Cioran A Dionysiac With The Voluptuousness Of Doubt

Author : Ion Dur
Publisher : Vernon Press
Page : 183 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2019-05-31
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781622734603

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Cioran – A Dionysiac with the voluptuousness of doubt by Ion Dur Pdf

Since its inception philosophical thought has been fixated by death. Death, as much as life, has been the unrelenting driving force behind some of history’s greatest thinkers. Yet, for Emil Cioran, a Romanian-French philosopher, even philosophy cannot attempt to understand nor contain the inevitable unknown. Considered to be an anti-philosopher, Cioran approached and reflected on the human experience with a despairing pessimism. His works are characterised by a brooding, fatalistic temperament that reveals and defines itself in his irony, black humour and inimitable style. Although Cioran’s later works have received much scholarly recognition, little attention has been paid to the texts he wrote in his adolescent. Grounded in the historical context of interwar Romania, this book presents for the first time an analysis of the little-known works of this pioneering Romanian thinker. Deeply affected by his upbringing, this book offers a glimpse into Cioran’s first attempts to delve into philosophical enterprise, before turning its attention to his later works, On the Heights of Despair (1934), The Transfiguration of Romania (1936) and Twilight of thoughts (1940; written in France). Using both the French and Romanian editions of these works, but also their original manuscripts, this volume seeks to provide a re-reading that takes language rather than a social or political critique as its focal point. As an important and provocative contribution to the existing literature on Cioran, this book will be an essential point of reference for students and researchers, alike.

Author : Ion Dur
Publisher : Vernon Press
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2019-08-31
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781622735761

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Cioran – A Dionysiac with the voluptuousness of doubt by Ion Dur Pdf

Since its inception philosophical thought has been fixated by death. Death, as much as life, has been the unrelenting driving force behind some of history’s greatest thinkers. Yet, for Emil Cioran, a Romanian-French philosopher, even philosophy cannot attempt to understand nor contain the inevitable unknown. Considered to be an anti-philosopher, Cioran approached and reflected on the human experience with a despairing pessimism. His works are characterised by a brooding, fatalistic temperament that reveals and defines itself in his irony, black humour and inimitable style. Although Cioran’s later works have received much scholarly recognition, little attention has been paid to the texts he wrote in his adolescent. Grounded in the historical context of interwar Romania, this book presents for the first time an analysis of the little-known works of this pioneering Romanian thinker. Deeply affected by his upbringing, this book offers a glimpse into Cioran’s first attempts to delve into philosophical enterprise, before turning its attention to his later works, On the Heights of Despair (1934), The Transfiguration of Romania (1936) and Twilight of thoughts (1940; written in France). Using both the French and Romanian editions of these works, but also their original manuscripts, this volume seeks to provide a re-reading that takes language rather than a social or political critique as its focal point. As an important and provocative contribution to the existing literature on Cioran, this book will be an essential point of reference for students and researchers, alike.

Author : Douglas ALLEN,Arleen IONESCU,Claudiu MESAROȘ,Carl OLSON,Steven SAVITT,Michal VALČO
Publisher : Zeta Books
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2020-12-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9786066971300

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The Time is Now. Essays on the Philosophy of Becoming by Douglas ALLEN,Arleen IONESCU,Claudiu MESAROȘ,Carl OLSON,Steven SAVITT,Michal VALČO Pdf

The time for what? The title of Mihaela Gligor’s edited collection is wonderfully flexible, as anything having to do with time should be. There is something not only boundless about time, but also raw and untamed. In its pure form, time would be too much for us to handle. We would be crushed by the sheer immensity of it, or else we would lose our minds trying to make sense of such unmediated time. Luckily, for the most part we don’t experience time in its pure form. Time comes to us already processed: shaped, engineered, tamed. The volume does fine justice to the notion that we experience time as already shaped by religion, politics, and culture. Whether its contributions cover religious or political figures, philosophers or poets, mystics or physicists, they show – sometimes explicitly, sometimes more discreetly – how difficult it is to deal with time in a pure, unmediated form. The contributors’ cultural, religious, and intellectual rooting inform the way think about time, just as about anything else. Which, far from being a weakness, is something to be recognized and celebrated. (Costică Brădățan, Texas Tech University, U.S.A.)

