This photo was taken by the french philosopher Jean Baudrillard. It is a photo of ruins which possibly a war left behind. It needs a slight shift of the gaze to see in the foreground a face, a face that hurts. And in the background α female figure, and its shadow, wandering past the remnants of a wall.

Now this place begins to breathe, it begins to talk, to tell stories. Later we will hear a word from the poet Paul Celan: "Speak with the dead-ends!". Let this be the motto of the following speech.

The Economic Crisis: an Existential Crisis

In Aristophanes' comedy "Plutus" Chremylus a poor but just man consults the Delphic Oracle concerning his son, whether he ought not to be instructed in injustice and knavery whereby worldly men acquire riches. The oracle tells him that he is to follow whomsoever he first meets upon leaving the temple. This proves to be Plutus, a blind and ragged old man, whom Zeus has robbed of his eyesight, so that he may be unable to distinguish between the just and the unjust. Chremylus leads him to the Temple of Aesculapius and Plutus regains his sight. Whereupon all poor men, who are anyway the just ones, are made rich. But the gods impoverish, because nobody offers them sacrifices. So Hermes comes down to earth and asks Chremylus for employment. At this point there follows a dialog between Hermes and Chremylus' servant Cario:

Cario: What? You would leave the gods to stay here?

Hermes: One is much better off among you.

Cario: What! You would desert? Do you think that is a good thing?

Whereupon Hermes utters this word:

Where I live well, there is my country

In mount Olympus breaks out an economic crisis. The gods are in trouble. They leave their place like economic immigrants. Mount Olympus is no more their country!

Being in one's homeland, Hegel writes, is happiness, it is "like in social life, where we are well with the people and their families gathered at their ancestral place, who are happy being by themselves, not farther out, not further out ..." Homeland, Heidegger notices, is "what carries, determines us in the core of our existence and lets us blossom" . And now, Hermes: "Where I live well, there is my country." ...

The economic crisis has no home. It renders origin, morals and customs meaningless. It bans the warmth of the familiar. It frustrates any perspective. It levels natives and foreigners, mortals and immortals. It puts all creatures in the same floundering boat. People become boat people.

The economic crisis, by cutting man off from the "core of his existence", is at the same time existential crisis.

Eco-nomy: The Law of Home

The phenomenon of economy is much broader than the field of finance. Eco-nomy is the nomos, the law of ecos, that is house, the law of home. Home is not only the building we live in. We live in various houses that shelter the warmth of our familiar things: we dwell in relationships with others, a family, a homeland, we dwell in a past and a future, we dwell in the planet, we dwell in ourselves. Eco-nomy, the law of home, is a law of the human being itself.

Some articles of this law are following:

Balance. We are talking about the equality sign [=],

And to auoide the tediouse repetition of these woordes : is equalle to: I will sette as I doe often in woorke vse, a paire of paralleles, or Gemowe lines of one lengthe, thus: =====, bicause noe .2. thynges, can be moare equalle.

(Robert Recorde 1512–1558)

that is about the orientation towards self-preservation: the preservation of the self amidst an environment where it is constantly threatened. The issue at stake is homeostasis, which on the psychological level is expressed in the name of psychic organization and psychic health. On the social level the events that are of public interest and are broadcasted through the media are almost exclusively episodes that derange the balance of a community, a nation, the planet. The name "ecology" testifies the overall dominance of the economic perspective.

The imperative of balance places everything in the viewpoint of what is in ones interest, in ones benefit, what is useful and what not. Dominant criteria become the "pleasure principle", needs and their satisfaction, the division of the world in like / dislike,

the dream of nesting in the cocoon of "I like" and of clearing the world of "I dislike".

My self means "my account".

I am manager of myself. Relationships with others have the character of transaction and reciprocity. If somebody feels deceived, then there rises the need for remedy through strategies of accusation, compensation, punishment, revenge.

