What makes Joy Division so Schopenhauerian is the disjunction between Curtis's detachment and the urgency of the music, its implacable drive standing in for the dumb insatiability of the life-Will, the Beckettian “I must go on” not experienced by the depressive as some redemptive positivity, but as the ultimate horror, the life-Will paradoxically assuming all the loathsome properties of the undead (whatever you do, you can't extinguish it, it keeps coming back). Perhaps it is this disjunction which goes to explain the strong correlation between depression and aesthetics. Identified with the dead yet still amongst the living, the melancholic cannot live, but equally cannot achieve either quiescence or quiet: they must speak about their predicament. As Leader points out, “A melancholic subject is in two places at once, two different spaces that cannot be superimposed. But how can this agony be communicated? One of the features of melancholia over the ages has been its association with artistic creation and writing. Indeed, in some periods, discussions of melancholia have emphasized the creative aspect far more than its depressive elements.”

Asylums with doors open wide Where people had paid to see inside For entertainment they watch his body twist Behind his eyes he says, “I still exist”