Dazzling literary/philosophical/psychological aphorisms from a gem of the 1940s, a book that very properly won Cioran a prize from the French cultural establishment. a] Throughout the text, Cioran entertains several of the negative themes which permeate his work, in poetic language. We betray ourselves, we exhibit our heart; executioner of the unspeakable, each of us labors to destroy all the mysteries, beginning with our own.

Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. Marvelous example of a foreigner (Romanian) managing to master the intricacies of the French language. We change ideas like neckties; for every idea, every criterion comes from outside, from the configurations and accidents of time. The inexactitude of its ends makes life superior to death; one touch of precision would degrade it to the triviality of the tombs.The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst.

There are also a number of essays that have and additional, often lengthy, paragraph at the end which is contained within ( ). By what necessity does this man shut himself up in a particular world of predilections, and that man in another? When we carry germs of disappointments and a kind of thirst to see them develop, the desire that the world should undermine our hopes at each step multiplies the voluptuous verification of the disease. Eugene Thacker is the author of several books, including In the Dust of This Planet (Zero Books, 2011) and Infinite Resignation (Repeater/PenguinRandomHouse, 2018). Nihilistic in tone, the book consists of a series of philosophical reflections on various subjects, such as fanaticism, music, and progress.

It is our incapacity to weep which sustains our taste for things, which makes them exist at all: it keeps us from exhausting their savor and from turning away.

The aims of reform and of pedagogy, articulated at the expense of irreducible data, denature thought and distort its movement. No one could survive the instantaneous comprehension of universal grief, each heart being stirred only for a certain quantity of sufferings. Creator of values, man is the delirious creature par excellence victim of the belief that something exists, whereas he need merely hold his breath: everything stops; suspend his emotions: nothing stirs; suppress his whims: the world turns to ashes. Love’s one function is to help us endure those cruel and incommensurable Sunday afternoons which torment us for the rest of the week—and for eternity. For the outburst of desires, amid our knowledge which contradicts them, creates a dreadful conflict between our mind opposing the Creation and the irrational substratum which binds us to it still.

If we could understand and love the infinity of agonies which languish around us, all the lives which are hidden deaths, we should require as many hearts as there are suffering beings.

Only the poet takes responsibility for “I,” he alone speaks in his own name, he alone is entitled to do so.Okay, I bought this and another of his work due to a nihilistic Romanian author who wrote about death and satanic metal fans. At first this excess of self-concern on the part of a decrepit crone left me torn between dread and disgust; then I left the clinic before it was my turn, determined to renounce my discomforts forever. Just as the outrageous opinions of Cioran's great favorite, Diogenes (see Herakleitos and Diogenes ), may be said to have "set off a stink bomb in Plato's Academy," Cioran sets off a stink bomb in our own world of comforting lies and illusions since, one way or another, he seems determined to have all of us either shuddering in horror or screaming with laughter. What is the Fall but the pursuit of a truth and the assurance you have found it, the passion for a dogma, domicile within a dogma? This book is translated from French, yet even in English it still has memorable ideas and sentences on virtually every page.