Alexander Widner

Again and again, the subjects of Western thought are confronted with the disease of civilisation that is death, or at least the tendency towards it that is present in everyone. “Desire, expectation, don’t lose what you’ve collected,” that is the utopian moment because “anything is better than death.” So says Marie in Iss und werde, the monologue of her life as a history of subjugation. Longing for a sense of belonging and meaning through personal origin and history, for “something that appears to everyone in their childhood and where no one has ever been” (Ernst Bloch) that cannot be redeemed. “So is madness our only refuge?”