Nature as Ideology

This chapter develops a critical-theoretical analysis of nature as ideology and shows how distorted relations to nature mediate the entanglement of antisemitism and sexism in modern society. Drawing primarily on Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, it reconstructs how civilisation's project of mastering outer and inner nature produces contradictory notions of nature that legitimise domination while concealing its social origins. Within this framework, antisemitism and misogyny are interpreted as authoritarian forms of revolt against domination that displace social antagonisms onto surrogate targets. The chapter analyses the ambivalent identification of Jews and women with both nature and anti-nature: women are naturalised and denied subjectivity, while Jews are simultaneously cast as abstract, overcivilised, and dangerously unnatural, yet also reduced to animalised nature. These contradictory images are traced back to the gendered organisation of labour, the repression of drives, and the formation of bourgeois subjectivity under capitalism. By conceptualising antisemitism and sexism as false cures for the tensions generated by domination, the chapter argues that both ideologies stabilise existing power relations by projecting denied desires and fears onto those marked as weak, deviant, or excluded.