... a remainder that cannot ever be re-integrated into the subordinate moment of a higher level of life.
I know the meanings of the words individually but I can not understand the meaning of the sentence as a whole. Could you please explain it to me?
The fuller text:
Viruses are “any of various infectious agents, usually ultramicroscopic, that consist of nucleic acid, either RNA or DNA, within a case of protein: they infect animals, plants, and bacteria and reproduce only within living cells: viruses are considered as being non-living chemical units or sometimes as living organisms.”
This oscillation between life and death is crucial: viruses are neither alive nor dead in the usual sense of these terms, they are a kind of living dead. A virus is alive in its drive to replicate, but it is a kind of zero-level life, a biological caricature not so much of death-drive as of life at its most stupid level of repetition and multiplication.
However, viruses are not the elementary form of life out of which more complex developed; they are purely parasitic, they replicate themselves through infecting more developed organisms (when a virus infects us, humans, we simply serve as its copying machine).
It is in this coincidence of the opposites—elementary and parasitic—that resides the mystery of viruses: they are a case of what Schelling called “der nie aufhebbare Rest”: a remainder of the lowest form of life that emerges as a product of malfunctioning of higher mechanisms of multiplication and continues to haunt (infect) them, a remainder that cannot ever be re-integrated into the subordinate moment of a higher level of life.
From COVID-19 shakes the world by Slavoj Žižek