





















































Nature and Pandemic


Elementa
Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology 
and Empirical Perspectives

1 
(2021) 

1-2

Pierpaolo Limone
Editorial 7

First Section

Slavoj Žižek
The Vagaries of the Superego 13

Ricardo Espinoza Lolas
Nature and Pandemic 33

Paolo Ponzio
Mask and Otherness between Recognition and Concealment: 47 
Notes on the Self and the You

Daniela Savino
“Liquid” Identity and Otherness in the Phenomenon 61 
of Religious Alienation: The Loss of Critical Thinking 
and the “Barter” of the Self in the System of Communion

Francesca R. Recchia Luciani
The Sexistential Vulnerability of Bodies in Contact 85 
in the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy

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Second Section

Martina Rossi
Universal Design for Learning and Inclusive Teaching: 103 
Future Perspectives

Marco Ceccarelli
A Historical Account on Italian Mechanism Models 115

Giusi Antonia Toto - Alessia Scarinci
Cyberfeminism: A Relationship between Cyberspace, 135 
Technology, and the Internet

Luigi Traetta - Federica Doronzo
Super-Ego after Freud: A Lesson not to Be Forgotten 153

Federica Doronzo - Gianvito Calabrese
Functioning of Declarative Memory: Intersection 163 
between Neuropsychology and Mathematics

Giuliana Nardacchione - Guendalina Peconio
Peer Tutoring and Scaffolding Principle for Inclusive Teaching 181

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Nature and Pandemic
Ricardo Espinoza Lolas
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (Chile)

doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/elem-2021-0102-espi
ricardo.espinoza@pucv.cl

Abstract

The article shows how the Covid-19 pandemic is not only a matter associated with 
nature, but it is an essential topic in order to understand humanity today, because 
at the beginning of the pandemic it was immediately shown that nature was behind 
this disaster, because it was, in a certain way, taking revenge on the humans. After 
all, the very conception of nature that we use today is a human conception, created 
from the subjectivity of the Self, that goes hand in hand with the modern creation of 
the nation-state. Nature, nation-state, etc., are creations of the Self and in this way 
nature is understood as something objective, but at the same time the human subject 
treats himself as an object. Here lies the very problem, because neither the Self nor the 
nature behave in an objective way, but both moments are made visible from a dynamic 
articulation of the movement of one in the other. This vision was part of the conception 
of the ancient Greeks and by Nietzsche and other current thinkers such as Žižek. 

Keywords: Greece; nature; Nietzsche; objective; pandemic.

Introduction: “Nature” since the pandemic

What is behind what is designated as “Nature” from the Labyrinth of 
Modernity in Europe? What is behind, in these days of quarantines and 
confinements in different regions of the planet, when you talk about a virus 
or water or climate or the countryside or the sea or the mountains? Did the 
invention of the modern European “I” need a concept of “Nature” as a 
tension moment for its own constitution? Why is “Nature” seen as some-
thing “good” (minus, obviously, the SARS CoV-2 virus), and the human as 
toxic? Why does everyone flee the cities to take refuge in “Nature”? Why be 

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able to touch our pets, such as dogs, and not our loved ones because they 
are human and infect us? Why does Capitalism today dress up and change 
from patriarchal to “matriarchal”, that is, to a “maternal” capitalism of care 
and soft loans for the good of countries, companies and humans? Why is 
“Nature” understood as feminine, as an ancient pagan goddess or, for Latin 
American Catholic believers, as the Virgin Mary, a Great Mother? Why 
this “Pachamama” fashion, which for many South Americans expresses 
“Nature”? Why is Capitalism dressed now, in a new mutation, as a maternal 
goddess who takes care of us for our good?

And if we ironically and see that there is a before Covid-19 and 
surely there will be one after that pandemic, as there has been with every 
pandemic throughout history: “Spanish” flu, cholera, bubonic plague, etc. 
we realize that we are stranded in BC-19/AD-19 or, simply put, before 
the Pandemic / after the Pandemic (aP/dP). I cannot stop thinking about 
that dialectical moment, to call it somehow, in which we are, in the types 
of “deniers” and also of “idolaters” of the virus. What is interesting is what 
they “lie or think” about Nature. And it does not matter if they are athe-
ists or believers, scientists or philosophers, rationalists or delusional, sane 
or crazy, learned or ignorant, etc.; what I see is almost always a kind of 
somewhat naive dialectic between the human and the natural. Between 
two moments of the same, but apparently not recognized as such. The 
“Nature”, by some and others, is understood as something alien to the 
human and in itself “good” and/or finished in and by itself. Said in a more 
academic and rational tone: as if the concept of “Nature” agrees with itself. 
And everything blurred, defective, hazardous, contingent, precarious, 
unfinished, or simply wrong would fall on the side of the human. It is a 
scandal that in the XXI century we continue to maintain this perspective 
and even more so in the middle of the pandemic. What I want to investi-
gate in this article are two ideas that are present around “Nature” that are 
opposed to the general vision. Simply put: 
• The human is naturally natural. The human being is a type of animal, 

