ROTTING CARCASS

“[S]tandard depression is fairly spread: it’s not very acknowledged, at least not as a political and cultural problem; instead…it’s highly privatised..Depressive people don’t expect much from life. Things are getting worse and they are changing only to stay the same in a more intense form — and that’s what capitalism is. So you have this kind of sadness or depression that is basically a consequence of adjusting to such things. But the melancholia I’m describing is a completely different thing. That’s why I’m opposing it to depression: it’s a much more conscious articulation, an aestheticised process. I would actually say that if depression is taken for a granted state, as a form of adjustment to what is now taken for reality, then melancholia is the refusal — or even the inability — to adjust to it. It’s holding on to an object that should officially be lost.”

2022