_AmaNesciri_

Translation of Breviary of Chaos & Fragments

Albert Caraco

The Prophet of Carnage

“Reading Albert Caraco is a torture. He may be the last truly

dangerous author of world literature.” (Frédéric Saenen)
Translator's note:

This is the first major attempt to translate Caraco's oeuvre (including much of his
Breviary of Chaos) with the aim of bringing it to the attention of English-speaking
readers and potentially laying the groundwork for an official translation, which, to the
best of my knowledge, has not yet been undertaken.

Please note that this translation is a work in progress and will be improved further
(especially in regards to grammar and more content) over time.

Now, before you start reading, it is important for me to mention that while many of
Caraco's ideas may become clear throughout his Breviary of Chaos and other
fragments, it is crucial to avoid jumping to hasty conclusions about his persona or
philosophy, given that he is a highly paradoxical figure and considering that this
translation represents only a small portion of his vast body of work.

That said, I encourage all interested readers to join the discussion and share their
thoughts on Caraco in the thread where this translation was officially shared. If you
have any uncertainties, further questions, suggestions for improvement, or even your
own translations of excerpts from Caraco's works that you would like me to add,
please do not hesitate to contact me.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Dorbis, P.G. Adebayo, and the many
other anonymous supporters for their contributions to this project. Many thanks!
I. Texts and Articles:

Remarks about Albert Caraco (Translated by Richard Costa)

[Source: Philippe Billé, Studia Caracoana, 2009]

«I am a racist and a colonialist.» (Ma Confession, 141). Albert Caraco had a certain
talent for making everyone comfortable, as soon as they open the book. In many
respects, an uncommon writer. He was born in Constantinople, of a Sephardic family,
(on June 8th according to his own words, in the Semainier de l’agonie, 44). He was
the only son of a banker.

During his childhood, he lived in Prague, Berlin (Kurfürstendamm, 129, from 1926 to
29) and Paris, where he studied in the Janson-de-Sailly high school. He graduated in
Advanced Commercial Studies in 1939, but never worked. He summarises his youth
with these words: «I spent the first ten years of my life in Germany, the following ten
in Paris, the following ten between Argentina and Uruguay.» (L’homme de Lettres,
207-208).

It was in 1939 that his family left Europe for South America, where they sojourned in
Brazil and Argentina before settling in Uruguay, in Montevideo. Two of his books from
this time, which I have in my hands, bear his mark, from which I decipher the address:
924 av. Mariscal Estigarribia, Montevideo. It’s a great avenue in the south of the city,
not far from the sea.

After the war, in 1956, the family returned to settle permanently in Paris. He
mentions in the Semainier de l’incertitude, in 1968, that he has been living there for
eight years, in the Jean-Giraudoux street (p 100 & 162). A natural melancholic, he
waited for the death of his parents before committing suicide. His mother went first,
in 1963 (he wrote about it in Post mortem). His father followed her in September
1971, and Albert hanged himself the day after. Until the end of his life he kept the
Uruguayan nationality.

His first books, published in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires in the beginning of the
40s, were classical in style and subject. His plays, partly in verse, are a testimonial of
his great mastery of French and the rules of style. One may find in the end of Inès de
Castro a remarkable tirade in prose, which on reading reveals itself to be a sequence
of alexandrine verses one after the other.
His later books are mostly philosophical essays, for the greater part arranged in
aphorisms or dialogues. His last books, more personal, are chronicles that combine
autobiography and pamphlet. In these books, in a casual manner, he discusses his life,
modernity, literature, history or religion, and often the same topics resurface. Ma
Confession presents a very regular and somewhat monumental structure : it is a
collection of 250 wandering meditations, beginning at the top of one page and
finishing at its bottom. Many works from this period, titled Semainiers, are divided in
weekly chapters. A block of six lines («It has been three generations since the West
swarms with teachers of barbarity...») which I see repeated word for word on pages
73 and 93 of the Semainier de l’agonie (weeks from 18 to 24 February and 4 to 10
March 1963) allow me to presume that the writing and the structure of the journals
are not as spontaneous as one might believe.

Although he was mainly French-speaking and French-writing, Albert Caraco also

practised three other living languages: «French, German, English and Spanish are four
admirable languages and I manage to express myself, with more or less success, in all
of them.» (Semainier de 1969, 45). He mentions, in the Semainier de l’incertitude
(23), that his order of proficiency was, after French, Spanish, then German and finally
English. He inserted, in different ways, in his later books, passages written in these
languages. The 250 pages of Ma Confession, include a sudden series of seven pages in
English (91-97), and later seven in German (105-111), then seven in Spanish
(113-119). In these diaries, the text is scattered in paragraphs written alternately in
one of these languages, and at times Caraco goes unexpectedly from one to the other
in the middle of a paragraph, or even in the middle of the sentence. He said of his
Semainier de 1969: «The informed reader knows, as he reads me, that he is listening
to a fugue in four voices» (134).

He was a reactionary and a misanthrope of the first order. «I don’t hide my profession
of pessimism and I’m an avowed partisan of reaction» (1969, 104); «the conservation
of a beautiful armchair is to me more important than the existence of many bipeds of
articulate voice» (Agonie, 237); «I would be pleased indeed, if the universe were full
of blazing ovens, and crowded concentration camps, and starving people deported»
(1969, 118). He was not only a racist and a colonialist, but also vaguely a monarchist,
at least nostalgic of the Ancien Régime («The sooner we reestablish monarchy, the
better» (Agonie, 37); inegalitarian («Behold the kind of runts which form the common
humanity, does it look as if they are our brothers?» ; «Which is the falsest idea?
Equality», Agonie, 233 & 279), and in favour of the death penalty («I approve of the
death penalty», Agonie, 59). All this to please modern humanists...
His scathing insults against Arabs and Blacks leave no doubt as to the scarce esteem
that he had for them, and miscegenation was unthinkable to him: «Paris is already
full of Arabs and Negroes, soon it will look as if we are in Brazil» (1969, 8) (and I do
not quote the worst of his imprecations).

Presenting himself as «the heir of immortal French traditions» (Agonie, 86), he

admired French culture and especially the literature of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries: «The time when the French flourished and had their greatness
measured, between Louis XIV and the first Napoléon» (Homme de Lettres, 115);
«from 1600 to 1800... during this time, France had a style» (Incertitude, 167); «from
1650 to 1775... one reaches such a harmony, in which greatness does not crush and
whose measure is not compressed» (Agonie, 33).

On the other hand, he detested contemporary France, which he considered

decadent: «I shall die as a Francophobe» (Agonie, 262); «France... the older I grow,
the more I despise her» (Confession, 112). Although he chose to live there, he did not
feel integrated and did not demand a naturalisation: «I am not a French writer, I do
not feel as such» ; «Albert Caraco is not French, does not feel French, and has little
esteem for France» (Agonie, 62 & 270).

Toward the Jews his feelings are mixed. He confesses to being «a Jew of birth and for
a long time discontented for being» (Agonie, 140). He was very contented in his last
years, particularly during the war of 1967, when he developed a racism in full scale,
placing the Jews at the summit of the human pyramid: «We are the backbone of the
white race» (Confession, 36). But that didn’t stop him from making unfavourable
conclusions from his meetings with Jews: «In Paris one may see some very horrible
Jews, these scoundrels coming from Algeria, ... yellow eyes, green skin and frizzy
hair», Agonie, 251; «God! The Jews are ugly!», 1969, 100; and even his own family:
«From what do I descend? I wonder how did all these runts even dare to survive»
Agonie, 265.

