/lit/ - Literature

>INTERVIEWER: You had a meeting with Camus?
>CIORAN: Ça c'est pas bien passé. Once. "Précis de décomposition", the first book... I'd read him and had a certain respect for him, but not particularly. For me, he was second rate, but an honest individual *stuttering* b-but ulitimately mediocre. And he read the manuscript: "Précis de décomposition". And he told me the following: "Maintenant, il faut que vous entriez dans la circulation des idées." Ohhhhh, "Fuck your mother then!" His culture was only... a schoolteacher's culture. He read a few writers. Not a trace of philosophical culture. And he tells me: "Maintenant, faire un effort par." "Comme un élève." I wanted to retaliate. It was very humiliating for me. He told me to enter the circulation of ideas, as if I was a provincial debutant. He gave a superior air. Not insolent, but "l'air supérieur". "La circulation des idées." He'd read a few great philosophers. He's giving me lessons. He had a teacher's culture. Enormously famous. His celebrity was unimaginable. Two hundred thousand copies... Unimaginable.
>INTERVIEWER: How did you retaliate?
>CIORAN: I didn't retaliate immediately. I managed to... That I was no longer considered to be a disciple...

Dark romanticist's literature or Nietzsche's philosophy look like Coleen hoover's books when compared to this Lunatic

>life is....le BAD
>lives to the ripe old age of 84

>>23175709
>When did you realize that his entire philosophy is as deep as a puddle?

>For two years I received letters from a woman who was absolutely crazy. It was more like a sort of mixture of madness and intelligence. This was about three years ago. She kept insisting that she wanted to meet me. I said I didn't want to. Well, one day, about two years ago, I was depressed. It was an afternoon, the middle of the summer. I was very depressed, feeling that I was worthless. I said, "I'd like to see someone who has a good opinion of me." Who liked me. I'd been receiving letters from this woman for more than a year, and I hadn't replied much to them. I call her up, it was six or seven in the evening, she answers the phone. I say, "Listen, I'd like to see you." She says, "Right away. I live in the suburbs, I'll take a taxi, be at your house in an hour." A very pretty voice, see. At eight o'clock, I had gotten all fixed up with a tie, I open the door, and when I open the door I explode with laughter. She was a monster! An old woman, seventy-five years old, nearly eighty, little and all twisted up, but horrible!Something unimaginable. I went "Ha!" I couldn't stop myself. I'd put on a tie.. .What could I do?Because, really, I had invited her to dinner. I thought, "I'm not going to a restaurant with
this woman."
>At midnight I decided that four hours of entertainment was enough, and I saw her to the door.
Why are writers like this?

>Men generally work too much to be themselves. Work is a curse which man has turned into pleasure. To work for work's sake, to enjoy a fruitless endeavor, to imagine that you can fulfill yourself through assiduous labor—all that is disgusting and incompre- hensible. Permanent and uninterrupted work dulls, trivializes, and depersonalizes. Work displaces man's center of interest from the subjective to the objective realm of things. In consequence, man no longer takes an interest in his own destiny but focuses on facts and things. What should be an activity of permanent trans- figuration becomes a means of exteriorization, of abandoning one's inner self. In the modern world, work signifies a purely ex- ternal activity; man no longer makes himself through it, he makes things. That each of us must have a career, must enter upon a cer- tain form of life which probably does not suit us, illustrates work's tendency to dull the spirit. Man sees work as beneficial to his being, but his fervor reveals his penchant for evil. In work, man forgets himself; yet his forgetfulness is not simple and naive, but rather akin to stupidity. Through work, man has moved from subject to object; in other words, he has become a deficient ani- mal who has betrayed his origins. Instead of living for himself— not selfishly but growing spiritually—man has become the wretched, impotent slave of external reality. Where have they all gone; ecstasy, vision, exaltation?

>>23017288
But we do

>>23006494
>A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

>A nation which no longer rapes is in its decadence; the number of rapes reveals its instincts, and its future. Find out in which war it has stopped practicing, on a large scale, this variety of crime: you will have found the first symbol of its decline; find out at what moment love has become for a nation a ceremonial, and the bed a condition of orgasm, and you will identify the beginning of its deficiencies and the end of its barbaric inheritance.

>“Everything is filled with gods,” said Thales, at the dawn of philosophy; at the other end, at this twilight we have come to, we can proclaim, not only out of a need for symmetry but even more out of respect for the evidence, that “everything is emptied of gods.”

>If I should do a resumé then I would have to say that I am the result of all my lost hours. I have no career, and I wasted enormous amounts of time. But this waste of time has been a real gain. Only the man who stays removed, who doesn't do like the others, keeps the faculty of being able to really understand things.

>It's really not modern at all of me to say this, but the antiquity has lived entirely with this idea. Today it is impossible. It's a position that no longer makes sense for people today. But, anyway, this world will perish, that there is no doubt about.

