on nature

Nature was never an easily graspable concept. It is an art to construct nature conceptually.

“It is this horror at the unforeseen results of our own acts that causes shock and awe, not the power of nature over which we have no control; it is this horror that religion tries to domesticate. What is new today is the short-circuit between these two senses of ‘second nature’: ‘second nature’, in the sense of objective Fate, of the autonomized social process, generates ‘second nature’ in the sense of artificially created nature, of natural monsters.”

The disasters that Zizek warns about are all human-caused natural disasters and not the destructive capacity of nature itself. Furthermore while Zizek denounces an ecology of fear he also connects a view of nature in which are finitude is asserted to viewing nature as sacred and so forth. I find this connection troubling since nature as sacred allows for a separation and comfortable return to nature (in a pre-Oedipal sense) and the dominant ideological use of nature (if it is negative) is not about nature over us but nature as a problem for our future – we must save the environment for our children etc.

Zizek continues with the following:

“‘terror’ means accepting the fact of the utter groundlessness of our existence: there is no firm foundation, a place of retreat, on which one can safely count. It means fully accepting that ‘nature’ does not exist. It means fully consummating the gap that separates the life-world notion of nature and the scientific notion of natural reality: ‘nature’ qua the domain of balanced reproduction, of organic deployment into which humanity intervenes with its hubris, brutally throwing off the rails its circular motion is man’s fantasy; nature is already in itself ‘second nature’. Its balance is always secondary, an attempt to negotiate a ‘habit’ that would restore some order after catastrophic interruptions.”

[ from Naught Thought ]

zizek accused for stealing a well known, historic, related to Romanticism representation of nature.

See also zizek's idea about a Balkan constitution of Europe's subconscious. Athens have to be crystallized in a double bind, including from one point of view this hidden Balkan character and in another level an idealized past that Europe installed in this city's body. Athens is necessarily a schizophrenic European representation including in the same time an absolute idealization of its own origin and the demonization of the Greek - Balkan Other.