Fear, [Heidegger] argued, is different from angst, because fear is a response to a definite, identifiable threat...But angst is the response to an indefinite threat; the danger is nowhere in particular and yet everywhere [...] Angst doesn’t make me aware of a particular threat, but draws me out of my ordinary utilitarian ways of operating in the day-to-day world and makes me aware of my existential quandary: Who and what am I? 'Being- anxious,' Heidegger says, 'discloses, primordially and directly, the world as world.' It places human beings into a face-to-face crisis with their own authentic potentiality. Angst is that unsettling philosophical sense that you, and every other thing in the world, are just dust in the wind.

Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

The alienation of the spectator, which reinforces the contemplated objects that result from his own unconscious activity, works like this: The more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

Tauba Auerbach, Mudra S, 2019

[S]tandard depression is fairly spread: it’s not very acknowledged, at least not as a political and cultural problem; instead...it’s highly privatised. Depressive people don't expect much from life. Things are getting worse and they are changing only to stay the same in a more intense form — and that’s what capitalism is. So you have this kind of sadness or depression that is basically a consequence of adjusting to such things. But the melancholia I’m describing is a completely different thing. That’s why I’m opposing it to depression: it’s a much more conscious articulation, an aestheticised process. I would actually say that if depression is taken for a granted state, as a form of adjustment to what is now taken for reality, then melancholia is the refusal — or even the inability — to adjust to it. It’s holding on to an object that should officially be lost.

Mark Fisher, Hauntology, Nostalgia and Lost Futures: interviewed by Valerio Mannucci and Valerio Mattioli for Nero (2014)

Brian Eno, Another Green World, 1975, back cover detail