Adorno on nature

摘要

Radical environmentalists, Cook argues, can learn much from Adorno, both in terms of how to maintain solidarity amongst diversity (something, one has to say, that Marxists have conspicuously failed to do in practice) and through understanding his concept of'natural history'. 'Natural history', of course, has nothing to do with the musings of Victorian clergymen on butterflies or birds but refers to the irrevocable mutual entanglements of nature and history. This idea might (to borrow an Althusserian idiom) be approached through both a historical materialism (an account of the actual imbrications of nature and history and their effects) and a dialectical materialism (an underlying philosophy that informs this account and reveals its limits).