Author : Nick Land
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 678 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2011-04-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780955308789

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Fanged Noumena by Nick Land Pdf

A dizzying trip through the mind(s) of the provocative and influential thinker Nick Land. During the 1990s British philosopher Nick Land's unique work, variously described as “rabid nihilism,” “mad black deleuzianism,” and “cybergothic,” developed perhaps the only rigorous and culturally-engaged escape route out of the malaise of “continental philosophy” —a route that was implacably blocked by the academy. However, Land's work has continued to exert an influence, both through the British “speculative realist” philosophers who studied with him, and through the many cultural producers—writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers—who have been invigorated by his uncompromising and abrasive philosophical vision. Beginning with Land's early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s—long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print)—in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids. Fanged Noumena gives a dizzying perspective on the entire trajectory of this provocative and influential thinker's work, and has introduced his unique voice to a new generation of readers.

Author : Enrico Manicardi
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2013-07-01
Category : Civilization
ISBN : 162049017X

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Free from Civilization by Enrico Manicardi Pdf

In clear, impassioned prose, Enrico Manicardi analyzes the evils of our age from their genesis. This or that economic, technological or cultural model is not to blame for our current crisis; the blame lies with economics, technology and culture as such. It is the ideology of fear that makes us afraid. It is the mentality of domination that jeopardizes all of our relationships. In short, the problem is civilization. Through its oppressive classes, values and processes that pervade everyone's life, civilization domesticates us, weakens our perceptiveness and distances us from the living world. We must radically change our way of thinking, feeling and behaving before it's too late-we must dam the flood of devitalization that is washing over us, and return to our wilder natures, both inside and outside ourselves. Manicardi's appeal is crystal clear: if we are to survive we must begin to search inside ourselves, not to celebrate the distant past as if it were a cult, but to return to ourselves, to grip life with our own two hands, and build upon that earlier ecocentric conscience which once held the place of the egocentric conscience now leading us astray. Enrico Manicardi was born in 1966 and is a member of La Scintilla, the Society for Libertarian Culture of Modena. A lawyer and founder of the antiauthoritarian media project "Infection," he has also played guitar and written music for an eponymous band since the 1980s. His lifelong wish has been to live in a free, radically off-kilter, ecologically sound world, one characterized by warm, spontaneous, non-hierarchical relationships rather than those consecrated by the cult of technology. Troubled by the way people have succumbed to a civilization that estranges, domesticates and regulates everything and everyone, he continues to protest against the modern world's project to enslave us. This book augurs the rise of an increasingly harmonious chorus loud enough to put an end to that project.

Author : R. J. Cardullo
Publisher : Springer
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2016-12-27
Category : Education
ISBN : 9789463008303

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Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the Film Director as Critical Thinker by R. J. Cardullo Pdf

"Hans-Jürgen Syberberg is an original, the most controversial of all the New German directors and a figure who has long been at the vanguard of the resurgence of experimental filmmaking in his homeland. Syberberg’s most characteristic films examine recent German history: a documentary, for example, about Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law, who was a close friend of Hitler (The Confessions of Winifred Wagner [1975]). But especially “historical” is his trilogy covering one hundred years of Germany’s past, including, most famously, Hitler—A Film from Germany, also known as Our Hitler (1977). In this film and other works, Syberberg unites fictional narrative and documentary footage in a style that is at once cinematic and theatrical, mystical and magical. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the Film Director as Critical Thinker: Essays and Interviews is the first edited book in English devoted to this director’s work, and includes his most important English-language interviews as well as some of the best English-language essays on his work. In sum, this book is a significant contribution not only to the study of Syberberg’s oeuvre, but also to the study of German history and politics in the second half of the twentieth century."

