Say yes to life! Affirmation, negation mere appearances, no oppositions but creation, suffering and illness as overcoming etc……I find all this quite sickening. My “natural” inclination or temperament is not Deleuzian or Nietzschean but Cioranic, but I find it more fun to write about the greatest affirmers who have ever lived: the unholy life-trinity of Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze, than in my first negative loves Schopenhauer, Leopardi and Cioran…but of course, as Deleuze would say, their style is their refutation. Style for Deleuze is a non-organic life that cannot help to express itself through the vilifications and negations of the content…like life that emerges even in the most remote and inhospitable regions of the world; grass (in more ways than one…) cannot help to grow amongst the negating pavements…
As a general rule pessimist are great stylist, (with the exception of Nietzsche, but maybe because he is also the cruelest of philosophers) optimist are too busy working about their content in a never ending justification or rationalization of appearances (Hegel’s labor or tarrying of the negative) to worry about “mere” ornamentation.
While of course for a pessimist, style is all there is; for a pessimist the content of the world is plain to see, yes to the Hegel’ “sense-certainty”, the senses do no deceive (for the optimist or rationalist they always do, that is their affirmative starting point) esthetes of the abyss, they enjoy expressing the farce-horror of life’s tale told by an Idiot “full of sound and fury signifying nothing” (maybe I should get off my dogmatic post/modernist fixation and around to reading that Shakespeare guy…after all) - or at least it’s more fun than death or suicide.
Cioran always maintained had he not had the idea of an exit/escape (i.e. suicide) he would have killed himself long time ago…instead of dying on his death bed with Alzheimer disease; an ironic and almost Nietzschean way to die for a self-confessed pessimist.
On the other hand, Cioran believed in nothing and forgot everything, he was far too ironic to believe, in pessimism or anything else for that matter (that is his Deleuzian charm)…ironic on the edge of his slippery slippers abyss, (or more aptly “myse on abyme”) how could he not be, in the postmodern age of disbelief and hyperconsciousness: “we live in a hell were every moment is a miracle”...
While…Schopenhauer was like Freud, a hyper-rationalist in a dark, irrational universe (and by now a hyper-ironic universe)…a rational labyrinth in a maze of insanity…or is it a universe lost in the fun-house of a Gödelian strange-loop caught within infinity?…Cantor maintained that the set of all sets (that includes all sets) is God, or the void for Badiou, or maybe it is a Dog after all… woff…wooff..woooff….wooooff etc…Dog = God and EVIL= LIVE, this is what is supposed to happen when you play 80’s black metal (is there a pink?) backwards…how do you play a vinyl backwards? Never found out…I guess I never will……ok…quit the rammmmmbling… Leaving you with the Oscar Wilde of the abyss:
Cioran (my favorite chat up lines…)
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
Everything is pathology , except for indifference.
