PC9001 1.29.26 5:28:44PM
The particular was not “a case of the general”; it could not be identified by placing it within a general category, for its significance lay in its contingency rather than its universality.(99) Further (and this was what separated the theory from nominalism), the particular was not identical to itself. It was more than the tautological “rose is a rose” because of its mediated relationship to society.(100) Like Leibniz’s monads,(101) each particular was unique, yet each contained a picture of the whole, an “image of the world,”(102) which within a Marxist frame meant an image of the bourgeois social structure, Because this general social reality was also not absolute, but a particular moment within the historical process,(103) instead of being ontologically and eternally valid, it was in itself “sedimented history.”(104) There was also a utopian dimension to nonidentity as it related to the concrete particular. The transitoriness of particulars was the promise of a different future, while their small size, their elusiveness to categorization implied a defiance of the very social structure they expressed.
- The Origin of Negative Dialectics, Susan Buck-Morss, 1977, The Free Press, p.76
(99) Cf. "It is not up to philosophy to exhaust things according to scientific usage, to reduce the phenomena to a minimum of propositions. . . . Instead, in philosophy we literally seek to immerse ourselves in things that are heterogeneous . . . without placing those things in prefabricated categories . " (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 13.) That the particular could not even be adequately comprehended as a case of the concept has been illustrated in Chapter 3: a natural object was not only natural but historical; a historical phenomenon was not merely history but material nature. (Cf. "objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder. . . ." [Ibid., p. 5.])
(100) One is reminded of Marx's comment "A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations." (Karl Marx, "Wage Labour and Capital," Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1972), p. 81.
(101) Leibniz challenged the principle of identity as it applied to the issue of universals and the problem of the identity of indiscernibles. In his Monadology he wrote: "It is necessary, indeed, that each monad be different from every other. For there are never in nature two beings which are exactly alike and in which it is not possible to find an internal difference. . . ." (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, "Die Monadologie," Hauptschriften zur Grundlegung der Philosophie, ed. Ernst Cassirer [Leipzig, 1906 ] , vol. 2, pp. 436-437.)
(102) "The idea is a monad. That means in brief, every idea contains an image of the world." (Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, ed. Rolf Tiedemann [ Frankfurt am Main : Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1972] ' p. 32.)
(103) Cf. "What dissolves the fetish [i.e., the "given" object] is the insight that things are not simply so and not otherwise, that they have come to be under certain conditions." (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 52.)