We started watching True Detective Season 1. I heard that the first season was phenomenal but the later seasons were underwhelming, so we’re treating it as a miniseries. The show definitely hooked us from the first episode. With three episodes left in the season, I’m already feeling blue about its ending. I want more Nietzschean Rust in my life.

I finally went to the gym after a month-long hiatus. I’d missed lifting weights a lot.

Also, I don’t know why, but Instagram is bombarding me with kettlebell content. Either it’s a new craze in the fitness infosphere or I’m late to the party, but anyway, I gotta say I’m influenced. I looked around my gym for a kettlebell but couldn’t find one.I’m wondering whether to just buy one and drop my gym membership completely.

Reader, if you have any thoughts on this, please write to me!

I met with Derek Sivers in İstanbul and we had a lovely chat. He is one of those people with whom you don’t need to scrutinize what you’re about to say; you can just talk. These kinds of people are my favorite because with them you can witness yourself saying wonderful, novel things. I would love to be this kind of person for others, someone people can witness themselves with on their own terms.

We watched a play by one of our comrades. The play was based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart, in which a man is pushed to commit murder by an old man’s vulture-like pale blue eye. The narrator, the alleged murderer, is unreliable, so you never really know whether he actually committed the crime or is just describing his fantasy of killing his own father.

This week I took the new turntable for a spin and started working on a small sculpture in plastilina. It’s great to be able to work on something without the need to commute an hour to the studio.

I decided to sculpt a reclining female nude, a homage to a Lovis Corinth painting that I saw in the Kunsthalle Bremen. I spent hours working on the armature and then the gesture.

The armature is the hardest thing for me in my sculpting practice. I find it almost impossible to get it right. The smallest mistake in it has enormous consequences for the proportions, and everything looks off. I’m at a very frustrating point: my eye is developed enough to notice the mistakes, but my knowledge of the craft is not enough to fix them.

I’ll be in New York between October 29 and November 7. Do you want to meet me (and my wife) for a coffee? Do you know anyone whom I should meet there? Do you know somewhere I should visit?

Write to me.

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The machinery of life, thankfully, is interesting. Busy, busy, busy.

I spent ~12 hours in the studio working on my next sculpture. I initially thought that this would be my simplest one to date, but it’s not. I still can’t make the hand look right. After 12 hours I’m almost at the same point where I started, if not further behind. This is frustrating.

On the bright side, I now have the turntable at home, so I’ll be able to practice more.

I’m happy with my accomplishments in art this year. I entered 2026 with a desire to sculpt and I now have a regular practice of sculpting. With 3 months still left in the year, I feel like I’ve reached my goals. For next year, in parallel to sculpting, I want to improve my drawing skills. I’ve already started practicing simple line drawing to improve my accuracy and dexterity. If I persist in practicing it till next year, I think I’ll elevate my skills even further in 2027.

We finished watching the Haunting of Hill House. Honestly, I was expecting a scarier show but, as usual, it was not. Nevertheless, the story was so good. I felt connected to all the characters (except Steve!) and many episodes left me with a profound feeling of melancholy (in a good way). I have absolutely zero regrets about investing time into this show.

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While we are on the lowlands, here’s the soundtrack of this week’s update:

For the last two weeks, I’ve only posted photologs as updates. I’ll cover minor happenings in this week’s update, so there’ll be some small fragments.

What have I been watching and reading lately?

• A friend recommended Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh (Cadáver Exquisito) to me. It was a short book, so I finished it in two sittings. However short it is, it’s not something easily digestible. It might be the most harrowing thing I’ve ever read. It tells a story where all animals in the world are exterminated after the discovery of a deadly virus and humanity decides to breed human beings as a source of protein. If you want to be disgusted by everything, this is the book.
• I’ve finished reading Todd McGowan’s Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn’t Try to Find Ourselves and published a short review.
• We finished watching Archive 81. It was probably the best ghost story I’ve ever seen. Even though the ending was a bit awkward, it captivated my attention throughout all 8 episodes. At first I was thinking this was a hauntological story where the spectre-of-what-never-was haunts the present, but then the haunting materialized and became bidirectional. If you’re looking for a miniseries, I strongly recommend Archive 81.
• We watched two movies: The Roses (2025) and Persona (1967). The Roses was meh but enjoyable if you want to watch a chill movie (but beware, it’s not a feel-good movie). Persona was very interesting. This is the first time I’ve watched Ingmar Bergman, and now I want to watch all his works.
• After the spectacular season 4 of Traitors US, we watched season 3. It was much more chaotic and from time to time frustrating to the point where watching was unbearable, but nevertheless we enjoyed it. My only problem with Traitors is that it’s so addictive it’s never a casual watch.
• Finally, we started watching the miniseries The Haunting of Hill House.

