ABSTRACT
Adorno’s non-identical is a complicated concept, but is best understood as the individual’s mental sovereignty within the oppressive superstructure of capitalist modernity, an acknowledgement of the importance of heterogeneity and difference in regard to both conceptual and physical objects. This chapter sets Adorno’s non-identical against Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000), a novel that offers a multifaceted and dynamic representation of the individual against the backdrop of the Sri Lankan Civil War, a war characterised by identitarian politics. The chapter shows that Ondaatje undermines totalising narratives of nationality, ethnicity, and gender, to speak to Adorno’s construction of non-identity. The rough symmetry between Ondaatje’s and Adorno’s visions refutes critique by literary reviewers of Ondaatje as pro-Sinhala or politically indifferent; it also unlocks the richness of Ondaatje’s rendering of human identity in the face of suffering. Ondaatje consistently maintains the individual’s integrity, and the innate integrity of the text itself, thereby transcending damaging stereotypes and one-dimensional political rhetoric.