Knowledge is also an economical phenomenon. Through theory and models, through generalization and specification, through understanding, explanation and interpretation the apple falling from the tree and last night's dream lose their alienating touch, they are being tamed, they become domestic, familiar. They are assimilated by the cognitive being, that is they become a continuation of his house, a continuation of himself. This expansiveness of the mind, which follows the imperative to become "maitre et possesseur de la nature" (Descartes),

is, according to Hegel, a substantial trait of power.

The defence mechanisms have an economic function in the service of power. Denial,

repression, rationalization, projection etc. distort reality, each time in their particular way, they render reality more compatible, more familiar by suggesting the illusion of a nonexistent power.

The economy of power makes psychotherapy meaningful, because psychotherapy looks forward to a better organisation of the ego, its strengthening, and to a more effective dealing with the threats against its balance.

(By the way: Psychiatry and Psychology are economical disciplines. That is why they can propose solutions for a better economy of the individual, its psyche and its life. But they are not in the position to even think of an unbinding from the fixation on the economic viewpoint. They are not, as in Wittgenstein's example, a grammophone can never say: "I am just a machine.")

Phenomenology of Money

In Aristophanes' comedy Chremylus explains to naive Plutus his great power:

But of you they never tire.

If a man has thirteen talents,

he has all the greater ardour to possess sixteen;

if that wish is achieved, he will want forty

or will complain that his life is not worth living.

"Auri sacra fames"

"The accursed greed for gold", says the old pirate to himself after Vergil, as he sees the shouting between the corrupted Roman Destructivus and his partner.

Without money life is not worth living, says Chremylus. Sacra does not mean only accursed, but also sacred - sacred greed for gold.

The ancient greek word for money, "χρηματα", is etymologically close to the verb "χραω, χραομαι", which means to need, to use. The word "χρηματα" is a name for things in the view of utility. "Χρηματα" is the word for things in a world determined by eco-nomy. In this world they manifest themselves as trade names, that is as transaction articles.

Things as transaction articles are exchangeable for money. Things which money can buy, are for its owner already present as if they were in an Aladdin's lamp. Money is concentrated world. The rich one has in the lamp of his account the whole world. The world is his order and thus finally his achievement. The rich one has long hands. He has the world in his hands.

One who has been struck by the crisis is being flung in a desert. There is nothing he can reach out for.

His hands, like those of the thalidomide victims, become stumps.

Things that money buys are things for which others have laboured. Money is accordingly work time. Along the things I buy, I buy the time needed for their production, too. The time of the rich man is the addition of his own lifetime and the time of the people working for the things he buys. Here belong also automatization of household and electronic machines, modern communication and transportation. Here belongs the imperative of speed, efficiency and effectiveness. They all save the time needed for each work, and so they multiply the activities to be undertaken in a certain time span. Money is time. Money is concentrated time. The time of the rich is potentially endless. It is concentrated eternity.

The economic crisis decompresses the disposable time. It leaves its victim naked against an unbearable transience - not even transience: The impoverished does not live only symbolically less. He has the feeling that he is not living.

When Onassis courted Maria Callas, he sent her a bunch of flowers every day at her apartment in Paris. Since the day she gave in, the flowers stopped coming. Callas complained, and Onassis' answer was following: "Now you're mine. Should I send flowers to myself?" Onassis' self is no more confined within his individual. It continues over to Maria Callas. This continuity of the self to the Other constitutes the essential element of power. We can see the phenomenon of power also in the example of the workers in a japanese company.

The company diffuses into their body and in their soul. Power is not only an economic phenomenon though. But, as far as our subject is concerned, wealth secures an expanded self, a self spreading out in all directions. It renders one omnipotent.

In the economic crisis one loses most dimensions of the continuity that expanded him and promised to expand him even more. He becomes small, he shrinks, he is reduced to the limits of his epidermis.

