Then Berlin. The cold, the gray. A different kind of chapel. I walked into its veins, its cellars, its wet electric nights. Philosophy by day, skin by night — I tattooed symbols onto strangers as if I could carve meaning into flesh.
I paint. Because I don’t know how else to survive the image.
My studio is in Weißensee now. A dog, a wife, a few ghosts.
Greece calls in the winter, with olives and bones and the blinding white that forgives nothing.
This project — INFLUENCE: Objekt of Desire — is not a work.
It’s the hunger that remains when the miracle doesn’t come.
Violence After Desire
Power, Libido, and the New Anarchy
There was a time when power promised something.
It promised a future, a trajectory, a direction. One worked, accumulated, produced, and in doing so inscribed oneself into history. Desire could be deferred because it was oriented. Libido had an object: the world, transformed through labor.
That time is over.
POWER ONCE PROMISED A FUTURE
What we are witnessing now is not a crisis of authority, nor the failure of institutions in the usual sense. It is something more radical: the exhaustion of power as a meaningful structure for desire.
This is not simply political. It is libidinal.
From power to life
In the work of Giorgio Agamben, modern power is defined not by command but by its relationship to life. Sovereignty no longer rules through law alone; it governs by managing existence itself. Life becomes the ultimate political object.
Yet the contemporary moment marks a further mutation. Power no longer even governs life in a productive way. It does not shape, orient, or form it. It merely administers survival.
What remains is bare life: existence stripped of symbolic mediation, no longer embedded in work, ritual, or shared meaning. But even this concept may no longer be sufficient. We are not only reduced to bare life — we are increasingly abandoned to it.
Power does not oppress; it withdraws.
And where power withdraws, something else rushes in.
WHEN POWER STOPS FORMING LIFE, LIFE REMAINS NUDE
Three generations, three failed sublimations
The story of the last seventy years can be read as the progressive failure of libido to find a stable form.
For the post-war generation, libido was sublimated through production. Work was not merely economic but ontological. One built something — a house, a company, a future — and in doing so became someone. Desire was postponed, disciplined, but rewarded with meaning.
For the next generation, production gave way to consumption. Libido no longer created value; it selected it. Identity was assembled through taste, brands, experiences. Desire circulated endlessly, stimulated but never fulfilled. Still, the system functioned. Consumption offered pleasure, if not purpose.
PRODUCTION WAS A RITUAL OF MEANING
Then came the digital generation.
Here, even consumption collapses. Objects dissolve into images, experiences into interfaces, bodies into profiles. Desire no longer encounters resistance. It scrolls. It flickers. It never lands.
Libido, deprived of object, begins to turn inward — or outward, violently.
When desire loses the world
Desire requires mediation. It needs distance, delay, friction. Without these, it does not elevate — it implodes.
This is the point where Chuck Palahniuk becomes diagnostic rather than literary. In Fight Club, violence is not rebellion against the system. It is what remains when the system has already won by emptying everything of meaning.
The fight is not political. It is existential.
Pain becomes proof. Blood becomes language. The body becomes the last surface on which something real can still be written.
Violence is no longer a means. It is an ontology.
The collapse of symbolic power
What we are seeing today is not revolution, but dissolution.
There is no sovereign to overthrow, no ideology to contest, no future to seize. The classical coordinates of politics no longer apply because power itself has lost its symbolic density.
This produces a strange condition: anarchy without freedom.
Not anarchism as a political project, but anarchy as the absence of form. No law, but also no horizon. No command, but also no meaning.
In this vacuum, violence becomes structurally justifiable — not morally, not ideologically, but existentially. It is the only remaining act that produces immediacy, intensity, and differentiation.
To hurt or be hurt is to feel again the boundary of the self.
Pure life, pure act
Agamben speaks of form-of-life: a life that cannot be separated from the way it is lived. Our moment is defined by the opposite — life without form, existence without ritual, desire without destination.
In such a condition, violence appears not as degeneration but as coherence. It restores gravity to a weightless world. It replaces lost transcendence with immanence at its most brutal.
This is why contemporary violence is often meaningless, random, spectacular. It does not aim at change. It aims at presence.
It says: I am here. I exist. I feel.
WHEN NOTHING RESISTS, VIOLENCE BECOMES GRAVITY
No conclusion, no redemption
This is not a call to arms, nor a lament for lost order. It is a diagnosis.
The danger is not that violence is increasing. The danger is that it is becoming intelligible.
When power no longer offers forms of life, and desire no longer finds objects in the world, violence ceases to be an exception. It becomes a solution — the last remaining one.
Not because we want it.
But because nothing else is left.