undignified thoughts after nature: adorno’s aesthetic theory

8/12/2019 Undignified Thoughts After Nature: Adornos Aesthetic Theory

1/25

[CRI12.3 (2011) 372-395] Critical Horizons (print) ISSN 1440-9917doi:10.1558/crit.v12i3.372 Critical Horizons (online) ISSN 1568-5160

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF.

Undignified Toughts After Nature:Adornos Aesthetic Teory

Harriet JohnsonDepartment of Philosophy, University of Sydney, [email protected]

Abstract:Tis paper seeks to redress the marginalization of Adorno inenvironmental philosophical discourse. Kate Soper describes two oppos-ing ways of conceiving nature. Tere is the redemptive nature-endorsingparadigm that lays claim to the intrinsic value or otherness of nature.Conversely, the nature-sceptical approach denies that we can access origi-nary, untouched nature. Tis paper argues that the significance of Adornostreatment of natural beauty lies in how he brings these approaches together.In writings that resonate with the dual connotations of Sebalds phraseafter nature, Adorno both affirms the skeptical point that we cannot tran-scend a human history alienated from nature as well as retaining redemp-tive hope wherein art after nature seeks creative possibilities from out ofthe very ruins of history marked by natures destruction.

Keywords:Adorno; natural beauty; natural history; Sebald; the constel-lation; the ruin.

Teres no more nature. Tis becomes a bald statement of fact in the

wasted terrain of Becketts Endgame.

HAMM: Did your seeds come up?CLOV: No.HAMM: Did you scratch round them to see if they had sprouted?CLOV: Tey havent sprouted.HAMM: Perhaps its still too early.CLOV: If they were going to sprout they would have sprouted. [vio-lently] Teyll never sprout!1

1. . W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, Volume 1(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991),245.
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


2/25

UNDIGNIFIED HOUGHS AFER NAURE 373

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012.

According to Adorno, the catastrophic event caused by human beings inwhich nature has been wiped out is not merely left unnamed by Beckettbecause the act of bringing it to words would render it comprehensible

and thereby mitigate its terror.2

Its name is omitted, he suggests, becauseit would be wrong to consider it an exceptional event, a one-off calam-ity. Instead, this is an additional disaster, perhaps the final straw.Becketts end-of-days catastrophe is continuous with the sad and ongo-ing story of human domination over the earth. oday, while we have notyet reached the Endgame phase of the complete reification of all naturalentities, there is very little left unaffected by human artifice. Our seeds mightstill sprout but they germinate in an earth threatened by unprecedented cli-mate disaster and may very well themselves be products of GM technologies.Beings ofnature, humans pit ourselves againstitwith such devastation thatwe are after nature. What might Adorno think it means to be after nature? Te phrase itselfis not his; I have drawn it from the title of W. G. Sebalds posthumouslypublished prose poem Nach der Natur(1988) where nach means bothafter nature and according to it. For Sebald, after nature does not signify anutterly wasted earth quite yet. As Beckett demonstrates, there would really benothing more to say in a world with no more nature. Rather, Sebald explores

the dual meanings of the phrase. We are after nature as bearers of a human his-tory of domination over nature that has alienated us from it and from whichthere is no going back. But his nach also suggests the question of what itmight be to accord to, rather than dominate nature? Te tradition of art afteror drawn from nature is seen as an attempt to listen to the muted secrets ofa not-entirely repressed nature. Te two meanings strain against one another.In Sopers terms he shifts between a natural-skeptical and nature-endorsingaccount.3Te first emphasizes the ineluctable intertwining of nature andhuman histories of domination while in the second nature itself portends adim hope for the emancipatory unwinding of this oppressive process. Just as Sebald is want to read historical and intellectual figures againstthe grain so as to reveal surprising new insights, when looking into Adornosaesthetics of nature I am aware that his name is not typically associated withenvironmental philosophical discourse. I attribute this neglect in large part tothe way that he unflinchingly draws out the uncomfortable tensions suggestedby the Sebaldian nach. In the first section of this paper I will argue that, forAdorno, we are after nature because our quest for subsumptive knowledge

2. Adorno, Notes to Literature, 245. 3. K. Soper, What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Non-human(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,

1995), 34.


3/25

374 HARRIE JOHNSON


has disenchanted it for us. In even the most mundane acts of thought thatconsider nature at a remove, we have sought to remove ourselves from it andbend it to our wills. In asking how to ward off the Beckettian catastrophe,

I turn to Adornos treatment of natural beauty and the attempt to combatdisenchantment with an alternate (aesthetic) mode of relating to nature.Terein lies the second permutation of Sebalds phrase: art drawn from,according to nature. Adorno thinks that art can negatively redeem apromise that natural beauty holds out but cannot articulate. Tis is thepromise of all that nature stands for in Adorno: the indeterminate, the non-identical, that suffering thing which somehowretains traces of the resis-tant non-subsumable. his is a troubling somehow. he idea of a moment of resistancewithin nature, repressed yet unchanging, implies the comforting nature-endorsing idyll that some kind of originary nature might be re-enchantedfor us. Adorno drops his usual guard against the false comforts offered byfoundations. But rather than utterly repudiating the implications of there-enchanting promise of nature, Adorno places this suspect hope along-side a concept of natural history that debunks any notion of nature as theinvariant eternal. By examining that structural principle of Adornoianphilosophy, the constellation, I show that, for him, the catastrophe will

be countered not by defending the putative integrity of one theory butby actively exposing the strains within conceptual thought itself. My ownstrategy, which traces the contrasting dimensions of the motif after natureas they emerge out of Aesthetic Teory, itself seeks to throw light uponAdornos mirror-hall of at once complementary and clashing reflectionsupon nature.