among other higher primates, that formally constitutes its own nonspe-
cific “hole”. It is a hole in which the human animal feeling is structured. 
Human feeling is a very open stimulus feeling, next to that of other 
animals, and it is this openness that we call “intelligence”. Xavier Zubiri 
is very blunt and tells us that “Man is the hyper-formalized animal” 
(Zubiri, 1998, p. 29). An animal materially open to itself; that character 
of “hyper” is what lies that radical “hole” of our animality (Espinoza, 
2017). Intelligence operates in that structural opening of our animality.

• It is the natural that is itself open and unfinished. This is the bottom 
line. Nature is labyrinthine in its own design and totally open to chance. 

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Therefore, nature is never something finished, nor clear, nor different, 
nor closed, nor systemic. Nature is neither mechanical, nor organic, 
nor teleological, nor feminine, nor divine, nor mythical; or anything 
at all. Nietzsche is brilliant and was very clear as early as 1882 about 
the problem of understanding nature in this way, not even mechanistic 
scientists succeed. In section & 373 “‘Science’ as prejudice” of La gaya 
Ciencia, the philosopher is totally resounding and very current:

The same thing happens with that belief with which so many materialistic 
researchers of nature are now satisfied, the belief in a world that must have 
its equivalent and its measure in human concepts of value, the belief in a 
“world of the truth” which could be definitively accessed with our square 
and small human reason – What? Do we really want to degrade existence in 
this way to an exercise of calculus servants and to being locked in a cabinet 
for mathematicians? Above all, one should not want to strip it of its poly-
semic character: good taste demands it, my lords, the taste of respect for 
everything that goes beyond your horizon! That only an interpretation of the 
world in which you have legitimacy is legitimate, in which it can be investi-
gated and continue to work in a scientific way in your sense (– Do you really 
mean mechanistically?). A sense that admits counting, calculating, weighing, 
seeing and touching and nothing else, is rude and naive, assuming it is not a 
disease of the spirit, an idiot. (Nietzsche, 2014, pp. 887-888)

Nature is “less than nothing”, as Zizek would say following the old Greek 
materialists (like Democritus). It is precisely the recognition of that elusive 
nature of nature, of the multiplicities of meaning suggested by the processes 
involved with it (natural laws, morals, romantic dreams, passions, art, 
mathematical laws, viruses, etc.) that leads to Žižek to declare that nature 
is “less than nothing”. Hence the potentiality of an empty notion that is 
beyond good and bad, of everything ethical, aesthetic, spiritual, individual, 
social and historical; even beyond the mechanical, the calculation and the 
algorithm. And it is “beyond”, because I repeat, it is “less than nothing”. 
This is an introduction. 

1. The question about “Nature”

The old and “romantic” question “idealized” by “Nature” in times of the 
Covid-19 pandemic, with so many documentaries, films and news daily, 
all online, seems a really valid and necessary question. The nature associ-
ated with the four seasons and our childhood is remembered, as something 
unique and that it left us, that it will not return. The “romantic” ques-
tion about “Nature” goes hand in hand with a certain melancholy, namely, 