Writing this feels a little cringe, but lately I feel accepted, appreciated and loved.

After a slow summer season, there’s a rejuvenated energy in our political organization. Now, I have many more responsibilities than before. I wish myself luck.

Next week I’ll have my own turntable at home for making sculptures. I’m really excited about it because I’ll be able to sculpt at home and work on something whenever I feel like it. I’m planning to make a female figure wearing a long dress, twirling, with the dress flying around her. I want to capture the movement of her body and the dress. If I can make it as I imagined, I want to cast it in bronze.

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Recently, I read his 2024 book “Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn’t Try to Find Ourselves”. This is a short review of the book.

Alienation is perceived as a negative thing by most. It means being separated from our essence. It’s what prevents us from living our lives in full and on our own terms. Its source is capitalism, which structures our lives around the circulation of commodities, or modernity, which uproots everything and displaces the human being. Emancipation means being free from alienation.

This view is what McGowan rejects in his book. Following the tradition of German Idealism, McGowan sees alienation as neither negative nor positive. It’s simply the basis of our subjectivity. This notion of alienation started with Kant—even though Kant never used the term alienation in his works. For Kant, the subject “refers to the entity that relates negatively to itself, one that is never just what it is.”¹ Hegel builds on top of Kant’s subject and views alienation as the condition of any self-awareness.

Identity consists of the various social positions that one occupies: job, familial status, religious affiliation, political preference, ethnicity, and so on. No matter how much I see myself as any or all of these identities, I am never fully identical with them. This failure is subjectivity.²

Thus, McGowan views alienation not as a modern phenomenon but as a constitutive part of the human condition. We become who we are through alienation. As Slavoj Žižek says, “there is no actual life external to alienation which serves as its positive foundation.”³

What McGowan warns against is not alienation but attempting to run away from it. Throughout the book, he repeats that any political project that promises an unalienated life to people is doomed to become oppressive. He criticizes both fascism and communism from the same standpoint. For him, discriminatory politics is also rooted in the rejection of alienation. Immigrant, woman, queer, Jew… These are all treated as stable identities.

Marx’s notion of alienation is also rejected. Marx blames capitalism for alienating the worker by reducing them to a commodity in the labor market and separating them from the fruits of their labor. For Marx, this alienation will be removed in a communist society. McGowan says Marx’s notion of alienation is a remnant of Feuerbach’s humanism in the early Marx, who believes there’s a human essence deep down in everyone.

Lastly, the liberal emphasis on community is described as an escape from alienation. Community, McGowan says, is an act of exclusion. Through exclusion, it offers a sense of belonging and a stable identity. For McGowan, the emphasis should be on the notion of the public rather than community. The public is the open space that belongs to no one and therefore belongs to everyone. No one can be fully integrated into the public since there’s always an other whose alterity threatens us.

McGowan’s notion of the public and of embracing alienation reminded me of a wonderful speech given by Ferda Keskin on “Neoliberalism and the transformation of public space”. In his closing thoughts, Keskin says something very similar to McGowan: “We need to stand on the threshold of our identities.” For Keskin, emancipation requires us to drop terms like “individual” and “society” and replace them with “singular” and “communality”. He emphasizes the importance of “borders”, since it’s the border between us that creates “the other”, and without the other, there cannot be a public space. We need to forget utopian ideas like removing or transcending borders—which, according to Keskin, is an absurd attempt that has plagued Western philosophy since Plato. Instead, we need to embrace the borders and be able to stand on the threshold of our identities—thus accepting we can never be at the center—so we can create a communality of singulars in the public space.