>Men generally work too much to be themselves. Work is a curse which man has turned into pleasure. To work for work's sake, to enjoy a fruitless endeavor, to imagine that you can fulfill yourself through assiduous labor—all that is disgusting and incomprehensible. Permanent and uninterrupted work dulls, trivializes, and depersonalizes. Work displaces man's center of interest from the subjective to the objective realm of things. In consequence, man no longer takes an interest in his own destiny but focuses on facts and things. What should be an activity of permanent transfiguration becomes a means of exteriorization, of abandoning one's inner self. In the modern world, work signifies a purely external activity; man no longer makes himself through it, he makes things. That each of us must have a career, must enter upon a certain form of life which probably does not suit us, illustrates work's tendency to dull the spirit. Man sees work as beneficial to his being, but his fervor reveals his penchant for evil. In work, man forgets himself; yet his forgetfulness is not simple and naive, but rather akin to stupidity. Through work, man has moved from subject to object; in other words, he has become a deficient animal who has betrayed his origins. Instead of living for himself—not selfishly but growing spiritually—man has become the wretched, impotent slave of external reality.
>As long as faith was enough for the honor and dignity of human beings, no objection could be made against any work, however strenuous, if it only did not hinder a person in his faith. However, now that everyone is supposed to develop himself into a human being, relegating human beings to machine-like work amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory worker has to make himself dead tired for twelve hours and more, he is kept from becoming a human being. All work should have the aim of satisfying the person. Therefore, he must also become a master in it, i.e., be able to create it as a totality. One who only puts on the heads, only draws the wire, etc., in a pin factory, works mechanically, like a machine; he remains a dabbler, doesn’t become a master; his work cannot satisfy him, it can only tire him out. Taken for itself, his work is nothing, has no purpose in itself is nothing complete in itself; he only works into another’s hand, and is used (exploited) by this other.

>>22931342
For me, it’s Cioran and Rimbaud.

>A nation which no longer rapes is in its decadence; the number of rapes reveals its instincts, and its future. Find out in which war it has stopped practicing, on a large scale, this variety of crime: you will have found the first symbol of its decline; find out at what moment love has become for a nation a ceremonial, and the bed a condition of orgasm, and you will identify the beginning of its deficiencies and the end of its barbaric inheritance.
Is rape really the only way we can combat the decadence of the West and prevent its total destruction?

>It was, if you like, my disillusionment with philosophy that made me turn to literature. To tell the truth, it's from that point on that I realized that Dostoyevsky was much more important than a great philosopher. And that great poetry was something extraordinary.

>>22698750
What did you think capitalism was? It’s taking abuse from people you hate in exchange for not living on the streets. In a non-capitalistic society you could have walked off or beat him to assert dominance and do a stint in a Norway-tier jail or prison.

>>22678068
Why is he so ugly bros?

>>22668483
For me, it’s Daoism.

>>22644661
>I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

>Men generally work too much to be themselves. Work is a curse which man has turned into pleasure. To work for work's sake, to enjoy a fruitless endeavor, to imagine that you can fulfill yourself through assiduous labor—all that is disgusting and incomprehensible. Permanent and uninterrupted work dulls, trivializes, and depersonalizes. Work displaces man's center of interest from the subjective to the objective realm of things. In consequence, man no longer takes an interest in his own destiny but focuses on facts and things. What should be an activity of permanent transfiguration becomes a means of exteriorization, of abandoning one's inner self. In the modern world, work signifies a purely external activity; man no longer makes himself through it, he makes things. That each of us must have a career, must enter upon a certain form of life which probably does not suit us, illustrates work's tendency to dull the spirit. Man sees work as beneficial to his being, but his fervor reveals his penchant for evil. In work, man forgets himself; yet his forgetfulness is not simple and naive, but rather akin to stupidity. Through work, man has moved from subject to object; in other words, he has become a deficient animal who has betrayed his origins. Instead of living for himself— not selfishly but growing spiritually—man has become the wretched, impotent slave of external reality. Where have they all gone; ecstasy, vision, exaltation? Where is the supreme madness or the genuine pleasure of evil? The negative pleasure one finds in work partakes of the poverty and banality of daily life, its pettiness. Why not abandon this futile work and begin anew without repeating the same wasteful mistake?

Why did he denounce fascism? This castration of his youthful political vigor really takes away from his later works, in my opinion.

>>22404879
>That they are as good poets as they are bad prose-writers is to be accounted for readily enough. Consider the literary production of any “minor” nation which has not been so childish as to make up a past for itself: the abundance of poetry is its most striking characteristic. Prose requires, for its development, a certain rigor, a differentiated social status, and a tradition: it is deliberate, constructed; poetry wells up: it is direct or else totally fabricated; the prerogative of cave men or aesthetes, it flourishes only on the near or far side of civilization, never at the center. Whereas prose demands a premeditated genius and a crystallized language, poetry is perfectly compatible with a barbarous genius and a formless language. To create a literature is to create a prose.

>>22394865
Bottom right has the most sovl.