He regretted having converted to Catholicism for a few years, which consumed his
first works. He didn’t think much of Christian and Muslim monotheism. To his eyes
the Qur’an was «the disgrace of the human spirit» (Confession, 140), and the Church,
whose only merit was «having for a long time favoured the fine-arts», is «the moral
cancer of the white race» (Agonie, 172 & 110). However, he had in the same sack of
contempt all three branches of monotheism, even the Jewish: «Judaism, the Church
and Islam are not agreeable to me, the spirit which animates them is often lowness
itself» ... «The Church, Islam and Judaism, I call them all poisonous; the sundry pagan
religions are much more agreeable, the Greeks were admirable, the Celts were
charming» (Agonie, 246 & 251). As we see, sometimes he professes a preference for
paganism: «The pagan religions are worth much more than the delirious systems
which have replaced them» (Agonie, 33); «The restoration of paganism will save the
species» (Confession, 62). With regard to eternal life, he declared: «the very idea of
relieving my needs for thousands of years immediately makes me dissent with
revealed religions» (Confession, 203).

Upon reading these virulent diatribes, which are rather offensive toward the French
and the Christians, sometimes I wonder, divided between indignation and fascination,
how far my situation as a reader could be symmetrical to that of a Jew reading
Céline’s Trifles for a Massacre. Regarding that, I must observe that Caraco, in spite of
his little sympathy toward anti-Semites («The anti-Semite is a brute, he eats grass on
all fours», Agonie, 141), seems to have a certain esteem for Céline, whom he
considered a «true born writer», a «possessed man», in opposition to the mere «man
of letters, the ape of inspiration», which he saw in Camus (Agonie, 85).

His style has the trenchant tone of intolerance, and an archaic syntax, which is
sometimes endeared with a precious mien, such as his tic of using old fashioned
negations without the word «pas», which doesn’t please everyone. He has whims, for
instance, the expression «we lack a thesis about...» He knew how to avoid the tricks
of slang and didn’t overuse exclamation marks.

«A good book is an exercise of thought and style», he noted (Homme de Lettres, 262),
and without a doubt he gave us good books. One will see that I am far from
subscribing to all of his ideas, or sharing his tastes. But I do not want to give the
impression that I like to read him only to savour his fulgurant style, or laugh at the
delirious exaggerations of a cantankerous prophet. He forgot, as we say, to be a fool;
his pages are also valuable for their truthfulness. I don’t think he was mistaken in
remarking that pollution and overcrowding are our primary problems, even more
nowadays, and that they are connected. He cast against the literature and the arts of
his time a thousand pertinent traits. He has penetrating views on psychology.

He was quite a biophobe: he didn’t love life and wasn’t particularly attracted by sex,
seeing himself as a «civil monk» (Agonie, 16), admiring the celibacy of priests
(Confession, 200): «desire has nothing honourable about it, pleasure has nothing
sublime» (Agonie, 248); «I am a puritan and I despise debauchery» (author’s English,
Incertitude, 142). He resumes: «No cat, no dog, no lover, no woman», and then
pontificates: «The company of females, I confess, bores me; almost all of them seem
ugly and stupid» Confession, 164); («Have I ever had a taste for boys? I don’t know
anything about that, and I am not all curious about these discoveries» (Confession,
50). Has he ever known love? Sometimes he says no, sometimes he confesses to
some encounters: «I have had very few relations of experience with women, usually
poor street women» (Agonie, 89); «those rare creatures whom I payed to overpower
didn’t heat up my blood» (Confession, 50). Sexual desire was unbearable to him: «The
last drop of misery: carnal temptation!» he confided in May 1963, «I will strangle
myself from rage!» (Agonie, 191). When these crises happen, «I need to relieve
myself» (Confession, 26 & 56), seeking «shameless and brief self-abuse» (Agonie,
238), following the example of «misanthropic philosophers who preferred their own
hands to the legs of the ladies» (Agonie, 67). And sometimes he becomes hard and
harsh: «I hate my phallus more than everything else, and a thousand times more...
I’ve burnt it, I’ve cut it, I’ve sliced it» (Agonie, 135).

Among his rare positive aspirations one will note the discreet but recurrent
expression of his love for the country and the garden. He says three times in Ma
Confession: «I wish I could live in the countryside and have a house in the middle of a
garden and spend my evenings working the earth» (27); «I would really like to have a
house in the country and be able to write in a garden, of which I would be the owner»
(122); «I have always desired to live in the country and I have always lived in the
stench and the noise of cities» (254). The same idea is found in his Semainiers: «I only
wish to breathe the air of the country and to work in a silent garden, I hate Paris»
(Agonie, 132); «If I was asked about the nature of my preferences, I would humbly say
that I would like to have a house with a garden, on the border of an old city» (1969,
151).

«I have some wishes to be translated» he declared (Agonie, 81), but judging that
«most translations deviate from the original, according to the inanity and the lowness
of our interpreters» (Homme de Lettres, 156), he prayed: «Lord, grant me faithful
translators» (Agonie, 259). What would be his opinion of me, a poor laborious goy,
first as his reader and then as his translator, I can’t imagine.

He was a solitary man. «I witness, alone in my room, as an isolated man, a man

walled up, a man who chokes and who will die in the dark» ... «My audience is the
walls of my room» (Agonie, 258, 274). His bitterness was so great that he didn’t think
little of himself: «My book will blow up like a bomb over Europe» ... «When I am dead,
it will be the remains of a giant that will be suddenly found surrounded by French
ants» (Agonie, 248, 256). Indeed, he was everything a man could be, except a
homunculus.
“Heaven is Empty” — Death Invocations by Albert Caraco

[Source: Michael Voelkel, Anbruch Magazin, 2020]

Rien ne va plus!

Albert Caraco always wanted to die. But first, he intended to await his parents' death,
a consideration rarely found within his philosophy.

In a last letter to his publisher, he is said to have announced that after his father's
death, which was expected soon, he would follow him into death by his own hand.
His mother had already died, and so he killed himself in Paris on September 7, 1971.

“For me, nothingness has charms that the abortions that populate this place could
never have and never will have. I thank heaven that I live here; leaving this world
doesn't take any effort.”

So he writes in a kind of epilogue for his "Breviary of Chaos.” These lines are not a
final declaration of love for Paris but rather a declaration of the decay of this city
which he not only registered astutely and sharply but which he regarded as the only
correct course of events. In this sentence, he also summarized his nihilistic philosophy
and indicated his obsessions and idiosyncrasies. They all revolve around the
irreversibility, the aporia of things, and a fateful, redeeming catastrophe, which the
disgusted man not only foresaw with captivating intuition but also longed for with
downright necrophilic passion. Death remains the only path to salvation open to the
modern world, and Caraco was imbued with it.

Born in 1919 in today's Istanbul as the son of wealthy Sephardic Jews, Albert Caraco
and his family came to Uruguay via Prague, Berlin and Rio de Janeiro, where he then
took on Uruguayan citizenship. In 1946 the family returned to Paris. Caraco hardly
takes part in working life, despite commercial training. Withdrawn into his private
retreat, he devotes himself to his confused and outstanding thinking, the
compendium of which is available in the “Breviary of Chaos.”
Breviary is the name of the book of hours for the Roman Catholic secular clergy,
which is to be prayed upon regularly. As in monasticism, the hours of the day are to
be dedicated to God in prayer. God, in turn, allows the clergy to step out of mundane
life in these moments and places the day's work on its transcendent horizon.

When Albert Caraco calls his work a breviary (at one point also calls it a manifesto),
he explicitly gives it a spiritual consecration and derives authority from it. Not without
reason and not without vanity, he describes himself at one point as an unheard
prophet who only writes for a tiny minority of chosen ones who should stand out
from their environment.

Nevertheless, in his 1987 review in Die ZEIT, Ulrich Horstmann (author of “The
Beast”) warned, despite any other spiritual affinity, against praying after him because
what Caraco reveals there in sections without headings or thematic structure is a
mental rampage.

