Ernst Jünger, Theodor Adorno, and the Idea of Natural History

This essay sets out an approach to Theodor Adorno’s rearticulation of the idea of natural history that foregrounds the undecidable relationship between symbol and allegory. This relationship is the structural condition of Ernst Jünger’s writing, from his protofascist journalism of the 1920s through to his postwar work, in which anthropocentric visions of world history are based on perishable symbolic identifications. As this becomes an increasingly prominent part of his thinking, he radicalizes the concept of natural history and, in the idea of planetary history superseding world history, anticipates some of the most topical contemporary work in the environmental humanities.