2. The disciplinary model and the liberatory model

A yearning to intervene in the sexual economy of desire—reshaping who and what people are open to desiring—has long united feminist thinkers concerned with diverse forms of marginalization. This endeavor has typically given rise to two distinct theoretical approaches, each grounded in opposed ontological commitments: the “disciplinary” and the “liberatory” models. These are positions that have been variously defended by feminist thinkers, even as they reflect broader tendencies in debates around sexuality.Footnote ⁴ Yet, shortcomings within both call for the elaboration of an alternative account of sexual desire and of its transfiguration.

Srinivasan’s recent work helps trace the contours of the disciplinary and liberatory extremes by problematizing both. To begin with, she provides an outline of the disciplinary model and illuminates some (though not all) of the issues inherent in it by offering a critique of desire that, by her own admission, could be conflated with the call to control desire. Indeed, her attacks are particularly powerful precisely because they accompany a broader analysis of desire and sex embedded with power, politics, and culturally contextual views of what and who counts as attractive, which condemns from the outset any mechanism of control. I dwell on this analysis as it better contextualizes the critiques Srinivasan and I respectively move toward the disciplinary proposal.

In seeking to develop a sexual ethics “beyond the narrow parameters of ‘consent’” (Srinivasan Reference Srinivasan2021, xiii), The right to sex advances the demand to decouple sexual desire from the status of brute natural fact, and thus to rethink sex as it is typically conceived to exist “outside politics” (xii). A “feminism that totally abjures the political critique of desire,” Srinivasan writes, “is a feminism with little to say about the injustices of exclusion and misrecognition suffered by the women who arguably need feminism the most” (90). We can think of Black women, considered at once too sexually available (thus “unassaultable”) and “comparatively unfuckable” (84)—compared, that is, to white women whose sexual attention is viewed as a prize to be won; of disabled women, often excluded from the hierarchy of desirability, and Asian women, too high on a hierarchy of objectification; of trans women, whose body—we are told precisely by those purporting to be most on board with the liberalization of sex—“one is free to not desire,” others to fetishize.

Perhaps more controversially, Srinivasan also asks us to think of men and of the negative effects the ideology of natural, personal preference has on them. There is no right to sex, which is to say that no one (especially, no woman) owes sex to anyone else (especially, to any man). Yet, to note that the sexual economy tends to consider Black men as “dangerous” and Asian men as too “effeminate” is to demand that the sexual value assigned to different groups of men be interrogated. It is to ask that all the political forces lying behind misguided and misogynist demands to sex be questioned. Srinivasan writes, accordingly:

As Srinivasan specifies, to confront and contest these patterns of domination is “a radical demand” because it involves problematizing the idea that “everyone can desire whatever or whomever they want” (Srinivasan Reference Srinivasan2021, 96)—that we can desire whatever or whomever we want. A sexual emancipation that truly benefits those most affected by systems of oppression, Srinivasan is suggesting, is not about the individualist freedom to express one’s desires as they are. It entails the long and far more difficult labor of deconstructing them: of undoing some, and bringing into focus others (specifically, the desires that the dominant sexual economy leads us to misrecognize and to desexualize, like a woman’s attraction for another woman). It is in this sense that Srinivasan asks us to “allow ourselves to feel admiration, appreciation, want, where politics tells us we should not” (96). It is, again, in this sense that she defends Adrienne Rich’s demand that straight women question their sexual orientation and recognize, at minimum, that heterosexuality has had to be “imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintained by force” (Rich Reference Rich2003 [1980], 26–27). That is, recognize that dominant heterosexuality, as Judith Butler notes, relies at the very least on the institutionalisation of an “asymmetrical oppositions between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’,” such that the cultural construction of gender serves to enforce the “heterosexualization of desire” (Butler Reference Butler1990, 24).

Srinivasan’s framing of the transfiguration of sexual desire as a political requirement is, to my mind, incredibly powerful, not least because she confronts the potentially prescriptive and disciplinary implications of her argument—the concern that this critique of desire might call for new mechanisms of control. Her suspicion of disciplinary models stems from her acute awareness of their risks: even when undertaken in the name of rendering sexual dynamics less sexist, ableist, racist, and heteronormative, the political regulation of desire, she argues, often operates through the same moral authoritarianism that has historically underpinned the policing of queerness and non-normative sexuality. Beyond raising the question of whether anyone can ever legitimately wield such authority, promoting this type of discipline risks introducing new mechanisms of control—ones that could all too easily be appropriated by forces hostile to feminist ideals. As Srinivasan poignantly asks, “if my desire must be disciplined, who will do the disciplining? And if my desire refuses to be disciplined, what will happen to me then?” (96).

Add to Srinivasan’s critiques a second set of problems. At its core, to advocate for a disciplinary approach is to affirm not only the malleability of desire but our capacity to regulate and reshape it—if not entirely, then at least in those aspects most pertinent to our political aims.Footnote ⁵ Yet, this emphasis on our capacity to reshape desire, if left unchecked, risks overlooking the structural conditions that limit our agency. This is a problem insofar as proposals to reconfigure desire require an awareness of the limits within which such action can unfold, including natural limits and those aspects of desire and sexuality that lie beyond our influence, no matter how hard we attempt to intervene.