Man or Mass

Being human has consequences. The course of human existence, especially at the
beginning of the modern age, steers the progress train towards the abyss. Albert
Caraco thus joins the critics of civilization, especially in the subgroup of life skeptics,
which starts with Schopenhauer and becomes increasingly rabid as it progresses, to
end with Lautréamont (also from Uruguay), Philipp Mainländer, or H. P. Lovecraft. The
dynamics that people unleash always carry the aggressions they will no longer be
able to master in the future. Caraco's bitter enmity is especially aimed at them. For
him, being human begins where an awakening to the monstrous reality of all things,
including spiritual ones, takes place. The advocates of every faith protect us from this
awakening. The beginnings may look promising, but in the temporal development,
"the ideas that were played with begin to play with men," says the author, in a
Nietzschean style. The calamity begins with the emergence of faith movements that
could never initiate a fundamental reversal since they also affirmed the consequences
of life in their affirmation of life. For Caraco, these are the destruction of the earth
due to the massification of man, overpopulation, and urbanization. In this context, he
utters sentences like curses:

“Are they humans? No. The mass of the damned is never made up of human beings,
for man only begins at the moment when the mass becomes the tomb of mankind.”
For Caraco, the mass consists only of termites or insects. He denies its human
characteristics as well as the system that has established itself thanks to human
intervention and from which the mass has emerged in immanent logic. There is no
salvation because a supposed salvation itself would come from the system and thus
perpetuate it. The sheer number of those to be healed would oppose it. Caraco
writes:

“Life is no longer sacred from the moment the living take over.”

In the distant future, only a small remnant will have the chance to become human
and survive the coming catastrophe. On the then largely depopulated Earth, he sees a
new order emerging that had already existed before the appearance of established
religions: matriarchy. He trusts the feminine principle alone to carry out a radical
realignment of life. Here one finds the only positive accents in his work. One reads
them like a breathing space between his dark aphorisms. However, one cannot avoid
the preceding catastrophe.

The Principle of Hopelessness

Albert Caraco's eschatology is shaped entirely by the approaching catastrophe. Chaos

is in the role of the awaited Messiah; death in that of a deity. To the startled reader,
he shouts:

“The cure is cruel, the disease is even more so.”

As clearly as he has named the problem of overpopulation, even at the price of a

racist undertone that can hardly be overheard, he remains vague in his description of
the decisive catastrophe. Its rank is comparable to that of the Kingdom of God in the
Gospels. In it, he places his sadomasochistic hopes for the end of a world that
repelled him and dehumanized or had to dehumanize man, including those who
think. He sees death as an impartial objectifier for whom man is nothing more than
"one thing" among many others. He was more likely to confide in Death than in a
personal God, whom he wanted to judge in a Gnostic manner solely based on his
creation. Since this had failed thoroughly or had to fail depending on the situation, he
could, at best, assume an abysmal evil god. Death would also free him from his evil.

Albert Caraco has a predilection for everything that pushes people into solitude and
leaves them there. In this loneliness, one finds oneself in a colorful society of onanists
or homosexuals, anarchists, non-conformists, and all sorts of other sinners against
human society. At the end of his breviary, he sings his praises to them in the style of
the Sermon on the Mount and inspires them in his own way:

“Heaven is empty, and you shall be orphans to live and die as free men.”
Requiem for Caraco (Excerpt)

[Source: Axel Matthes, Vierundzwanzigste Etappe - Almanach für Politik, Kultur &
Wissenschaft, Bonn, 2018/2019, p.63-65]

Every human and ordinary mortal has an individual mind if given the chance.
Everything else is animal husbandry. Socialism has always been about forcing people
to do things (the Sparta model), which doesn't mean people can't decide to work
together independently. If there were a Groucho Marx party, many people would
probably join it. I like faces like Caraco's that show the scars of war, for they are quite
rare. The others are faces of surrender. People like Albert Caraco, a writer who thinks,
will only find the resistance movement somewhat interesting. One doesn't need to
read him as much as say his name to get things done (a characteristic of the fetishism
of culture). Albert Caraco, a "maudit" on the German cultural market, has already
published his Satyricon "Supplement to the Psychopathia Sexualis." His thoughts don't
submit to the guards of political correctness' tyranny, and this book doesn't stop at
any taboo on the subject. The author who wrote the "Breviary of Chaos'' was a
pessimist with contradictions; he always felt melancholic about life. At the same time,
he wrote militant pieces with the mood of a free-spirited rogue. From Caraco's point
of view, our species is incapable of self-perfection, but we can dress it up. Caraco has
little faith in man, the homo informatics, but favors the machine no less. In some
areas, the automaton is more "competent" than the brain. But to compare it with
human intelligence would be to measure heterogeneous realities against each other.
The spirit cancels out the mechanics; we can choose to be human.

As an anti-patriarchy misogynist, Caraco knew that pain is everywhere, that illusion is

reborn in each generation, and that kisses prolong it. Was he unhappy, then? Caraco:
"As a Jew, I obviously should be, and most Jews are, which is why they display
excessive optimism. Their thirst for life is reminiscent of a hanged man's erection, and
I'm not opposed to believing that it springs from the same source…."

Albert Caraco (1919-1971) was born in Constantinople as the son of Jews who had
fled the Spanish Inquisition. He and his family made their way to South America via
Prague, Berlin, and Paris. A nomad against his will, he settled in Paris after 1945 with
an Argentine passport; despite his studies in economics, he devoted himself entirely
to writing and philosophy from age twenty-five. The multilingual stylist, despised by
the French, paid for his printing in Switzerland and the French translation of his
works. Eighteen volumes of his writings have been published since then.
Caraco lived out of courtesy for the sake of his parents. After the death of his mother,
he wrote her a bizarre book, "Post mortem," as he called this collection of fragments.
A record of the deepest depths of the soul, reflecting the tropical luxury of love,
non-love, hatred, dependence, and passion. In his "Confession," his last will, Caraco
describes in detail the why and when of his future departure. Although frivolity
tempted him (see his amusing "Supplement to the Psychopathia Sexualis"), he
considered himself incapable of living it: "I reproach my mother for having robbed me
of my masculine nature — a trifle perhaps, but still…." Finally, Caraco addresses the
German reader in our language (translated into English): "The instinct is carrier and
destroyer; it carries the species and destroys man, but most don't deserve to escape
the doom, and therefore asceticism seems a mere presumption when paired with
nothingness. The denial of the instinct leads to madness, acceptance mostly to
shallowness; art alone saves us from both and inevitably remains the best answer;
religion too if it glorifies lust."

However, because writing was more important to him than everything else, he
devoted his life to it and had no impact until his father passed away. Barely a day
later, he took barbiturates and cut his throat; both corpses were found lying on each
other. Death and the resulting finiteness in the sense of Heidegger? Of course, all
metaphysics must include death, the threshold of the urge to survive at all costs, even
as a sentimental longing. Ceronetti claims that what is visible in Eros, as in death, is
only the surface; Rolf-Dieter Brinkmann, too, could only have found solace outside of
planet Earth (by leaving the world); in his diary, he admits to writing from the "back
of the star." According to the psychoanalytic classification, Caraco suffered from an
extreme attachment to his mother. However, it does depend on who is "neurotic" and
what the person can make out of it. Uncommunicated sexuality — the absence of
social norms in communication — has been the catalyst for the extraordinary
intensity of the writings of Lautréamont, Emily Dickinson, Pessoa, Kafka, and Artaud.
Is it acting as a ferment for irreducible otherness? It's well known that one cannot
read that literature without even the slightest resistance. However, in addition to the
ascetics, writers like Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Ezra Pound, Gottfried Benn, etc.,
display virility behavior. Only Bataille didn't deceive himself or us regarding eroticism.