Te Disenchantment of Nature

Describing, classifying, drawing, filling little bags with dried seeds, GeorgWilhelm Steller botanist and explorer on the Bering expedition, paid hom-age to the shapes of the fauna/and flora of the distant region where Eastand West and North/converge .4Sebalds poem chronicles how Stellerszoological masterpiece is hijacked for the purposes of pelt hunters, whilehe himself is hounded to death by an Imperial power intent on punishinghis interventions on behalf of the indigenous people. Seeking to know

every creeping thing of nature,he is returned to it, left to lie in the snow/

4. W. G. Sebald,After Nature(New York: Random House, 2002), 44.


4/25



like a fox beaten to death, himself nothing more than a piece of suffer-ing nature.5

Sebalds version of Stellers life story contains in nucethe concept of natures

disenchantment of which Adorno had written. Te naturalists attempt toname and classify the proliferation of kinds is itself a conceptual dominationof nature fundamentally akin to the logic of colonialist exploitation. Stellersparticipation in a voyage of discovery to open up trade routes is no mereaccident of historical opportunity. Adorno would say that it manifests thesecret complicity between the man of sciences will to reduce all difference toknown, and therefore exchangeable, quantities and the reifying principle ofexchange. Steller is the agent of imperial control, both literally, as he was sentby the St Petersburg Academy and as the bearer of the Enlightenment projectto gain increased knowledge of nature intent on enhancing our capacity topredict and thereby influence the behaviour of natural things. Stellers brutalfate stands testimony to a point also underscored by Adorno: the agents ofdomination, themselves all-too-natural, fall victim to it. Tis equation of Stellers apparently innocuous brand of botanical inves-tigations with the base logic of imperial expansion seems to elide the veryreal differences between them. Yet this is a conscious strategy of Adornoscritical theory, laying bare the rotten core of even apparently benign civi-

lizatory practices. In Adorno and Horkheimers Dialectic of Enlightenmentthe whole history of humankind is a continuum of the steadily advancingdomination over nature. In the pre-animistic phase, all of nature is felt tobe imbued with mana, an impersonal spiritual force resistant to humanunderstanding.6Ten follows animism where that which is animate is sun-dered from the inanimate, certain sites and objects of nature are rarefied asoccupied by local deities and demons at the expense of the excluded rem-nant, the inanimate, which is disenchanted.7National mythologies, typi-fied by the Ancient Greeks, go on to reject the pseudo-deities of animismin favour of a pantheon of divinities who now embody nature as a universalpower.8Tis belief in anthropomorphic gods is subsequently discarded by ametaphysics that deems nature to be the plenipotentiary of overarching uni-versals, forces or substances. Steller, the godless Lutheran from Germanystands for the final stage of science.9In place of appeals to divine or occult

5. Sebald,After Nature,78. 6. M. Horkheimer and . W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment(Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Uni-

versity Press, 2002), 10. 7. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment,11. 8. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment,12. 9. Sebald,After Nature,77.


5/25


6/25



a picture of natures quasi-intentionality, wherein domination suggests thethwarting of its pre-dispositions.14

Te burning question is how Adorno envizages relieving nature of its

suffering. Or otherwise put, how to resist in theory, in art, in politicalpractice our seemingly inevitable slide towards the Beckettian catastrophe,an endgame of nature no more? Given that disenchantment proceeds byrejecting the anthropomorphic intuition that nature is beseelt(ensouled),Adornos portrayal of nature denied what it wants might seem a moveaimed at reinstating to nature some of its former mystery. Yet the option thatAdorno most decidedly rejects is the flight back to a re-enchanted nature.Te attraction of this flight is understandable:

So long as progress, deformed by utilitarianism, does violence to thesurface of the earth, it will be impossible in spite of all proof to thecontrary to completely counter the perception that what antedatesthis trend is in its backwardness better and more humane.15

Yet the rational re-enchantment of nature is a contradiction in terms; wecannot reason nor will ourselves back to a mysterious universe. InAestheticTeory, Adorno dismisses this as a fanciful Rousseauian retournons. Te

idea, which he assigns to the manifold irrationalists who blossomed in theWeimar Republic, that we might attain a direct, intuitive access to naturebeyond language and rational concepts, is absurd. Even that nature thathas not been pacified by human cultivation, nature over which no humanhand has passed alpine moraines and taluses resembles those industrialmountains of debris from which the socially lauded aesthetic need for natureflees.16While his example is ill-chosen (are heaps of industrial waste reallysuperimposed upon our visions of craggy mountain peaks?), Adornos essen-tial point stands. Tere can be no originary experience of nature outsideof socially conditioned, disenchanted ways of relating to it. Whats more,Adorno thinks the motif of re-enchantment often serves as an alibi for thenaturalization of social mores and conventions. Te atomized individuals ofmodern society experience it as unalterable, necessary for self-preservation.Social rules stiffen into seemingly natural laws, for instance gender roles.Individuals then begin to perceive natural phenomena as enchanted, themysterious font of the social relations they are thought to bring about. Tiseffect of enlightened society recalls Adornos metaphor of the bulls eye

14. . W. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory(London & New York: Continuum, 2004), 58.15. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 64.16. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 68.


7/25

378 HARRIE JOHNSON


lantern, which can be closed to conceal the source of its light.17In my dis-cussion of Stellers fate, I alluded to Adornos thought that those who seek toenslave nature find themselves captured by it; the apparatus of domination

they helped to engender is turned back upon them, the lantern they holdup to the worlds dark places itself darkens and turns opaque. It is the sub-jects powerlessness in a society petrified into a second nature [that] becomesthe motor of the flight into a purportedly first nature.18Te injustice [tonature] is passed along the chain, while at the same time [that which hadbeen originally], oppressed, poisoned, limps along further.19

Natural Beauty and Art After Nature

Te way back is barred; first nature becomes a screen for second nature,masking the contingency of social conventions with the appearance thatthey are necessary to continue life, disguising mediateness in immediacy.20Instead, Adorno champions another aspect of nature, one which he thinkssloughs off the aims of self-preservation. Tis is nature as appearing beauty.Adorno criticizes a post-Kantian tradition that has neglected the aesthetictreatment of nature.21 It is precisely the indeterminateness which Kant

ascribed to natural beauty on the grounds that the faculty of aestheticjudgement can only be addressed to objects without a determinate concept which prompts the Idealist devaluation of nature and, needless to say,Adornos praise of it. He and Kant differ, however, in that, for Kant, theindeterminacy of natural beauty is treated with the possibility of its cogni-tion in mind, whereas indeterminacy suggests to Adorno less a potentialconceptualization than an outright challenge to the rigidity of the concept.If natures disenchantment was a sad tale of converting all differences toexchangeable sames, the indeterminateness of natural beauty is the trace ofthe nonidentical in things under the spell of universal identity.22

On first blush, Adorno seems to contradict himself by stating that [w]ithregards to its content, the ambiguity of natural beauty has its origin in

17. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 96.18. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 65.19. . W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (European Perspectives; New

York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 149.20. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 68.21. R. Gasch, Te Teory of Natural Beauty and Its Evil Star: Kant, Hegel, Adorno, Research

in Phenomenology32 (2002): 103122.22. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 73.