It is fairly uncontroversial to claim that desire is not fully subject to conscious or volitional control. The idea that we can simply will ourselves to will differently overlooks the complex, hidden mechanisms shaping desire.Footnote ⁶ Psychoanalysts have long insisted that, while a person may consciously choose to desire differently, this intention is constrained by unconscious biases and attachments, which have already shaped their desires long before any effort at intervention.Footnote ⁷ If one does not wish to commit to psychoanalytical claims, Srinivasan makes a comparable point when she advances that compulsory heterosexuality regulates women’s “relations in ways that often betray what it is they really want”—hiding and dissimulating desires (Srinivasan Reference Srinivasan2021, 97). Since we are unaware of these feelings, we cannot control them; since we are unknown to ourselves, we cannot change easily, or at least enact this change from the position of self-transparent agency. Empirical studies further suggest that hormones play a role in determining the intensity of sexual desire, its patterns across time, and sexual preferences in a way we cannot always control (Gangestad and Thornhill Reference Gangestad and Thornhill1998; Gangestad et al. Reference Gangestad, Thornhill and Garver-Apgar2005)—something that does not govern but frames how we experience desire. This does not mean that the body dictates whom or what we desire, nor that it determines the shape of our sexuality. Rather, the suggestion is that there is a material basis to desire, that this modulates libidinal responsiveness and intensity, and that we cannot—at least not everyone, not regularly—control this modulation.

The tendency to overestimate our ability to regulate desire is not an inevitable consequence of adopting the disciplinary framework Srinivasan critiques. Indeed, one may argue that interventions on desire can only ever be minor. Still, the risk of verging toward the advocacy of wholesale control is real and significant if the type of agency involved is not further qualified. More than the moral authoritarianism Srinivasan highlights (one could claim that political transformation always requires assuming that one has the right and capacity to drive change), this danger points to a deeper issue: underscoring the vulnerability of desire to political and social influence, if not done attentively, can foster the illusion that we have full control of our desire and sexuality. This misconception can skew, in turn, both individual efforts to reshape desire (to modify our personal preferences) and collective attempts to alter the norms governing desirability.

One can easily detect the anxieties outlined above even in feminist accounts of desire that robustly endorse the need for disciplinary interventions. For example, Son and colleagues articulate a constructivist perspective in which individuals’ sexual desires are deeply “influenced by sexual scripts” (Son et al. Reference Son, Yaraskavitch, Nguyen, Murray and van Anders2024, 2988), making a point of highlighting the positive impact that feminist prescriptions have had in reshaping men’s sexual behaviors and attitudes. They cite changes such as refraining from “sexually objectifying women, decreasing (unwanted) sexual advances, respecting women’s desires, restricting certain fantasies, and asking for explicit consent before proceeding with any sexual activity” (2989). Yet the authors also acknowledge the ongoing tensions and uncertainties the effort to discipline desire entails. Specifically, the difficulty some men report in conforming their desires to feminist expectations—leaving them uncertain “about how to manage sexuality that does not align with these approaches” (2989)—raises, again, the question: To what extent can desire be controlled and transformed?

Now, the most intuitive alternative to disciplinary paradigms is the model of liberation. This approach contends that we can counteract the marginalization embedded in the dominant sexual economy by distancing—indeed, liberating—desire from political influence. Here, the task is not to regulate, control, or discipline but to set desire free from external elements—the core assumption being that desire could exist independently of the political and social forces with which it intersects. The presumed separability of desire from power, culture, and politics is the reason I term the view of desire associated with liberatory models as prelapsarian: before the fall, but also after it, for desire can be restored, on this account, to an original state preceding its distortion, with liberation amounting to a subtractive process that removes the influence of oppressive forces.Footnote ⁸

Unsurprisingly, some of the clearest articulations of this account can be found in feminist analyses informed by Christian thought. For example, in addressing—like Srinivasan—the worry that saying “yes” does not suffice to challenge oppressive sexual dynamics, Karen Peterson-Iyer develops a Christian ethics of “sexual flourishing” aimed at contesting “patterns of injustice and marginalization” (Peterson-Iyer Reference Peterson-Iyer2022, 15). While the notion of “flourishing” already implies a focus on potentials to be discovered and cultivated, Peterson-Iyer is explicit about the conception of liberation underpinning her account—one premised on the removability of structures of oppression. This is, as she puts it, “a vision of justice and freedom that includes within itself an explicit rejection of social patterns that bind, imprison, or otherwise afflict” (41, my emphasis). A vision, that is, where desire can be freed from social forces and exist outside of power, with power itself appearing as a foreign imposition rather than a constitutive condition.

To be clear, this analysis is not confined to religious thought. The queer slogan “I was born this way” offers a parallel rationale and encapsulates its political potential. By reclaiming the congenital nature of queer sexual desire, queer people have been able to challenge narratives that cast queerness as deviant. The underlying claim is that, despite the pervasive influence of heteronormativity, sexuality is innate and must be freed from the norms that infiltrate our intimate lives. Interestingly, given Srinivasan’s exegesis, Rachel Stein attributes this position to Rich, as well as Minnie Bruce Pratt, arguing that their “identification of lesbianism with natural terrain and phenomenon” helps affirm same-sex desire (Stein Reference Stein, Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson2020, 315). On this reading, it is not through the politicization of sexuality but through its naturalization that “we can make it evident that people of diverse sexualities have the human right to bodily sovereignty” (315).

I do not wish to trivialize the subversive potential of this rationale, nor the success of the “I was born this way” narrative. Still, we must acknowledge the harmful ramifications of these views. Imagining an unsocialized state of desire risks fostering an apolitical stance that discourages active efforts to reshape desire in meaningful ways. It sustains the illusion that we should strive to return to an idealized state of innocence rather than engage in the difficult task of aligning our desires with our political commitments. Moreover, positing a pre-political state of desire could reinforce the very norms and ideas that we seek to contest—such as rape fantasies and compulsory heterosexuality. On the one hand, the belief that there is something within desire that is pre-social legitimizes views construing the sexual act as the unavoidable fulfillment of one’s uncontrollable instincts. As Katherine Angel observes, even the ostensibly egalitarian claim that “women, like men, have a deep, libidinal, urgent desire”—regardless of its object—risks reinforcing, rather than unsettling, the supposed naturalness of masculine violence (Angel Reference Angel2021, 40). On the other hand, the belief that there is a fixed, natural dimension of desire might end up bolstering heteronormativity, not because only heterosexuality can be deemed pre-social, but since the authority to determine what is natural has historically been heterosexual.Footnote ⁹

