The virulent anti-Hegelianism of French poststructuralism and its (difficult) confrontation with J rgen Habermas has long obscured the closeness of Jacques Derrida's "diff rance" to Theodor W. Adorno's "Nonidentical." Taking the overarching theme of "identity and difference" as a guide, we can peel apart what unites and separates these two thinkers. In so doing, certain "de-realizing" effects of Derrida's entrapment in signs reveal themselves. By contrast, Adorno's social and cultural diagnosis, when extrapolated to a post-Fordian context is astonishingly fruitful. Attempts to trivialize negative dialectics as a model of intellectual self-understanding from a past age or as an esthetic reserve of ways of life are untenable.