saturnia tellus

“psychic maladies such as depression and burnout define our times. In contemporary American self-help literature, the magic word is healing. The term refers to self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance. Yet perpetual self-optimization, which coincides point-for-point with the optimization of the system, is proving destructive. It is leading to mental collapse. Self-optimization, it turns out, amounts to total self-exploitation…the only pain that is tolerated is pain that can be exploited for the purposes of optimization. But the violence of positivity is just as destructive as the violence of negativity. Neoliberal psychopolitics, with the consciousness industry it promotes, is destroying the human soul, which is anything but a machine of positivity (Positivmaschine). The neoliberal subject is running aground on the imperative of self optimization, that is, on the compulsion always to achieve more and more. Healing, it turns out, means killing.”

What language are you fluent in?

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”

“In the end, film is a form of recording. If we give it up, our memory of gaze upon human beings will cease to exist. If we remove our gaze, we will end up with an era where people no longer see one another. Therefore, we shouldn’t give up making films. ‘When I see you, you already exist in me.’ That’s what Plato said”