[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

Jeux interdits, René Clément, 1952

Capitalism is obsessed with death. The unconscious fear of death is what spurs it on. The threat of death is what stirs its compulsion of accumulation and growth. This compulsion drives us towards not only ecological, but also mental catastrophe. The destructive compulsion to perform combines self-affirmation and self-destruction in one. We optimize ourselves to death. Relentless self-exploitation leads to mental collapse. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produces an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one’s own self.

— Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive