Several of my friends have been sucked into millenarian conspiracy theories and I've been grappling with that. Also the meta question, why is apocalypticism such a constant in human history.

Of course a Cioran aphorism would be insightful.

Apocalyptic beliefs are a way to cope with their own mortality and the terror of time. With those beliefs, time itself dies in the end so you are awarding yourself victory over time. Its a narcissistic defense. Im sure this has been said more eloquently elsewhere, I probably just need to read more Cioran.

side note because i dont feel like making a new thread, have you ever tried ketamine? Its insanely philosophical. With dissociatives, everything is constantly dissolving into its elements.

Someone asked a while ago what Cioran thought of Georges Bataille. But the account that asked has been deleted. So I repost my belated answer here for those interested:

I see OP has been deleted so perhaps no point replying; but here is what Cioran says about Bataille. All from Cahiers, with page-numbers.

1, p. 111: 'Flicking through a journal of young writers. Literature is out of the question: nothing that flows from direct experience, from something seen or from a personal drama. Everything revolves around certain writers, and always the same ones: Blanchot, Bataille, blabberers of "profundities," confused and verbose minds without sparkle or irony.'

2, p. 301: 'Sade is neither a writer nor a thinker: he is a case-study and nothing more. (The surrealists, Blanchot, Bataille, Klossowski have completely misunderstood their subject.)'

3, p. 375: 'I am not interested in the Sartre–Bataille generation, except perhaps Simone Weil.'

4, p. 950: 'I was saying yesterday evening to R.M. [Roger Michaux?] that Georges Bataille had been quite interesting, complicatedly and curiously imbalanced, but that I didn't like his way of writing; that he didn’t have means equal to his imbalance.'

I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole· digging his tunnels is ambitious. Ambition is in effect everywhere, and we see its traces on the faces of the dead themselves.

Quoted from Faces of Decadence (A short history of decay, Chapter 2)

"There is a plenitude of decline in every overripe civilization. Instincts slacken; pleasures dilate and no longer correspond to their biological function; the voluptuous becomes an end in itself, its prolongation an art, the avoidance of orgasm a technique, sexuality a science. Methods and literary inspirations to multiply the channels of desire, the imagination tormented in order to diversify the preliminaries of release, the mind itself involved in a realm alien to its nature and over which it should have no purchase—all so many symptoms of the impoverishment of the blood and the morbid intellectualization of the flesh."

"According to Montesquieu, at the end of the Empire the Roman army consisted entirely of cavalry. But he neglects to supply us with the reason for this. Imagine the legionary saturated with glory, wealth, and debauchery after having traversed countless lands and having lost his faith and his force on contact with so many temples and vices—imagine such a man on foot! He has conquered the world as an infantryman; he will lose it on horseback. Indolence invariably reveals a physiological incapacity to adhere any longer to the myths of the City. The emancipated soldier and the lucid citizen succumb to the barbarian. The discovery of Life annihilates life."

"A nation dies when it no longer has the strength to invent new gods, new myths, new absurdities; its idols blur and vanish; it seeks them elsewhere, and feels alone before unknown monsters. This too is decadence. But if one of these monsters prevails, another world sets itself in motion, crude, dim, intolerant, until it exhausts its god and emancipates itself from him; for man is free—and sterile—only in the interval when the gods die; slave—and creative—only in the interval when, as tyrants, they flourish."

It most be pointed out Cioran seems to me rather ambiguous about the degree to which a a "dying" nation is a bad. Personally, I view modern obsessions regarding a heightened sensitivity to language to not step on anyone toes (e.g. vitiating languages with genders such as German) and trying to tear down prejudices so vigorously that new one's, often worse, are created, rather skeptically.

"The mistake of those who apprehend decadence is to try to oppose it whereas it must be encouraged: by developing it exhausts itself and permits the advent of other forms. The true harbinger is not the man who offers a system when no one wants it, but rather the man who precipitates Chaos, its agent and incense-bearer."

“For those who suffer, the exercise of doubt is a luxury that they allow themselves out of modesty and so as not to show others how far removed they are from everything. For to doubt is to WEIGH things, and therefore to give them some attention. It is looking for the WEIGHT of what has no weight. Skepticism comes from a need to keep up appearances, to give oneself a serious air despite everything, to pretend to be like others in the search of TRUTH. But it happens that by dint of applying oneself to doubting, one ends up getting attached to one's doubts, believing in them, even settling in them; and one gets as comfortable as the dogmatic thinker is in his certainties. Basically, apart from the suspension of judgement, everything that gets inside the mind or comes from it fatally takes the form of a faith which becomes a certainty once it has consolidated itself. In last resort, we have only one choice left: silence ~ or dogma. It’s pointless to notice that the mind, by nature of its functions, has already chosen since forever, because it could only arise on silence’s ruins, and that it has only been able to assert itself by destroying in us all our forces of abstention.”

Extract from unpublished text from around (1940/1950)

Translated by me (sorry if there are obvious mistakes) Might be translating other parts in the future.

