All Gall Is Divided_The Aphorisms of A Legendary Iconoclast Read online

  Had he not held onto one last illusion, I would gladly ally myself with Omar Khayyam, with his unanswerable melancholy; but he still believed in wine.

  The best of myself, that point of light which distances me from everything, I owe to my infrequent encounters with a few bitter fools, a few disconsolate bastards, who, victims of the rigor of their cynicism, could no longer attach themselves to any vice.

  Before being a fundamental mistake, life is a failure of taste which neither death nor even poetry succeeds in correcting.

  In this “great dormitory,” as one Taoist text calls the universe, nightmare is the sole mode of lucidity.

  Do not apply yourself to Letters if, with an obscure soul, you are haunted by clarity. You will leave behind you nothing but intelligible sighs, wretched fragments of your refusal to be yourself.

  In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart.

  Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

  To be modern is to tinker with the Incurable.

  Tragicomedy of the Disciple: I have reduced my mind to dust, in order to improve on the moralists who had taught me only to fritter it away…

  The Swindler of the Abyss

  Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile.

  With infinite precaution, I prowl around the depths, draw off certain delirium, and make myself scarce, like a swindler of the Abyss.

  Every thinker, at the start of his career, opts in spite of himself for dialectic or for weeping willows.

  Long before physics and psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.

  That uncertain feeling when we try to imagine the daily life of great minds… Whatever could it be that Socrates was doing around two in the afternoon?

  If we believe, so ingenuously, in ideas, it is because we forget that they were conceived by mammals.

  A poetry worthy of that name begins with the experience of fatality. It is only the bad poets who are free.

  In all the edifice of thought, I have found no category on which to rest my head. Whereas Chaos — there’s a pillow!

  To punish others for being happier than ourselves, we inoculate them — lacking anything better — with our anxieties. For our pains, alas! are not contagious.

  Nothing slakes my thirst for doubts: if only I had Moses’s staff to summon them from the very rock!

  Except for the dilation of self, that fruit of total paralysis, what remedy for crises of annihilation, asphyxiation in the void, the horror of being no more than a soul in a gob of spit?

  If melancholy has vouchsafed me such a dearth of ideas, that’s because I loved it too much to let my mind deplete it.

  A philosophical vogue is as irresistible as a gastronomic one: an idea is no better refuted than a sauce.

  Every aspect of thought has its moment, its frivolity: in our time, the notion of Nothingness … How dated seem Matter, Energy, Spirit! Fortunately the lexicon is rich: each generation can delve there and come up with a word as important as the others — uselessly defunct.

  We are all humbugs: we survive our problems.

  In the days when the Devil flourished, panics, terrors, troubles were evils profiting from supernatural protection: we know who provoked them, who presided over their efflorescence; abandoned to themselves now, they become “internal dramas” or degenerate into “psychoses,” a secularized pathology.

  By compelling us to smile turn and turn about at the ideas of those we importune, Poverty degrades our skepticism into a livelihood.

  The plant is mildly affected; the animal contrives to break down; in man the anomaly of all that breathes is exacerbated.

  Life! homogeny of stupor and chemistry … Shall we take refuge in the equilibrium of the mineral kingdom? Step backward over the realm dividing us from it and imitate normal stone?

  As far back as I can remember, I’ve utterly destroyed within myself the pride of being human. And I saunter to the periphery of the Race like a timorous monster, lacking the energy to claim kinship with some other band of apes.

  Boredom levels all enigmas: a positivist reverie.

  There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.

  Death reaches so far, requires so much room, that I no longer know where to die.

  Lucidity’s task: to attain to a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.

  Happiness is so rare because we accede to it only after old age, in senility — a favor bestowed on very few mortals.

  Our vacillations bear the mark of our probity; our assurances, of our imposture. A thinker’s untruthfulness may be recognized by the sum of precise ideas he advances.

  I plunged into the Absolute a fool; I emerged from it a troglodyte.

  The cynicism of utter solitude is a calvary relieved by insolence.

  Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadlier to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities?

  Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!

  In this provisional universe, our axioms have only the value of fait-divers.

  Anxiety was already a common product of the caveman. Imagine our Neanderthal’s smile had he discovered that philosophers would one day claim to have invented it.

  Philosophy’s error is to be too endurable.

  The abulic, leaving ideas alone, should be the only one given access to them. When men of action deal with ideas, our sweet quotidian clutter is organized into tragedy.

  The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.