Michel Foucault’s critique of the “repressive hypothesis” in the first volume of The History of Sexuality is quite instructive in this regard. This is not necessarily because Foucault successfully demonstrates that there is nothing pre-political in desire that gets repressed and could be liberated—or at least, this is not what interests me here. Primarily, Foucault highlights that calls for liberation and for a return to a desire beyond politics “always [unfold] within the deployment of sexuality, and not outside or against it” (Foucault Reference Foucault1998, 131). Put differently, the idea that we can escape power extends the reach of the dominant regime of sexuality by foregrounding a pre-political dimension of desire that reinforces, instead of subverting, dangerous naturalizing tendencies. Further, it limits the scope of transformation, overemphasizing a stable core of desire one can only rediscover, never change.

Srinivasan does not pursue this alternative, though some of her phrasings are quite confusing in this respect. She describes, for instance, her project as an effort to “liberate sex from the distortions of oppression,” specifying that this does not entail “a desire regulated by the demands of justice, but a desire set free from the binds of injustice” (Srinivasan Reference Srinivasan2021, 96, my emphasis). Yet, given that The right to sex is organized precisely around the argument that desire is never pre-political, this appeal to a rhetoric of liberation seems indicative of the difficulty of charting a path beyond the dichotomy identified. In fact, Srinivasan ends up posing the question in a form that rehearses the very binary she interrogates: “Must the transformation of desire,” she asks, “be a disciplinary project (wilfully altering our desires in line with our politics)—or can it be an emancipatory one (setting our desires free from politics)?” (100) Again, I do not take this formulation to imply her allegiance to either position, but to constitute a sincere expression of a difficult and genuine conundrum. While we cannot assume total control over desire, as if we could force ourselves to desire or not desire something at will, we must nonetheless take those dimensions of desire of concern to feminism—its complicity with systems of oppression and marginalization—as liable to transformation. Yet we must do this without presupposing that only systems of oppression shape desire, that power operates solely as a force of injustice, or that we could return to some state of nature.Footnote ¹⁰

Hence, the question: How do we conceptualize the transformation of desire without falling into one of two problematic extremes? On one side, we cannot assume an unbounded, omnipotent agency that disregards structural limits circumscribing action. Such a vision neglects the fact that not everything within desire is subject to direct control, yielding an unrealistic and potentially counterproductive account of agency. On the other side, we must reject the notion of a prelapsarian or pre-political desire. Such a view feeds dangerous narratives about natural preferences and overemphasizes structural constraints by implicitly invoking an unchangeable pre-social dimension of desire that can only be revived or rediscovered. The critical task, then, is to develop a model of transformation that fully acknowledges the entanglement of desire with power and politics while sustaining a meaningful account of agency.

Admittedly, this inquiry might appear, in some respects, superfluous. Srinivasan argues, for instance, that the question “How do we address our desires without fear, as Lorde puts it, of the distortions we may find within ourselves?” requires a practical, and not theoretical, response (Srinivasan Reference Srinivasan2021, 102). It is through “experiments of living,” and not solely philosophical arguments, that we can transform how we live desire (102). This, I think, is incontestable. Yet, it also seems evident to me that, for such experiments of living to succeed, they must confront a fundamental risk: the threat of political nihilism—the paralyzing fear that, despite our best efforts, meaningful change is unattainable. Put differently, inspiring people to undertake these experiments requires more than solely proposing new practices; it necessitates demonstrating that political transformation is, in fact, possible. This, in turn, demands an account of the conditions under which such transformation can take place.

To support the practical project that Srinivasan envisions, then, we need an account of desire that avoids the dangers of the positions identified above—one compatible with and indeed supportive of Srinivasan’s proposals. Far from being a purely abstract or academic task, this is a necessary step in ensuring that the endeavor to reshape desire is both compelling and credible. It is with this in mind that I begin to introduce, in the next section, Adorno’s concept of natural history.

3. Theorizing change: natural history and contingency

If desire is often affirmed as mutable—socially constructed, historically shaped, and therefore open to transformation—many accounts tend to stop short of explaining how this mutability is to be understood philosophically. What kind of history makes transformation possible? What prevents this very historicity from being reabsorbed into a teleology that nullifies genuine change? This is where Adorno’s account of natural history—his remarks more than those of his readers—becomes indispensable. On the one hand, rather than just echoing the thesis that desire can be otherwise, Adorno’s defense of contingency articulates the deeper philosophical conditions under which such a claim can hold. At stake here is a disambiguation between a conception of desire as open to external mediation and a view in which desire changes only by virtue of its own internal necessity—a kind of immanent evolution of sexual norms and economies that bypasses agency altogether. On the other hand, Adorno’s effort to think together nature and history provides more concrete suggestions for articulating an account of desire integrating contingency, the political embeddedness of desire, and historical agency. These are the suggestions I refine with the help of Whyman, Buck-Morss, and Farina, as they offer the conceptual foundation for an account of desire that neither calls for the escape from politics promoted by liberatory paradigms nor requires the unbounded agency assumed by disciplinary models.

Adorno elaborates on the first point via two compatible critiques of teleological history, whose failures, he argues, end up legitimizing contingency. One critique—presented in the section of Negative dialectics dedicated to natural history—targets Hegel and illuminates, in this way, the stakes of an endorsement of historical contingency. Hegel’s central move—for Adorno and many other critics—consists in equating historical progress with an objective structure akin to natural development, and this objective structure with the necessary development of a form of rationality. “The only Thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History,” Hegel writes, “is … that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process” (Hegel Reference Hegel2001 [1837], 22). Paraphrasing, Hegel transposes the identity of subjectivity and objectivity dear to idealism onto history: just as structures of subjectivity reflect fundamental structures within objects in Kant’s transcendental idealism, so too in Hegel, the objective course of history corresponds to the development of forms of consciousness and self-consciousness. A logical progression—rational and of Reason—thus expresses itself in material history. History comes to follow, accordingly, a structure that absorbs historical contingency by way of subsuming historical change under a rational progress.