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So, why do I continue psychoanalysis? That’s the wrong question; better to ask: what is the function of psychoanalysis for me today? The answer is simple. My analyst is someone whom I can talk to.

Don’t get me wrong, I have people around me who listen to me willingly. First and foremost my wife is always there for me. She’s all-accepting all the time. However, she’s an individual who has her own feelings. I can’t simply dump my internal state upon her without a filter. What I say is going to affect her. My feelings for another, even if transient and not acted on, would have a permanent effect on her and our relationship. Which means there’s always a fraction of things that I can’t really talk about with her.

There are friends with whom I can express my sexuality without any hindrance. With some I can be dumb and vulnerable and with others I can recklessly abuse drugs. With others still I can talk about my politics and the desire to literally cook billionaires in city squares and eat their flesh. I contain multitudes and each of them has someone to share it with. But the problem is that I usually need to be careful not to let one aspect bleed into another. I can’t say everything everywhere. These people are not fleeting passengers, they have a place in my life and their perception of me needs to be tended in one way or another.

This is the beauty of psychoanalysis. My analyst, although an important figure in my life, is basically a void. The analysis is the time and space where I can jump from one aspect to another and let the multitudes I contain express themselves freely. I can’t describe how freeing this is. Yet I don’t usually look forward to going into sessions since they make me feel dirty because of the things I express there. Still, from time to time I find myself excited for the opportunity to say something to another person, knowing that whatever I say will end up in /dev/null.

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“Fuck, I’ll be biased against them because of… y’know, the genocide.”

I repeated internally: we must separate regular Israelis from the racist and genocidal Israeli government. I’m sure there are a lot of people in Israel who are genuinely against the repression and slaughter of Palestinians.

We started talking about shawarma and döner kebab. I learned that they use tahini as a sauce for döner, which intrigued me a lot. I also realized they can’t imagine döner without sauce, which means they have shitty döner, lol.

We were just three guys arguing about sauce. We finished our cigarettes and were about to go our separate ways. One of them stopped and said to me with a smirk on his face:

“Y’know, shalom means both hello and peace. So every time we greet each other, we also wish peace.”

Motherfucker…

Since I was there for work, I couldn’t afford a political conflict—especially about Israel. But I couldn’t believe he had the audacity to say such a thing. I wonder how he would feel if he heard a German in the 1940s saying something like this while thousands of Jews were being slaughtered every minute. I doubt he would be smirking like that.

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It’s impossible to do justice to the amazing texture of Modersohn-Becker’s last painting with a 2D photograph. It has layers of paint so thick that it looks like crochet. Thankfully, Rachel shared a few close-up pics on her Instagram page.

The moment I got interested in art was when I saw Monet’s painting that started Impressionism. The traces of sunlight reflecting on the small waves of the sea fascinated me. The blue light in Heinrich Jakob Fried’s painting had the same effect, I could spend a long time looking at it.

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I saw this right after I arrived in the city. Before anything, its scale made me stop. At first I thought it was a futuristic scene. Then I realized that it was concretely bureaucratic.

This was sculpted by Manfred Lohrengel in 1973 on the wall of the district court. Its name is Im Fadenkreuz der Justiz (“In the Crosshairs of Justice”). Before reading the Wikipedia page—which is only available in German—I figured it was depicting some kind of hearing.

What’s going on at the bottom? The woman at the center is the most prominent. She looks captured and broken. Is she the accused or the victim? Her appearance is so out of joint. A naked body and an almost erotic posture.

In the upper right, just past her shoulder, you’ll notice an angry man shouting at her. Who is he? The offender? The prosecutor?

With all these questions running through my mind, I encountered another gory body buried in a wall: Bernd Altenstein’s Das Ende.

The graffito on the upper corner says “wouldn’t have happened with glasses on.” At first I thought that was part of the sculpture, but Wikipedia—again, only available in German—says it appeared after the piece was erected there in 1978. It’s funny because at first glance the sculpture looks like someone ran into a wall. However, the body looks like it was hurled into a wall. There’s movement, as if the man is fighting the wall to get inside. As if something on the other side were pushing him away. This is the end for him, but he’s not going down without a fight.

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