Nietzsche, Cioran and Postmodernity, Posthistory, Postmetaphysical and Posthumanistic Thinking: Live Talk with Kerstin Borchhardt

On June 12, 2021, Saturday, at 7 pm (Berlin timezone), Portal E.M. Cioran Brasil is hosting a live talk on YouTube with Kerstin Borchhardt, professor at Siegen University, Germany. The talk shall be held in English while simultaneously translated to Portuguese / Spanish.

A written interview has already been published. Some fragments from Cioran’s works pertaining to the proposed set of themes of the live talk:

The human experiment has failed. Man has become a dead end, whereas a non-man is more: a possibility.
Look one of your “fellow human beings” in the eye: what makes you think that nothing more can be expected? Every man is too little…
The Twilight of Thought [Amurgul gîndurilor], 1940

The Cynics are neither “super” nor “sub-humans”, but “post-humans”. We come to the point of understanding them, and even to love them, when, from the torment of our emptiness, a confession escapes to ourselves, or to no one: I was once a man, and I am no longer one. When there is no one in you anymore, not even Diogenes, and you are vacant even of emptiness, and your ears no longer whistle with nothingness…
The Twilight of Thought [Amurgul gîndurilor], 1940

The human experiment was successful only at times when man believed to be God himself.
The Twilight of Thought [Amurgul gîndurilor], 1940

History would be over the moment man settled into a truth. But man truly lives only insofar as all truth bores him. The source of becoming is the infinite possibility of error in the world.
The Twilight of Thought [Amurgul gîndurilor], 1940

The ideally lucid, hence ideally normal, man should have no recourse beyond the nothing that is in him… I can imagine him saying: “Torn from the goal, from all goals, I retain, of my desires and my displeasures, only their formulas. Having resisted the temptation to conclude, I have overcome the mind, as I have overcome life itself by the horror of looking for an answer to it. […] Once I had a self; now I am no more than an object .. . I gorge myself on all the drugs of solitude; those of the world were too weak to make me forget it. Having killed the prophet in me, how could I still have a place among men?”
A Short History of Decay (1949)

“I give myself up to space like a blind man’s tears. Whose will am I, who wills in me?”
A Short History of Decay

I breathe out of prejudice. And I contemplate the spasm of ideas, while the Void smiles at itself. . . . No more sweat in space, no more life; the least vulgarity will make it reappear: a second’s waiting will suffice. […] A conformist, I live, I try to live, by imitation, by respect for the rules of the game, by horror of originality. An automaton’s resignation: to affect a pretense of fervor and secretly to laugh at it; to bow to conventions only to repudiate them on the sly; to be numbered in every ledger but to have no residence in time; to save face whereas it would be only duty to lose it. . . . […]
Let us keep deep down inside a certitude superior to all the others: life has no meaning, it cannot have any such thing. We should kill ourselves on the spot if an unlooked for revelation persuaded us of the contrary. The air gone, we should still breathe; but we should immediately smother if the joy of inanity were taken from us. . . .
“The Automaton”, A Short History of Decay (1949)

Committed beyond his means, beyond his instincts, man has ended up in an impasse. He has burned his bridges . . . to catch up with his conclusion; animal without a future, he has foundered in his ideal, he has worsted himself at his own game. Having ceaselessly sought to transcend himself, he is paralyzed; and his only remaining resource is to recapitulate his follies, to expiate them, and to commit a few more. . . .
“Procession of Sub-Men”, A Short History of Decay (1949)

We are truly ourselves only when we coincide with nothing, not even with our own singularity. [..] Forever different, we are ourselves only insofar as we depart from our definition, man in Nietzsche’s phrase being das noch nicht festgestellte Tier, the animal whose type is not yet determined, fixed.
The Fall Into Time (1964)

Just as theologians rightly speak of ours as a post-Christian age, some day we shall hear of the splendors and miseries of living in a posthistorical epoch. Despite everything, it would be sweet to know that twilight success in which we might escape the succession of generations and the parade of tomorrows, and when, on the ruins of historical time, existence, at last identical with itself, will again become what it was before turning into history.
Drawn & Quartered (1979)

Man makes history; in its turn history unmakes man. He is its author and its object, its agent and its victim. He has imagined hitherto that he masters it, now he knows that it escapes him, that it dissolves into the insoluble and the intolerable: a lunatic epic, whose conclusion implies no notion of finality. How to assign it a goal? If it had one, history would reach it only once it had reached its term. The only advantage will be enjoyed by the last of the race, the survivors, the leftovers, they alone are to be gratified, profiteers of the incalculable number of efforts and torments the past will have known.
Drawn & Quartered (1979)

The date of the event has been postponed in one day, from the 11^th to the 12^th of June, 2021.