Note

Landscape with Diogenes, Nicolas Poussin, c. 1647, Oil on canvas, 160 cm x 221 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris

"According to one story, Diogenes went to the Oracle of Delphi to ask for its advice, and was told that he should deface the currency, and Diogenes, realizing that the oracle meant that he should deface the political currency rather than actual coins, traveled to Athens and made it his life's goal to deface established customs and values." The difficulty of the prophesy to Diogenes lies in the fact that the alter of the currency, refers to the change of the political currency and state currency but also to the actual face of the coin. With the current socioeconomic chaos seems that the prophecy is solved because the currency has no face anymore. Economy acts out through fiat money, let it be done money. Money counts time and only, time of exchange, time of investment. The central image on the coin doesn't exist, the superior face is gone and we don't believe in it; and if we have any memories or symptoms of belief they count nothing. We are sure now, more than any other time that capital exists in its own world, in its own time, acting out capital. Diogenes was a living example of another possible political currency but he didn't amend the face of the actual coin, the currency itself. I wonder at the current political and economic situation without thinking the "coin's" altered symbolic, material and representational state we will end up talking and acting politically although there is something more drastic to be done. In order to alter the political currency we need to think of it in connection to the changed currency. We cannot distinguish those two. If the face is already destroyed then our work is to make time, separate of the entropy of capital and political examples.