The implications of such a view for an analysis of desire should be clear. If teleological frameworks tend to naturalize their trajectories by integrating every deviation into a unified narrative, then the idea that desire is transformable is not in itself sufficient. A conception of transformation governed by rational necessity risks reducing desire to a pre-scripted developmental logic, thereby undermining the possibility of intentional change. Adorno critiques this position (without, however, focusing on the desire) insofar as it legitimizes suffering and domination—and indeed the marginalizations Srinivasan targets—by integrating them into a narrative deemed to be rational and necessary. As Adorno writes, “domination is absolutized and projected on Being itself, which is said to be the spirit” (Adorno Reference Adorno1990, 356). Further, he advances, Hegel distorts the meaning of historical change: “history, the explication of something it is supposed to have always been, acquires the quality of the unhistoric” (356–7). That is, Hegel explains history through a principle supposed to be eternal or, in any case, ontologically more primary than historical becoming. As such, he aligns himself “with the ever-same identity of the process whose totality is said to bring salvation” (357). This is not because Hegel overlooks what is historical and transitory, but insofar as he glorifies what is static within it: not the character of novelty and what may be contingent within historical events, but what appears rational and as such eternal.

Besides appraising rational history, Adorno’s earlierFootnote ¹¹ critique of phenomenology grounds contingency by showing that any teleological history is bound to misfire. Admittedly, Adorno engages phenomenologists—in particular, Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger—precisely for their attempt to reject the view of history he also attacks. They too, in other words, try to interrogate historically changing reality as something potentially alien to reason and to escape both subjectivism and teleology (Adorno Reference Adorno1984, 112). Yet, in all its shifts and turns, the phenomenological project fails, Adorno argues, on both fronts: it neither transcends the identity of reason and reality nor adequately accounts for historical contingency and particularity. The precise details of each misfire are less significant than the broader trends they reveal. For Adorno, phenomenology reduces historical becoming to an unalterable and universal structure of being which finds reflection in subjective structures or the mind—be it Heidegger’s historicity or the capacity of the thinker to “combine everything existing under [a] structure” (115). This move excludes the contingency of history and forecloses any form of historical change not already prefigured in the underlying ontological schema.

However, Adorno also advances—and this is his key, critical insight—that this subsumption is never fully successful. Paradoxically, phenomenology demonstrates the inability of any teleological structure to encapsulate all that exists and occurs. Whether by positing a transcendent meaning behind historical events or by rendering history itself an ontological (and subjective) structure, phenomenology thus reintroduces a dualism between what is essential—natural qua necessary—and that historical contingency that escapes, by definition, any essential structure. As Adorno writes:

The inability of an onto-historical structure to encompass all aspects of historical events necessitates, in other words, the introduction of a secondary category: contingency, as what escapes the structure. And, though such a category can be integrated into the primary framework, its presence exposes the failure of such framework to encompass the empirical, thereby affirming historical contingency as a critical concept.

This, I argue, is the first tile of the conceptual foundations Adornoian natural history offers to a project interested in transfiguring desire: the critique of the teleological reduction of history to a progressive structure ultimately underscores the possibility of non-determined change—a vital precondition for envisioning political transformation. Whyman captures this idea succinctly when he writes that “critical theory needs a way of accounting for the meaningfulness of historically contingent being, whilst also allowing for the possibility that this meaning might change” (Whyman Reference Whyman2016, 458). Which is to say that, by showing that the real and elements within it are not moved, primarily, by inner necessity, we can underscore our force as agents and our potential to intervene in and transform the world. What Adorno ultimately provides, in this respect, is a way to underwrite the political claim that desire is transformable with a philosophical account of history that sustains this very openness.

Now, onto the concrete suggestions concerning how an account of desire that integrates contingency may articulate itself—suggestions I elaborate in the sections to follow. There is a risk that emerges once we account for contingency, despite the obvious advantages this concept carries: contingency may still imply either an extreme pliability of the world to human will or, alternatively, an arbitrariness that excludes agency. This is why Adorno attempts to outline a “concrete unity of nature and history” (Adorno Reference Adorno1984, 117). This unity is concrete because it forsakes abstract ontological structures, embracing instead “the existing itself in its concrete inner-historical definition” (117). It is a unity of nature and history insofar as it involves thinking through the relation between “natural stasis” and “the historical dynamic” (117), understood not merely as immobility and movement, but as the interplay between what cannot be changed and what becomes without following any inner necessity (and is thus open to intervention). This dialectic—I argue below—is central to rethinking desire.

To outline it, Adorno draws, in his lecture, on the work of György Lukács and Walter Benjamin. From Lukács, he borrows specifically the notion of second nature (drawn, in turn, from Marx) as emblematic of “the metamorphosis of the historical qua past into nature” (Adorno Reference Adorno1984, 118). This is a vision that directs our attention to “the nature of man-made structures” (Lukács Reference Lukács1988 [1920], 63) or to a historical product that has become so conventional and rigidified that it can only appear as nature: as constrictive and unmovable as the latter often seems. From Benjamin (Reference Benjamin1998), Adorno lifts the “allegorical” as an interpretative stance which expresses concrete particularities that decay, thereby highlighting how nature too can be transient without being driven by inner necessity. These are the insights I expand upon and mobilize in the next two sections to account for the mutability of desire and our capacity to transform it while avoiding a relapse into the pre-social and claims to total control.