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as Freud would say, a “mourning” for what is gone (Freud, 1993). And 
this for a reason that connects us with what is most typical of 20th and 
21st century thinking; with that thought about the earth as Gaia that has 
appeared very strongly and that has its roots in German Romanticism, 
English Empiricism, Italian Renaissance, Amerindian Environmentalism, 
American and European Complexity Sciences, planetary citizen move-
ments, anti-capitalist ideology, Greenpeace, Heideggerianism, naturists, 
vegans, old eastern texts and practices, orientalized Westerners, ancient 
Greeks, ecologists, Jakob von Uexküll’s multiple disciples, ecosophers. It 
is a thought that we find in many longing radical clusters of gods who are 
lost in the Labyrinth of Modernity, in that tremendous European human 
creation that has been the “I”. And all this today is updated and returns 
with the pandemic in a more sloppy and politically correct way. The reason 
is what I see now in many places (especially in academic circles and, also, 
in communication media and, needless to say, in the squares of many parts 
of the planet where deniers are against government measures to stop the 
pandemic): the discussion about how “Nature” that is good, true and beau-
tiful, is destroyed by the abominable “man”. It is often said that “the virus 
came to put things in their place; for the pride of man will be punished by 
‘wise Natur’”. Stated ironically, it is fundamentally a patriarchal logic that 
in what is called innocently and naively “Nature” means something of its 
own that can be shaped by the human, something that is at the service of 
the human. I explain. That dual logic that separates the human into man 
and woman is a patriarchal logic, the same one that separates nature from 
man. In this patriarchal logic of the modern European self, this patriarchal 
duality acts in a reduplicative patriarchal way: the human as a man who 
abuses women, and, in turn, as an abuser of “Nature”. Man is understood 
as an abuser of “Nature”; even as a “rapist” of her (that human-man who 
has destroyed “Nature”, especially in the last 50 years and has destroyed 
her due to that phallic character of sovereign domination). 

The Catalan philosopher Laura Llevadot explains it very correctly:
In all its metaphysical polarities (essence / appearance, culture / nature, 
man / animal, life / death, logos / writing, or masculine / feminine…), the 
difference does not indicate the opposition, as the very idea of ‘sexual’ dif-
ference that is hoisted itself wanted to do. It is, on the contrary, the first 
term of the opposition the one that needs to affirm its identity to rank and 
differentiate itself from what could contaminate it and, therefore, put its 
dominance in question. (Llevadot, 2020, pp. 100-101)

Today it is necessary to overcome this metaphysical duality, which always 
brings a complex and ideological trap, because an essential differential rela-
tionship is used as an “in itself ”, as something fixed, and, furthermore, 

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one of the terms is always anchored to another. In this perspective, I listen 
to speeches all day, from environmentalists to scientists, talking about 
how the good “Nature” is deforesting, drying up, intoxicating because the 
human-man does not do what he should do, that is, “take care of it”. We 
are today more than ever immersed in the logics of care; this logic is perfect 
for the new capitalism that was born in the pandemic (the “matriarchal” 
capitalism that wants to put aside the cold patriarchal capitalism in the 
face of human anguish, fear and insecurity). Capitalism is transforming the 
concept of “Nature” to get out of the crisis:

That capitalism, not only as a “father”, but now as a “great mother” come to 
“save us” from all that pain and destruction. It is what has been seen today 
in 2020. Capitalism itself mutates into being “our Mother” who protects us, 
takes care of us and returns us to some “normality” symbolic and “created 
and invented” for the “children”. Capitalism mutates and from being a 
brutal patriarchy it becomes a generous mother who “loves” us. And so, she 
becomes more powerful (A). (Espinoza, 2021)

And if man cares for “Nature” (man as “shepherd of being” paraphrasing 
Heidegger), “Nature” will also take care of him. It is like a perfect capi-
talist economic transaction for the creation of added value, efficient and 
utilitarian: we should take care of “Nature” because she will take care of us 
all! and thus we will be able to continue generating and producing capital, 
values and successes in the midst of Capitalism. 

The “Nature” will take care of the human-man (and by default the 
human-feminine). Ultimately, she will take care of him. It is a matter of 
thinking about all the advertisements that are in the middle of the banking 
pandemic, the stock market, etc., advertisements where we are told that 
everything will change for the better because they are there to help us in 
times of crisis 1. 

What I don’t like about this circular logic is almost everything, but I 
can summarize it in a double moment. On the one hand, that “familiar” 
game that exists between “Nature” and man. This patriarchal logic of the 
heterosexual marriage of Mrs. “Nature” with Mr. Man is unacceptable and 
no longer gives more of himself. In addition, he returns to that relationship 
with the chant that she is passive and he is active. In Greek texts, like Hesiod’s 
Theogony, it is quite clear that the Earth is active-passive; a passive essential 
femininity cannot be applied to the Earth goddess: “To chaos” comes from 
the verb chaskein and lies open her mouth wide. Chaos in the initial sense 
does not imply something substantive, and less divine, but the open itself 

 1 Véase, por ejemplo, este anuncio del Banco Santander: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=4COuWi0E5P0.