At times Caraco wrote German, and his German reveals that he greatly appreciated
Stefan George, Rudolf Borchardt, and Martin Heidegger. Nevertheless, Caraco
remained a loner, free of gestures of ingratiation or inbred text destruction
(Deconstruction of Academics). To believe that he is not something fundamentally
different for our tastemakers than for our own is an illusion. Caraco's Frankophobia
referred to today's France, not that of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; he
preferred Fontenelle to Léon Bloy, admired the Prince de Ligne, abhorred the
Surrealists, and never liked Transmontanism. In the 1960s, he wrote to Cioran: "We,
who are similarly unknown," nevertheless, from a Romance point of view, for
example, that of Italian and French augurs, his work appears equal to that of Sándor
Márai, Porchia, Pasolini, Ceronetti, and Cioran. Instead of garlands of phrases or
tinkering, Caraco writes clear, factual sentences and likes to shoot from the hip
against hopeful delusions. He criticizes political naivete and opportunism, avoids
stating unalterable realities, and is aware that many of the most significant ideas had
been expressed centuries earlier.

Hasn't Caraco remained an alien? Only the genius lives on the entire planet; life
doesn't have an infinite duration: the fall into the sun is the "future." Indeed, much
can be found in his works that could serve as a cure for our modern poisoning,
assuming that this cure must contain the poison itself…
The Apocalyptic Nihilism of Albert Caraco

[Source: Roland Jaccard, Causeur, 2013]

1. What's the point of playing Prophet?

Albert Caraco was a courteous man, approving of all foolishness and refraining from
appearing more learned or wittier than he was. That's how he described himself and
how he appeared to me when I met him in Lausanne, at L'Âge d'Homme, at the end
of the 1960s. Back then, he was living with his father at the Beau-Rivage Palace and
publishing in Switzerland, leaving French critics unaware of his works.

This faded, almost insignificant man carried a secret with him, a secret that I am only
now discovering, almost forty years after his death: that he created a piece of work so
ferocious, devastating, and prophetic that one had to be mentally disturbed to
succumb to it. He himself, he believed, could be its only consenting victim.

Caraco lived in the shadow of death, and his father, "Monsieur Père," was the last link
that bound him to life. As he watched him sleep, he thought that if he didn't wake up
one fine morning, he would follow him willingly. He didn't want to follow in his
footsteps. "Ah, how horrible old age is! I'd rather die seven times," he wrote. A few
hours after the death of "Monsieur Père," he hanged himself, thus giving his work a
seal of authenticity that no one really cared about.

Caraco considered sexual pleasure to be slavery, which led him to continence. The
very idea of having children repelled him. "If there were a bit of logic in people's
minds," he wrote, "a man with six children would be a criminal, for it’s the same thing
to have either six convictions or six babies." He also mocked maternal love, a
prejudice that should be rid of as soon as possible for the sake of intellectual hygiene,
as he did in his sublime book, Post Mortem, which begins as follows: "Madame Mère
is dead. I had forgotten her for quite a long time, but her end brings her back to my
memory, if only for a few hours. Let's meditate on that before she returns to oblivion. I
wonder if I really loved her, and I am forced to answer: no." He has been blamed for
these paradoxes, which would soon become commonplace.

It goes without saying that Caraco's love of life is reminiscent of a hanged man's
erection. And he expects death to free him from a life he despises as much as he
hates it. Rarely has a discreet, courteous, and cultured man expressed feelings of
such violence in such chaste language.
Caraco's suicide went as unnoticed as his books. He was not a man of despair. He was
despair itself. If I passed him by, like many others, it was because his racist remarks
became unbearable, and the preciosity of his style put me off.

After collaborating with the Germans, he said that France had chosen the wrong side
for the second time in a generation, that of the Arab nations, out of inveterate hatred
of the Jews. "What France doesn't forgive the people of Israel," he wrote, "is that they
have found the path of honor and have not capitulated as they did. At the moment
when the Jews have become a military nation, France will have ceased to be one. […]
For many years now, the miserable editors of Le Monde are diligently erring, and
whatever they write appears to be intended more often for the Arabs than for the
French. They are Arabizing the French; they will soon negrify them..." To be sure, my
friend Cioran had more or less the same thoughts in his private life. Like Caraco, he
was not far from thinking that the Arabs were a people in excess, devoured by
fanaticism, for whom castration would be a charity. Both of them were indeed
readers of Oswald Spengler, whereas I read Salut les Copains and Playboy. Freud
came later.

I didn't like their racism at all, but like them, I had no doubt that tolerance was a
deception and respect a form of hypocritical delusion. As for brotherhood, Caraco
wrote in his Breviary of Chaos that we forget a little too easily that those on the other
side are beggars and avengers, ugly, unhealthy, vicious, cruel, and despotic, more
treacherous than the worst among us and more mendacious than our most resolute
sophists. I agreed with him. He was aiming at Sartre, of course, and with him at all the
counterfeiters of a more righteous world.

2. Nietzsche's Heir

Nothing could be further from the truth than to imagine Albert Caraco as a grumpy
old man, living in isolation and nurturing a rather rancid vision of the world out of
bitterness.

He was born in Constantinople on July 8, 1919, into a family of Jewish bankers.

Anxious to give their only son the most cosmopolitan education possible, his parents
took him successively to Vienna, Prague, Berlin, and then Paris, where he studied
humanities at Janson-de-Sailly, before being forced into exile in Latin America, where
he obtained, not without difficulty, Uruguayan citizenship, which he kept until he died
in 1971. Like Cioran, he wrote equally in German, Spanish, English, and French,
tasting civilizations at their peaks: 18th-century France, Ming China, and, of course,
the England of the great eccentrics, especially Dr. Samuel Johnson, as well as the
Germany of the philosophers. Caraco considered himself the heir of Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche. He did not doubt that one day, a distant day to be sure, the French
would end up adoring him, just as the Germans had adored Nietzsche: "Don't the
Germans love Nietzsche? I write French like Nietzsche writes German; I feel like the
philosopher's heirloom, and tomorrow I'll be called the prophet's legatee," he wrote in
his book My Confession. Has this long-awaited day finally arrived? Most likely.

Caraco was unheard. But now, he is on the verge of becoming the European author
par excellence: a calmly and coldly atheistic thinker who has no illusions about
anything, treating God as a monster, theologians as the architects of torture
chambers, and Kant as the author of a masterpiece of naivety with his project of
"Perpetual Peace."

3. Cioran before Cioran

Like those of Cioran, Caraco's thoughts revolve tirelessly around the same obsessions:
suicide, extermination, racism, the decline of the West, religion, the disadvantage of
being born, chastity and lust... Weininger, Wittgenstein, and Karl Kraus are his
brothers in arms.

If Cioran is a worldly hermit, Caraco is an outcast. If one pretends not to adhere to his
delusions, the other keeps plunging into them and, sometimes, even drowning in
them.

Cioran understood that in France, he would have to play a double game to survive. He
proceeds masked, concealing a past as a young Romanian fascist that would
otherwise discredit him. Caraco, on the other hand, doesn't hide his game… which is
why no one else wants to play with him. Even Cioran will keep Caraco away. One
should read Louis Nucera's memoirs in Mes ports d'attache; he is one of the few
admirers, along with Raphaël Sorin, of this imprecator, who is disqualified less by the
excess of his words than by the fact that he doesn't make a mockery of them.
However, he doesn't lack humor. His Supplement to the Psychopathia Sexualis of
Krafft-Ebing proves it quite well.

Caraco didn't compromise; his suicide, at the age of 54, in total solitude, was the
logical conclusion of his apocalyptic nihilism. Whereas Cioran will be buried with
great pomp in an Orthodox church, a conclusion no less logical given his frivolous
nihilism.
As I conclude this article, I wonder why I found Caraco abhorrent in my youth and
why I now consider him more fraternal — more frank, in any case — than all those
who profess a humanism of facade.

