30 November 2016

Each living being must interact with its environment  in order to survive. For living beings,  vital contact between organism and environment  must always be maintained—in the face of all the  risks of breaking away, in a manner of “continuous  discontinuity,” so to speak. We can call this  principle of sustaining contact the “Subject” of  life in the precise etymological sense of subjectum,  which designates what lies at the base of  all living behavior. In so far as the “Subject” can  be effective only as long as the organism continues  to live, it certainly belongs to this organism,  but it by no means resides inside of it. Its place of  being is between the organism and the environment,  therefore in a certain sense outside the organism.  What we are referring to here with the term  “organism” is not limited to a single individual