Augustina Von Nagel - The Thinker, 1997

'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

Doctor, that is kind of you

– Nothing is harmless anymore. The small joys, the expressions of life, which seemed to be exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have a moment of defiant silliness, of the cold-hearted turning of a blind eye, but immediately enter the service of their most extreme opposite. Even the tree which blooms, lies, the moment that one perceives its bloom without the shadow of horror; even the innocent “How beautiful” becomes an excuse for the ignominy of existence, which is otherwise, and there is no longer any beauty or any consolation, except in the gaze which goes straight to the horror, withstands it, and in the undiminished consciousness of negativity, holds fast to the possibility of that which is better. •Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, Theodor Adorno

The Passions

Narrow paths my passions tread: Laughter rings there, sorrow cries; Sick and sad, with half-shut eyes, Thro' the leaves the woods have shed,         My sins like yellow mongrels slink; Uncouth hyenas, my hates complain, And on the pale and listless plain Couching low, love's lion's blink.

        Maurice Maeterlinck

Video

Edvard Munch, 1885, Asta Nørregaard

Takashi Kawashima

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

Louise Bourgeois, He Disappeared into Complete Silence, 1947