Adorno’s charge sheet against Hegel is severe: the sovereignty of the Concept transfigures the totality of historical suffering into the positivity of an absolute whose self-realization is the absolutization of suffering (cf. Negative Dialectics, Part III, II, ‘World Spirit and Natural History. Excursus on Hegel’). Yet Adorno’s most acute dialectical insights owe a profound debt to Hegel. Indeed, it is precisely the dialectical cast of his critique that distinguishes it from the anti-Hegel vulgate that extols fragmentation against totalization, difference against identity, singularity against universality, etc. Nevertheless, Adorno’s basic accusation is that Hegel’s privileging of identity and reconciliation over non-identity and the unreconciled signals a lapse into the undialectical affirmation of what is. But this stark contrast between affirmation and refusal should give us pause.