To do this, I turn in the next section to Whyman’s engagement with natural history, to then move to Buck-Morss’s and Farina’s in the following one. Whyman demonstrates that what seems essential, core, and pre-social is always mediated and subject to flux, while Buck-Morss and Farina provide critical tools for understanding how to harness our collective power while remaining aware of its limits.

4. Historical contextuality: the changing meaning of desire

By affirming contingency, Adorno provides the conceptual foundation for navigating questions concerning desire, challenging us to think critically about the conditions under which its transformation becomes possible. Whyman expands upon this framework in two ways. First, where Adorno establishes contingency as a critical category for a philosophy of history, Whyman finds in Benjamin’s reflections on allegories an anchor for a more concrete interpretation of the world organized around this concept. Second, he demonstrates that references to an essential and core aspect of desire need not imply an appeal to the pre-social; rather, they affirm the political and historical embeddedness of desire.

Reading both Adorno and Benjamin, Whyman advances that allegories never express meaning “beyond conceptual thought,” ideas somewhat infinite and eternal, whose value one believes absolute (Whyman Reference Whyman2016, 464). Instead, he claims, they consist of stereotyped mechanical representations that are always historically specific. Take, as an example, the allegorical function of the fish within Christianity. The association between Jesus and the image of the fish arose from concrete historical circumstances: the persecution of early Christians, which necessitated the creation of secret symbols and phrases to affirm the Christian faith. Among these symbols was “ichthys,” the Greek word for “fish” and an acrostic for the phrase “Iēsous Christos, Theou Yios, Sōtēr” (“Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”). Like Jesus on the cross, the fish—still present in Catholic iconography today—came to represent hope for salvation within persecution, thereby reflecting the particular historical relationships and contexts within which it emerged.

Examples like this illustrate that, as Whyman puts it, “what something means, need not be something eternal, but can instead be a historical relationship alone” (Whyman Reference Whyman2016, 465). More broadly, if allegories home in on what is historically specific, an allegorical approach to the world foregrounds the transitory character of the latter. The use Whyman makes of the notion of “meaning” adds precision to this idea. Traditionally, meaning has been conceived of as consisting of eternal and universal qualities that provide coherence, including the dynamics (or mechanisms) that govern an entity, the structure that organizes it. On his part, Whyman engages with but challenges this conventional view by arguing that it is historically specific relationships and practices, rather than eternal qualities, that give coherence and structure to the existing. He advances, in other words, that history itself constitutes the meaning of the real, not as an invariant structure of historical becoming but as the shifting practices, relationships, and dynamics that form and transform the world over time. Thus, in this view, the existing is not governed by an immutable order but by these historical interactions and their transient, contingent character.

Crucially, the rethinking of meaning Whyman promotes also comprises an important problematization of the category of immutability, which subtends in turn a reframing of the “pre-social.” This emerges most clearly in one of the examples Whyman offers—his qualification of the Marxist project as natural historical. As he writes: “We are attempting to discern what capitalism is precisely as some natural thing; but then, equally, that whatever is ‘natural’ has always itself formed historically, is to this extent within history, and thus can in principle always be transformed” (Whyman Reference Whyman2016, 467). The argument here is more nuanced than the recognition that capitalism functions as a form of second nature—that it imposes laws that might appear natural and unchanging but which remain, as historical products, inherently perishable. Nature—Whyman is suggesting—is at bottom always a second nature, always a historical product. This is because nature is always already the object of external action. Thus, we can never approach it—even conceptually—as some entity that rests outside culture and history, since the way nature presents itself to us is always mediated.

In this light, then, Whyman’s turn to allegory corresponds to an attempt to make historically contingent being meaningful and render meaning itself transitory. Whyman accounts indeed for a form of becoming that—unbound by inner necessity—remains open to diverse influences. This is not the mere affirmation of contingency; it is an effort to illuminate the structured and historically situated mechanisms through which coherence is provisionally secured. He problematizes, moreover, the category of the pre-social, suggesting that human action, thought, and external forces always mediate whatever we might presume to have formed independently of culture.

This framework supports the transfiguration of desire in two respects. It offers a concrete way to account for the mutability of desire at the collective level, explaining how and why dominant configurations of desire shift over time. Namely, the meaning we attribute to desire, the ways in which we regulate it, and consequently how it structures our lives and sense of being vary according to the broader practices, norms, and relations within which sexual desire is expressed or experienced. Further, by insisting that nature is always second nature, this account extends the vulnerability of desire to political action. To be more precise, Whyman first asks us to consider sexual preferences as petrified and coercive, urging us to recognize that petrification itself is a process—a political one in all the ways that matter. That, to use Srinivasan’s words, “it is in this intimate sphere, protected by the logic of ‘personal preference,’ that [racism and heteronormativity] sink some of their deepest roots” (Srinivasan Reference Srinivasan2021, 94). Yet, he also clarifies that it is not enough to insist on the social dimension of desire: we need to grasp its most natural aspects—elements of desire and particular sexual preferences assumed to be originary and pre-social—as subject to mechanisms of regulation that continue to evolve.

This position, while potentially unsettling, is not especially radical. The general thrust is that even the core internal structures of desire—those that might be argued to precede a proper entrance into society—necessarily relate to and are mediated by external objects and the external world at large. Thus, even these structures cannot be considered apart from the historically specific possibilities, contextual horizons, and relational frameworks within which they are expressed. This refines liberatory accounts, specifically, in a crucial way. By showing that even potentially essential, core aspects of desire remain within the grasp of history and power, Whyman’s framework avoids a regressive appeal to the pre-political while affirming the possibility of reshaping our sexual lives. Again, this is not simply a matter of arguing that what seems natural is in truth social—a version of Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis—but of showing that even an originary, core dimension of desire that might have formed before interpersonal interactions is subject to external regulation.

