Reporting harm as natural history: the case of W.G. Sebald

Abstract

The idea of a non-metaphysical approach to the labor of harm (of naming and facing it) can receive support from the perspective of Natural History both regarding past harmful experiences and for an understanding of the “never again!” that these elicit. The article focuses, first, on W.G. Sebald’s texts, specially his Natural History of Destruction, to comprehend how a two-fold tradition of natural history –one deriving from Benjamin and Adorno, the other from Zuckerman’s scientific approach–intertwine in the understanding of past harms. But, second, the “never again” that such an understanding calls for seems to require moving beyond these theoretical frames. A new reading of the categorical imperative, in Kant’s law of nature formula, is suggested as a theoretical rendering of facing harm.