I missed that. Well put!
What Ascolo’s position might be is that suffering is the most direct way the being has, to consciously relate to his being.
This is the essential question, it seems. Does need presuppose that which needs? Surely psychological need, biological need presupposes the psyche, the biology. But what they are these? In and of themselves, non-living matter, elements and chemicals and molecular relations of energy. Do these ‘need’? We can speak of their state of aquisition, that they react in the presence of certain things as if they need them. But this is just basic natural law of electromagnetism, or whatever the case may be. Surely we need not ascribe a will or a primal ‘being’ to these non-living energies.
It seems that need might only relate to living beings which are capable of suffering from a lack. Being that this lack is the foundation for all striving-behavior, all growth and overcoming, all happiness and satiation and pleasure, then suffering (need) is the basic value, the basis of all living behavior is the avoidance or overcoming of suffering. But does the fact that this system presupposes the living organism itself mean anything? I dont know. At the point where the “living thing”, the organism ends and becomes only arrangement of non-living matter, it would seem the the concept of need stops here as well – and yet we can see that this concept of need would extend right up to this point, and cease at the exact same moment. So there might be no overlap where we could say that the need itself presupposes its opposite, in a prior fashion. I would imagine that values per se only apply to living things, but as for what Ascolo might say, I dont really know. Yet if this is the case, that values only apply meaningfully to living entities, then the idea that need presupposes the needer, value presupposes the valuer, might not amount to a genuine criticism of Ascolo’s ideas. It is too bad he cannot answer this question for himself.
Suffering and repression suck, so why go there… having said that, I’ve been dabbling in narcissism and asceticism this past year gone and it felt kinda good - I think I’ll stop before I get to self-flagellation though 
Perhaps the Suffering/repression are warranted as long as they are self-inflicted…
Nothing at all wrong with a healthy dose of narcissistic asceticism 
Apparently Ascolo was only banned for a week -
was - I dont know if that is still his status.
That can be be seen as untrue by observing assimilating of particles on an inorganic level. Atoms do not evolve into molecules because of need, or do they? If not, need is a derivative concept of something more fundamental, pre organic, certainly prepsychological.
Minerals evolve, as Darwin observed, in the same way as animals.
Yes, but I do not think that evolution is the sole indicator where we can draw the line between living and nonliving. All sorts of non-living things evolve, like geologic processes, social dynamics, as you say, minerals. Surely none of these are alive. The problem is to come up with a definition of “life”, which is all but impossible. My main point was that, if we assume that this definive line is drawn somewhere between say, micro-organisms and minerals, between cells and the basic elements that compose them, we can (maybe) see how “need” is applicable only to the living organisations, and not the non-living. Granted, non-living things act like they have needs, which I also pointed out, and this is highly problematic.
But all in all, I believe that Ascolo was talking about animal life, consciousnesses which are capable of suffering in the way that suffering is known in its intelligibility. Suffering/pain/lack of needs, in the sense of animals/humans which do suffer in the way that we commonly think of suffering. I think that Ascolo was speaking physiologically and psychologically about complex living organisms like men and animals, and I do not think he was trying to make a case that all life, or all of existence, “suffers” in the way that we commonly think of suffering. But I could be wrong.
Assuming his point that animal/man suffers basically, that his activities and pleasures and happinesses are all guided by this state of constant need/lack/suffering, he was saying that all human activity, psychologies and values are derived from, are reactions against suffering. That the common values and happinesses of man, his personality and psyche, are reactions against “suffering” and are illusory, that these psyche’s and values and physiologies conceal a deeper essential structure which is nothing like their surface appearance is, I believe, his point. But once again, I could be wrong.
Let me put it this way:
Not all my actions are based on suffering, or lack.
Some of them are based on overflowing.
Ponder this for a while - I say that in general -
as I move on to say that overflowing is more in line with the problematic concept of being itself - (why being rather than not being?) than any lack. If all there would be was negative existence, then lack would make sense as a basic value. In an existent universe, it doesn’t.
I refer all the way back to my response about the shadow of God to explain my conception of the ubiquity of suffering.
I wonder if I can agree with Nietzsche that there is no cumulative of suffering - I am inclined to because suffering marks so very clearly the subject who is suffering.
In that sense it can be seen as a primordial value - it is definitely a principium individuationis.
But then, as Dionysos demonstrates, suffering is only a form of rapture.
I just read something which complicates the idea of this synthesis. It also has a very direct relevance to Ascolo’s suffering concept and my idea of pleasure and pain as different forms of rapture, although I cannot see the consequences of it now but I still want to quote it, from Wiki:
Jouissance
This sexual connotation (i.e. orgasm) lacking in the English word “enjoyment”, and is therefore left untranslated in English editions of the works of Jacques Lacan.[1]. In his Seminar “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis” (1959-1960) Lacan develops his concept of the opposition of jouissance and pleasure. The pleasure principle, according to Lacan, functions as a limit to enjoyment: it is the law that commands the subject to ‘enjoy as little as possible’. At the same time the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the pleasure principle. Yet the result of transgressing the pleasure principle, according to Lacan, is not more pleasure but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this ‘painful principle’ is what Lacan calls jouissance. (Dylan Evans). Thus jouissance is suffering (Ethics).
