“Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.”
—F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §78.
—F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §78.
I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics, where the idea that the universe is a void but a kind of positively charged void, and then particular things appear when the balance of the void is then disturbed. I like this idea very much that the fact it’s not just nothing, things are out there, it means means something went terribly wrong, that what we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance, a cosmic catastrophe, that things exist by mistake. I’m even ready to go to the end and to claim that the only way to counteract this is to assume the mistake and go to the end, we have a name for this… it’s called Love.
- Slavoj Zizek
- Slavoj Zizek
“The statistics office on Beimler Strasse counts everything, knows everything. How many shoes I buy a year (2.3). How many books I read a year (3.2). And how many pupils graduate with straight as every year (6.347).
But there is one thing they don’t count, maybe because even bureaucratics find it painful, and that’s suicides. If you call Beimler Strasse to ask how many people between the Elbe and the Oder, between the Baltic Sea and the Ore mountains, despair drove to their death, our numbers oracle is silent. But it may just note your name for the State Security. Those grey men who ensure safety in our land, and happiness. In 1977, our country stopped counting suicides. “Self murderers”, they called them. But suicide has nothing to do with murder. It knows no bloodlust, no heated passion, it knows only death, the death of all hope.
When we stopped counting, only one country in Europe drove more people to their death: Hungary. We came next, the land of “real existing socialism”.
But there is one thing they don’t count, maybe because even bureaucratics find it painful, and that’s suicides. If you call Beimler Strasse to ask how many people between the Elbe and the Oder, between the Baltic Sea and the Ore mountains, despair drove to their death, our numbers oracle is silent. But it may just note your name for the State Security. Those grey men who ensure safety in our land, and happiness. In 1977, our country stopped counting suicides. “Self murderers”, they called them. But suicide has nothing to do with murder. It knows no bloodlust, no heated passion, it knows only death, the death of all hope.
When we stopped counting, only one country in Europe drove more people to their death: Hungary. We came next, the land of “real existing socialism”.
“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
— Ursula K. Le Guin