Jennifer Bartlett, Day and Night, [from an untitled series], New York, NY, 1978

The more our daily life appears standardised, stereotyped and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the more art must be injected into it in order to extract from it that little difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition, and even in order to make the two extremes resonate - namely, the habitual series of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Denis Boulze, Léa, 2021

The more that the symptoms [of depression] are seen as signs of deviance or unadapted behaviour, the more the sufferer will feel the weight of the norm, of what they are supposed to be. They become casualties of today's view of human beings as 'resources', in which a person is just a unit of energy, a packet of skills and competencies which can be bought and sold in the market-place.

Darian Leader, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia, and Depression

Leon Berkowitz
Big Bend No. II (Double Violet)
Oil on canvas, circa 1976

Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863). Study of Flowers, c. 1845 - 1850.

Our “will to meaning” is an innate inner necessity, the chronic frustration of which can result in anger, rage, despair and depression. In extreme cases, frustration of the “will to meaning”—[or] existential frustration—may engender a deep-rooted rage, that gradually turns into a...hatred of oneself, one’s world, and of the people populating it. This bitter resentment toward life—a life devoid of meaning, significance, freedom, dignity, passion and love—is intimately tied to Sigmund Freud’s idea of the “death instinct,” which drives one to destroy life.

Stephen A. Diamond, Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity