An interesting review of two recent books on Adorno. This passage caught my eye:

As the dominant mode of cognition in modernity, abstract identification specifies an individual thing in the world, picks it out as a member of a group, and places it under a concept.....what matters is that the object is no longer a unique and strange thing but is rather a member of a category that makes sense to me. This process, which Adorno names "identity thinking," causes a belief that concepts fully "capture" the objects to which they refer. When we consistently disregard particularity while reinforcing similarity, we forget the notion of something genuinely concrete, particular, unique, non-fungible, or incommensurable. The material world is made to fit the abstract idea and actual things are seen as nothing more than examples of their concept. Abstract classifications do not, however, inhere in objects but rather are artifacts of intellectual organization.....I forget that my classification is merely a construct of convenience. Because identity thinking pretends that concepts exhaust their objects, the thing’s particularity will remain overlooked and in reason's blind spot.