The doctoral project investigates how the capitalist relationship between spirit and nature is made experienceable in contemporary art. In art theory, such an investigation is usually reduced to the ecological question of flora and fauna, which aims to reconcile spirit and nature. Yet gender, body, race, and sexuality are also modulated as nature through this relationship. Nature is thus not only a precondition but also a determination of the capitalist spirit itself, from which this historical relationship to nature emerges. What does not serve the reproduction of the capitalist spirit is excluded from this determination as counter-natural; the modulations of the relationship to nature thus constitute corresponding exclusions of abject nature. Drawing on Georges Bataille's theory of art, the investigation is therefore based on works of contemporary art that, by the respective turning of abject natures against the very spirit that excludes them, render the fundamental irreconcilability of the capitalist relationship between spirit and nature experienceable. Indexing such inversions of abject nature in contemporary art and bringing them together in an overarching theory is the aim of this dissertation.

• Prof. Dr. Juliane Rebentisch
• Prof. Dr. Christoph Menke