The three elements of wealth mentioned: the world as order and achievement, as concentrated eternity, the omnipotence of the rich, have a fairy-like charm, they lull one in the delusion of immortality, they relieve him from death anxiety, which he seeks to repel before even recognizing it as such. Already Calvinism states that the accumulation of wealth is the gate to deliverance. Enrichment, being a modern figure of religion, is "death technique", a technique of denying death. And just because we are dealing with an illusion, wealth is being pursued with such an maniacal greed.

Thus the economic crisis, partial or total impoverishment, would not mean the end of the illusion but its reversal: The economic crisis would equal to sentence to mortality.

The Hell of the Same

It was one morning at the pastry-shop in my neighbourhood in Athens. The saleswoman, while preparing my order, is speaking with her colleague. They are in a happy mood and they start laughing. The saleswoman, whom I know for years, turns to me and says: "Excuse me." I, perplexed: "Excuse you because you are laughing?" She: "The customers don't like that."

Modern consumer has a devouring behaviour. He is totally fixed at what he is going to grasp, to acquire. He is heading straight towards it. The saleswoman, who will talk with her colleague, will even laugh, distracts the consumer from his fixation. She shows up in the space as an Other, who does not share the consumer's interest; she prepares his prey in a mechanical way and is interested in other things.

Modern consumption demands that nothing gets in its way, that there is no sign of altertity. In consumption, and characteristically among the rich, the mediator has to hide any human trace. He has to be blank-faced, formal, laconic. My saleswoman is expected to be accordingly. That is the way one has to behave in luxurious shops, restaurants and hotels, high quality airlines etc. That is the way top models learn to present clothing in magazines and on the catwalk. VIDEO

The consumer has maximal satisfaction when he does not encounter an Other, when he fools himself that he lives in a narcissistic desert inhabited by androids. (He does not see that the android opposite has already become his mirror image.) If Calvinism states that labour and possession of wealth open up the way to deliverance, we could say that in this life the deliverance promised by money is the deliverance from the Other.

Deliverance from the Other does not take place only in the field of economy in the narrow sense of the word. The presocratic thinker Xenophanes writes that if horses had hands and could paint, then they would represent their gods in the form of a horse. God, this absolutely transcendent being, is deprived of its otherness when he appears in the form of a human, when our prayer is an appeal for attention, care and protection. Animals are deprived of their otherness when they are regarded as rational beings who communicate like we do, just using different codes, when we attribute to them feelings like ours that are simply not expressed by words. Other people are deprived of their otherness when we believe that we know and understand them, when via empathy we believe that we can think and feel as they do.

The greek name for "objects" is "antikeimena", meaning beings-lying-opposite. By lying opposite, things reveal their alterity, they reveal their facticity. Being opposite, they manifest a resistance, and in this resistance they present themselves as facts. Their usage, the friction encountered during their usage, fixes the user at their here and now. VIDEO

Today in the so-called civilized societies, water runs by a slight movement of the hand. We have the world at our fingertips. VIDEO Things have been deprived of their being-opposite, of their resistance, of their alterity, of their facticity. They have undergone a de-factification.

Humans and objects have lost their singularity. They have been dissolved in a homogenous insubstantiality. We live, after a phrase of Jean Baudrillard, in the "hell of the same" . Its archaic figure is the story of king Midas who demanded from Dionysus in return for a favour the capacity of the "golden touch" - everything he touches would be transformed into gold. It starts like this: VIDEO And the hell, which is for us still out of sight, comes like that: VIDEO

The economic crisis cannot restore the Other. This, either man or god, either animal or plant or thing, has been lost. The visual field of the crisis is like a snow tv or a pc monitor with a damaged graphics card. Its acoustic field is like a radio with a broken antenna and now full of parasites. Its smell is that of a clogged toilet.

