Humans are part of and apart from nature at the same time – it is counter productive to reject or try to escape anthro in all instances

London, Author of several Books at the Intersection of Political Philosophy and Current Events. “Beginning again at the End: A Dialectics of Extinction,” New Formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, Volume 107-108, accessed via ProQuest / spp)

One of the main problems with liberal anti-anthropocentrism is not so much that the human (unwittingly) re-emerges centre stage, but that it does so in exactly the wrong kind of way. Rather than the fiction of a chastened humanity treading lightly on the earth and achieving some kind of harmonious ‘balance’ with nature, we need to begin instead by acknowledging that human beings are in fact freaks of nature: constitutively divided speaking beings; subjects of the unconscious and the death drive; and beings who are dialectical contradictions – on the one hand, part of nature (emerging immanently out of it) and, on the other hand, standing apart from this very nature (acquiring a degree of independence and autonomy from it). This latter point is crucial and can be further developed along lines suggested by Hegel and a number of his contemporary interlocutors.

The subject that emerges from nature, and which separates itself off from nature in order to achieve a kind of self-relating independence, is, we might say, an effect of the non-identity at the heart of nature, the failure of nature to be fully natural. As Adrian Johnston remarks, nature is not some ‘placid organic evenness … undisturbed by any destabilising imbalances’; rather it is ‘perturbed from within itself’.7 The subject is thus the name of the fissure by way of which nature becomes ‘alien’ to itself;8 it is the push of natural substance to produce its own otherness; and this, at least in one respect, is what Hegel means when he says that ‘substance shows itself to be essentially subject’.9 Putting the point slightly differently and adapting a phrase from Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XI, we can say that there is something in nature more than nature itself;10 and this extra something, this exteriority which is also interior, is the human subject which nature generates out of itself.

But to think of the subject as dialectically entwined with nature, is also to think of nature as ontologically incomplete: as having a void or hole inscribed at its very centre. ‘At the level of nature,’ as Althusser writes, the human subject ‘is an absurdity, a gap in being, an “empty nothing,” a “night”’ – the final references here being to Hegel’s 1805-6 Jenaer Realphilosophe manuscript and to his famous description of human beings as ‘the night of the world’ (die Nacht der Welt).11 This empty nothing, this void of pure negativity which is the subject, operates however in a powerfully double sense: it is both the wound of nature, the rupturing of any unified identity that substance might have enjoyed with itself; and simultaneously the attempt to heal the wound by constructing a universe of meaning out of negativity itself.12 If we are to think the relation between subject and nature, then it is from this point that we need to begin: first, the subject as nature’s inner’s disturbance, its excess of negativity, that which prevents it from achieving any kind of harmonious internal ‘balance’; and second, the experience of negativity itself (including an awareness of our non-rapport with nature)13 as the very precondition for the appearance of a new kind of human universality which (potentially at least) can make possible a transformed relationship with all living things.