8/25



mythical ambiguity.23Myth, after all, colludes in the conceptual domi-nation of nature, expelling all those traces of non-identity which naturalbeauty is said to promise. o pardon him of this apparent inconsistency,

the provisio with regards to its content is crucial. Natural beauty, like firstnature, is liable to be appropriated to ideological purposes wherein the inde-terminate character of natural beauty is harnessed to conceptual schemesand content forced upon it. Adorno decries, for instance, attempts to see inthe amorphousness of natural beauty the anamnesis of freedom and therebyseek freedom in the old unfreedom.24By conflating indeterminancy withambiguity or uncertainty, myth sees an opportunity to inscribe its owncontents onto the supposed tabula rasa of natural beauty. But, for Adorno,the indeterminacy of natural beauty is not uncertain at all; it is a site of thepromise of critical resistance. Te resistant indeterminacy of natural beauty congeals in that aspect inwhich human domination has its limits and that calls to mind the power-lessness of the human bustle.25Natural beauty evokes the limits of all thatis human-made. Adorno foreshadows the Levinasian ethics of alterity bysuggesting that the beauty of nature is an other to which we can have nocertain epistemological access yet whose call cannot be entirely suppressed.26Even here, Adorno faces the danger that he himself might transform natu-

ral beauty into myth by plying its indeterminacy with his own contents.He hopes to circumvent this problem by siding with Hegel in so far thatnatures muteness needs to be sublated in art. Hegel insisted on this becausehe thought that the indeterminacy of natural beauty makes it an inferiorexpression of reasons burgeoning self-consciousness, unable to exercise thefreedom of being-for-itself. For Adorno however, it is discursive thoughtitself that is deficient. In his declaration that natural beauty is close to thetruth but veils itself at the moment of greatest proximity he means thatthe truth of non-identity is veiled to reasoning caught within the regimeof identity-thinking.27As the limit-concept of reason, natural beauty canonly be grasped by discursive thought when it is framed within art. But, ofcourse, not just any art will do. Just as the re-enchantment of nature collapses into ideology, and theattempt to imbue natural beauty with conceptual content downgrades it tomyth, natural beautys aesthetic sublation is prey to a terrible danger. Art

23. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 66.24. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 66.25. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 70.26. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 74.27. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 7374.


9/25

380 HARRIE JOHNSON


that seeks to copy natural beauty is tarred with the same brush as the cul-ture industrys principle of meticulously duplicating appearance.28Adornomocks shabbily painted hotel-lobby vistas and the green forests of German

impressionism alike as cultural kitsch. Natural beauty is but a caricature ofitself in art that depicts it as the healing antithesis of society both becauseits objectification eliminates that indeterminacy which makes it beautiful,29and because it is bought and sold as a therapeutic commodity, an artisticcorollary to the tourist industry. For Adorno, the proposition that natu-ral beauty is the antithesis to society ought be taken in deadly earnest. 30Adorno opposes Hegels teaching that a negation of the negation results inan affirmative. Authentic art offers a determinant negation of natural beautyfor as long as society is antithetical to nature, art must be too. If naturalbeauty cannot remain locked in itself because its indeterminate characterresists conceptualization, it is rescued only through that consciousness setin opposition to it.31Te domination of material nature is more effectivelycaptured by arts domination of its own material form than in any direct pleafor Edens restoration. Adorno endorses the negativity implied in the Frenchphrase for still life: nature morte. Te truth of natures disenchantment isrevealed by art that represents the scars of its wrenching displacement. ForAdorno, authentic art is an organized emptiness which in its pleasure in

the repressed, [] takes into itself the disaster, the principle of repressionrather than merely protesting hopelessly against it.32

An artwork that has internalized the disaster is the subject matter of thefirst section of SebaldsAfter Nature. Mathias Grnewalds Isenheim alter-piece bespeaks an anxious apprehension of imminent catastrophe drawnfrom his particular historical context; the sickening away of the world wit-nessed in the 1502 solar eclipse, the spread of plague, St. Anthonys fire andviolent anti-jewish pogroms.

Here in an evil state of erosionAnd desolation the heritage of the ruiningOf life that in the end will consumeEven the stones has been depicted.33

28. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 122.29. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 119.30. Of course, as I will go on to discuss, Adorno recognizes that this antithesis between natural

beauty and society only goes so far. Te very idea of natural beauty or landscape is a historicaleffect of a bourgeois leisured class no longer working the land but luxuriating in it.

31. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 75.32. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 19.33. Sebald,After Nature, 31.


10/25



Like Becketts no more nature, the plight of nature is starkly captured inthe almost complete dearth of it in Grnewalds art, its abolition in effigy.34Crucially, for Adorno, art in the model of or after nature does not imitate

nature, not even individual instances of natural beauty but natural beauty assuch.35By this he means that authentic art stands in mimetic likeness notto natures raw beauty but to those traces of the non-identical suggested byit. For this reason, it is the modern compositions that organize dissonance,the great modernist works that perform languages collapse beyond signi-fying meaning, which approach nearest the ungraspable indeterminacy ofmuted nature. Tey offer an after-image of the silence through whichnature speaks.36

Natures Promise

When authentic art ventriloquizes nature it promises to enunciate theunspeakable: utopia.37 Following Adorno along the via negativa, thesequence goes thus: authentic art negates natural beauty, itself the antith-esis of society to reveal utopia, and, utopia turns out to be the negationof what exists. Adorno looks to the Stendhalian promesse de bonheur, in

which we might overcome the subject/object divide and achieve a non-dominating reconciliation with nature such as has never previously exist-ed.38Te promise of this radical overhaul is said to come to us from twoopposite temporal directions the far-distant past and a possible future.It is a flash of light between the poles of something long past, somethinggrown all but unrecognizable and that which some day might come tobe.39

I will first examine his account of the promise of that which mightcome to be. Tis is a completely speculative foreshadowing of immediacy,a glimpse of a different possibility rather than a fulfilled achievement. Hethinks that the silence of natural beauty gestures towards this prospect inso far that its own insufficiency as the cipher of the non-identical demandsthat there be something more.

34. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 66.35. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 72.36. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 74.37. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 32.38. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 17.39. A. Morgan,Adornos Concept of Life(London: Continuum, 2007), 71.


11/25

382 HARRIE JOHNSON


Nature, as it stirs mortally and tenderly in its beauty, does not yet exist.Te shame felt in the face of natural beauty stems from the damageimplicitly done to what does not yet exist by taking it for existence.

Te dignity of nature is that of the not-yet-existing.40

It is useful here to recall Adornos concept of domination, wherein heascribed to nature the suffering of an entity whose spontaneous wants hadbeen thwarted. Nature suffers because it does not yet exist for-itself. Weknow that it might come to exist for-itself because its beauty contains tracesof non-identity, the not-existing-for-an-other that stir us painfully. Adornosuggests that the suffering of first and second nature refer to one another:over long periods the feeling of natural beauty intensified with the suffer-ing of the subject thrown back on himself in a mangled and administeredworld.41Suffering demands a transformative praxis that would resolve theantagonisms manifested by it. Adorno connects hope for the future andthe experience of present-day suffering, Weh spricht: vergeh. Each and everyempirical moment of suffering:

belies all the identitarian philosophy that would talk us out of suffering [it] tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things

should be different.42

It is both natures suffering as the not-yet-existing-for-itself and our ownsuffering as natural organisms living the wrong life that propel us to scanthe horizon for a promise beyond the ossified present, ever unsure whereit will come from.43

Te promise of natural beauty that authentic art reveals in its negationof the wrong state of things is a relation of non-dominating immediacybetween humans in their own naturalness and their environing naturalworld. But what of that other pole long past and scarcely recognizable fromwhich this promise is said to arise? As became apparent in his critique of anyflight towards re-enchanted nature, the nature-skeptical Adorno is quickto expose the ideological workings of the nature-endorsing idea that weever existed in a state of complete reconciliation with nature. Recall also thatmyth is said to conscript natural beauty so as to profess as if the experience

40. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 74.41. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 63.42. . W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 203.43. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 8.


12/25



were at one with the primordial origin.44Adorno concedes that the fantasyof a harmonious origin has its strengths it instills in the collective memorya hazy notion of another possibility. But it still has an undermining weak-

ness. Te remembrance of what never really was is so amorphous that it canbe bent and moulded to suit all kinds of dominating practices. Faced with aculture caught in the strangle-hold of near total reification, Adorno cannotafford to entirely dismiss dim recollections of some lost union of subjectivitywith nature, so he walks a very fine line sourcing redemptive promise fromthis imagined past whilst pointing to its ideological traits. Most thought and by implication Adornos own is said to preserve a mimetic aspect:

In the total process of enlightenment this element gradually crumbles.But it cannot vanish completely if the process is not to annul itself.Even in the conception of rational knowledge devoid of all affinity,there survives a groping for that concordance [non-hierarchical sub-ject-object relations] which the magical delusion used to place beyonddoubt.45

His own drift of thought often assumes a shared exposure to the Romanticdream that we once inhabited a playground of unmediated natural beauty.

For how could authentic art meaningfully express the absence of nature-existing-for-itself if the viewer did not have some preconception of whatits presence might look like? He advises that aesthetic comportment mayrequire familiarity with natural beauty in childhood [and, I suggest, theidea of the childhood of man] and the later abandonment of its ideologi-cal aspect.46

Emancipatory promise residing in a possible future and that hailing fromthe distant past are not as disconnected as it first seems; they intersect in thefigure of suffering. Nature suffers because its ownmost impulses have beenrepressed by the mechanisms of domination. As I have shown, this repres-sion points forward to the necessity for radical change but it also directs usback. Something must survive as a trace from an earlier stage of not-quite-so-complete domination, so that we know that repression has taken placeat all. Given that Adorno thinks the suffering of first and second naturerefer to one another, an analogy between nature and the account he gives ofthe survival of resistant traces revealed in human suffering seems appropri-ate. o explain human suffering, Adorno turns to Freudian psychoanalysis,

44. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 66.45. Adorno, Negative Dialectics,45.46. AdornoAesthetic Teory, 69.


13/25

384 HARRIE JOHNSON


detailing the disowning of instinct in favour of a drive for self-preservationin civilizations development.47Tat which remains is registered as the lossof ego a de-subjectification that doesnt result in the merging of subject

and object but is felt as an aching lack i.e. the shame felt upon viewingnatural beauty. Te concept of anamnesis suggests that originally repressedimpulses (like sexual instincts) do somehow live on in the subject. Adorno insists that we can have no knowledge of an originary momentof nature existing for-itself wherein resistance to the hurtling progress ofdisenchantment could be said to lodge. Yet how else can Adorno account forthe nachlebenof a mimetic element or trace? Te theory of repression takenover from Freud assumes that the impulse or drive is unaffected historically.If somatic impulses are one such lingering residue of a former approach toobjectivity then they must be thought of, first, as given to experience (andpre-reflective) but suppressed by identity thinking, and second, as able toreturn in those recuperative experiences which disrupt our customary instru-mental relation to things. Te problem is how to make sense of the latentpresence of an impulse, prior to modern subjectivity, living on within thesubject without indulging in moot speculation about some foundationalground. Te motif of suffering cannot do the conceptual work that Adornostheory demands of it. Our own somatic experience (and by analogy, natures)

can suggest cause to revolt against the hegemony of identity-thinking, yet itcannot ground hopes for a liberated future in any precedent that we couldnow have any knowledge of. His theory begins to resemble his own dispar-aging metaphor of the bulls eye lantern that implies a source of light whichit then conceals, denying that a first spark ever existed. It remains unclearwhere exactly art after nature is supposed to source the promise of utopiannon-identity that it voices. If ambiguous talk of promise courts myth, then the urge to pin downpromise would destroy those very moments of non-identity it seeks. Yet togo without means we are abandoned to no promise at all. Without promise,authentic art cannot negate the existent but merely confirm its inevitableworsening. Becketts Endgamewill emerge as a waiting game for a societywith no chance of escaping the catastrophe. Negative dialectics requires thepromesse de bonheur, even if its origins are murky and susceptible to mythicalre-enchantment. So preceding with caution, Adorno continues to tread his

47. Te time-lag between consciousness and the unconscious is itself the stigma of the contradic-tory development of society. Everything that got left behind is sedimented in the unconsciousand has to foot the bill for progress and enlightenment. .W. Adorno, Sociology and Psy-chology, inModern Critical Tought: An Anthology of Teorists Writing on Teorists, D. Milne(ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 65.