Déformation Existentielle

Marshall McLuhan writes that modern communication media constitute extensions of our body. He does not see that the buttons of the washing machine managing the laundry are not extensions of the hands carrying the water bucket. Its buttons inflict an atrophy of the hands, because now these are useless, save the fingers which push the buttons. The washing machine is not an extension of the hands, but a prosthesis for a cripple who does not have arms and elbows, whose image is rather that of those thalidomide children. The most characteristic figure of modern mans' body, of the paralytic man inside an armour of prostheses, is Stephen Hawking,

the english physician who suffers from an amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and has given movement, writing and speaking over to sophisticated machines. Modern man has suffered an existential atrophy and dystrophy, a déformation existentielle.

Baudrillard: "Immobile in front of his computer, Virtual Man makes love via the screen and gives lessons by means of the teleconference. He is a physical - and no doubt also a mental cripple. That is the price he pays for being operational." Modern man is a mental cripple not in the sense of a disorder diverting from normality. The very normality is pathology, when it is measured with regard to the measures of things themselves. There is namely the illusion of progress, growth and development; the delusion of conceiving of the past as a database and of the future as projected present; it is the chimera of warding off life from wearing and death, of fixation to life, activity, dynamism, productivity.

As it is often the case with folly, modern man moves around like a somnambulist. He maintains his insaness by afflicting unimaginable violence to himself, for example surrendering to the procrustean beds of school and work, living with the phantoms of past and future amidst a present which has no meaning beyond that of an intermediate station, fooling himself that his money can buy eternal youth and immortality. Somnambulism and the bubbles of the stock market or the real estate etc. go together.

I am talking about the drama of the man thinking that he is what he wants. I am talking about the obsession of "I can", "I get things done", the imperative of the vita activa. I am talking about the auto-erotic torture of self-doping.

Upon hearing this, the sleep walker will possibly answer using a word from Aristophanes' Plutus:

you won't convince me, even if you convince me

The economic crisis awakens the sleep walker with the same violence by which he stupefied himself in the times of prosperity. But it does not awaken him into a broader visibility. It awakens him into a nightmare.

Stupor

The word "crisis" is misleading and thwarts every attempt to understand what it seeks to name. That is because the greek word "κρισις" means distinction, it means a break and a tranlocation at another way of living, where things are no more the way they used to be. The present situation, in contrast to that crisis, does not bring and will not bring any catharsis, as it happened in ancient tragedy. Catharsis presupposes that one learns from suffering. Though suffering means intrusion of an Other, and learning means assimilation of the Other, whereby I become an Other myself. In the hell of the same one neither suffers a misfortune nor learns from it. This one is a simulation of crisis, a phantom crisis.

Nevertheless what is happening is far more execrable. It comes in the form of a Medusa head - that is the form of the radically Other, the radical Evil, and its view means sudden death. This radically Other does not come from a radical elsewhere, but is the most proximate; it is the shadow of the overall sameness. It is the storm one reaps, when he sows winds.

The economic crisis, if we have to keep this word with all the reservations mentioned, is an identity crisis, whereby it is the identity of modern man that drifts him toward the crisis in so far as it is pathological itself. "Pathological" not in the medical sense of the word, but as what ancient Greeks called Hybris, which means violation of measures, for example the ambition of immortality, the existential shrinking down to eco-nomy, the illusion of the extinction of the Other, the robbing of singularity and the establishment of the hell of the same, the bypass of the body and the fall into today's' existential disability.

Hybris nurtures Ate, that is a confusion, a folly, a befogging, a being struck dumb, where one looses his awareness and, in his blind and wild course, he will sooner or later perish. In Aeschylus' "Persians" we hear the chorus saying:

For Hybris, when it has matured, bears as its fruit a crop of Ate, from which it reaps an endless harvest of tears

The economic crisis is the harvest of the storm one reaps, when he sows winds. And at the end of Sophocles' "Antigone" it says:

The great words of arrogant men have to make repayment with great blows, and in old age teach wisdom.

