Suehiro Maruo

There is, however, an asymmetry here that is obfuscated by this straightforward solution: the political struggle is not one among other struggles (in a series alongside artistic, economic, religious, etc., struggles); it is the purely formal principle of antagonistic struggle as such. That is to say, there is no proper content of politics; all political struggles and decisions concern other specific spheres of social life (taxation, the regulation of sexual mores and procreation, the health service, and so on and so forth)—"politics" is merely a formal mode of dealing with these topics, Insofar as they emerge as topics of public struggle and decision.

This is why "everything is (or, rather, can become) political" —Insofar as it becomes a stake in political struggle. The "economy," on the other hand, is not just one of the spheres of political struggle, but the "cause" of the mutual contamination-expression of struggles.

To put it succinctly, Left-Right is the Master-Signifier "contaminated" by the series of other oppositions, while the economy is the objet a, the elusive object that sustains this contamination (and when that contamination is directly economic, the economy encounters Itself in its oppositional determination). Politics is thus a name for the distance of the "economy" from itself.

Its space is opened up by the gap that separates the economic as the absent Cause from the economy in its "oppositional determination," as one of the elements of the social totality: there is politics because the economy is "non-all," because the economic is an "impotent" impassive pseudo cause. The economic is thus here doubly Inscribed in the precise sense which defines the Lacanian Real: it is simultaneously the hard core expressed" in other struggles through displacements and other forms of distortion, and the very structuring principle of these distortions.

In Defense of Lost Causes S. Zizek

“Why can’t we stay closed up inside ourselves? why do we chase after expression and form, trying to deliver ourselves of our precious contents or “meanings,” desperately attempting to organize what is after all a rebellious and chaotic process? wouldn’t it be more creative simply to surrender to out inner fluidity without any intention of objectifying it, intimately and voluptuously soaking in our inner turmoil and struggle? then we would feel with much richer intensity the whole inner growth of spiritual experience. All kinds of insights would blend and flourish in a fertile effervescence. A sensation of actuality and spiritual content would be born, like the rise of a wave or a musical phrase. To be full of one’s self, not in the sense of pride, but of enrichment, to be tormented by a sense of infinity, means to live so intensely that you feel you are about to die of life.” Emil M. Cioran from On the Heights of Despair Translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston

A Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours, francis bacon, 1961 inspired by Eadweard Muybridge photos of paralytic child.

'There is not narcissism and non-narcissism. There are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended. What is called non-narcissism is in general but the economy of a much more welcoming and hospitable narcissism. One that is much more open to the experience of the Other as Other. I believe that without a movement of narcissistic reappropriation, the relation to the Other would be absolutely destroyed, it would be destroyed in advance. The relation to the Other, even if it remains asymmetrical, open, without possible reappropriation, must trace a movement of reappropriation in the image of one's self for love to be possible. Love is narcissistic.' JACQUES DERRIDA POINTS STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1995

The Cold Mountain Poems

Always it’s cold on this mountain!

Every year, and not just this.

Dense peaks, thick with snow.

Black pine-trees breathing mist.

It’s summer before the grass grows,

Not yet autumn when the leaves fall.

Full of illusions, I roam here,

Gaze and gaze, but can’t see the sky. Hanshan

Takashi Kawashima

NIETZSCHE AND THE THEORY OF THE DRIVES

“Suppose we were in the market place one day, and we noticed someone laughing at us as we went by: this event will signify this or that to us according to whether this or that drive happens at that moment to be at its height in us—and it will be a quite different event according to the kind of person we are. One person will absorb it like a drop of rain, another will shake it from him like an insect, another will try to pick a quarrel, another will examine his clothing to see if there is anything about it that might give rise to laughter, another will be led to reflect on the nature of laughter as such, another will be glad to have involuntarily augmented the amount of cheerfulness and sunshine in the world—and in each case, a drive has gratified itself, whether it be the drive to annoyance, or to combativeness or to reflection or to benevolence. This drive seized the event as its prey. Why precisely this one? Because, thirsty and hungry, it was lying in wait” Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudice of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche. 1881

_sickness unto death 2: story by Hikaru Asada art by Takahito Seguchi

Edvard Munch, 1885, Asta Nørregaard