14/25



fine line. He draws upon the anamnesis of not-yet-existent nature to restocka depleted critical imaginary yet consciously places this idyll in tension witha vigilant awareness of the ideological and historical conditions upon which

all images of the natural are staked.

Natural History, a Constellation

We are at once beforenature as the pristine non-identical and afterit as analways already historical entity. When asking how Adorno sustains thesetwo apparently contradictory concepts of nature, in Sopers terms nature-endorsing and skeptical, we enquire into a fundamental strategy of hisphilosophy. It is the same productive tension that besets Adornos use ofcritical thinking to expose the mechanisms of domination inhering in everyoperation of critical thought. He simultaneously holds that the domina-tion of nature, far from distorting the principles of our rationality, actu-ally unmasks them, whilst maintaining that reason might, self-reflectively,come to serve new purposes that bit by bit transform its ministry to theaims of self-preservation. Because conceptual thoughtreduces its objects toexemplifications of types of things and relations of identity, it is genetically

incapable of conceiving the other moments embedded within them. Tismotivates thought to formulate ever-new concepts to capture those aspectsoverlooked by the foregoing one. Each act of conceptualization foundersupon the full reality of the object of thought say, nature forming a seriesof incomplete insights, a constellation. Although a single concept withinthe constellation cannot grasp the object in its non-identical uniqueness,the relations between successive, or simultaneously held but differing, con-cepts might come to shed light upon it no longer an abstraction but in itsvery fabric. Non-identity emerges not as some generalized alterity but as arelational and therefore historical term pointing to an otherness that bothresists every will-to-identity even as it provokes them. Te phenomenologi-cal specificity of objects necessarily includes the marks of damage done bythe various acts of conceptual domination and the tensions between them.o shy away from conceptual tensions would be to ignore the sedimentationof history within the objects of thought. As the object of Adornos thought of concern to me, the concept of naturemust be examined in the light of itshistorical sedimentations. Adorno thinks

that second nature that estranged world of petrified meanings signifyingthe reification of human histories into immutable facts of life needsto be awakened. He thinks second natures constituent parts, human his-


15/25

386 HARRIE JOHNSON


tory and nature, must be realized as a constellation of mutually illuminat-ing semi-contradictions: natural history. Tis is no simple reiteration ofMarxs ambition of naturalizing human beings and humanizing nature. For

Adorno, humanity is already natural, all too natural and nature subject to ahistory that is human, all too human. Civilized humanity dominates itsworld in a manner akin to the beast of prey and nature has been reified byhumans to the extent that itis afterus. Te novelty of Adornos constellationaround natural history resides rather in its suggestion that history and naturecoincide in the moment of transience that attends them both. In order forthe meaning of the reified to be extracted, Adorno turns to Benjamins callfor the resurrection of second nature out of the infinite distance into infinitecloseness.48As a charnel-house [Schdelsttte] of long-dead interiorities,Lukacs second nature is infinitely distant to us because it repulses humanspontaneity. o see the charnel house from the angle of infinite closenessrequires us to pick among the bones and reveal their susceptibility to a tran-sience that cannot become thing-like. Natural history is anchored in a process of decay rather than (post-)Enlightenment categories of freedom and teleology. Its face, Adorno says, isnot illuminated by the light of redemption but resembles the Hippocraticcountenance wasting in cachexia. Adorno contests the idealistic dichotomy

between history and necessity, human freedom and nature. Whenever anew historical element appears it refers back to the natural element thatpasses away within it. Tese elements are not invariants to be defined butgather around a concrete historical facticity that, in its own precise context,is unique. Te assertion of historical contingency that Adorno in his habili-tation on Kierkegaard called the irreversible and irreducible singularity ofthe historical fact debunks the idea that a rational spiritual developmentcourses through particular events.49

Sebald ends his After Nature with a similar allegorical juxtaposition ofnature and history. In the third and final section, the poet persona revisitsa schoolroom picture of Alexander the Great in battle. What strikes him isnot the majestic deeds of men but the overlooked history of the landscape,the incomprehensible/Beauty of nature that vaults over the historical play-ers.50Sebalds prose and Adornos theory alike map the contours of natureand human action, which overlap but are not reducible to one another. Like

48. R. Hullot-Kentor, Tings Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Teodor W. Adorno(NewYork: Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2006), 262.

49. B. Hanssen, Walter Benjamins Other History(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,1998), 9.

50. Sebald,After Nature, 112.


16/25



Adornos natural history, the poets natural history of destruction positsitself as an archaeology of missing parts, a sifting through rubble. Sebaldcoins this term to express the suppressed history of the retaliatory bomb-

ing of German cities in the Second World War and the peoples fragile,creaturely response to this devastation. He criticizes the post-war culturalresponse to this trauma, namely the internal emigrates tendency to resort tovague notions of freedom and the humanist inheritance of the west in end-less and prolix abstractions.51Natural history is promoted as an alternativeto these abstractions not because it yields a ready-made synthesis of nature,taken as archaic-ontological substance, and history, taken as intention-laden human innovation. Natural history is no totalizing amalgam of theseabstract domains but proceeds instead from their discontinuity. From anaerial vantage point, Sebald describes the survivors of the bombings crawlingaround in the wreckage of their cities and setting fires. We are left uncer-tain whether this scene shows the resurgence of the old modes of behaviourappropriate to the history of human autonomy or rather another episodein the organic cycle of life, ever decomposing and then regenerating itself.Natural history exposes the historical implications of naturalized myths andbegins to unwind the natural, archaic fiber of historical development.52

Natural history is integral to the coherence of that tension-ridden con-

ceptual constellation that Adorno devises in his plea to assist nature on thissad earth. Te danger myth had posed to attempts to re-enchant nature hadbeen its propensity to disguise the conventions of second nature as staticinvariants by equating them with first nature. Natural history scores a blowagainst this hypostatization of first nature: only what had escaped natureas fate would help nature to its restitution.53Natural history challenges thebelief that nature was that which has always been there, that which as a fate-fully organized, pre-given being bears human history.54Adorno wants toresist the static quality accorded to the concept of nature as a function of thedynamic concept of reason and thereby arrest the usurpation of the realm ofthe non-identical to the ends of identity-thinking. By investing nature witha dynamism that thought usually deprives it, Adorno inveighs against thosenature-endorsing theories that hold nature to be a primeval arche-principle ora historical origin.55While this does not ease niggling reservations that his own

51. W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction(New York: Random House, 2003), 9.52. F. R. Dallmayr, Phenomenology and Critical Teory: Adorno, Philosophy & Social Criticism

3 (1976): 409.53. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 67.54. Hanssen, Walter Benjamins Other History, 14.55. Hanssen, Walter Benjamins Other History, 1416.