I'll leave it to you to answer for me.

II. Breviary of Chaos:

[Source: Bréviaire du chaos, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 1982]

“Our most terrifying fears and our innermost secret desires for extermination are
reflected in this elegant and profound book, without any sort of leniency to attenuate
the disgust and hopelessness we feel when faced with a humanity constantly
atrophied by a series of values and practices that lead to chaos.”

(Editorial text of the Spanish version)

English Translation:
“We strive towards death like an arrow towards its target, and we never miss. Death
is our only certainty, and we always know that we will die, no matter where, when,
or how. The idea of eternal life is nonsense, eternity is not life, death is the rest we
seek, life and death are intertwined, and those who demand something else ask for
the impossible and will earn nothing but smoke.

We, who are not satisfied with empty words, consent to disappear, and we rejoice in
our fate. We didn't choose to be born, and consider ourselves fortunate to have
nowhere to outlive this life, which was imposed upon us rather than given — a life
full of sorrows and pains with dubious or harmful pleasures.

What does it prove that a man is happy? Happiness is an exception, and we are only
concerned with the laws of the species. It's from them that we derive our reflections;
they are what we meditate on and deepen. We despise whoever seeks miracles, and
we are not hungry for beatitudes. Our evidence is sufficient for us, and our
superiority is not to be found elsewhere.” [P. 6]

“We all die alone and with the whole of our being; these are two truths that most
people refuse to accept, for most slumber as long as they live, fearing to wake up at
the moment of their own demise.” [Fragment, P. 7]

“The cities we inhabit are schools of death because they are inhuman. Each has
become a den of noise and stench. Each has become a chaos of buildings where we
amass ourselves by the millions, losing our life's purpose.

Unfortunates, with no escape, we feel that we have put ourselves, willingly or not, in
the labyrinth of the absurd, from which we will only emerge dead, for our destiny is
to multiply without end, only to perish in great numbers. With each turn of the
wheel, the cities we inhabit advance imperceptibly towards each other, aspiring to
merge into an absolute chaos of noise and stench. With each turn of the wheel, the
price of land rises, and in the labyrinth that devours free space, the revenue from
investments builds hundreds of walls, day after day.

Since money must work and the cities we inhabit must progress, it's still legitimate
for their houses to double in height with each generation, even if they lack water
every two days. The builders only seek to escape the fate they are preparing for us by
fleeing to the countryside.” [P. 8]

“The world has closed as it was before the Great Discoveries. The year 1914 marks
the advent of the Second Middle Ages, and we find ourselves in what the Gnostics
called the "prison of the human race", in a finite universe from which we will never
escape.

The optimism that had been the lot of so many Europeans for four centuries is gone.
Fatality returns to history, and we suddenly wonder about where we are heading and
the why of what is happening to us. The beautiful faith of our fathers in limitless
progress, leading to a more human life, has vanished. We go round in circles, and are
unable to comprehend our works, which means that our works are surpassing us and
that the world, transformed by man, is once again beyond his intelligence.

We are building more than ever under the shadow of death; death will be the heir of
our splendor, and the hour of exposure is approaching, where our traditions will fall
one by one, like clothes, leaving us naked to be judged, naked on the outside and
empty on the inside, the abyss beneath our feet, the chaos above our heads.” [P. 9]

“Men are both free and bound, more free than they desire and more bound than
they realize. The masses of mortals are made up of sleepwalkers, and order never
has an interest in waking them up from their slumber, for they would become
ungovernable. Order is not a friend of men; it only rules them, rarely civilizes them,
and even more rarely humanizes them.

Since order is not infallible, it is up to war to one day remedy its faults, and as order
continues to multiply them, we are heading towards war; war and the future seem
inseparable. This is the only certainty: death is, in a word, the meaning of everything,
and man is but a thing in the face of death, as are nations. History is a passion, and its
victims are legion. The world we live in is hell moderated by nothingness, where man,
refusing to know himself, prefers to sacrifice himself like an animal species that has
become too numerous - similar to swarms of locusts and armies of rats - believing
that it is more sublime to perish, to perish innumerable times, than to finally
reconsider the world he inhabits.” [P.10]

“Our youth feels condemned and that's why the universities are in turmoil. They are
right, we are wrong, and we are preparing another war for them. Order and war are
linked, and our morality is well aware of this fact. Simply looking at the teachings of
the great moralists is enough to realize this; such is the only certainty, and we cannot
imagine a state of permanent peace because order would not be able to withstand it.
Our youth has come to understand this coexistence of order and war; they have
grasped the connection between their own misfortunes and our values - a discovery
that is now irreversible. However, the real paradox is that while our youth is right,
they are also wrong because in this world, under the threat of uniformity, peoples are
not contemporaries of one another. There are still many nations where the youth are
willing to sacrifice themselves.
Do our young people believe that simply declaring peace down here will be enough
for the world to listen? We are in hell, and the only choice we have is to be the
damned who are tortured or the devils who are in charge of their punishment.” [P.
11]
“The century is dying, and death is upon us. We possess enough means to kill each
man forty times. We no longer know what to do with our weapons. Buildings are no
longer sufficient for us. We are already hollowing out the mountains, and our tools of
death are accumulating in the depths of the earth.
Our ecumene seems like an arsenal, and tens of millions of men are toiling for war.
We no longer imagine breaking this temperament, where morality and interests have
formed an alliance. Our youth will pay the price of this paradox tomorrow. They feel
it, they rebel against it, but we cannot promise them a miracle, nor do we dare to
lecture them. We know that they are already condemned and that revolutions will
not change their fate.
It's too late. History no longer stops, and we are being carried along by it. The
inclination of its plans forbids us to hope for any slowdown. We are heading for a
planetary catastrophe, and the universe is full of people who desire it and will
increasingly do so in order to escape the order - an increasingly absurd order that is
maintained only at the expense of coherence and, therefore, man's humanity.” [P. 12]
“We live for death, love for death, and give birth and toil for death. Our works and
days now follow one another in the shadow of death. The discipline we adhere to,
the values we uphold, and the plans we make all lead to one end: death.
Death will harvest us when we are ripe, and we mature for it. Our descendants,
reduced to no more than a handful of men on the surface of an ecumene in ashes,
will not cease to curse us as they burn everything we worship. We worship death
under borrowed guises, unaware that it is him. Our wars are sacrifices of glory in
which we dedicate ourselves to death, our morality is a school of death, and the
virtues we uphold will never have been anything but virtues of death. We cannot
escape this; we cannot change the order of the world. We are condemned to bear
what crushes us and to rely on what shatters us. We have no choice but to perish or
to kill before we die ourselves, even if we are the last. A third way, I say it explicitly, is
impossible.” [P.13]
“The hell that we carry within us corresponds to the hell of our cities. Our cities are
reflections of our own mental content. The will to death presides over our fury to live,
and we are unable to distinguish which one motivates us. We blindly throw ourselves
into the same work over and over again, boasting about climbing the highest
mountains. Excess has taken hold of us, and without truly understanding ourselves,
we keep building.
Soon, the world will be nothing but a construction site where billions of blind men,
resembling termites, will toil like automatons amidst noise and stench until they can
no longer breathe. Then they will finally awaken, succumb to madness, and begin to
slit each other's throats without weariness.” [Fragment, P. 14]
“One day, if people want to know who our true gods were, they will have to judge us
based on our works and never on our principles. Then the answer will be clear, and
they will say what we have kept unspoken and even avoided thinking: "they
worshipped madness and death.” In fact, we worship nothing else, but we cannot
always admit it, because madness and death are the ultimate fulfillment of the
revealed religions, and these religions, especially the Christian faith, contain them in
power.” [Fragment, P. 15]

“Ideas are more alive than men; it is through ideas that men live, and it is for them
that they will die without a murmur. Now all our ideas are deadly; none of them obey
the laws of objectivity, measure, or coherence, and we who perpetuate these ideas
march towards death like automatons.” [Fragment, P. 16]

“We prefer catastrophe to reform; we choose to sacrifice ourselves rather than

rethink the world, and we will rethink it only in the midst of ruins.” [Fragment, P. 16]

“I raise a lament for those who are doomed to perish, and in the face of our
hypocritical regents, mitra-adorned charlatans, and scientists, most of whom are
immature, I, the lonely and unacknowledged prophet of my generation, walled up
alive in silence instead of being burned at the stake, utter the ineffable words that
tomorrow's youth will repeat in chorus.