Ironically, however, if “Foucault now stands accused … of providing no real formulation of how individuals question (or do not question) the socioeconomic, political, and cultural hegemony,” as Carolyn Dean for instance argues, Whyman seems to fall into a similar trap by de-emphasizing “the power of individual agency and of contested meaning” (Dean Reference Dean1994, 277). Specifically, it is unclear—from Whyman’s account—whether and how intentional action can intervene in shaping the contexts and broader circumstances on which meaning hinges. Put differently, his focus on historical rearrangements suggests that change happens, but there is no assurance that this can be the result of intentional action. Shifts in meaning, laws, and structures are dependent on historical rearrangements that, while mutable, may occur without conscious or direct involvement, thereby remaining arbitrary. In this sense, Whyman moves too far from the overstating of agency that disciplinary accounts risk perpetuating. This, as Dean advances in her critique of Foucault, is a methodological problem: “The problem of how to think these two levels together: of how meaning is always socially constructed, always contingent and yet never arbitrary, how individuals are constituted within discursive systems and yet construct meaning capable of transforming those systems” (Dean Reference Dean1994, 274).

True, Whyman contends that we have the freedom and duty to change certain configurations of meaning, understanding, and laws regulating reality. Yet, if political struggle—as Srinivasan suggests (Reference Srinivasan2021, 102)—is not simply a matter “of knowing-that, but of knowing-how,” Whyman is culpable of articulating natural history only as a knowing-that (meaning is transitory) without establishing that there are grounds for knowing-how (to change this meaning). This leaves agency insufficiently grounded, raising the concern that the process of change might be arbitrary, occurring without any clear connection to intentional or organized political action.Footnote ¹² This problem re-emerges in the approach to second nature I am attributing to Whyman, albeit in a different register. The idea that nature is always second nature, if unqualified, promotes a form of ontological monism that considers nature and history (or nature and culture, in language traditionally closer to feminism) as one.Footnote ¹³ The lack of an interval between the two leaves no space for agency insofar as historical action (or culture) cannot exert itself intentionally against another. We return, then, to the central problem guiding this article: How do we conceptualize agency within a framework that acknowledges both transformability and structural constraints? If Whyman’s interpretation highlights the challenge of articulating agency within arbitrary becoming, we should indeed keep sight of the risk (manifest in disciplinary models) of veering too far in the opposite direction—underscoring the human capacity for transformation without adequately reckoning with the structural constraints that shape and limit it.

Now, to demand from natural history a full theory of agency or a model of self-transparent subjects would be to mischaracterize its critical ambitions. As I argued earlier in this article, we remain necessarily unaware of many of the forces that shape us; this opacity limits our conscious control over desire and complicates any straightforward form of self-transparency. Still, the partial inaccessibility of our desires, the forces that shape them, and our personal agency do not entail that agency is structurally unintelligible. On the contrary, natural history enables us to understand agency as a structural feature of the world—one that does not require transparency to be effective, as I explain below. It is this level of structural intelligibility that, I suggest, Buck-Morss and Farina attend to, allowing us to think transformation not despite the limits imposed on agency, but through them.

5. Agency, rigidity, and new mythologies of the sexual regime

Buck-Morss’s and Farina’s respective contributions to the project of transfiguring desire hinge on the strong yet realistic sense of agency their approaches to natural history promote. Through compatible and complementary studies refiguring historical action as an interpretative act, they bridge contingency and agency. They do this, paradoxically, by way of addressing a necessary counterpoint to human freedom—the rigidity of the world we act within—thereby framing agency not as an unconstrained force, but as something exercised within and against givenness. Moreover, by rethinking the notion of myth and showing that myths are never static, Buck-Morss and Farina allow us to mobilize narratives concerning states of nature and the pre-political, intervening at a broader cultural level without promoting an escape from politics. This intervention responds directly to the question that emerged by reading Whyman—namely, how, if at all, can we influence the broader horizons of meaning and the regulatory mechanisms structuring desire? The response I extract from Buck-Morse and Farina is that we can renegotiate, at the individual level, what is fixed within our desires—those aspects we do not directly control—by redetermining how we relate to them. In doing so, we also shift the larger mechanisms that regulate desire. This implies, further, that we can intervene in the cultural frameworks shaping the collective economy of desire by reinterpreting what we take to be foundational (and ostensibly pre-social) within our sexuality.

This line of argument emerges most clearly, in my view, as Buck-Morss and Farina confront the problem of rigidity—that which is, as Farina puts it, “rigid and constrictive” (Reference Farina2018, 258) by virtue of resisting or delimiting action. A critical engagement with rigidity introduces a necessary dimension that remains insufficiently thematized if we consider only transitoriness and contingency: the recognition that agency always encounters a world that is not infinitely malleable. Yet, far from merely asserting this fact—one that is fairly self-evident and has, indeed, served as a point of departure for my inquiry into desire—I take natural history to reveal that rigidity is not simply an impediment to transformation but can itself be politically mobilized: we can renegotiate the conditions in which we are embedded precisely by shifting our relation to what resists change and appears to lie outside history.

Buck-Morss articulates this movement with precision by thinking through Adorno’s reflections on music. She focuses, specifically, on the figures of the conductor and the composer, the performance of pieces from the canon and the writing of new music. Conductors, she argues, perform “a past work” in order to rescue “its living meaning, which history threatened to obliterate” (Buck-Morss Reference Buck-Morss1977, 44). Yet, to genuinely communicate with a contemporary audience and “to draw from its meaning,” the conductor must necessarily “change that material,” reworking the past through the lenses of the present (44). The composer enacts a complementary movement, creating new works that inevitably enter into dialogue with past compositions; or by participating in an artistic tradition that, like most art, develops “through artworks rather than in accord with some transcendent principle” (45). In this sense, composition is always a renegotiation of history, producing the new not ex nihilo but through an engagement with a heritage. Both activities—Buck-Morss advances—remain integral to music as an art, each laying the foundations for the other. Agency lies at the passage between them.

