179an account of the specific and contradictory character of concrete phenomena. It is
this aim that forms the core of the numerous essays and analyses that Adorno de-
voted to concrete phenomena.^47 In his principal philosophical work, Negative Dialec-
tics, he attempts to support these aims with an epistemological basis. His purpose
is to employ a strictly philosophical approach to elucidate the “nonidentical,” that
which cannot be contained within the conceptual grid of identity thinking. Adorno
states explicitly that Negative Dialecticsis an attempt to make a consistent use of
logic in order to trace that which escapes the hegemony of the unity principle and of
a hierarchically organized conceptual apparatus.^48
In Adorno’s opinion, reality is nonidentical: reality is not simply what it is, it
does not entirely coincide with itself, but continually refers to something else, to
something more than itself: “That which is, is more than it is. This ‘more’ is not
something that is annexed to it, but is immanent in it, because it consists of what has
been repressed. In that sense, the nonidentical would be the thing’s own identity as
opposed to the identifications imposed on it.”^49 While the principle of nonidentity is
therefore in a certain sense rooted in reality itself, the nonidentical only becomes
manifest in language. It only acquires a clear outline through the relationship that lan-
guage creates with reality. When language casts its network of concepts over real-
ity, “identifying” the phenomenon, the nonidentical falls through this net. It does not
permit itself to be defined by a single concept, but this only becomes apparent be-
cause the concept attempts to do just that: “Whatever part of nonidentity defies de-
finition in its concept goes beyond its individual existence, because it is only in
polarity with the concept, in staring at the concept that it will contract into being.”^50
The “nonidentical,” that which cannot be grasped by an identifying gesture, can be
approximated in language only by hemming it in with a constellation of concepts,
each of which on its own is not able to identify the matter completely; through the
tensions generated by their force field, however, they give form—mimetically—
to that which cannot directly be grasped. Adorno states this concept of language as
follows:Language offers no mere system of signs for cognitive functions.
Where it appears essentially as a language, where it becomes a form of
representation (Darstellung), it will not define its concepts. It lends ob-
jectivity to them by the relation into which it puts the concepts, centered
about a thing. Language thus serves the intention of the concept to ex-
press completely what it means. Only constellations are capable of
representing, from without, what the concept has cut away within:
the “more” which the concept is so eager to grasp without ever being
able to.^51In Adorno’s thought, therefore, language occupies an extremely important po-
sition. Through its use of constellations, language enables us, even if only for a mo-178