17/25

388 HARRIE JOHNSON


concept of anamnesis still cannot account for the existence of residues with-out itself implying some static point of origin, it is nonetheless plausible thatAdorno wants the idea of natural history to work in a constellation with that

of anamnesis as a corrective to its tendency to re-enchant nature. By attackingmyths fondness for origins steeped in mystery, natural history undermines theuse of natures touted promise to sanctify dominations return of the same.Meanwhile, natural historys dynamic nature and contingent history eman-cipated from their respective bondage to eternity and teleological progress derive indeterminate hope from the recollection of another relation betweenhumans and nature. Of course, natural history and the promise of naturalbeauty do not exist in a synthesizing dialectic. Rather, Adorno lays them side-by-side to create a conceptual force field that reveals the prospect of naturebeing-for-itself to be a truly historical struggle.

While this theme finds programmatic expression in the 1932 paper TeIdea of Natural History, it is ultimately inAesthetic Teory that the multiplefacets of Adornos reflections on nature reflect back on each other. rue to histhought that authentic arts organization of its material form could articulatethe buried truths of natural beauty, Adornos paratactical form seeks to revealtruths illuminated by the constellation. An instantiation of Adornos constel-lation of natural beauty and natural history emerges in his celebration of the

Kulturlandschaft, which resembles a ruin even when the houses still stand.56Such Benjaminian pictograms of passing are to be found in Hlderlinspoem Winkel von Hardt, which portrays a stand of trees as all the morebeautiful for bearing the mark of a past event. Te motif of ruins is used tosummon those remnants of a repressed past supposed to unleash the untoldpromise of non-identity. Meanwhile such comments gesturing towards reve-latory suffering are slotted next to historicizing, skeptical reflections refutingthe ideology that there has ever been an untouched nature which sufferingcould reveal. Even the idea of landscape, he reminds us, is a historical effectof the division of labour and a leisured class no longer working the land butrelaxing in it as appearing beauty. In his reflections on the cultural landscape,Adorno revels in the tangled complications of the proposition that naturalbeauty is the antithesis to society. If the society to which he refers is bourgeoissociety, then society itself is rather the pre-requisite for our appreciation ofthe landscape as beautiful. In this reminder of the temporal specificity ofnature as it appears to us, we take a lesson from natural history. Yet Adornostill thinks that natural beauty possesses an indeterminacy antithetical to

society, which might assist history to shake off the pre-determined course of

56. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 65.


18/25



a naturalised second nature. Te ways things simply haveto be could, infact, be otherwise: this is the promise of natural beauty. By responding to a historical landscape bearing the marks of its own

domination, Adorno thinks authentic art taps a profound force of resis-tance stored in the cultural landscape.57He had once criticized the rever-sion to a lost joyful childhood by noting that its temporal unattainabilityfor us now implies the unattainability of joy itself.58By instead making thequintessential landscape after nature a site of the possibility of resistance,he suggests we need only to look around us in this sad earth to see in its veryattainability signs of the attainability of resistance.59

Sebald: One Who Recovers A LittleIf Adorno invests our suffering alongside that of nature with anticipativepromise, Sebald responds quite differently to the question of whetherthe poetic-philosophical examination of ruins suggests hope for a non-dominating relation of human and natural histories. Written more thana decade after Adornos late work Aesthetic Teory, SebaldsAfter Naturebears witness to the eighties heightened awareness of the scale of ecologicaldestruction as well as the despondent view that the forces that have driven

us to the brink of cataclysm have unstoppable momentum.60

Te countrys on fire already and everywherethe forests are ablaze, theres a cracklingof fire in the fanned leavesAnd the African drought plainsare expanding. Stillperhaps on your travelsyoull see a golden coast of land veneered with rain ora schoolboy on his way home over a beautiful meadow.Ten another joy will have been lived,thinks one who recovers a little.61

57. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 64.58. . W. Adorno, Essays on Music(Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press, 2002),

304.59. Insofar as possible, I want here to strip resistance of its naively triumphalist connotations. For

Adorno, it is signs and only signs, cryptograms pointing to another mode of being accordingtonature, that natural beauty afternature can give us.

60. Te text makes allusion to Rachel Carssons Silent Springwhich was one of the first texts toraise the alarm about the imminent danger resulting from the environmental pollution.

61. Sebald,After Nature, 103.


19/25

390 HARRIE JOHNSON


In a world on fire already and everywhere rare moments of crisp beauty inwhich nature appears re-enchanted partake neither in the Romantic fantasyof paradisiacal restoration nor in anamnesis of the repressed non-identical.

Sebald detects in natures remaining beauty only small joys to break up livesalready resigned to disaster. Rather than pitching for a happy reconciliationof humanity and environment, Sebalds natural history is one of destructionprecisely because it envisages nature as the final victor of a violent and ongo-ing struggle. Colin Riodan points out that SebaldsAfter Natureinverts thetraditional problem of environmental ethics: at issue here is not so muchthe extent to which we value nature but the reverse: that nature has no needwhatever to value us.62In Adorno, the foremost scenario for environmentaldestruction appeared to be Beckets wasteland where human life, in someform, lives on. By contrast, Sebald sees our ingrained practices of ecologi-cal exploitation as having their terminus only in the collapse of the organicconditions for human life, with nature, in some form, living on. If it appears a foregone conclusion that natural and human histories arecoordinated in their destruction, the question arises of what role poetryitself takes, how it engages with the disaster? Sebalds natural history ofdestruction has been accused of indulging in a leftist melancholy, of tyingitself too closely to the apocalyptic philosophy of history so prominent in

the German tradition, of retreat to the aesthetic sphere.63While writingAesthetic Teory,Adorno was also accused of political irresponsibility andof maintaining a theoretical distance above the fray of 1968 protest culture.Sebalds response to these charges as well as his points of intersection withAdorno begin to come clear once his work is located within debates aroundthe role of literature in Germany in the 1990s. Despite a pessimism beyondeven Adornos, Sebald will adopt a similar stance to the philosopher on theneed for intellectual and artistic works to offer a practical engagement thatresists serving as instrument to political ends. Te literary strategy that heundertakes leads him to complicate Adornos own aesthetics of the ruin. Te responsibility of public thinkers and artists towards a national com-munity was famously confronted in Tomas Mann in his critique of theGerman tradition of cultural pessimism both in the essay Deutschlandund die Deutschen and in the novel Doktor Faustus, in which the com-poser Adrian Leverkhns story is a cautionary tale of how supposedly aloofapolitical art is all too prone to fall into step with the barbaric elements