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that makes it possible for the “‘Earth’ ‘to give itself ’ to Heaven” (Gigon, 
2000). Chaos is like an abstract initiality that expresses that fissure, that 
opening, that exit that starts the theogonic system itself so that the “Earth” is 
whatever it is, “gives of itself” everything. The passive “Earth” has nothing, it 
is phallic, it is active power, it gives of itself to “Heaven” itself so that it covers 
it and they can carry out sexual intercourse and this is prior to any sexual 
difference of an ontological and ideological nature (Espinoza, n.d.). 

And now, in this new modern European logic, “Nature” must be 
cared for by man, a “bad” man who brings hidden intentions of domina-
tion. This is very unserious. And, on the other hand, there is in that ideo-
logical discourse (inverted patriarchal logic) another factor that I cannot 
accept either. The idea that there are some “beautiful souls” among men 
who do know how to take care of “Nature”; and these are, in particular, 
the active and brave ecological voluntarists, accompanied by the profound 
scientists of algorithms and the profound philosophers of concepts (as in 
a science fiction film, Soderbergh’s Contagion, 2011 or Nolan’s Interstellar, 
2014). They are the ones who really know how to take care of that sick 
“Nature”; and they also know how to be able to give back to “Nature” it’s 
real and true status: it will be the great cosmic lady (divine) who “is there” 
to support us as mother-matter in our active lives (this is the serious error 
of the essentialist feminism); because we are connected to it by a certain 
“umbilical cord” (as well as in the ancient Greek myth of Anteo son of Gaia 
or the film Avatar by Cameron, 2009). 

2. Not to the “objective”
But the most wrong thing about this approach is something that some 
philosophers know very well, such as Hegel in his Phenomenology of the 
Spirit, Nietzsche in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Heidegger in Sein und Zeit, 
Zubiri in Inteligencia sentiente, Deleuze in Logique du sens, Zizek in The 
sublime object of ideology, etc.; and I refer to the typical repetitive epistemo-
logical and, therefore, ontological (and maliciously: “ideological”) tale, of 
the modern rationalist European horizon of problem analysis. 

It is a very superb horizon that never wants to step aside, that always 
comes back again and again with another face (it is like Hegel’s “bad infinity” 
or Schopenhauer’s “eternal return” which is the one Nietzsche attacks); there 
is always the “mantra” that you want to impose on everyone’s “common 
sense”; the sense most constructed by the ideology of the day that is in sover-
eign power. For it is from this horizon, absolutely modern and European, 
where nature remains as “the objective” and the human-man as “the subjec-

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tive”. And, furthermore, one hangs on the other, one as lord and the other 
as servant; and without any reconciliation, only domination and injury. The 
self not only creates the need for “Nature”, but also the structuring of the 
nation-state, and of capitalism as the very motor of the entire system of the 
self. And here also the ways in which this can be understood do not matter 
(there are several ways throughout the centuries) (Espinoza, 2018). 

The interesting thing is to highlight the very duality in which this 
type of analysis is placed from this logic: man on the one hand and 
“Nature” on the other; the subjective and the objective were born and 
there is no way to eliminate them. Everything that was possible then 
becomes necessary, as Hegel wisely sees it as early as 1830 in his Lessons on 
the Philosophy of history: “That which at first seemed only accidental and 
fortuitous, thanks to repetition becomes something real and confirmed” 
(Hegel, 1970, p. 338). (This is the text that Marx paraphrases in Louis 
Bonaparte’s The 18th Brumaire.) And so, there is no way to de-structure 
it from the system. And in this one does not see or, what is worse, does 
not want to see the obvious, that the human is by himself and nature. It 
is something that many thinkers throughout history point out, to name 
just two, apparently very different: Nietzsche and Zubiri. What would an 
unnatural human be? What happened to the Europeans with the human to 
formally “remove” it from nature, leave it without the land of it; expel him 
from paradise? A human who is not human? Zizek shows how capitalism 
works with its operation of extraction of the essential: “Our consumerism 
is organized like this: we want sex, but for sure; beer, but without alcohol; 
coffee, but without caffeine; chocolate, fat free. We want to play safely” 
(Žižek, 2015). A human himself without humus? Is it possible for a piece 
of earth, an earthling, that does not realize that its meaning is to be a sense 
of the earth? Immanence and nothing but immanence we are as humans; 
Earth humans. Deep down in this extraction of the human, capitalist 
ideology is also operating since its modern beginnings (Espinoza, 2019). 

