┐ Modern Battlefields └

photo by @ Juan Manuel Serrano/Associated Press, more images here and here

miners struggle for working conditions in Asturias, Spain. It’s been going on for weeks… You can read a personal account of what’s happening here

“The total absence of limitation to the thirst for power which wants to hold everything under its thumb, even beyond all necessity, is only the expression of the absolute disappointment that the I feels when it realises that once in existence it is confined to share it with other beings and that the totality of existence is not its alone. A word from Nietzsche, ‘If there was a God, how could I endure not to be God’ [sic], constitutes the definitive formulation of this painful state. In the desire for power, man seeks to make up for the advance that the world has on him; since already he is not all, he must have all. He gets his revenge on the world by spreading his contingent self over the world, by incorporating it within himself and by representing it. For the one who is powerful is no longer only himself, such as he was in his miserable condition, but this one and that one, himself and the other, an ensemble. He is simultaneously here and there and there again. For he is, in domination, in representation, and in glory, to employ an expression from theology, omnipresent.

So he wants to be now and always. That is, he attempts to be immortalised in time, just as he worked to be glorified in space; he attempts to subsequently refute the contingency of the now to which he is abandoned. And he endeavours to set up his authentic being in the form of a permanent monument, in relation to the Memory and in the Renown of which his actual and incomplete form stands merely as the phenomenon to the Idea. His being is still only the unfaithful and temporal copy of this glorious monument. Here is the paradox: the more its glory increases, the less he ‘himself’ seems to have to do with his own monument. It has usurped his name and will reap the glory in his place even long after his death. Crushed and devastated, he is now envious of his own great name.”

excerpt from The Pathology of Freedom: An Essay on Non-Identification, by Günther (Stern) Anders, translated by Katharine Wolfe