Download The Temptation to Exist by E. M. Cioran PDF

By E. M. Cioran

This choice of 11 essays initially seemed in France thirty years in the past and created a literary whirlwind at the Left financial institution. Cioran writes incisively approximately Western civilizations, the author, the radical, mystics, apostles, and philosophers.

"A kind of ultimate thinker of the Western global. His statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning."—Washington Post

"An highbrow bombshell that blasts away in any respect forms of cant, sham and conventionality. . . . [Cioran's] language is so erotic, his dealing with of phrases so seductive, that the act of interpreting turns into an come upon within the erogenous zone."—Jonah Raskin, L.A. Weekly

Show description

Read or Download The Temptation to Exist PDF

Best existentialism books

Time and Narrative (Volume 2)

In quantity 1 of this three-volume paintings, Paul Ricoeur tested the kinfolk among time and narrative in historic writing. Now, in quantity 2, he examines those kin in fiction and theories of literature.

Ricoeur treats the query of simply how a long way the Aristotelian notion of "plot" in narrative fiction will be extended and even if there's a element at which narrative fiction as a literary shape not just blurs on the edges yet ceases to exist in any respect. notwithstanding a few semiotic theorists have proposed all fiction may be lowered to an atemporal constitution, Ricoeur argues that fiction is determined by the reader's knowing of narrative traditions, which do evolve yet inevitably contain a temporal size. He seems to be at how time is de facto expressed in narrative fiction, fairly via use of tenses, standpoint, and voice. He applies this method of 3 books which are, in a feeling, stories approximately time: Virgina Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway; Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain; and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of items Past.

"Ricoeur writes the easiest type of philosophy—critical, cost-effective, and transparent. "—Eugen Weber, manhattan occasions booklet Review

"A significant paintings of literary concept and feedback below the aegis of philosophical hermenutics. i think that . . . it's going to come to have an effect more than that of Gadamer's fact and Method—a paintings it either supplementations and transcends in its contribution to our knowing of the that means of texts and their dating to the realm. "—Robert Detweiler, faith and Literature

"One can't fail to be inspired by way of Ricoeur's encyclopedic wisdom of the topic into consideration. . . . To scholars of rhetoric, the significance of Time and Narrative . . . is all too obtrusive to require large elaboration. "—Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Quarterly magazine of Speech

Note: I'd say this is often simply the most vital books I've learn within the final decade. tough examining, yet definitely worth the persistence. Recommended.

Converted from the retail AZW3 addition.

Existentialism: An Introduction

Existentialism: An creation offers an obtainable and scholarly advent to the center principles of the existentialist culture. Kevin Aho attracts on a variety of existentialist thinkers in chapters centering at the key issues of freedom, being-in-the-world, alienation, nihilism, nervousness and authenticity.

Sartre on the Body (Philosophers in Depth)

A who is who of Sartre students give a contribution to a suite of multidisciplinary views from sociology, faith, and bioethics, on a hitherto missed region of Sartre's philosophy.

Introducing Nietzsche: A Graphic Guide

Why needs to we think that God is useless? will we settle for that conventional morality is simply a 'useful mistake'? Did the primary of 'the will to energy' result in the Holocaust? What are the constraints of clinical wisdom? Is human evolution whole or in basic terms starting? it truly is tough to overestimate the significance of Friedrich Nietzsche for our current epoch.

Additional info for The Temptation to Exist

Example text

If it is declining, he will agree, if need be, to de­ cline too, to remark upon it and upon himself the effects of tatum. As for remedies, he neither possesses nor proposes them. Since he knows you cannot treat destiny, he does not set himself up as a healer in any case. His sole ambition : to keep abreast of the Incurable. * Given the spectacle of their teeming successes, the nations of the West had no trouble exalting history, attributing to it a meaning and a finality. It belonged to them, they were its agents : hence it must take a rational course .

Unable to sustain the dignity of be­ ing fastidious, less and less inclined to winnow truths, he is content with those he is offered. By-product of his ego, . he proceeds-a wrecker gone to seed-to crawl before the altars, or before what takes their place. In the temple or on the tribunal, his place is where there is singing, or shouting­ no longer a chance to hear one's own voice. A parody of be­ lief? It matters little to him, since all he aspires to is to desist from himself. All his philosophy has concluded in a refrain, all his pride foundered on a Hosanna l Let us be fair: as things stand now, what else could he do?

The crusaders, turned gardeners, vanished 61 I On a Winded Civilization into that home-loving posterity in which no trace of no­ madism s usbsists. But history is a nostalgia for space, a horror of home, a vagabond dream and a need to die far away . . but history is precisely what we no longer see around us. There is a satiety which incites to discovery, to the in­ vention of myths, of lies that instigate actions : it is an un­ satisfied ardor, a morbid enthusiasm which becomes healthy as soon as it fixes upon an object; there is another kind which, dissociating the mind from its powers and life from its wellsprings, impoverishes and dessicates.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.28 of 5 – based on 36 votes