Adorno Theodor W. - Adornos philosophy of the nonidentical: thinking as resistance

Oshrat C. Silberbusch

Adornos Philosophy of the Nonidentical Thinking as Resistance

To my children

S., M. and T.

The only true thoughts are those that dont understand themselves, Adorno writes in Minima Moralia. The sentence stands on its owna monogram, Adorno calls itwithout any context that would help illuminate its paradoxical meaning. That Adorno believed truth to be something not easily possessed is hardly surprising, The elusiveness of truth, the fact that truth is a process rather than an end, that truth has a temporal corethese are all central tenets of Adornos thinking. But to get to the heart of this aphorism, we have to go a step further and ask why, according to Adorno, truth is out of our reachor more precisely, incomprehensible. Why do true thoughts not understand themselves? And conversely, why are thoughts that understand themselves not true? For Adorno, the answer has to do with the nature of reason and the fundamental structure of our understanding, and it is closely linked to that elusive other that lies at the very heart of his philosophy: the nonidentical. The relationship of reason to the world is fundamentally conceptualconnected to expression and thus to concepts: to grasp something, we name it. The problem is that we have a limited number of names at our disposal, for an unlimited number of phenomena. Reason solves this conundrum by subsuming the infinite richness of our world under a finite number of concepts, in other words, by pretending that what is different is in fact the same. It identifies the unique phenomenon as a specimen of a category and forces it into the Procrustean bed of conceptuality, treating the unknown as long known, the singular as an instance. This identity thinking, as Adorno calls it, allows us to form thoughts and makes intersubjective communication possible, but it comes at a price: the elimination of the nonidentical, that which is unique and therefore inexpressible. Adorno called the nonidentical the concepts other (DSH 5:363/133), the ungrasped, the incomprehensible (DSH 5:375/147). The nonidentical is that part of the truth that we, quite literally, cannot comprehend, that which slips between the cracks of our conceptual rationality, the unsayable and unsaid that prevents us from having a complete grasp of the world around us and makes all the thoughts that we