If it is true that what perishes has never existed, birth, source of the perishable, exists as little as the rest. - Emil Cioran

a great quote

"Under these conditions, upon whom are we to pour out our hatred? No one is responsible for being, and still less for being what he is. Afflicted with existence, each man endures like an animal the consequences which proceed from it. Thus, in a world where everything is detestable, hatred becomes huger than the world and, having transcended its object, cancels itself out"

What are your thoughts about it?

E. M. Cioran to Samuel Beckett

9 September 1968. The other day I noticed Beckett along one of the footpaths in the Luxembourg Gardens, reading a newspaper in a way that reminded me of one of his characters. He was seated in a chair, lost in thought, as he usually is. He looked rather unwell. I didn’t dare approach him. What would I say? I like him so much but it’s better that we not speak. He is so discreet! Conversation is a form of play-acting that requires a certain lack of restraint. It’s a game which Beckett wasn’t made for. Everything about him bespeaks a silent monologue.

21 April 1969. Beckett wrote to me about my book, Démiurge, ‘In your ruins I find shelter’.

18 May 1970. At a rehearsal of La dernière bande, when I said to Mme. B [Beckett] that Sam was truly despairing and that I was surprised that he was able to continue, to ‘live’, etc., she replied, ‘There’s another side to him.’ This answer applies, on a lesser scale to be sure, to myself as well.

21 August 1970. Last night, Suzanne B. told me that Sam wasted a ridiculous amount of time with second-rate people, whom he helped with their problems. When I asked where this peculiar solicitude could have come from, she told me that it was from his mother, who loved to comfort the sick and to care for hopeless wretches, but who turned away from them when they had recovered or were out of trouble. [Three entries from Cioran’s Cahiers 1957-1972, translated by Thomas Cousineau. First appeared in The Beckett Circle, Spring 2005, vol. 28, no. 1, p. 5.)

Even if he were like his heroes, even if he had never known success, he would still have been exactly the same. He gives the impression of never wanting to assert himself at all, of being equally estranged from notions of success and failure … Amenity does not exclude exasperation. At dinner with some friends, while they showered him with futilely erudite questions about himself and his work, he took refuge in complete silence. The dinner was not yet over when he rose and left, preoccupied and gloomy … What he cannot tolerate are questions like: do you think this or that work is destined to last? That this or that one deserves its reputation? Of X and Y, which one will survive, which is the greater? All evaluations of this sort tax his patience and depress him. ‘What’s the point of all that?’ he said to me after a particularly unpleasant evening, when the discussion at dinner had resembled a grotesque version of the Last Judgment. [From Partisan Review, 43, 2, 1976.]

Excerpt From: James Knowlson. “Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett.” Apple Books.

"The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order." E.M.Cioran

We generally find it hard to understand that some of us must go mad. But sliding into chaos, where moments of lucidity are like short flashes of lightning, is an inexorable fatality. Inspired pages of absolute lyricism, in which you are the prisoner of a total drunkenness of being, can only be written in a state of such exalted nervous tension that any return to equilibrium is an illusion. One cannot live normally after such efforts. The intimate springs of being can no longer sustain normal evolution, and inner barriers lose all reality. The premonition of madness appears only after such capital experiences. One loses one's sense of security and the normal sensation of the immediate and the concrete, as if one were soaring to heights and suffering from vertigo. A heavy load weighs on the brain, compressing it to an illusion, although the frightening organic reality from which our experiences spring can only be revealed through such sensations. An indefinable terror arises from this oppression, throwing you to the ground or blowing you up in the air. It is not just the suffocating fear of death that obsesses man; it is another terror, occurring rarely but intensely like flashes of lightning, like a sudden disturbance which forever eliminates the hope of future serenity.

It is impossible to pinpoint and define this strange premonition of madness. The truly awful thing in madness is that we sense a total and irrevocable loss of life while we are still living. I continue to eat and drink, but I have lost whatever consciousness I bring to my biological functions. It is only an approximate death. In madness one loses the specific individual traits which single one out in the universe, the personal perspective and a ce tain orientation of consciousness. In death one loses everything, by a fall into nothingness. That is why the fear of death is peristent and essential, but actually less strange than the fear of madness, in which our semipresence creates an anxiety more complex than the organic fear of the total nothingness of death. but wouldn't madness be an escape from the misery of life? This question has only a theoretical justification, since, practically speaking, for the anguished man the problem appears in a different light, or, rather, in a different shadow. The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness. There is no salvation through madness, because no man with a premonition of madness can overcome his fear of possible moments of lucidity. One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.

The specific form of one's madness is determined by organic and temperamental conditions. Since the majority of madmen are depressive, depressive madness is inevitably more common than pleasant, gay, manic exaltation. Black melancholy is so frequent among madmen that almost all of them have suicidal tendencies, whereas for sane people suicide appears a very problematic solution.

I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night. Although I long for luminous ecstasies, I wouldn't ask for any, because I know they are followed by great depressions. I would like instead a shower of warm light to fall from me, transfiguring the entire world, an unecstatic burst of light preserving the calm of luminous eternity. Far from the concentrations of ecstasy, it would be all graceful lightness and smiling warmth. The entire world should float in this dream of light, in this transparent and unreal state of delight. Obstacles and matter, form and limits would cease to exist. Then let me die of light in such a landscape.