We do not learn. The Other, who would teach us, does not exist. We do not suffer and we do not learn. The economic depression found us unprepared, it surprised us, like any form of breaking in of the radically Other, for example a terrorist attack, a kidnapping, a natural catastrophe, a cancer diagnosis.

As in the case with the head of the Medusa, the appearance of the radically Other mutes. This embarrassed stupor is not accompanied by silence. It runs through reactions as anger, fury, explosions, despair, stammering. All of them come out so false and inarticulate as the sound of an untuned piano. Such words are condemned to fail from the very beginning.

Depression

Some decades ago depression was a wild thing. The word "guilty" was like a crown of thorns nailed on the scull of the sufferer. Self-accusations were cruel and pitiless. Guilt was surrounded by a veil of magic, so that there was no clear and persuasive answer about its reason and there was no punishment which, by its serving, would neutralise it.

The Era of these depressions is mainly past. It was the time of discipline, prohibition, punishment that shaped up a society of negativity. Today the "I must" has been replaced by the "I can". It is the triumph of libertinage. There is no barrier in hypercommunication, hyperinformation, hyperconsumption, hypertransparency, and all of them belong to a pornographic stripping of everything and to what was formerly characterized as the "hell of the same". One is the manager of himself, and this leads him to hyperperformance. We are talking about a society of positivity.

The depression of today's economic crisis does not circle around guilt, because there are no prohibitions and laws and courts any more, and their remnants have a simply processual character stripped from any moral and existential dimensions. There are no more guilty and innocent beings.

The depression of the economic crisis consists in the loss of the hype of consumption, communication, activity and performance. One is no more super-man but rather sub-man. He is not an outcast but a loser. He is not a prisoner but a shadow. He does not hurt but he mutes.

The society of positivity does not tolerate any limits, and therefore it does not even want to know about the unbridgeable gap between fantasy and reality. This society of "I can", which is also society of "I want", is driven by the illusion that wishes, which belong in the realm of fantasy and dreaming, can be fulfilled and come true. But wishes are so much characteristic for the individuality of an individual as his fingerprints. The society of positivity, by investing in wish and in its fulfilment, personalizes and isolates. Some time ago there came out a german commercial stating: "One percent of all men wish more conversation with their partners. 86 percent wish a new HD television."

The curse of individuation along with the obsession with wish fulfilling recurs in the nightmares of the economic crisis. The first person plural of "What should we cut?" of today's austerity is as impossible as the "What do we want?" of the past prosperity. The potential of the fulfilment of practically any wish isolates the wealthy as much as impotence isolates the impoverished.

In the old society of negativity there was somebody in front, an Other, friend or foe. In the incident of a catastrophe the Other, just because he was opposite, was a Thou whom one could address, he was, in the poet's Paul Celan words, an "addressable Thou". So a plague in Vienna in the 17th century could bring forth a song addressing a Thou, and that was Augustin,

a beloved strolling ballad singer.AUDIO

The individual of today's economic crisis has nobody to talk to, because his narcissism does not bear the distance of an Other being opposite. And he rather has no need for it because he cannot miss something that is not there.

Maybe the most tragic in the case of the man of today's economic crisis is that he lost, he loses, he is going to lose an illusion, a chimera that gave meaning to his being. And often the most torturing is the loss of a groundless expectation which, in Pindar's words, PP "is hunting down empty air with hopes that cannot be fulfilled".

In Euripides's tragedy "Helen" beautiful Helen, contrary to the Homeric epos, never went to Troy. She says: "I did not go to Troy; that was a phantom." And the messenger: "What are you saying? We suffered for the sake of a cloud?"

Maybe the loser in the economic crisis has lost a phantom. Maybe, in the words of the poet Georgios Seferis, some time he AUDIO

"... is fated to hear

messengers coming to tell him

that so much suffering, so much life,

went into the abyss

all for an empty tunic, all for a Helen."

