“Living through” the Elements
Year: 2026
Type: conference-abstract
Abstract: In recent ecological thought, abstracted natural elements — air, water, earth, and fire — have increasingly been granted forms of subjectivity and agency, with some states institutionalising the convergence of posthumanist theory and Indigenous ontologies in the legal personhood of concrete natural entities. Yet these attempts at the subjectivisation of nature may reproduce the very anthropocentrism they seek to overcome. Drawing on lived encounters with elemental forces — the flooding torrent, the wind-felled tree, the solstice bonfire — and employing genealogical and phenomenological methods, this paper questions whether the subjectivisation of the elements constitutes a genuine decentering of the human or rather a discursive colonisation of the nonhuman. In dialogue with theorists such as Foucault, Haraway, and Bennett, I argue that attributing subjectivity to the elements is not a recognition of their agency but a form of Foucauldian subjectivation: a continuation of the human impulse to render the world intelligible through familiar categories of intention and relation.Instead, I propose a practice of “living through” nature, grounded in an ethics of asymmetrical coexistence — an orientation that resists the projection of relationality onto what remains fundamentally unintelligible. To live through nature is to acknowledge that nature is not other to us, nor addressable by us, but the medium through which all life — including our own — unfolds. Ontologically, it names the condition of being itself: nature is not what we encounter but what we are. Existentially, it marks our exposure to elemental processes of creation and decay, with no prospect of recognition or reciprocity. Phenomenologically, our experience of time, space, texture, and affect emerges through nature’s materiality. Spiritually, there is no separation to be overcome: to live is already to participate in the immanent fabric of the real, composed not of fixed objects but of events and processes. And epistemologically, the very act of conceiving “nature” imposes distortion — a reflexive abstraction through which humans estrange themselves from their condition of being-nature. “Living through” nature resists both anthropocentric mastery and biocentric moralisation, suggesting that the most radical humility lies not in representing or relating to the elemental world, but in enduring its opacity without mediation, while remaining attuned to its unfathomable and constitutive force.
Author: Cirila Toplak
Institution: University of Ljubljana
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7167829155