In his Seminar “Encore” (1972-1973) Lacan states that jouissance is essentially phallic. That is, insofar as jouissance is sexual it is phallic, meaning that it does not relate to the other as such. Lacan admits, however, that there is a specifically feminine jouissance, a supplementary jouissance, which is beyond the phallus, a jouissance of the Other. This feminine jouissance is ineffable, for both women and men may experience it but know nothing about it.
In his seminar “The Other Side of Psychoanalysis” (1969-1970) Lacan introduced the concept of surplus-jouissance (French ‘plus-de-jouir’) inspired by Marx’s concept of surplus-value: objet petit a is the excess of jouissance which has no use value, and which persists for the mere sake of jouissance.
For some reason, I’m completely put off by ‘French philosophy’.
Anyway, Freud later replaced the pleasure and reality principles by (not precisely respectively) Eros and the death instinct (a.k.a. the life instinct and Thanatos, respectively). I now think the infant’s narcissistic project, which expresses itself through Eros, is already morbid:
[size=95]Parental care makes childhood a period of privileged freedom from the domination of the reality-principle, thus permitting and promoting an early blossoming, in an unreal atmosphere, of infantile sexuality and the pleasure-principle. Thus sheltered from reality by parental care, infantile sexuality—Eros or the life instinct—conceives the dream of narcissistic omnipotence in a world of love and pleasure.
[Brown, Life Against Death, chapter IX.][/size]
I now see the life instinct as a will to union, and the death instinct as a will to deny separation. Denied separation is imaginary union. However, real union, though the objective opposite of separation, would be no different for the subject. The death instinct seeks the absence of all feeling of struggle; and union would entail that absence. The only thing that can be felt is a change of distance. Union must therefore always be resisted by the will to separation (in Jungian terms, Phobos (in the sense of “hate” rather than “fear”)). But perhaps it’s rather a case of separation being resisted by the will to union (Eros). As Nietzsche says, we love our desire, not what is desired. Translated to psychoanalysis this means: we take pleasure in our will to union, not in union itself. As Jim Morrison said, when sex dies it becomes Climax. Climax is the feeling of the dying, the ebbing away, of Eros; there is no feeling of its being-dead.
I think I see what you’re getting at, though I’m put off by this kind of extensive systematization of terms I’m not familiar to begin with so it took me some time to really read it.
I found an opening into “French philosophy” in Zizek, who is a Heideggerian.
Jouissance is an interesting concept set next to what Ascolo Parodites said - I understand if you want to keep this pure in your own terms.
I’m for the idea that a certain limit of pleasure is allowed in childhood. Poets like Blake must have had repressed childhoods - not repression of suffering, but of pleasure. As such, all great pleasure becomes jouissance, hence, Satan.
“Repression of suffering”?
Haha, thanks 
Are you toying with any isms yourself, or just winging it?
Repressed memories of suffering I mean
Memories of pleasure are also repressed.
Naw I just wing it mostly. I don’t hang my hat on any ‘isms’, rather I try to sift through them in order to extract the useful psychological or philosophical pieces and elements contained within.
Here you come very close to my understanding of all motivation as the lust for Truth. Truth I have in that context elaborately explained in terms of union.
Can you elaborate here, what is your concept of truth in terms of union?
What’s your definition of ‘Truth’, then, in terms of union?
Funny how I just asked that very question.
First of all, truth is transient.
It is a state reached through/in union of wills/forces which up until the union had been conflicting and as such the cause of a particular consciousness. In the resolution of this conflict, and hence, of this consciousness, an entirely different kind of consciousness arises - a limited duration in which subjective existence appears as self-explanatory, which is to say as much as that it appears to be objective, in line with all there is (appears to be).
The reason for this state of mind, the cause of it in physical terms, is explained by William Blake when he says that ‘reason is the circumference of energy’. As we’ve seen before, above, everywhere I’ve written and been understood, reason is duality. In such a union of forces, in such a temporary resolution of duality, in effect, in such a fusion of quanta of power, as with all fusions, a great deal of energy is released. As a consequence, the circumference of this energy, the reason of the consciousness that belongs to the energy (the subject), breaks apart, and is temporarily supplanted in its function of ego by the entire mass of energy itself. The ‘Self’, for a short duration, takes over the function of the ego, for as long as it takes the rational functions of the subject to enclose the new constitution of energy. In other words, to impose, to refer to another discourse, a new symbolic order on the Real. This short duration is my definition of truth.
Please note that I am not talking about a simple libidinal release of energy here, I am referring to all integration of wills within the subject. So also about concepts which have appeared irreconcilable and in a flash of brilliance merge into a new, superior concept. Dwelling on the emergence of an integrated conception is such non-dual state of mind. I’m sure we all know this state. I expect you’ll concur that it lasts until it has been formulated, circumscribed, encapsulated into terms. Then ‘the magic wears off’ (quite literally, as this fusion is the center of occult practice) and we need to pursue a new integration, a new moment of truth.
Ehm, yes, I first meant to ask something else, but it then became the same question as yours, and I did not realise it.