" of this language to bring idealism down to earth, transforming the language of metaphysics into a tool of an applied social criticism capable of analyzing the real suffering correlated with false identity. Immanent critique, the central technique of Adorno's late work, wrought philosophy out of false identity by making critique of nonidentity the reflex of all claims of identity, truth, and self-assertion.
Negative Dialectics, the book in which these claims about identity are articulated most fully, appeared in 1966, at a moment in which notions of "identity" were emerging as the centerpiece of many theoretical traditions. Mixing cultural and psychological concerns, the new sense of modern subjective "identity" posited the possession of an identity as a kind of cure for what Emile Durkheim called anomie. As Gerald Izenberg has argued, the twentieth century embraced this new sense of self-identity as something akin to a first principle of mental health.2By corollary, both in serious literature and in the language of psychology, the condition of not having an identity came to be considered tantamount to losing all sense of orientation in the world, and theorists became interested...