Indentity in the Shadow of Domination

"The positivity of identity logic tends, as a principle of its own health and strength, to promulgate myths of self-making, to cultivate forgetfulness - and it tends to view notions of duty or weakness as useless or even harmful. Modern identity consciousness aligns with nationalism in wanting self-making without self-incrimination."

The negativity of identity is a process by which the injuries of others redound back onto the self and in that process shape the self.

"Adorno, at the end of his life, was exploring ways of countering the students' vernacular language of identity with a negative approach to identity and philosophical non-identity.

"identity's utility in imagining new possibilities for freedom is complicated by its instrumentalization for the purposes of identifying enemies and inventing collective antagonisms. For this reason, it is useful to pay attention to Adorno's original complaint, his insistence that it is incumbant on theory to distinguish between 'two types of liberty,' positive and negative, in order to understand the relation of liberty to concepts of law and state, so it seems increasingly important to disintguish positive from negative identity in order to analyze its subjective and objective dynamics. Identity, far from being self-identical, is not one."

Eric Oberle, Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2018), 12-14.