My only consolation is that in the future, the regents, the charlatans, and the scholars
will die with us. There shall be no cellars left for these damned to escape the
catastrophe, no island in the ocean to offer them refuge, nor a desert to swallow
them up with their wealth and loved ones.

Together we will float into the darkness of no return, and the Shadow Realm will
receive us - us and our absurd gods, us and our criminal values, us and our ridiculous
hopes. Then, and only then will justice be done, and we will be remembered as a
model not to be imitated under any circumstances. We will serve as a warning to
future generations, and they will come to contemplate the horrific remains of our
cities, these daughters of chaos, born of what order!” [P. 17]

“Our masters have always been our enemies, and now more than ever; they are
mistaken, as it is their fault that we are so numerous. For centuries and millennia,
they have only sought to multiply their subordinates in order to enslave them and
lead them to death.

Even today, as the world is bursting and people are running out of space, their dream
is to build fifty-story buildings and industrialize the world under the pretext of
meeting the needs of billions of people yet to be born, because they always need
more living beings, regardless of their protestations. They systematically organize the
hell in which we burn, and to prevent us from thinking, they offer us idiotic
spectacles where our sensitivity is barbarized and our minds will eventually dissolve
into nothingness. They will sanctify these games by indulging in their madness with
all due pomp.

We are returning to the circus of Byzantium, and there we forget our real problems,
but without these problems forgetting us. We will be reminded of them tomorrow,
and we already know that we will go to war once they have become unsolvable.” [P.
18]

“One day, we will drink the water from the poles, whose pack ice will serve our
needs. One day, we will be able to turn everything into delicious food. One day, the
mountains of waste will sink into the bowels of the earth through the cracks in the
ocean floor. One day, we will no longer need to work to live, and will spend our time
with distractions. One day, we will colonize all the planets, one by one.

These fairy tales are told at a time when three-quarters of humanity are living worse
than our dogs or cats, with no hope to escape their misery, while the remaining
quarter, to whom unlimited abundance is promised, has every reason to doubt the
reality of these miracles. For one war is all it would take for the end to spread rapidly
over the surface of this planet in successive waves, and for the survivors of
unmitigated horror to once again suffer under the yoke of former poverty.”
[Fragment, P. 19]

“If there is a God, chaos and death will appear among His attributes; if there is none,
nothing changes, for chaos and death will last until the end of time. No matter what
we praise, we are all victims of shadow and dissolution; no matter what we worship,
we will avoid nothing. The good and the bad have only one common destiny, a single
abyss that takes in saints and monsters. The idea of right and wrong has never been
anything but a delusion to which we cling for reasons of convenience.

In truth, the source of religious and moral ideas lies within man himself; seeking for it
outside of man is nonsense. Man is a metaphysical animal who wishes the universe
existed only for his own sake, but the universe knows nothing of this, and man
consoles himself for this ignorance by populating space with gods, gods made in his
own image. Thus, we manage to live contendly with empty reasons, but these
beautiful and comforting reasons collapse once our eyes are opened to the death and
chaos that always surround and threaten our lives. Faith is nothing but a vanity
among vanities and the art of deceiving man about the nature of this world.” [P. 20]

“The nature of this world is all-encompassing indifference.” [Fragment, P. 21]

“Catastrophe is forever the only school where the unworthy will be taught the lessons
that their stupidity and madness deserve.” [Fragment, P. 21]
“We cannot turn sleepwalkers into seers, nor can we make the blind-born taste the
light; the law of order is that the mass of the damned will not be saved, and that they
will console themselves over their disappearance by bearing children to the point of
exhaustion, in order to become countless and tirelessly provide a legion of victims.”
[Fragment, P. 21]
“We need a new revelation, for the previous ones are obsolete or, even worse,
sources of disorder. We are heading towards death with the support of all moral
authorities. With the blessing of all religious authorities, we are marching towards
universal death, and nothing can stop us. Our traditions urge us to do so, and our
values as well as our interests push us in the same direction. Never before has there
been such unanimity. The earth is the altar of sacrifice, and humanity, caught in a
state of frenzy, climbs up to offer itself while trampling on those who denounce the
fraud.” [Fragment, P. 23]
“The altar of sacrifice is smoking, and our race will feed it, feed it with cries of love, in
the hope of escaping the inhuman situation in which it finds itself.” [Fragment, P. 23]
“We cannot avoid the disaster or its logical consequences. We are doomed to endure
the course of events, some predictable, and others unpredictable. We will not stop
the movement that carries us along: men will continue to impregnate, women to give
birth, and everything will be put to work to feed the mass of the damned, mortgaging
the future.
Our descendants, reduced to a tiny fraction of humanity, will inherit a devastated
world whose beauty will be nothing but a memory. It will take centuries to restore it,
and they will limit their population to allow the land to rest and the waters to be
purified. They will take care not to violate the ecumene or seek gods and their laws.
They will no longer sacrifice reality for the illusion of transcendence. They will remain
faithful to the earth, forcing heaven to sanctify it.” [Fragment, P. 26]

“We become more and more conservative and end up holding on to the most
obsolete and shameful traditions. Our revolutions are purely verbal, and we change
the words to give the illusion that things are changing.” [Fragment, P. 30]
“The supreme duty is to return to the origin, or else man will perish. The few great
thinkers worthy of the name are occupied with ontology and etymology in order to
restore metaphysics, while small minds, anxious to keep up with the times, sink into
the contemplation of the social, that subaltern detail.
For society is nothing but a form; its content is the mass of the damned; it's the mush
of spermatic sleepwalkers; it's an infinitely contemptible matter which the
philosopher doesn't bother himself with.” [Fragment, P. 32]
“The catastrophe is necessary, the catastrophe is desirable, the catastrophe is
legitimate, the catastrophe is predetermined. Without it, the world will not renew
itself, and if the world does not renew itself, it will disappear with the humans who
pollute it.
Humans have spread over the universe like a disease, and the more they multiply, the
more they denature it. They believe they serve their gods by becoming more
numerous, and their merchants and religious leaders approve of their fertility; the
former because it enriches them and the latter because it accredits them.
Scientists may sound the alarm, but their voices are almost always silenced. The
interests of morality and commerce form an unbreakable alliance, and money and
spirituality do not allow the movement to stop. Merchants want consumers, priests
want families, and war frightens them less than depopulation. Merchants and priests
are the strongest supporters of the order of death.
Mankind will have to remember this conspiracy, and when misfortune has become its
daily bread, it must punish those who, for the sake of their mere existence, abandon
it to chaos.” [P. 33]
“The only remedy for misery lies in the sterility of the miserable, but the order of
death, the order of priests and merchants, doesn't even allow us to speak of it.
Merchants and priests seek to enrich themselves and maintain their domination.
They want monetary gain and moral authority, which they obtain from our stupidity,
because our disillusionment would be their end, just as it would be the end of misery.
Our traditions are obsolete, and those who defend them are criminals. Those who
preach obedience to us do so with the intention of perpetuating their power, even if
it means our death.
Our duty is to desecrate what they worship, for without desecration there can be no
change, and the longer we delay change, the greater the misery and suffering we will
endure. Now, I speak to everyone, and declare to the mass of the damned that they
can escape their misery if they refuse to be faceless victims. From now on it is
necessary to dry up the sources of life and to realize that there is no greater vice in
this world than that of being poor, for every poor person becomes a criminal the
moment they bear another child in poverty, giving misery a new host.” [P. 34]
“We must fundamentally overhaul the status of the family, for traditional families are
proliferating, and all moralists have praised them. We want to hold these moralists to
their word, and by making fertility a criminal act, we will one day triumph over this
crime and upset the traditional family structure. Furthermore, the school of servitude
does not reside elsewhere, which is why tyrants love traditional families where the
wife is a servant and the children are subordinates, while the father - no matter how
immoral, ridiculous, or vile he may be - is the master of the house and the archetype
of our princes, yes, the living example of our gods and kings!

