Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: A remark made by Theodor W. Adorno in 1942 gains a new relevance in our current situation of on-going anthropogenic planetary depredation and the ecological challenges it poses: ‘Need is a social category. Nature as “drive” is contained within it’. With this remark, Adorno appears to attribute both a natural moment and a social moment to the category of human need. I propose a reading of it in which there are two aspects to need’s natural moment: a transgressive power and a reminder of the constitutive materiality of human agency. Moving beyond Adorno I elaborate the first as a call for interpretations and evaluations of human need through reference to human-transcending ideas of ‘the good’ or ‘the just’. I elaborate the second as a call for attentiveness to the normative importance for ethical agency of the multiple, complex entanglements between human agency and other-than-human-agencies. Taken together they call for a decentring and opening of the idea of autonomous agency prevalent in contemporary political theory. This has implications for the politics of need.
Author: Maeve Cooke
Institution: University College Dublin
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4413045676