In this game of marking “Nature” and man as two moments that are 
related, it is clear that the dominant ideology operates in which one of the 
terms is above the other; and operates as the first analogous: the man who 
has told us the ideology that we are in the image and likeness of God, but 
apparently not of an immanent god, but transcendent (what would that 
be?), is the one who cares for the earth, the one who is mandated to take 
care of it or, conversely, is the one who constantly stains it. It is like a total 
dual character, of radical bipolarity in which the human moves; almost like 
a villainous Batman character: like a Joker. Then, the human, as man with 
“Nature”, performs multiple functions: he is the one who protects it, the 
one who saves it, the one who redeems it, the one who gives it its light, its 

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meaning, its concept and its purpose. It is the one that reduces it, experi-
ences it, ritualizes it, historicizes it, narrates it, metaphorizes it, represents it, 
deconstructs it, signifies it, capitalizes it, measures it, murders it, produces 
it, cultivates it, educates it, apprehends it, it ideologizes it, the subjective 
one, it spiritualizes it, exorcises it, wants it, loves it, deifies it, expresses it, 
makes it audible, makes it visible, imagines it, remembers it, explores it, 
seduces it, outrages it, uses it, manipulates it, etc., etc. In short, the human 
as a man has become a delirious madman with the female “Nature”: he loves 
her and destroys her at the same time. “However, he moves”; that is, nature 
is not “there” in front of us, neither in a categorical way, nor in an empirical 
way, but neither in an ontological way. Nature is nothing that “is there” 
with respect to man, in any respect. And this, among other things, because 
man is not “there” for nature either, it is not what is subjective about her, 
nor is nature what is objective about him. This logic prevents us from seeing 
what nature is, supposing that it is “something”, because perhaps it is not 
even a “something”; it is “less than nothing”.

3. And if “Nature” is an immediate expression 
of the “Nation-State”

So, if nature is not opposed to human and human is not opposed to 
nature: what is nature? From the outset, you do not have to write it in 
capital letters or even in quotation marks. For now, if there is no opposi-
tion between the two terms, these terms will fall by their own weight, since 
each one depended on the other. As Nietzsche emphatically says: “We have 
eliminated the true world: what world has remained? Is it the apparent 
one?... No! By eliminating the true world, we have also eliminated the 
apparent world” (Nietzsche, 2000a, p. 52). 

Not only does “Nature” have to step aside and, as Hegel would say, 
it must “commit suicide”: “Nature’s destiny (Ziel) – it says there – is to 
kill itself (sich selbst zu töten)” 2, rather, man himself must die in order 
to be reborn, as Nietzsche says over and over again at the end of his sane 
life. If the dual metaphysics “Nature and man” ceases to be what it is, then 
why ask about “Nature”? Why not ask for the “Man”? Ah, but let’s not 
forget “this one” also fell and it is essential that it should fall; somehow you 
have to de-construct and de-sediment the modern European self, in that 
Heidegger is right, but his solution is obviously not (it is not an extreme 
environmentalism either; to live in and by “Nature”). That self is part of 

