What is Spirit? What is a subject? What is (radical) ecology?

« What is “Spirit” at its most elementary ? It is the wound of nature: the subject is the immense – absolute – power of negativity, of introducing a gap or a cut into the given and immediate substantial unity, the power of differientiating, of “abstracting”, of tearing apart and treating as a self-standing what in reality is part of an organic unity. This is why the notion of the “self-alienation” of Spirit (of Spirit losing itself in its otherness, in its objectivization, in its result) is more paradoxical than it may appear: it should rather be read together with Hegel’s assertion of the thoroughly non-substantial character of Spirit: there is no res cogitans , no thing which also has the property of thinking, Spirit is nothing but the process of overcoming the natural immediacy, of the cultivation of this immediacy, of withdrawing-into-itself or “taking off” from it, of – why not? – alienating itself from it. The paradox is that there is no self that precedes Spirit’s “self-alienation”: the very process of alienation creates/generates the “self” from which Spirit is alienated and to which it then returns. Spirit’s self-alienation is the same as, fully coincides with, its alienation from its Other (nature), because it constitutes itself through “its return-to-itself” from its immersion in natural Otherness. In other words, Spirit’s return-to-itself creates the very dimension to which it returns. What this also means is that communism should no longer be conceived as the subjective (re-)appropriation of the alienated substantial content – all versions of reconciliation which take the form “the subject swallows the substance” should be rejected. So again, “reconciliation” is the full acceptance of the abyss of the de-substantialized process as the only actuality that exists: the subject has no substantial actuality, it comes second, it emerges only through the process of separation, of overcoming its presuppositions, and these presuppositions are only a retroactive effect of the same process of their overcoming. The result is thus that there is, at both extremes of the process, a failure or a negativity inscribed into the very heart of the entity we are dealing with. If the status of the subject is thoroughly “processual”, it means that it emerges through the very failure to actualize itself. […]

And the same goes of substance: substance is not only always already lost, it only comes to be through its loss, as a secondary return-to-itself – which means that substance is always already subjectivized. In the “reconciliation” between subject and substance, both poles thus lose their firm identity. Take the case of ecology: radical emancipatory politics should aim neither at complete mastery over nature nor at a humble acceptance of the predominance of Mother-Earth. Rather, nature should be exposed in all its catastrophic contingency and indeterminacy, and human agency assumed in the total unpredictability of its consequences. »

ŽIŽEK, Slavoj, Living in the End Times, London, Verso, 2010, p. 231-232.