I have difficulty understanding the way that Adorno uses “identity”. He seems to mix together different meanings within this section. So I revisited the footnote a few sections back, where he describes three distinct senses, the first two he explains as closely related. These two are first, the identity of “I”, whereby the human consciousness is a unity of temporally distinct experiences, and second, what was supposed to be juridically the same for all rational beings, the general concept.
The second is the source of logical generality, whereby A=A, and your concept of what “A” is supposed to be, is the same concept as my concept of “A”. This is what he calls the “logical moment in idealism”, and I understand it to be the way that Platonic realism makes the concept into an object (something with identity).
So he explains how the second sense is dependent on the first sense because the first allows for temporal extension, therefore the temporal existence of 'the concept". Then something “which is past could be maintained in something which is present”. But in a reciprocal way, the individual thinking presupposes the identity of generality as a requirement for thinking, so that “the individual moment of unity, always requires the supra-individual generality”. Further, “The individual-I is One only by virtue of the universality of the numerical principle of the unitary”. So the conclusion is “Neither of the two moments has priority over the other.”.
The third sense is the epistemological sense, whereby “the subject and object, however mediated, go together”. As described above, the first sense is the particular and the second the general, but they are wrapped together in codependency. The third sense validates a separation between them, through a required mediation, and this “legitimates the dialectical conception of the particular and the general”.
With this background, I’ll take another look at the current section.
In the second paragraph where he speaks of the compulsion that identification has imposed on humanity, this is identity in the second sense, the general sense. This I am inclined to reduce to the simplest form, human equality. This leaves “non identical particular essences and achievements” but they are made commensurable, therefore identical, through the social model of “exchange”, That brings the totality of the world into “the identical”. In this way the non-identical particulars are made compatible with identity, the unequal are exchanged as equal, providing for “the surplus-value of labor”.
In the next paragraph, the critique of “the exchange-principle” seeks “the ideal of free and fair exchange” by means of an ideal which would transcend all actual exchanges. When the ideal is demystified, it is simply an aim of equality by criticizing the inequality within equality. This ideal equality is “rational identity” which would take society beyond the need to identify (identifying being the act of making the non-identical identical, the non-equal equal). This he says, “comes close enough to Hegel”.
But then he describes two distinctly different possible directions, 1) to make identity the ultimate absolute goal, or, 2) to see it as “universal apparatus of compulsion” which we might ultimately escape.
After discussing the role of negative dialectics in the fourth paragraph, he moves toward the other of the two entwined senses of identity in the fifth. This is the sense of the identity of “I”. So the last paragraph deals with the relation between the two forms of identity, and it is actually quite complex. I interpret it like this.
The thinking I desires identity in the general sense because it’s conducive to thinking. But this is to go “against itself” as an “I”, having identity in the particular sense. So this “ideological side” sees the non-I (what is non-identical in the I), as what is essential to the I as a particular. That reduces the I to a mere object. Then we get the third sense of identity, the epistemological sense whereby there is a need for the dialectical separation between the particular and the general.
It demonstrates therein its ideological side, that it never makes good on the assertion, that the non I would in the end be the I; the more the I grasps it, the more completely the I finds itself downgraded to an object. Identity becomes the authority of a doctrine of adjustment, wherein the object, according to which the subject would be directed, pays back to the latter what the subject inflicted on it.