 2 Enz., § 376, Zusatz (W. 9, 538). 

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the very problem of everything that happens to us today. Better not to ask 
about either of the two, and even less about the metaphysical articulation 
“Nature-man”. So, what can we ask, reflect, criticize? It is interesting to 
note that the term “Nature” always expresses a “birth” from Latin, even 
in the device that Europeans invented, the State, to which the adjective 
“nation” is attached. The State is itself a “nation-state”, a State in which 
those who are born in it give it their identity; and, therefore, its borders 
and limits, both inward and outward. The invention of “Nature” was not 
enough, it was also necessary to invent the “Nation-State” for the “I” to 
rule as its lord (and without forgetting that the “Heaven of God” had to 
be invented, where we are going or we are not going to stop depending on 
our actions in life, and the “Unconscious”, the place par excellence where 
we are governed without our realizing it). The nation-state is one of the 
best gadgets, together with capitalism (they go hand in hand) that Euro-
peans have invented to be able to dominate sovereignly whatever it is: now 
empirical territories, now virtual territories, and unconscious territories. 
It is a logic of war and domination. The State in its “Nature” (“Nation”) 
is like a great totalitarian monster, in the style of Leviathan; it is the War 
Machine par excellence that has been invented to hegemonize the planet 
and tame it for a few. With the pandemic it has become clear that the only 
one that has won is capitalism; this is worthy of analysis for feminists, 
Lacanian psychoanalysts and critical materialist theorists (not for Honneth 
and his current Frankfurt School which always plays for European social 
democracy and therefore to keep everything the same: Gatopardism!). 
What if nature had nothing to do with a certain constitutive identity birth 
of “inside and outside”? That is, of the metaphysical logics of the patri-
archal rational European ideology built from the self. The Greeks of the 
Mysteries, of the Cult, of the Tragedy, of Heraclitus, etc. they were forging 
their words, their myths from the experience in which they were immersed, 
in the same polis. Therefore, for them, as for the Amerindians, Orientals, 
etc., it has never been about “Nature” and, consequently, not about “man” 
either. What is it about? of something as simple as the Dionysian. 

4. A nature with a small letter for human, simply human

The Greek physis so important not only for philosophers (this is another 
modern rationalist and patriarchal European deformation), but for the 
ancient Greeks, it expresses something other than nature, at least to this 
one that we have made visible in this text. Nietzsche spoke of the “Diony-
sian vision of the world” to better understand the Greeks in his masterpiece 

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Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik and Zubiri, always more 
formal, of the “horizon of movement” in Los problemas fundamentales de 
la metafísicos occidental. That Greek, which is hidden in the figure of the 
god, expresses the dance of the god; and a dance that in turn is the very 
tension of everything human, things and gods. This dance is life-death 
tension (joy-silence, birth-death), that is why the god expresses himself in 
the masks and, in the Tragedy, they are his heroes: Antigone, Hippolytus, 
Oedipus, Agamemnon, Medea, etc. (but the mask was also present in the 
cult and in different parts of the polis). 

The great thinker philologist Walter Otto in his beautiful book 
Dionysus tells us many features of the god, for example: “[…] the infernal 
roar that announces and accompanies the god reveals the phantasmagoric 
nature of him, especially because of what he suddenly leads to: a silence 
mortal” (Otto, 2000, p. 105). That tension in dance is what allows to 
configure what there is (Apollo), namely, the polis itself, without holding 
onto any transcendent plane. Without any support, everything starts to 
move dynamically and returns again and again; and the polis is recreates and 
realizes and forges a destiny. In all this we already see what is understood by 
nature and human in the Greeks. In the Dionysian, something like move-
ment is expressed, but where we do not have a motive (as something in and 
of itself ), nor a beginning or an end (as an absolute origin and end), it is 
like a movement in movement, itself, with partial starts and closings, self-
contained; as well as “waves in the sea”. Physis expressed movement with 
dynamic density within itself; with internal material tissue, never nothing, 
because on the Greek horizon there is no space for any Creatio ex nihilo, 
typical of the Semitic horizon that pierces Europe.

And that “creation” is behind modern metaphysics, its theology, its 
science, its technique, its war, its city, its capitalism, its nation-state, its 
“Nature”, deep down, behind that “I” that rises from nothing in the image 
and likeness of the Semitic God. Theological metaphysical nothingness is 
always a condition of possibility, the limit from where everything starts to 
move. On the other hand, in the Greeks, this material fabric in the move-
ment itself gives of itself the different modes of things, from the simplest 
to the most complex; they are different forms of tissue with their different 
consistency planes (Espinoza, 2020b). It is a dynamic fabric that organ-
izes itself in material densities, in precise and random material patterns. 
Behold: things, plants, animals, humans, cities, gods, to call them somehow. 
Nature is either “less than nothing” or it is simply another “Monster” of 
the Labyrinth of modernity; and it has to be “less than nothing” because it 
cannot respond to anything that has to do with nothing, that is, with the 
metaphysical-theological characteristic of medieval and modern Europe. 

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Zizek is very clear in his voluminous book dedicated to Hegel Less than 
nothing: 

Nature is not a conglomeration of dispersed phenomena, but a connected 
whole. Afterwards, this Whole is not immobile, but in a state of constant 
change and movement. Afterwards, this change is not only a quantitative 
gradual increase, but also implies qualitative jumps and breaks. Finally, this 
qualitative development is not a question of harmonious unfolding, but 
rather it is propelled by the struggle of opposites. (Zizek, 2015, p. 63)

Only from the theological metaphysical plane does the self “happen” and 
as an addition it is necessary to postulate that “Nature”, that nation-state, 
that Capitalism, that Unconscious, and so on. 

