The word "subsisting" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to something continuing or existing, usually with difficulty. For example, "The family subsisted on a meager income."
Most of the population is engaged in subsistence farming, but barely subsisting.
Senior politicians are constantly exhausted, subsisting on five or six hours' sleep, thrust on to a 24/7 treadmill, in and out of planes, in and out of rooms, in and out of time zones, grinding away, duchessing their preferred stenographers in the media and playing them like puppets, grabbing any open microphone they can find to self-promote and promote the agenda of the government.
It turns out that a few hundred people are subsisting in nearby San Francisco, its skyscrapers now crumbling and overgrown with ivy and looking all the better for it.
And while some Gazans are feeling the economic pinch, many others were either subsisting on handouts already or have learned to benefit from a burgeoning black economy, fuelled by a proliferation of smuggling tunnels under the border with Egypt.
Red Cross workers say many North Koreans are subsisting on a single bowl of rice or corn a day, supplemented by grass, dried leaves or roots.
Crops are withering, and on Tokelau people are subsisting on bottled water after six months of scant rainfall.
Mrs Hiyale lives hand to mouth, subsisting in a slum on 100 rupees a day with the help of a local charity.
Earlier this year he put his mouth where his money is by subsisting solely on Soylent for three months.
Because they depend on the only self-subsisting being, they are not independent beings (D 122 123, W 4.758).
Each of these horizontal lights becomes a 'Lord of Species', i.e., a luminous self-subsisting and fixed species, whose function is analogous to the Platonic Forms in so far as it 'governs' the species under it (rather than being a mere universal), such as the species of bodies that move the celestial spheres and all matters sublunar, including human souls.
This power is unique; absolute, in that no limits of time or competence can be placed upon it; and self-subsisting, in that it does not depend for its validity on the consent of the subject.
