Adorno’s (Non-)Identity Politics

Abstract Adorno can help us to articulate an immanent and therefore sympathetic critique of the position on the left that has become known as identity politics. While there are several different iterations of it, identity politics can be succinctly defined as the idea that the interests of persons are tightly indexed to collective historical experiences of suffering, exclusion, and marginalization; the epistemic claims these experiences generate; and the notion that the articulation of such claims transforms objects of historical processes into subjects with the agency to make rather than to be made by history, if not fully under the conditions of their own choosing. Identity politics is to be understood as a manifestation of what Adorno calls non-identity, which is a different way of thinking and acting. Non-identity thinking articulates the experience of suffering and is a form of resistance and therefore politics. Adorno’s “non-identity thinking” can prove surprisingly helpful in clarifying and pointing to some of the considerable blind spots and weaknesses of contemporary identity politics. Without a utopian dimension, which Adorno provides, identity politics tends to reify identities and therefore subverts its own stated aspirations toward emancipation.