62. C. Riordan, Ecocentrism in Sebalds After Nature, in W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion,A. Whitehead and J. J. Long (ed.) (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2004), 50.

63. A. Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory(Palo-Alto, CA: Stan-ford University Press, 2003), 156.


20/25



of its time. In the late eighties and nineties, a time when Sebald was begin-ning his own literary career, the role of the author again came under attackin the Literaturstreitthat condensed around a number of feuilleton reviews

of Christa Wolfs Was Bleibt. Tis was an era self-described as one of newbeginnings that hoped to slough off the post-war demand for moral(izing)engagement and resurrect the modernist claims to aesthetic autonomy, forart judged as art and nothing else. Sebalds natural history frustrates thereductive alternatives offered by the entrenched positions of the Literatur-streit. His critique of cultural responses to the Luftkriegtargets inner emigra-tion yet it also refuses the suggestion that literature is thereby committed toteleological and normative obligations. Simon Ward argues that Sebalds mode is not to write a critical historywith an emancipatory intention but to compose a literature whose aestheticpurity is disrupted through the interplay of fictional invention and historicaldetail, intertextuality and quotation.64His is a literature that agitates fora new comportment to our environment and to each other not by makingdirect appeals for change but by composing narratives that challenge oureveryday relations to things. In an essay titled Nach der Natur, published ayear before Sebalds poem of the same name, Karl-Heinz Bohrer argued thatthe mourning for alienated nature typified by Hlderlins poetry or the lost

promise of happiness, especially the writing of Gottfried Benn, is anachro-nistic.65Tis mode of modernist, and romantic, art is no longer relevant asit offers a depiction of natural history as ruins directly representable by us.A decade earlier, Adorno had himself sought the lost promise of happinesswithin the damage done to natural beauty and had applauded Hlderlinspoetry for depicting a Kulturlandschaftwith a profound source of resis-tance welled up in its scarred surface. For Bohrer, what is now needed is aliterature of mourning (rauer) scanning a landscape where even ruins arepresent only as fleeting traces. He calls for a literature that scours the rubbleof the past whilst remaining diligently aware that this means that its ownform and language must pose as artificially constructed ruins. Sebalds writings give form to this other, self-negating aesthetic of theruin. Sebald hopes to reclaim the endangered semantic potential of frag-ments of the past, be they photographs, letters, testimony, yet he never servesthese up as ruins ready for consumption. His play with memory is alwaysmediated; it is the writing of someone elses memories, of broken narration,

64. S. Ward, Responsible Ruins? W. G. Sebald and the Responsibility of the German Writer,

Forum for Modern Language Studies42 (2006): 192.65. K.-H. Bohrer, Nach Der Natur. Ansicht einer Moderne jenseits der Utopie,Merkur41:8

(1987): 63145.


21/25

392 HARRIE JOHNSON


of a passive voice that refuses to name and simply accord blame to the activeagent of destruction. It is quite a feat to go one step further in negation thanAdorno but the natural history of destruction does just this. It negates the

lingering motif of natures resistance to human domination, the ruin, withwriting itself in ruination. Yet while this is a poetics of mourning it is notone of resignation. As Ward puts it, Sebalds response to pessimism is to befound in the production of an art that understands itself as part of nature,but only partially, and thus is able to offer a form of resistance to overrid-ing narratives through its conscious process of symbiotic construction andruination.66Sebalds writing, like Adornos, is after nature because it servesas provocation to a readership made active in the work of memory. We arenot handed over memories complete. We are rather accompanied in the dis-jointed process of recollecting nature and historys imbricated sufferings. Tere is a danger in aestheticizing a political programme and renderingthe intertwined fates of nature and history into yet another hotel lobbylandscape. Tey may differ in their diagnosis of the environmental crisisand the extent that art should claim to represent the ruins of natural his-tory but on this Sebald and Adorno fundamentally agree. In a 1969 Spiegelinterview Adorno, like Sebald, claims to a thinking that stands in a ratherindirect relationship to praxis.67A critical account, one that locates the

kernel of natures ongoing suffering in the instrumental attitude with whichwe approach it, must be wary of itself being turned into a convenient instru-ment of political change. For Sebald, engagement with his 1990s context ispursued with a radical faith in the literary utterances own power to moveits audience. Adorno, too, thinks theory is much more capable of havingpractical consequences owing to the strength of its own objectivity.68InAesthetic Teory, Adorno suggests that happiness would be above all praxis.Given that thepromesse du bonheurreferred to the prospect of a non-dom-inating relation between subject and natural object, the association of hap-piness and praxis would suggest that one may only aspire to a successfulpraxis, in his sense of the term, when action is undertaken as non-coerciveactivity engaged in for its own sake.69It is for this reason that Martin Seelcharacterizes Adornos praxis as a contemplative ethics, a project that seeksout a many-sided receptiveness and purpose-free connections to the world.70

66. Ward, Responsible Ruins, 196.67. Appendix: Whos Afraid of the Ivory ower?, in G. Richter, Language Without Soil: Adorno

and Late Philosophical Modernity(New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 233.68. Richter, Appendix, 234.69. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 12.70. M. Seel, Adornos Contemplative Ethics, in Contemporary Perspectives in Critical and Social

Philosophy, J. F. Rundell et al. (eds) (Boston, MA: Brill, 2004), 263.