This arrangement has lasted for too long, and the mass of the damned is its
consequence.” [Fragment, P. 35]
“With a hundred million humans, the Earth would be a paradise, but with the billions
devouring and polluting it, it will become a hell from pole to pole - a prison for the
species, a universal torture chamber, and a cesspool filled with mystical lunatics who
persist in their own filth.” [Fragment, P. 37]

“I'm one of the prophets of my time, and since I have no right to speak, I write down
what I have to say. Madness, stupidity, and ignorance surround me, mixed with lies
and calculation, with virtues supporting both equally. The tragedy of the situation,
which moralists deny, is that the world is overflowing with virtues, and I suspect that
there has never been as many virtues as in modern times.

Despite all these virtues, we are heading towards chaos. So many virtues are not
saving us from universal death, and I wonder if virtues are truly necessary for us to
achieve coherence and objectivity? We are now victims of a system that misleads us
about our interests and sacrifices us for its own, convincing us that its interests are
also ours.

Thus, we all think we are doing the right thing and deceive ourselves, with madness
being our reward and stupidity our climate, where ignorance seems to be the first
duty, so that lies and calculation have a free hand. We are still children and will
remain so as long as the family exists.” [P. 38]

“The family is an institution that we must one day overcome as it no longer has a
right to exist. In most cases, it only serves to increase the population, and the
universe is already overcrowded. Moreover, it is the source of our most questionable
beliefs, and we cannot afford to perpetuate false ideas in the face of works whose
accuracy is frightening. Only eugenic families should be tolerated, and we know that
they are rare; the others will eventually no longer seem desirable to us.” [Fragment,
P. 39]

“In a world threatened by poverty, every poor family contributes to further misery.
Every poor family is already criminal by its very existence.” [Fragment, P. 39]
“It's immorality that will save the world. It's idleness and indolence. It's the rejection
of sacrifice of any kind and the abandonment of militant virtues. It's the contempt of
all that we consider worthy of admiration and the affirmation of frivolity. It's
femininity that will free us from the nightmare into which masculinity leads us and
from which we will never return, because man is the consort of death, death directs
his actions.

War is man's domain and man prepares himself for it; it's his reason for being, and if
we were granted eternal peace again, as it was before history, when woman was both
mistress and priestess, temporal and spiritual power would slip away from him and
he would resign himself to nothingness, the nothingness from which death frees him,
death, the moral order, war and the necessity of militant virtues, the apparatus of
legal barbarism and the establishment of systematic inhumanity.

Man must justify his superiority by organizing catastrophe; at this price he makes
himself indispensable, but how long can we afford to pay this price?” [P. 40]

“Truly, man has no heart; his acts of charity have only been a facade. He must force
himself to be non-violent, and the foundation of the order he establishes is built upon
murder.

The ancient peoples who lived before history were simpler and more gentle than
those who have bequeathed us our empires and traditions; they were ruled by
women, and we judge them as immoral, but that is the reputation that their vain
conquerors, whom we still admire, attributed to them. Man appears to be at a
crossroads, torn between his cruel imperatives and his excesses, and he has no choice
but to prepare for the universal holocaust that will be seen tomorrow as the
culmination of his works.

We will only escape our history by transcending it, and we can only do so with the
help of self-sacrifice. The entire world must become a graveyard, so that the change
in sensitivity can wash it away, otherwise we will not give up; we love our misfortune
more than renewal, and we will always follow those who show us the way of death,
and we will esteem ourselves for doing so.” [P. 41]

“The world will continue to become harsher, colder, darker, and more unjust, and
despite the ensuing chaos, it will also become more methodical. The combination of
systematic thinking and disorder seems to me to be its most indisputable
characteristic; one will never see more discipline and, at the same time, more
meaninglessness, calculation, and paradoxes, and, ultimately, more problems solved,
but completely in vain.” [Fragment, P. 42]

“Since death is the meaning of everything, it is reasonable to assume that history,

having begun, must end. There was a world before history, and it is presumed that
history, being alive, does not have the privilege of eternity, whereas salvation begins
when our history ends.” [Fragment, P. 43]

“The only way to change our cities is by annihilating them, even with all the people
who inhabit them, and the time will come when we will applaud this holocaust.

Then we will no longer hesitate at anything, and there will be a competition to see
who is the most barbaric. We will become priests of chaos and death, and order will
be our victim, which we will sacrifice so that the absurdity ends. We will surpass the
natural plagues by doubling their harmfulness. In this way, we will punish those who
are born unwanted and yet are proud to multiply. We will teach them that life is an
abuse, never a right, and that they deserve to die because they take up too much
space and contribute to the ugliness of a world overloaded with surplus people.

We want to restore, and that is why we plan to destroy. We want to find harmony
again, and that is why we arm chaos with our love. We want to renew everything, and
that is why we will spare nothing. For if the living choose to be like insects, swarming
in darkness, noise, and stench, we are there to stop them and save humanity by
exterminating them.” [P. 44]

"When men come to understand that there is no remedy but death, they will bless
their murderers, for they will no longer have to kill themselves.” [Fragment, P. 45]

“Since all of our problems are unsolvable and new ones constantly arise that we
cannot solve, our will to live, which consumes us, will eventually be exhausted, and
despair will have to follow the criminal optimism that seems to me to be the cancer
of our times.” [Fragment, P. 45]

“No matter what we attempt, it will only lead to further horror, and as we have no
access to rational thought, we will inevitably follow in the footsteps of Icarus' fall or
Phaeton's descent into the abyss.” [Fragment, P. 45]

“Our cities are nightmares, and their inhabitants are beginning to resemble termites.
Everything that is built now is of monstrous ugliness, and we are no longer able to
construct temples, palaces, tombs, triumphal arches, or amphitheaters. At every turn,
the eye is offended, the ear is numbed, and the sense of smell is driven to despair.”
[Fragment, P. 47]

“What is this creation of chance, where life is merely a byproduct and man a
coincidence? What is this natural order where a thousand miscarriages precede a
thousand agonies for a single triumph? Beauty, goodness, justice, and all that we
hold dear are not the reflections of an imaginary Providence - alas! - but rather our
own creation, achieved by our own efforts, and we must not look elsewhere for their
ideals or purposes. They are the fruits of our own superiority, which also shows that
men cannot be equal and that there is an abyss between the mass of the damned,
created in the image of chaos and forever doomed to perish, and the chosen, in
whom dwell light and order.” [Fragment, P. 48]

“Our scientists will fill the world with expensive toys; they are like big boys playing
violently with nature, which we sometimes admire without reason, because the
services they provide are becoming increasingly problematic. We can no longer
predict where this or that discovery will lead us, for it offers as many paths to doom
as it does to human progress.” [Fragment, P. 49]

“Charity is nothing but a fraud, and those who teach it are my enemies. Charity
cannot save a world full of insects who know only how to devour it and pollute it with
their filth. We should not give them any support, nor should we try to fight the
diseases that decimate them. The more of them die, the better, because we will no
longer have to exterminate them ourselves.

