Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno’s oeuvre has been widely translated into English, and despite an uneven reception history in the Anglophone world, he can be regarded as a “fashionable”, perhaps even a “celebrity” philosopher in English translation. Whilst it remains an open question to what extent a high intellectual pedigree can be distilled into cultural capital when refracted through the lens of translation, it appears reasonable to assume that key works of German critical theory in English are refracted through a positivist order of discourse, which is at odds with the ideological, or more precisely utopian, convictions of mainstream critical theorists. This article discusses the translational recontextualisation of Adorno’s concept of the “non-identical” and some of its associated conceptual frames.