Author : Joshua Foa Dienstag
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2009-02-17
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781400827480

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Pessimism by Joshua Foa Dienstag Pdf

Pessimism claims an impressive following--from Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, to Freud, Camus, and Foucault. Yet "pessimist" remains a term of abuse--an accusation of a bad attitude--or the diagnosis of an unhappy psychological state. Pessimism is thought of as an exclusively negative stance that inevitably leads to resignation or despair. Even when pessimism looks like utter truth, we are told that it makes the worst of a bad situation. Bad for the individual, worse for the species--who would actually counsel pessimism? Joshua Foa Dienstag does. In Pessimism, he challenges the received wisdom about pessimism, arguing that there is an unrecognized yet coherent and vibrant pessimistic philosophical tradition. More than that, he argues that pessimistic thought may provide a critically needed alternative to the increasingly untenable progressivist ideas that have dominated thinking about politics throughout the modern period. Laying out powerful grounds for pessimism's claim that progress is not an enduring feature of human history, Dienstag argues that political theory must begin from this predicament. He persuasively shows that pessimism has been--and can again be--an energizing and even liberating philosophy, an ethic of radical possibility and not just a criticism of faith. The goal--of both the pessimistic spirit and of this fascinating account of pessimism--is not to depress us, but to edify us about our condition and to fortify us for life in a disordered and disenchanted universe.

Author : Susan Sontag
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2013-05-16
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780141976518

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Under the Sign of Saturn by Susan Sontag Pdf

Susan Sontag's third essay collection brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980. In these provocative and hugely influential works she explores some of the most controversial artists and thinkers of our time, including her now-famous polemic against Hitler's favourite film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, and the cult of fascist art, as well as a dazzling analysis of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler, a Film from Germany. There are also highly personal and powerful explorations of death, art, language, history, the imagination and writing itself.

Author : Emil Cioran
Publisher : Bloomsbury Academic
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2015-08-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1472519361

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The Transfiguration of Romania by Emil Cioran Pdf

A close friend of Eugene Ionesco and Mircea Eliade as well as - in his later Paris years - Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett, the Romanian philosopher and essayist Emil Cioran is an important figure in central European Modernism. Cioran's existentialism channelled many seminal intellectual influences of the time from Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger and Henri Bergson. More controversially, it was also a philosophy that that took on distinctly fascist overtones in the inter-war years, especially in his early work The Transfiguration of Romania. Now available for the first time in English translation, the publication of The Transfiguration of Romania casts new light on Modernist culture's engagement with the rise of European fascism between the wars. Supported by an extended introduction that explores Cioran's life, work and enduring influence up to the present day as well his ongoing engagement with the far-right in Romania and beyond, this is a crucial text for anyone seeking to understand the rise of fascist culture in Europe in the interwar period.

Author : Klara Moricz,Simon Morrison
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2014-05-08
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780199829453

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Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié by Klara Moricz,Simon Morrison Pdf

Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié explores the varied aesthetic impulses and ever-evolving personal motivations of Russian composer Arthur Lourié. A St. Petersburg native allied with the Futurist movement and profoundly sympathetic to Silver Age decadence, Lourié was swept away by the Revolution; he surfaced as a Communist commissar of music before landing in Europe and America, where his career foundered. Making his way by serving others, he became Stravinsky's right-hand man, Serge Koussevitsky's ghostwriter, and philosopher Jacques Maritain's muse. Lourié left his mark on the poems of Anna Akhmatova, on the neoclassical aesthetics of Stravinsky, on Eurasianism, and on Maritain's NeoThomist musings about music. Lourié serves as a flawless lens through which aspects of Silver Age Russia, early Bolshevik rule, and the cultural space of exile come into sharper focus. But this interdisciplinary collection of essays, edited by musicologists Klára Móricz and Simon Morrison, also looks at Lourié himself as an artist and intellectual in his own right. Much of the aesthetic and technical discussion concerns his grandly eulogistic opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, understood as both a belated Symbolist work and as a NeoThomist exercise. Despite the importance Lourié attached to the opera as his masterwork, Blackamoor has never been performed, its fate thus serving as an emblem of Lourié's own. Yet even if Lourié seems to have been destined to be but a footnote in the pages of music history, he looms large in studies of emigration and cultural memory. Here Lourié's life, like his last opera, is presented as a meditation on the circumstances and psychology of exile. Ultimately, these essays recover a lost realm of musical and aesthetic possibilities-a Russia that Lourié, and the world, saw disappear.