22/25



Tis contemplative, non-possessive relation to nature emerges in aphorism54 ofMinima Moralia:

Te pure unreflective act is violation projected on to the starry skyabove. But in the long, contemplative look that fully discloses peopleand things, the urge toward the object is always broken, reflected.Contemplation without violence, the source of all the joy of truth,presupposes that he who contemplates does not absorb the object intohimself: a distanced nearness.71

Once again the motif of distanced nearness that Benjamin had prescribedas crucial to the resurrection of second nature reappears in Adornos work.Not only does it characterize a constellation that seeks to unlock the for-gotten history of the natural world and reified social structures but alsoan ethics of contemplative thinking, purposive if only in its refusal of anysingular purpose.

Conclusion

oday disaster looms but not in the shape of Becketts one-off cataclysmof earth scorching atomic warfare. Rather it is unsustainable day-to-daylives that threaten catastrophe; the unchecked use of wasteful technologies,billions of decisions and acts of domination made every second by powerelites and the multitude of individuals. Adornos radical thesis that disasterinheres in the way we think has come home to roost. Te mechanisms ofthought tame and progressively eliminate the nature internal and externalto us. Despite this, Adorno has been but a marginal presence in environ-mental philosophical discourse. o many, his dual critique of reason andthe romantic re-enchantment of nature seems to confirm Lukacs charge ofa mandarin intellectualism residing in hotel abyss, maintaining a digni-fied distance from the tensions that result from any real engagement withthe disaster. In his defence we might note that inAesthetic Teorydignityhas a telling usage: it is systematically associated with the absence of nature,its defeat at the hands of human domination. Post-Kantian aesthetics haddismissed natural beauty in the name of exulting human dignity. We arethen told that the only dignity that nature itself possesses is the uncertain

good of not-yet-existing. So as to open up the possibility of a new history

71. . W. Adorno,Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life(London: Verso, 2005), 8990.


23/25

394 HARRIE JOHNSON


of natures presence for itself, Adornos critical theory is prepared to embraceindignitys nitty-gritty. Te object of Adornos thought is to reveal that in nature which is not

reducible to being the object of thought. He doesnt expect to get at natureprecisely because it has already been completely got at. So, he piles uplayer upon layer of mutually undermining but partially illuminating moments of undignified thought. He pays visit to that a-historical font ofnature re-enchanted, all the time declaring himself an unbeliever. Despitealigning the very logic of technology with the mass murder of the deathcamps, the attempt to expunge human nature itself, he will go so far as toadmit that under transformed relations of production technology mighteven assist nature.72Otherwise put, far from aloof, Adornos theory mimeti-cally responds to the grubby history of the conceptual domination of nature.It too is prepared to enlist aspects of both post-modern skepticism and re-enchanting romanticism in the hope that the questioning self-reflectionand ethical contemplation that this forces on them might yield a beneficialtransition to praxis. How this transition may occur is a question that bothSebald and Adorno think beyond the purview of their work, but it is only bysorting through the imbricated ways that we are, in the poets words, afternature, that Adorno thinks we might ever put ourselves without places to

hide before it.

Harriet Johnsonis currently completing a PhD at the University of Sydney, Australia.Her research interests include social philosophy, political philosophy, critical theoryand phenomenology.

References

Adorno, Teodor W. 1997.Aesthetic Teory. London: Athlone Press.Adorno, Teodor W. 2005. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords(European Perspectives).New York: Columbia University Press.

Adorno, Teodor W. 2002. Essays on Music. Berkeley, CA and London: University of CaliforniaPress.

Adorno, Teodor W. 2005.Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London: Verso.Adorno, Teodor W. 1973. Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Adorno, Teodor W. 1991. Notes to Literature, 2 vols (European Perspectives). New York: Colum-

bia University Press.Adorno, Teodor W. 2003. Sociology and Psychology. In D. Milne (ed.).Modern Critical Tought:

An Anthology of Teorists Writing on Teorists. Oxford: Blackwell.

Bohrer, Karl-Heinz. 1987. Nach Der Natur. Ansicht einer Moderne jenseits der Utopie.Merkur41:8.

72. Adorno,Aesthetic Teory, 68.


24/25



Dallmayr, Fred, R. 1976. Phenomenology and Critical Teory: Adorno. Philosophy & SocialCriticism3.

Gasch, Rudolph. 2002. Te Teory of Natural Beauty and Its Evil Star: Kant, Hegel, Adorno.

Research in Phenomenology32.

Hanssen, Beatrice. 1998. Walter Benjamins Other History. Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress.

Horkheimer, Max, and Teodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Frag-ments, Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Hullot-Kentor, Robert. 2006. Tings Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Teodor W. Adorno,Columbia Temes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts. New York and Chichester:Columbia University Press.

Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Palo-Alto,CA: Stanford University Press.

Marcuse, Herbert. 1970. Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis Politics and Utopia.London: Allen Lane.Morgan, Alastair. 2007.Adornos Concept of Life. London: Continuum.Richter, Gerhardt. 2010. Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity. New

York: Fordham University Press.Riordan, Colin. 2004. Ecocentrism in Sebalds After Nature. In W. G. Sebald: A Critical Com-

panion, A. Whitehead and J. J. Long (eds). Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.Sebald, Winfried, Georg. 2002.After Nature, 1st edn. New York: Random House.Seel, Martin. 2004. Adornos Contemplative Ethics. In Contemporary Perspectives in Critical and

Social Philosophy, J. F. Rundell et al.(eds). Boston, MA: Brill.Soper, Kate. 1995. What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Non-human. Oxford: Wiley-

Blackwell.Stone, Alison. 2006. Adorno and the Disenchantment of Nature. Philosophy Social Criticism 32,

no. 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0191453706061094Ward, Simon. 2006. Responsible Ruins? W. G. Sebald and the Responsibility of the German

Writer. Forum for Modern Language Studies42.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0191453706061094http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0191453706061094


25/25

C o p y r i g h t o f C r i t i c a l H o r i z o n s i s t h e p r o p e r t y o f M a n e y P u b l i s h i n g a n d i t s c o n t e n t m a y n o t b e

c o p i e d o r e m a i l e d t o m u l t i p l e s i t e s o r p o s t e d t o a l i s t s e r v w i t h o u t t h e c o p y r i g h t h o l d e r ' s

e x p r e s s w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n . H o w e v e r , u s e r s m a y p r i n t , d o w n l o a d , o r e m a i l a r t i c l e s f o r

i n d i v i d u a l u s e .

undignified thoughts after nature: adorno’s aesthetic theory

Documents