> The main reasons I was criticizing Adorno are (1) "Tough Baby" represents a
> typical left-wing twist to homophobic discourse (which was not at all
> limited to Adorno) and (2) I'm interested in identifying how left-hegelian
> dialectic leaves untouched the categories on which it is parasitic.
I'm sorry, but this won't fly. You keep saying Adorno is a gay-basher, when he's talking about *power*, the feminization of tough men a la Genet's prisoners of love. Fascism, which claimed to be wholesome, was itself the perversion which Hitler's goons ascribed to the Jews, Communists, gays and lesbians, gypsies it branded as subhumans, and later murdered by the millions. Adorno had *zero* sympathy with the repressive sexual mores of the Forties or Fifties, his whole philosophy is a protest against the bureaucratization of life, art, sexuality, Nature and everything else worth living for.
Second, Left Hegelianism is a political category from the 1830s. Adorno is a multinational Marxist, through and through; he never leaves his concepts just lying there, but pushes them to their logical contradiction, reads history against their grain. Here's Adorno on the significance of the non-identical:
"To change this direction of conceptuality, to turn it towards the non-identical, is the hinge of negative dialectics. Before the insight into the constitutive character of the non-conceptual in the concept, the compulsion of identity (which otherwise carries along the concept without such lingering reflection) dissolves. Its self-determination leads away from the illusion of the concept's being-in-itself as a unity of meaning, out towards its own meaning. The disenchanting of the concept is the antidote of philosophy. It hinders its overgrowth: i.e. becoming the absolute itself." (Negative Dialectics, pg. 24, my translation)
For compulsion of identity, read "heterosexuality"; for non-identity, read "queer-identity", and you'll get a sense of the practical applications possible here. And note the extraordinary humility of the thought, which insists that the concept ought not to imperially annex the non-conceptual, but must respect such, solidarize with such, harmonize with such without impinging on such.
-- Dennis