Author : Aaron Ben Ze'ev,Angelika Krebs
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2017-07-27
Category : Emotions
ISBN : 1138906646

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Philosophy of Emotion by Aaron Ben Ze'ev,Angelika Krebs Pdf

Despite their apparent familiarity, emotions are an extremely subtle and complex topic, historically neglected of study by philosophers and scientists. In recent decades, however, research in the emotions has grown considerably. This new four volume collection is a broad philosophical examination of basic concepts and essential issues but also takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines philosophical analysis with other types of scientific research (such as psychology, anthropology, history, sociology, and brain sciences).

Author : Peter Stone
Publisher : Vernon Press
Page : 214 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2017-06-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781622731916

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Bertrand Russell’s Life and Legacy by Peter Stone Pdf

Almost five decades after his death, there is still ample reason to pay attention to the life and legacy of Bertrand Russell. This is true not only because of his role as one of the founders of analytic philosophy, but also because of his important place in twentieth-century history as an educator, public intellectual, critic of organized religion, humanist, and peace activist. The papers in this anthology explore Russell’s life and legacy from a wide variety of perspectives. This is altogether fitting, given the many-sided nature of Russell, his life, and his work. The first section of the book considers Russell the man, and draws lessons from Russell’s complicated personal life. The second examines Russell the philosopher, and the philosophical world within which his work was embedded. The third scrutinizes Russell the atheist and critic of organized religion, inquiring which parts of his critical stance are worth emulating today. The final section revisits Russell the political activist; it directs an eye both at Russell’s own long career of peace activism, but also at his place in a highly political family tradition of which he was justifiably proud. This book thus constitutes an invitation, if one were needed, to the world of Bertrand Russell. Those new to Russell, but with an interest in biography, philosophy, religion, or politics, will hopefully find something to learn here. This may spark an interest in learning more about Russell. But this book is not just intended for the Russell neophyte. The book sheds fresh light on a number of topics central to Russell studies—his connections to other philosophers, for example. Scholars well-versed in Russell studies will enjoy grappling with the treatment given to these topics here.

Author : Emile M. Cioran
Publisher : Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Company
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 1970
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : UVA:X000532841

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The Fall Into Time by Emile M. Cioran Pdf

Author : Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2009-01-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780253003454

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Searching for Cioran by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston Pdf

Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston's critical biography of the Romanian-born French philosopher E. M. Cioran focuses on his crucial formative years as a mystical revolutionary attracted to right-wing nationalist politics in interwar Romania, his writings of this period, and his self-imposed exile to France in 1937. This move led to his transformation into one of the most famous French moralists of the 20th century. As an enthusiast of the anti-rationalist philosophies widely popular in Europe during the first decades of the 20th century, Cioran became an advocate of the fascistic Iron Guard. In her quest to understand how Cioran and other brilliant young intellectuals could have been attracted to such passionate national revival movements, Zarifopol-Johnston, herself a Romanian emigré, sought out the aging philosopher in Paris in the early 1990s and retraced his steps from his home village of Rasinari and youthful years in Sibiu, through his student years in Bucharest and Berlin, to his early residence in France. Her portrait of Cioran is complemented by an engaging autobiographical account of her rediscovery of her own Romanian past.

Author : E. M. Cioran
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 129 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2013-03-22
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780226037240

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The New Gods by E. M. Cioran Pdf

Dubbed “Nietzsche without his hammer” by literary critic James Wood, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran is known as much for his profound pessimism and fatalistic approach as for the lyrical, raging prose with which he communicates them. Unlike many of his other works, such as On the Heights of Despair and Tears and Saints, The New Gods eschews his usual aphoristic approach in favor of more extensive and analytic essays. Returning to many of Cioran’s favorite themes, The New Gods explores humanity’s attachment to gods, death, fear, and infirmity, in essays that vary widely in form and approach. In “Paleontology” Cioran describes a visit to a museum, finding the relatively pedestrian destination rife with decay, death, and human weakness. In another chapter, Cioran explores suicide in shorter, impressionistic bursts, while “The Demiurge” is a shambolic exploration of man’s relationship with good, evil, and God. All the while, The New Gods reaffirms Cioran’s belief in “lucid despair,” and his own signature mixture of pessimism and skepticism in language that never fails to be a pleasure. Perhaps his prose itself is an argument against Cioran’s near-nihilism: there is beauty in his books.