Unlearning the Crisis

Let's assume that tomorrow I get sick. I have high fever, shivering, myalgias, my legs are shaky, my head is bumping and my sight is dull. The only thing I want is to lie in my bed, take an aspirin and sleep. My active last day belongs to a distant past which now does not concern me at all.

Of course I could resist being sick, I could curse the sickness that happened to me, I could get stuffed with pills and try desperately to keep up with my program; that might not work perfectly and I would become ill-mooded, irritable, miserable.

In the first case I am fluid following the flowing of things. In the second case I resist what happened to me, I am stubborn against the flowing, I insist on my identity from yesterday, I am a plain No.

If the word sickness has a meaning only in its comparison to health and its differentiation from it, then in the first case I do not compare. Past and future are forgotten. I am the way I am and that's that. Accordingly I am not sick! I am sick in the second case, where my resistance is based on the comparison between my today's situation and that from yesterday. I don't forget! It is the comparison with yesterday that makes the present day in relation to yesterday appear degraded, dark, useless. In this case I am Sick - with a capital S.

The same holds not only for influenza, where it is highly probable that it will be over in a few days, but as well for an accident which could make a cripple out of me, or a disease that could be chronic, or even lethal.

There is an analogy to the man struck by the economic crisis. His life changes here, too, maybe in the way of influenza, maybe in the way of disability or chronic disease. Crisis does not exist for one following the flow of things. The crisis is Crisis, with a capital C, for one who does not live in the present day but in the past and its perspectives, longs for it and wants it back, who does not accept today's situation at all, who behaves like Xerxes who ordered his soldiers to whip the sea when his ships sank in the Hellespont.

I do not support any passive position that resigns in front of destiny. It is another thing for someone to try his best to preserve his threatened income, and another to experience this situation as a war against a deadly enemy, where he is going to win or to die, where the world is to be rescued or lost.

In this latter case, in the "mother of wars", there take place reactions like anger, fear, protest, tears, resignation. Here belongs the fairy tale about crisis as chance, which refers to some kind of Second Coming. Here belong the wise admonitions about what is to blame and what we have to change. Here belongs the psychological viewpoint on the impact of the crisis to its victims, which, in a world that has changed, nevertheless remains warded off behind the windbreak of its models, makes its diagnoses and proposes worn out therapeutic and social remedies.

The man in the former case, for whom there is no crisis, looks like a fool, like the servant of a haiku poem who sweeps the snow away from the neighbour's yard, too. Or like this one: AUDIO

Well on the way, head in a cloud,

Man of a thousand voices

Talking perfectly loud

Nobody ever hears him,

Or the sound he appears to make,

He never seems to notice,

But the fool on the hill

Sees the sun going down,

And the eyes in his head,

See the world spinning around.

Psychotherapy

Ideally the therapist would be one who follows the zen word "Enter the hell!". Or, "Get in the muddy river of the world for the sake of those drowning in there!" Or he would embrace a calling of the poet Paul Celan: "Speak with the dead ends"

Let me speak about the utopia of such a therapist who is a little foolish and somehow aloof.

Such a therapist would attain in front of the crisis an ample heart. He would host anything coming from his client. This hospitality is not a cognitive one, it is not the arrogance of the omniscient. Nor is it the fairy tale of empathy and of the "I understand". Hospitality occurs when he can voiceless say, as in the tale of the Grimm brothers "The Hare and the Hedgehog", "I am already here" and show to his client, aloud and at the proper time and in the proper words, the landscape he is wandering in - without any sentimentality, without criticizing, without any therapeutic ambition. At the fortunate moments one loses his identity amidst the other and as time passes the client may assimilate the living example of his therapist, that is, he may settle there as in a hostel, a housing, one among his several housings.

The stake would be to stop talking, for example about his suffering because of the crisis - but certainly not out of a self discipline. The crisis would stop being an existential issue for him, an issue of life and death.

In the Sahara desert there is a tribe of shepherds who belong to the people of "Hausa".