Aesthetic identity seeks to aid the nonidentical, which in reality is repressed by reality's compulsion to identity. --Theodor Adorno One of the central aims of the recent critical turn in IR theory has been to show that the pseudoscientific epistemology employed by the orthodox perspective on international relations renders invisible a myriad subaltern peoples. (1) The propensity of scholarly and political work in this area has been to deduce central characteristics of the international realm--agents and forces that then structure and limit further thinking on the subject. This deduction does not occur objectively. How one conceives of oneself and others will determine what one sees and, very importantly, what one does not see. This is a familiar argument, a familiar cry of poststructural, postcolonial, and feminist critiques of the epistemology of international relations as a scholarly discipline as they insist on the important constitutive role of culture, class, gender, history, and geography in our senses of ourselves. I am similarly interested here in the epistemology, the account of a proper scholarly and the methods it enables, that has contributed to these blind spots, where the subalterns of international relations would fit. I want, first, to show that the claims of this epistemology are dependent on an ongoing exclusion of other ways of understanding; and, second, to introduce Theodor Adorno's account of the understanding through which he attempts to address the ideological commitments behind exclusionary epistemologies and to suggest a revised account of knowledge. The compartmentalization, codification, and watering down of experience, Adorno suggests, depends on the suppression of those qualities of the human being that would resist pseudoscientific quantification. The expansion of the meaning of enabled by an aesthetic involves highlighting the precisely those resistant qualities of the individual that remain after the violence of naming and categorizing. Aesthetic makes note of the sensuous, the nonrational that is so often dismissed as merely irrational and that cannot be exhausted by rational codification. Orthodox forms of IR theory, this argument implies, should not presume to claim certain knowledge of structures and processes into which conceptions of ethics and politics must be made to fit, for the excess of the sensuous, that which cannot be rationally codified, always puts into doubt the secure conclusions that the theory of international relations works to affirm as a practice of exclusions. A third purpose of this article is to argue that Adorno's account of aesthetic enables a negative critique that challenges the pretension of a universal grounding that can be given determinate, or concretely empirical, meaning. Adorno affirms process, rather than teleology, and denies that the meaning of an object can be summarized in terms of what results from contemplation. He argues that it is non-identity, the that which cannot be empirically described, that aesthetic can recognize so as to provide the basis for a conception of a processual nondeterminate (and perhaps for Adorno this involves an idea of nondeterminate subjectivity, though there are limitations in Adorno's conception of this that I will outline later). The term sensuous particular is used by Jay Bernstein to stress that because sensuous experience cannot be codified (it cannot be made sense of in terms of an overarching, previously determined universal structure), its meaning is irremediably and irreducibly individual, particular to the individual undergoing the experience.2 Bernstein's insight is employed here to suggest that aesthetic provides a means of focusing on the irreducibly particular, juxtaposing it against the homogeneity of the universal, and in so doing throwing the security and predictable progress of the norm out of kilter. …