The immediate feeling of self implicated in the structural processes of animal corporeity contains what Hegel explicitly characterises as a negation, establishing the individual organism as finite set against the materiality of its environmental context. Hegel writes: ‘The sentience of individuality is to the same extent immediately exclusive however, and maintains a state of tension with an inorganic nature to which it is opposed as to its external condition and material.’ This precise tension, bizarrely reminiscent of the positing active at the core of Fichte's model of radical subjectivity, between internality and externality becomes most acute in what Hegel calls the ‘practical relationship’ which reveals the animal as dirempted within itself: on the one hand, it has the feeling of externality as its negation; on the other hand, the animal, as a self-relating structure, feels itself as certain of itself in the face of the material world constituting its unambiguous negation. Hegel demarcates the organism's duplicitous feeling of negation and self-certainly under the category of lack [Gefühl des Mangels]. Lack, in the precise sense that Hegel here employs it, holds an important position in the economy of animality: it shows the animal as the concept existentially materialised in nature insofar as it is those shifting states that nevertheless manifest, maintain, and endure the contradictory tensions that establish not only the internal–external relation but also the ‘infinitude of its self-relation’, its own self-production and projection. Indeed, it is a precise expression of the ‘active deficiency’ [Thätigkeit des Mangels] of life. Animal life, in the Hegelian lexicon, is bound up with what it lacks, is, in a sense, constituted by it. Lack expresses the animal's subjectivity, its infinite self-relationality, which is to say that even in its most radical relation to an external other, it is always only in relation to itself. This reveals the significant status that Hegel's analysis assigns to configurations that do not express the stable plenum of a specific structural identity, but rather show the organism in perpetual tensional distress, ones that demarcate the perpetual transmogrification and resuscitation of the very structure under consideration by way of a dynamic interplay with otherness. Concomitant with the animal's subjective sense of lack, however, is the instinct to do away with it, to negate it.