Where Buck-Morss speaks of the past, I seek to locate the rigidity I have mentioned above and qualified in the first section of this article: the elements of desire resisting direct intervention, such as biological and unconscious components. I take the liberty of shifting registers here for two reasons. First, albeit tangentially, these elements function analogously to the musical pieces and the cultural heritage Buck-Morss discusses, as far as they prevent the creative process and transformative action from beginning from a tabula rasa. Second, and more significantly, while we cannot directly shape or mould these elements—just as we cannot eliminate the original versions of musical works from existence—we can, as Buck-Morss suggests, determine the way they influence us in acts of creation and transformation.

This rigidity is what Adorno, at key moments, names “nature,” qualified in turn as “substance in history” (Adorno Reference Adorno1984, 111). Nature, in this respect, refers to that which resists direct intervention—not in a merely negative sense, but as a condition for the intelligibility of historical change and agency. Rigidity, as already indicated, encompasses however also the unknowability of all the forces that shape us and of our very desires: those unconscious elements, embodied drives, and cultural factors we can never completely pin down, which prevent us in turn from pinning down desires, and which thus constrain action by way of hiding from it. In this context, the brilliance of Buck-Morss’s reading is that it introduces agency precisely at the point where it is most constrained—as a practice of confrontation with limits. Her framework concedes, in other words, that we are also natural beings in a mysterious world: that the world resists us, and our body resists us too; that, sometimes, we really do just sexually desire certain things, without knowing why, or even knowing that we do. Still, it is precisely within these limits that agency articulates itself, not as unbounded action but as a mediated responsiveness to that which we cannot simply change. Agency, then, is not the effect of a self-transparent will, but a situated practice of interpretation and response.

The argument I am extracting from Buck-Morss is thus both descriptive and constructive. Descriptively, if there is something given within desire, then there must also be a gap between the content it presents to us and the way we engage with it—what we make of it. Historical and political action, I wager, entails mobilizing this gap: intentionally reflecting on how to relate to what seems outside history (in Adorno’s jargon) and allowing different approaches to transform us. Hence, constructively, if certain elements of desire resist direct transformation, we can still interfere with their regulatory force. The relevance we attribute to them, the ways we integrate them into new arrangements, and how we experience them in our daily life remain open to negotiation and intervention—even when their formation and constituting causes remain obscure.Footnote ¹⁴

Crucially, this operation is simultaneously individual and collective, since renegotiating how we approach and live our sexuality also involves rethinking the place it occupies in the world and thus mediating collective meanings. Consider same-sex attraction. As Whyman’s remarks already help us appreciate, while such attraction has existed throughout history, the modern discursive construction of “homosexuality” has conditioned how individuals understand and navigate their desires. This process of regulation does not necessarily alter the physical or unconscious mechanisms underlying attraction, but it does shape how individuals allow desire to govern them, thereby transforming the conditions under which it is lived. While one may not be able to fully redirect sexual attraction—as this is also governed by mechanisms we cannot control, whose cause we remain ignorant of—individuals can interrogate, reframe, and potentially reconfigure the significance of their preferences. Still, this reconfiguration is never purely individual; as the emergence of “queerness” as a political category exemplifies, it necessarily engages broader cultural frameworks that mediate how desire is understood and lived. The process of negotiating the meaning of one’s own sexuality is then also a process of reshaping the place it occupies in collective life. This is why societal transformations in the regulation of sexuality do not unfold independently of agency tout court.

If this process already encompasses the broader configurations and laws that Whyman reveals to be mutable yet not necessarily subject to direct intervention, both Buck-Morss and Farina extend this insight toward an even more collective mobilization of the interval between what is given and what this givenness means to us. They do this by attending, respectively, to the notions of the “archaic” and of “myth,” though both arguments, I suggest, hinge on the fundamental engagement with rigidity outlined above. This constitutes what I would call the second-order intervention apposite to natural history—one that directly engages the concept of the “pre-social” or the “foundational” operative, albeit in a problematized form, in Whyman’s analysis.

In his lecture, Adorno employs the concept of myth to qualify nature, equating both to that idea of the pre-social or unhistorical I have discussed: “what has always been, what as fatefully arranged predetermined being underlies history and appears in history” (Adorno Reference Adorno1984, 111). Farina, for his part, draws attention to the ways in which historical change and narratives of mythical origins constantly redetermine one another. Specifically, he advances that “the historicity of myth … means indeed that history in its advancement continues to produce mythology, even though this mythology becomes secularized” (Farina Reference Farina2018, 261, my translation). This suggests, first, that the “supposedly substantial and enduring mythic, is in no way a static foundation” but “historically dynamic” (Adorno Reference Adorno1984, 123), both because origin stories involve internal movement and are continuously reconceptualized. Second, that “hidden within historical progression, we always find the mythical dimension” (Farina Reference Farina2018, 258)—not simply because historical meaning-making often appeals to myths, but since the new “actually presents itself in history as the archaic” (Adorno Reference Adorno1984, 123). That is, insofar as the present projects itself into the past, it produces and constitutes new mythologies.

Buck-Morss presents a similar picture when she speaks of “the viewpoint of the present.” She advances that, for Adorno, “the archaic [can] be made to appear meaningful in the light of the present,” just like, inversely, “the very newness and modernity of the present [can] be made to suddenly release its significance when seen as archaic” (Buck-Morss Reference Buck-Morss1977, 58). She thus advances that what we may deem foundational and beyond history (a mythical nature or state of nature in Whyman’s sense) is always shaped by the historical context that conceptualizes it. Each epoch, therefore, determines and delineates its own foundations, envisioning myths that express present desires and fears. At the same time, the present is itself interpretable in light of the mythologies it constructs. As Buck-Morss succinctly states: “to identify the historical ‘source’ (Ursprung) or historical prototype (Urbild) or historical development (Urgeschichte) [is always] to construct it from the perspective of the present” (60).

