“How to be indestructible: the power of deidentification” – Orion Taraban | PsycHacks ▶️

To be indestructible, you must first understand how you are destructible. From a psychological perspective, you are destructible when you inappropriately identify with external reality. This basically means that you conflate what you have with who you are. This is dangerous, as any threat to a possession with which you are identified will be experienced…

“The Model Traitor” – CIORAN

Since life can be fulfilled only within individuation—that last bastion of solitude—each being is necessary alone by the fact that he is an individual. Yet all individuals are not alone in the same way nor with the same intensity: each occupies a different rank in the hierarchy of solitude; at one extreme stands the traitor:…

‘The Refusal to Procreate’ and other Antinatalist Writings – CIORAN

Having exhausted his appetites, the man who approaches a limit-form of detachment no longer wants to perpetuate himself; he loathes surviving in someone else, to whom moreover he has nothing more to transmit; the species appalls him; he is a monster—and monsters do not beget. “Love” still holds him prisoner: an aberration among his thoughts.…

“Superior Simpletons” and the “Advantages of Debility” – CIORAN

"Simp" is an internet slang term describing someone who shows excessive sympathy and attention toward another person, typically someone who does not reciprocate the same feelings, in pursuit of affection or a sexual relationship. The Urban Dictionary defines a simp as "someone who does way too much for a person they like". This behavior, known…

“The Devil Reassured” – CIORAN

Why is God so dull, so feeble, so inadequately picturesque? Why does He lack interest, vigor, actuality and resemble us so little? Is there any image less anthropomorphic and more gratuitously remote? How could we have projected into Him lights so dim and powers so unsteady? Where have our energeis leaked away to, where have…

“The Anti-Prophet” – CIORAN

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world. . . . The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something—anything. He has…

“Genealogy of Fanaticism” – CIORAN

In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy . . . whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games. Idolaters by…

“Is Reality a Controlled Hallucination?” – Anil SETH

Whether he is an angel that has lost his wings or an ape that has lost his hair, he has been able to leave the anonymity of creatures only by the eclipses of his health. His poorly constituted blood has allowed the infiltration of uncertainties, approximations, problems; his wavering vitality, the intrusion of question marks…

Prefácio à edição inglesa do Breviário de Decomposição – Eugene THACKER

Eugene Thacker é filósofo, poeta, escritor e professor de media studies em The New School , na cidade de Nova York. Sua produção se concentra, em grande parte, em temas como filosofia do niilismo e pessimismo filosófico. Entre seus livros estão In the Dust of This Planet (parte da trilogia Horror of Philosophy) e Infinite…

Cioran’s A Short History of Decay (1949): Foreword by Eugene THACKER

There are writers that one seeks out, and there are writers that one stumbles upon. Emil Cioran is arguably of the latter kind. Such was my own introduction to his work, as a student meandering one rainy afternoon in a used bookstore in Seattle. In the philosophy section, probably squeezed between “Cicero” and “Confucius,” was…