/lit/ - Literature

>Life thus deposes me from myself, making me seek what is ever beyond me. Such life is a permanent deficit and a tragic drive, a contradiction in terms, a living death. Being themselves, all things affirm what they are not. "Their life is suicide". Having hypostatized a "will-in-itself" at the bottom of one's qualities, Michelstaedter is unable to predicate anything of this essential will except an intrinsic nothing.

>Thus far the stipulations of Persuasion and Rhetoric may be summarized as follows: Willing is the essence of subjectivity; this willing is subjected to an alienating progression of exclusive moments; it must find its satisfaction in itself alone.

>Thus Michelstaedter makes explicit the nihilism inherent in the subjectivist tradition. Once consciousness refuses to forego its quest for a meaning that is no longer available, it is left to affirm nothing but voiceless passion. That is the point at which "man would rather will nothingness than not will at all." Suicide becomes the self's only proper act, its sole affirmation, the form of a transcendent and impossible identity.

>Having sketched an oil lamp in the process of extinction, Michelstaedter glosses it with these words in Greek: "The lamp goes out for lack of oil. I, overflowing at the brim, extinguished myself."