Clearly, the point of departure here is similar to Whyman’s. Farina and Buck-Morss focus on meaning as qualifying element and structuring principle. However, they go beyond the claim that meaning and regulative mechanisms are historically situated and transitory. While Whyman emphasizes historical specificity and the inevitability of transience, they address the processes through which we collectively reinterpret both the archaic and the new: the interpretative act as a way to regulate the shared world. More specifically, they first argue that cultural horizons begin to shift precisely through a rethinking of what is foundational and originary—of the mythologies through which we articulate who we are. They then suggest that these interpretative reworkings are open to intervention and are neither impersonal nor arbitrary, precisely because there exists an interval between the content given to us (in this case, what we take to be core, pre-social structures of desire) and how we choose to interpret it, or even whether we take it up.

This is the same interval operative in relation to the fixed elements of sexual desire, for in both cases, we confront a givenness. Yet I take the mobilization at stake here to be of a second order because it legitimizes a strategic use of narratives. Consider the claim implicit in liberatory paradigms—that there is a dimension of desire that withstands external forces. This claim carries strategic value: it resists oppressive ideologies by positing a realm of desire impervious to social conditioning, as exemplified in the “born this way” narrative, which has historically served to legitimize desires deemed deviant.Footnote ¹⁵ What natural history affords, in this context, is not an affirmation of this claim as an objective truth but a recognition of its status as a historically situated regulative ideal—one that reflects the myths each epoch produces and re-elaborates.

Here, myth must be understood both as a narrative structure and as the content of these narratives—the supposed “originary” structure of desire—shown to be historically mediated by the very narratives that claim to report it. These myths need not be taken as literal truths or static foundations. If they function as normative fictions that guide action, recognizing their constructed nature does not diminish their force; rather, it enables a critical stance that resists nostalgic longings for an escape from politics, society, and power. In this sense, strategic myths do not reify a timeless natural order but actively participate in an ongoing reconfiguration of desire (thus, we might add, myth is not merely the product of cultural and intellectual efforts but part of praxis as such, as understood in Marxist jargon: the human mediation of nature, the process by which nature becomes first nature).

Under this light, the intervention of natural history vis-à-vis desire is thus threefold. First, making sexual desire the object of political critique and transformative action must involve attributing to it a certain openness to external forces, for any political intervention demands that we contemplate the possibility of change. Still, solely asserting that what sexual desire is and how it operates is historically contextual and mutable is clearly quite weak, at least politically. Tastes might shift, but if we cannot bring this process partly under our control, the mere fact of mutability still condemns us to political inertia. Natural history complicates this by demonstrating that existing configurations of desire emerge at the intersection of what presents itself as given and the way we approach this givenness. This constitutes the second and third modalities of intervention. In order: precisely where aspects of desire appear resistant to change, there is always space for reinterpretation and regulation. This is because the extent to which “fixed” aspects of desire shape us and how we respond to them remain open to contestation. Finally, there is a higher-order point to be made, one that concerns critique itself: Our conceptualizations of what is “foundational” are historically situated and politically significant. Ways of approaching elements perceived to be external to culture shape the very conditions of critique and transformation; and because the way we approach foundational structures or so-called states of nature is always open to contestation, these structures are not beyond reinterpretation.

This does not constitute a move beyond Srinivasan’s intervention, but an effort to build conceptual foundations that render her proposal more robust. Without assuming that desire can be reshaped at will, or that political action requires the removal from politics as if all we can do is return to some uncontaminated state, this effort attends to the capacity to transform desire despite its relative rigidity. Thus, rather than elaborating an alternative to Srinivasan’s proposal, this account offers the conditions under which her call for the collective transformation of desire becomes thinkable without collapsing into voluntarism or prelapsarian fantasies.

6. A tool for interpreting desire

Natural history—I have argued in this article—offers a way to think and promote the transformation of desire that avoids the pitfalls of both disciplinary and liberatory extremes. Where disciplinary models risk overstating agency, liberatory frameworks assume that desire has an authentic core, untainted by external forces. The first view neglects structural and natural constraints, framing desire as an empty slate onto which to inscribe new preferences at will. Yet even the simple recognition that desire is not fully conscious, and that hormonal and neurological mechanisms influence attraction in ways not wholly subject to volition, suffices to challenge this view. The second account is not only epistemically flawed but also politically dangerous: it sustains a prelapsarian fantasy, as if desire could exist in a space untouched by power, and as if the solution were to abandon society instead of engaging in political action.

A natural-historical account of desire responds to the complex demands of a critique of desire by negotiating between these models while offering an alternative to them. Whyman’s work is central here, as it highlights how social and political formations regulate individual desire and actively shape what we might regard as essential, core, and pre-social. Buck-Morss and Farina, in turn, outline modes of intervention that allow us to disrupt these formations and engage with the most rigid aspects of desire, while also accounting for their resistance to change. On the one hand, if desire contains fixed components, these do not fully determine its organization: how we experience and navigate them remains open. Thus, these elements are not determinants but starting points for renegotiation. In this sense, natural history activates the agency disciplinary models foreground, underscoring however that this is not unbounded: we can reshape desire, but not from an empty slate. On the other hand, natural history offers a way to mobilize the claims concerning a pre-social or prelapsarian dimension of desire that disciplinary paradigms tend to overstate, insisting that this operates as a strategic fiction rather than an immutable foundation.

What natural history contributes to the transfiguration of desire, then, is not a normative framework or evaluative system—that remains the task of feminist philosophy and critical theory more broadly. Rather, by accounting for mutability, opening the space for intervention, and explaining how to enact change at the individual and collective level, a natural-historical framework helps reject both fatalism and indifference toward the forces that sustain injustice. This is not a prescription for politics but a precondition for it: a refusal to accept that the present is immovable and an insistence that we can, and should, act to change it.