  The Skeptic is perfectly willing to suffer, like other men, for life-giving chimeras. He fails to do so: a martyr of common sense.

  Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn’t deserve to be known.

  How can a man be a philosopher? How can he have the effrontery to contend with time, with beauty, with God, and the rest? The mind swells and hops, shamelessly. Metaphysics, poetry — a flea’s impertinences …

  Stoicism for show: to be an enthusiast of nil admirari, an hysteric of ataraxia.

  If I can struggle against a fit of depression, in the name of what vitality can I oppose an obsession which belongs to me, which precedes me? In good health, I take the path I prefer; “sick,” it is no longer I who decide: it is my disease. For the obsessed, no choice: their obsession has already opted for them, ahead of them. One chooses oneself when one possesses indifferent potentialities; but the distinctness of a disease antedates the diversity of the roads open to choice. To wonder if one is free or not — a trifle for a mind swept on by the calories of its deliriums. For such a mind, to extol freedom is to parade a discreditable health.

  Freedom? Sophistry of the fit.

  Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torments his nature demands?

  Why not compare myself to the greatest saints? Have I expended less madness in order to safeguard my contradictions than they to surmount theirs?

  When the Idea sought a refuge, it must have been decrepit, since it has found only the mind’s hospitality.

  A technique we practice at our cost, psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.

  Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves — that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.

  We undermine any idea by entertaining it exhaustively; we rob it of charm, even of life…

  A little more fervor in my nihilism and I might — gainsaying everything — shake off my doubts and triumph over them. But I have only the taste of negation, not
its grace.

  Having experienced the fascination of extremes, and having stopped somewhere between dilettantism and dynamite!

  It is the Intolerable, and not Evolution, which ought to be biology’s hobbyhorse.

  My cosmogony adds to primordial chaos an infinity of suspension points…

  With every idea born in us, something in us rots.

  Every problem profanes a mystery; in its turn, the problem is profaned by its solution.

  Pathos betrays an abyss of bad taste; like that prurience of sedition in which a Luther, a Rousseau, a Beethoven, a Nietzsche indulged. The grand accents — plebeianism of solitaries.

  That need for remorse which precedes wrongdoing, which actually creates it…

  Could I bear a single day without that charity of my madness which promises me the Last Judgment tomorrow?

  We suffer: the external world begins to exist…; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.

  Thought which liberates itself from all prejudice disintegrates, imitating the scattered incoherence of the very things it would apprehend. With “fluid” ideas we spread ourselves over reality, we espouse it; we do not explicate it. Thus we pay dearly for the “system” we have not sought.

  The Real gives me asthma.

  We dislike following, or leading, to its conclusion a depressing train of thought, however unassailable; we resist it just when it affects our entrails, at the point where it becomes malaise, truth and disaster of the flesh. — No sermon of the Buddha, no page of Schopenhauer fails to turn my stomach …

  Subtlety is encountered:

  among theologians. Unable to prove what they propose, they are obliged to practice so many distinctions that they distract the brain; their purpose. Imagine the virtuosity required to classify angels into ten or a dozen species! Not to mention God: how many minds has His exhausting “infinity” cast into deliquescence;

  among the idle — among the worldly, the nonchalant, among all who feed on words. Conversation — mother of subtlety … Insensitive to it, the Germans have been swallowed up by metaphysics. But the talkative peoples, the ancient Greeks and the French, inured to the graces of the mind, have excelled in the technique of trifles;

  among the persecuted. Liable to lying, to ruse and machination, they lead a double life, a false one: insincerity — out of need — excites the intelligence. Sure of themselves, the English are boring; thus they pay for the centuries of liberty during which they could live without recourse to cunning, to the sly smile, to expedients. Easy to understand why, diametrically opposite, it is the Jews’ privilege to be the most wide-awake of peoples;

  among women. Condemned to modesty, they must camouflage their desires and lie: lying is a form of talent, whereas respect for the “truth” goes along with heaviness and vulgarity;

  among the criminal — who are not confined …, among those for whom one might conceive an ideal penal code.

  Still young, we launch ourselves into philosophy, searching not so much for a vision as for a stimulant; we track down ideas, diagnose the delirium which has produced them, dreaming of imitating and exaggerating it. Adolescence delights in the juggling act of altitudes; what it loves in a thinker is the acrobat; in Nietzsche, we loved Zarathustra, his poses, his mystical clown-show, a real farmer’s market of the peaks…

  His idolatry of power derives not so much from an evolutionist snobbery as from an inner tension he has projected outward, from an intoxication which interprets becoming and accepts it. A false image of life and of history was the result. But we had to pass through such things, through the philosophical orgy, the cult of vitality. Those who refused to do so will never know the relapse, the antipodes and the grimaces of this cult; they will remain closed off from the sources of disappointment.

  We had believed with Nietzsche in the perpetuity of trances; thanks to the maturity of our cynicism, we have ventured further than he. The notion of the superman now strikes us as no more than a lucubration; it used to seem as precise as a given of experience. Thus the enchanter of our youth fades. But which one of him — if he was several — still remains? It is the expert in failures, the psychologist, an aggressive psychologist, not merely an observer like the moralists. He scans with the eye of an enemy and makes enemies for himself. But he draws such enemies out of himself, like the vices he denounces. Does he attack the weak? He is merely being introspective; and when he attacks decadence, he is describing his condition. All his hatreds bear indirectly on himself. His weaknesses he proclaims and erects into an ideal; if he execrates himself, Christianity or socialism suffers for it. His diagnosis of nihilism is irrefutable: because he himself is a nihilist, and because he avows it. A pamphleteer in love with his adversaries, he could not have endured himself had he not done battle with himself, against himself — had he not placed his miseries elsewhere, in the others: on them he took revenge for what he was. Having practiced psychology as a hero, he proposed to the enthusiasts of the Inextricable a diversity of stalemates.

  We measure his fecundity by the possibilities he affords us of continually repudiating him without exhausting him. A nomad mind, he is good at varying his disequilibriums. In all matters, he has championed the pro and the con: this is the procedure of those who give themselves up to speculation for lack of being able to write tragedies — to disperse themselves in many destinies. Nonetheless, by exhibiting his hysterias, Nietzsche has spared us the shame of ours; his miseries were salutary for us. He has opened the age of “complexes.”

  The “generous” philosopher forgets to his cost that in any system only the detrimental truths survive.

  At the age when, for lack of experience, one takes to philosophy, I determined to write a thesis like everyone else. What subject to choose? I wanted one that would be both familiar and unwonted. The moment I imagined I had found it, I hastened to announce my discovery to my professor.

  “What would you think of A General Theory of Tears? I feel ready to start work on that.”

  “Possibly,” he said, “but you’ll have your work cut out, finding a bibliography.”

  “That doesn’t matter so much. All History will afford me its authority,” I replied in a tone of triumphant impertinence.

  But when, in his impatience, he shot me a glance of disdain, I resolved then and there to murder the disciple in myself.

  In other times, the philosopher who did not write but thought incurred no scorn thereby; ever since we began prostrating ourselves before the effective, the work has become the absolute of vulgarity; those who produce none are regarded as failures. But such failures would have been the sages of another age; they will redeem ours by having left no traces.

  More than once it has occurred to me to glimpse the autumn of the mind, the denouement of consciousness, reason’s final scene, then a light which froze my blood!

  Toward a vegetal wisdom: I would abjure all my terrors for the smile of a tree …

  Time and Anemia

  How close she is to me, that old madwoman running after time, trying to catch up with a piece of time!

  A link exists between the deficiency of our blood and our embarrassment in duration: so many white globules, so many empty moments… Don’t our conscious states derive from the discoloration of our desires?

  Surprised at high noon by the delicious terror of dizziness, how to account for it? Something in the blood? in the heavens? or in anemia, located halfway between?

  Our pallor shows us to what degree the body can understand the soul.

  You with your veins full of night — you have no more place among men than an epitaph in the middle of a circus.

  At the climax of Incuriosity, you think of a good fit of epilepsy as if it were the promised land.

  Your passion ruins you in direct proportion to the diffusion of its object; mine was Boredom: I have succumbed to its imprecision.

  Time is denied me. Unable to follow its cadence, I clutch or contemplate it, but follow it? nev
er: it is not my element. And it is in vain that I crave a little of everyone’s time!

  Leukemia is the garden where God blooms.

  If faith, politics, or bestiality alleviates despair, everything leaves melancholy intact: it can cease only with our blood.

  Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.

  Our sadnesses prolong the mystery sketched by the mummies’ smile.

  Black Utopia, anxiety alone affords us exact details about the future.

  Vomit? Pray? — Boredom makes us climb to a heaven of Crucifixion which leaves in our mouths a saccharine aftertaste.

  For a long time I believed in the metaphysical virtues of Fatigue: true, it drags us down to the roots of Time; but what do we bring back? Some twaddle about eternity.