Individuals are – as Georg Simmel points out in his book On Social Differentiation – the intersection points of social threads; they are not, however, the final focal points of these threads. Which is to say: the social threads in question do not issue into these individuals as rivers issue into the sea but rather continue to exert their action beyond the individuals through which they pass. It is in this sense that Adorno raises the question of “what concatenations we owe our own existence to and how this existence is bound up with calamity…”