In nature as “less than nothing”, like that wise “void” of the atomists 
like Democritus, we are in a thought in which it is not shown in the verb 
“to happen”, but in the “to arise”, “to emerge”, “to be”, “dance” of things 
to each other so that the jovial sense emerges as a whole: already from 
the polis, already from the gods (and thus democracy was born in Greece 
and never in any Semitic people). Zizek is very clear and shows us that 
nothingness is a condition of possibility of modern metaphysics, but the 
emptiness of the materialists that is “less than nothing”, in its own fleeting 
materiality, already gives everything in its own materiality: “The distinc-
tion between nothing and emptiness. Nothing is localized, as when we 
say ‘there is nothing here’, while emptiness is a dimension without limits” 
(Zizek, 2015, pp. 61-62). In nature we are cast to the fate of materiality 
in its representational emptiness that does not allow itself to be trapped 
by the self in any way; in this is that richness of being “less than nothing”, 
because by being so, one is in the very fragility of life. And that fragility 
lies in nature, namely, the very nature of animality, of human animality, 
of things, and of all those things that we value. That a-signifying fragility, 
as Deleuze thinks in Thousand Plateaus, lies that nature of which we 
are parts, nothing more than that. Nature is like a simple “remainder”, 
Schelling would say, an “immediate” feature always open as Hegel would 
say, namely, the Dionysian that in its own tension and fleeting fragility 
allows us a certain always dynamic stability to create, as Nietzsche says in 
his Zarathustra: “[…] one must still have chaos within oneself to be able to 
give birth to a dancing star” (Nietzsche, 2000b, p. 39). 

Conclusion

That Greek physis gave the polis and its participatory and differential 
democracy; on the other hand, European “Nature” has given the nation-

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state and its current totalitarian capitalist democracy (because of the 
representative and liberal democracy there is also very little left). For 
the same reason, it is not minor to rethink this issue of democracy, but 
not because of the “Water Cycle” or because of the Covid-19 pandemic, 
because the matter is simpler and deep down more radical. Joseph H. 
Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate in Economics, makes an intelligent critique of 
Thomas Piketty and his famous book sold by the thousands, Le Capital 
au XXIe  siècle: “The main question we must ask ourselves today is not 
about capital in the 21st century, but on democracy in the XXI century” 
(Stiglitz, 2015, p. 147). Stiglitz is right, because it is not about discussing 
what capital will be or what it is in our century and from there giving 
multiple solutions to generate a more just, reliable and transparent society, 
but what it is about is democracy. It is necessary to rethink how we want 
to organize ourselves. It is about rethinking society politically so that 
then we can talk about how capital is distributed and produced in a more 
dignified way for all. Therefore, what I want to express in this text is that 
obviously we have a serious problem with our planet that is expressed, 
for example, in its climate change, but the solution is not to discuss the 
“Water Cycle”, but how we organize ourselves politically in order to be 
able to “dissolve capitalism”. A capitalism that ultimately we are ourselves: 
we are the capitalists of the self who are destroying the planet because 
in advance we destroy ourselves (from scientists to philosophers, from 
believers to atheists, from right to left, from rich to poor, from the from 
North to South, from wise to ignorant, from poets to politicians, from 
citizens to zombies, from men to women, from gods to demons). In that 
destruction is the basis of the current pandemic. And it is that we do 
not even know how to feed ourselves. This is well pointed out by Chris-
tian Drosten, the German Government’s scientific advisor for the whole 
pandemic issue:

Coronaviruses try to change host organism when the opportunity presents 
itself. Through our use of animals, contrary to the principles of nature, we 
create that opportunity. Farm animals are in contact with wild animals. The 
way they are stored in large groups amplifies the spread of the virus between 
them. The human being comes into intense contact with these animals, for 
example, through the consumption of meat. That represents a possible tra-
jectory of coronavirus outbreaks. 

And it is clear that we always try to do business and generate efficiency 
and high capitalization even in what we eat (Espinoza, 2020a). Hence that 
simple and fragile nature of itself to a miserable virus, which as such is 
nothing or almost nothing, and simply being almost nothing has already 
caused so much pain to millions of humans on this global capitalist planet. 

