Adornoian Natural History and the Politics of Sexual Desire

Abstract This article rethinks the political project of transforming sexual desire and the norms that regulate it, aiming to reduce oppression and marginalization in intimate life. In the wake of recent feminist revivals of this project, such as Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex (2021), I analyze the limitations of two dominant frameworks: ‘disciplinary’ models, which overestimate our capacity to regulate desire, and ‘liberatory’ models, which assume the existence of an authentic, pre-political core of desire that can be freed from power. I argue that both models are flawed, promoting respectively the illusion of total control and prelapsarian fantasies. To move beyond them, I turn to Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of natural history, which challenges the fixity of desire without assuming its infinite malleability. Specifically, drawing on Adorno and his interpreters, I show the natural history provides a framework for conceptualizing agency and transformation that neither negates the constraints shaping desire nor forecloses the possibility of its active reconfiguration. This approach, I suggest, offers a critical foundation for feminist efforts to rethink and reshape desire.