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

Kazimir Malevich, The Principle of Painting the Walls, 1920

From an existential perspective, then, we are first and foremost a verb-like being, and it is only subsequently that we may define ourselves as a noun-like thing: such as ‘an extrovert’ or ‘a therapist’. This is the meaning of the well-known Sartrean phrase: ‘Existence precedes essence’. In other words, human beings are not fixed selves, but a relationship towards their own being; or, as Kierkegaard puts it, ‘a relation that relates itself to itself’. For Heidegger, too, the essence of human existence is ‘self-interpretation’. As human beings, we are constantly making sense of ourselves and understanding who we are – even if this is not at a level of reflective self-awareness.

Mick Cooper, Existential Therapies

Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910)
Girl with a Wreath (1898)
Earthenware w/ colored glazes
Private Collection