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Only with a possible dissolution of capitalism is it possible that we 
can, with the multiple knowledge and practices, open a planet together 
so that We are viable in the best way. It is that “NosOtros” (We/Others), 
which is no longer mere “us” (because that is capitalized and is based on the 
self ), which is called to re-politicize the very plane of immanence in which 
we are dynamically fabric socio-historical, visionary and virtual. 

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Covidosofía. Paidós Ibérica.
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Pandemia?. En N. Barria-Asenjo, Construcción de una nueva normalidad. 
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Espinoza, R., Fernández, J. E., & Toscano, A. (2020). Hegel hoy. Una filosofía para 
los tiempos del Otro. Herder Editorial. 

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Gigon, O. (2000). Los orígenes de la filosofía griega. Gredos. 
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(Eds.), Evadir. La filosofía piensa la revuelta de octubre, 2019. Santiago de 
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Hegel, G. (1970). Filosofía de la historia (póstuma, apuntes de lecciones recopila-
das por 1ª vez en 1837). Trad. de J. M. Quintana. Ediciones Zeus. 

Llevadot, L. (2020). Jacques Derrida. Democracia y soberanía. Gedisa.
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Ricardo Espinoza Lolas

Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 1 (2021) 1-2 
https://www.ledonline.it/elementa

46

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hundiendo_0_1021548406.html

Riassunto

L’articolo dimostra come la pandemia di Covid-19 non sia solo una questione associata 
alla natura, ma sia un tema essenziale per comprendere l’umanità oggi, perché la pan-
demia ha mostrato fin da subito come dietro questo disastro ci fosse la natura e come essa 
stessa, in un certo senso, si stesse vendicando dell’umanità. Del resto la stessa concezione 
della natura che usiamo oggi è, in fondo, una concezione creata dell’umano, dalla sog-
gettività dell’io, che va di pari passo con l’altra creazione moderna, quella dello Stato-
Nazione. La natura, lo Stato-Nazione e altri concetti simili, sono creazioni dell’io: in 
questi concetti, la natura è intesa come qualcosa di oggettivo, ma al contempo il soggetto 
umano tratta sé stesso come un oggetto. Questo è il vero problema, perché né l’io, né la 
natura si comportano in modo oggettivo ma entrambi i momenti sono resi visibili da una 
articolazione dinamica del movimento dell’uno nell’altro. Questa visione fu presente sia 
nel pensiero degli antichi greci che in quello di Nietzsche, fino a quello di altri pensatori 
contemporanei come Žižek. 

Copyright (©) 2021 Ricardo Espinoza Lolas 
Editorial format and graphical layout: copyright (©) LED Edizioni Universitarie

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to cite this paper:
Espinoza Lolas, R. (2021). Nature and pandemic. Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, 
Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives, 1(1-2), 33-46. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/
elem-2021-0102-espi

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	Elementa_1-2021-1-2_00b_Sommario.pdf
	Editorial
	Pierpaolo Limone

	First Section
	The Vagaries of the Superego
	Slavoj Žižek
	Nature and Pandemic

	Ricardo Espinoza Lolas
	Mask and Otherness
between Recognition and Concealment: Notes on the Self and the You

	Paolo Ponzio
	“Liquid” Identity and Otherness
in the Phenomenon of Religious
Alienation: The Loss of Critical
Thinking and the “Barter” of the Self in the System of Communion

	Daniela Savino
	The Sexistential Vulnerability of Bodies in Contact in the Philosophy
of Jean-Luc Nancy

	Francesca R. Recchia Luciani

	Second Section
	Universal Design for Learning
and Inclusive Teaching: Future
Perspectives
	Martina Rossi
	A Historical Account on Italian
Mechanism Models

	Marco Ceccarelli
	Cyberfeminism: A Relationship
between Cyberspace, Technology,
and the Internet

	Giusi Antonia Toto 1 - Alessia Scarinci 2
	Super-Ego after Freud: A Lesson
not to Be Forgotten

	Luigi Traetta 1 - Federica Doronzo 2
	Functioning of Declarative Memory: Intersection between Neuropsychology and Mathematics

	Federica Doronzo 1 - Gianvito Calabrese 2
	Peer Tutoring and Scaffolding
Principle for Inclusive Teaching

	Giuliana Nardacchione - Guendalina Peconio