We are entering a barbaric future, and we must arm ourselves with their inhumanity
to oppose their incoherence. Our only choice is to fight or to surrender. We must
strike today those who would strike us tomorrow. This is the rule of the game, and
those who ask for mercy would soon punish us if we were to spare them.” [Fragment,
P. 50]

“We neither know how to build, nor to sculpt, nor to paint, and our music is an
abomination, which is why we restore ancient monuments instead of destroying
them, and why we make ourselves conservators of all styles - a double confession of
our impotence.” [Fragment, P. 52]

“We are doomed the moment we overestimate our own power, for a power that fails
to comprehend itself ends up in chaos.” [Fragment, P. 53]

“The hundreds of dead cities that we have resurrected from one end of the universe
to the other will die again, with no possibility of resurrection, and they will be
forgotten, as will our museums and the pieces they contain. All nations will lose their
past, for the human race cannot survive unless this condition is fulfilled. Each must
sacrifice its treasures, its legends, and its hopes.” [Fragment, P. 54]

“How lovely is the avenging chaos, and how beautiful its helper, death! And how
blessed are we to expect them and to know that both are inevitable! Truly, today we
are already the conformists of our future.” [Fragment, P. 56]

“We are already too many to live, not as insects but as human beings. We are
multiplying the deserts by exhausting the land, our rivers have become nothing more
than sewers, and the oceans too are dying. However, faith, morality, order, and
material interests all conspire to condemn us to overpopulation: religions need
believers, nations need defenders, industries need consumers; all the world needs
are children, regardless of what they will become as adults.

We are driven towards collapse and disaster, and the only way we can maintain our
current way of life is by embracing death. Never has there been a more tragic
paradox, never has a more obvious absurdity been seen, and never has the proof that
this world is a creation of chance, life a triviality, and man an accident received
greater general confirmation.

We have never had a Father in Heaven; we are orphans. It's up to us to understand

this, to grow up, to refuse obedience to those who mislead us, and to sacrifice those
who devote us to the abyss. No one will save us; we must do it ourselves.” [P. 58]

Salvation becomes meaningless when billions of people demand it at the same time.
[Fragment, P. 60]

“Our worst enemies are those who speak to us of hope, promising us a future of joy
and light, of work and peace, where our difficulties will be solved and our desires
fulfilled. It costs them nothing to renew their promises, but it costs us infinitely more
to believe them, and all that we gain are illusions.” [Fragment, P. 61]

“Not one of our leaders has the courage to foresee the catastrophe, and even less to
admit it. The categorical imperative of our times is optimism, even when we are on
the edge of the abyss.” [Fragment, P. 63]

“We only know how to barbarize those we claim to educate, leaving them helpless in
the face of life while pretending to prepare them for it.” [Fragment, P. 66]

“The salvation of the human race will take place against the mass; the mass is the
chaos that has taken on a human face and that we will push back into the abyss of its
future works. There will be only individuals left; the mass will disappear and take all
the evil with them.” [Fragment, P. 67]

“Only a few people will survive the final catastrophe, in which the mass of the
damned, born of evil and destined for evil, with which it is of the same essence, will
perish. In the future, humanity will be the precious remnant that will always want to
remain a remnant, and the superstition of numbers will disappear until the end of
time. This will be the lesson of history that will be taken to heart and given priority
over all others: do not be fruitful and multiply; the source of misfortune is fertility.
Beware of exhausting the treasures of the earth and violating its purity. Reject the
fate of an insect and remember those wretched beings who were devoured by the
fire in the billions, who lived amidst filth and consumed their own excrement, five or
six in a room, in countless horrible cities full of noise and stench, where no tree grew.
These were your fathers; remember their degradation and don't follow their example.
Despise their morality and reject their faith (both of which are equally abominable).
They were punished for remaining children and seeking a Father in Heaven. Heaven is
empty, and you shall be orphans to live and die as free men.” [P. 68]

"We carry within us the will to death, over which we have no control. We believe that
we are driven by the will to live, but this very will turns into its opposite and dedicates
us to the abyss.” [Fragment, P. 71]

“We find ourselves surrounded by people of good faith who are ready to die for their
beliefs and will take pride in doing so. However, we know that in most cases, their
beliefs are based on misconceptions, yet it is entirely pointless to enlighten them, as
they will refuse to believe us, especially since their meaning of life is tied to it. The
ideal is almost always a chain of misconceptions, and if we were to eliminate these
misconceptions, we would condemn most men to a meaningless existence, for the
truth is never tailor-made for them.” [Fragment, P. 72]

“It is not utopia that I profess; it is a truth that I foresee.” [Fragment, P. 73]

“The worst is certain, and we are its accomplices. It's a longing for death that
becomes the purpose of life. Thus, we rush towards the inevitable, like those animals
that have become too numerous and only think of killing themselves in great
numbers.” [Fragment, P. 76]

“The mass of the damned has no consciousness and never will possess one. The very
nature of consciousness is to isolate beings, and humans only come together to
escape their consciousness.” [Fragment, P. 77]

“Evil desires men to multiply, for the more men there are, the less they are worth. To
be truly human, man will never be rare enough.” [Fragment, P. 77]

“Life is no longer sacred from the moment the living become too numerous. The lives
of surplus men are no more valuable than those of insects, and soldiers killed in war
are no different in the eyes of those who command them.” [Fragment, P. 79]

On the Day of Judgment, neither hope nor faith shall be forgiven in the face of the
dead they have brought forth and the tormented they have tempted to multiply until
their last breath. [Fragment, P. 80]

“Hope and faith deceive the generations that pass and will deceive the generations
that come, and misery is passed on along with the burden of false beliefs, while the
system watches over the legacy of the ages and feeds on the deaths of the people
who are misled. From time to time a savior appears in the world, but the message of
this savior is never understood, and the system does not hesitate to interpret it
according to its needs. The few who understand what they read rediscover order in
the midst of unspeakable words, for order lets the prophets speak, and when they
are done, it is order that has the last word. It will leave its mark on both hope and
faith: under these conditions, the texts are accepted and their inspiration is
considered infallible. This procedure dates back several millennia and will never
change until the end of time.” [Fragment, P. 81]

“For one country that makes history, there are more than twenty that suffer it.”
[Fragment, P. 85]

“Nationalism is a universal disease whose cure will be the death of its fanatics. We
cannot survive in an increasingly narrow world with such harmful beliefs, and as a
result we will perish. The historian of the future will say that nature has taken
revenge on mankind by instilling in them a spirit of vertigo, and that nationalism is a
frenzy similar to that which plagues animal societies when they become too
numerous.” [Fragment, P. 86]

"Nationalism is the art of consoling the mass that it is nothing but a mass, and
holding up to it the mirror of Narcissus: our future will shatter that mirror.”
[Fragment, P. 87]

“Goodwill needs space, and space is what the world will lack most.” [Fragment, P. 88]

“We are building a temple to fate, honoring it with sacrifices, and the hour is not far
when we will offer ourselves as sacrifices. The world is full of people who dream of
dying and taking the rest of us with them.” [Fragment, P. 90]

Tomorrow there will be nothing but victims, and such is the justice of history.
[Fragment, P. 92]

“Our religions are the cancers of the human race, and we will be cured of them only
through death.” [Fragment, P. 93]

“Tomorrow, death and chaos will celebrate their marriage, and we are already
decorating their tables. It is their feast for which we toil. Our buildings will serve as
centerpieces amidst the flesh of sacrificed, sliced, boiled and roasted peoples, whose
guts will tremble with love before the benevolence of Providence and who, in the
moment of their agony, will contemplate the emptiness they deemed to be divine.”
[Fragment, P. 93]

“We will be punished for not having burned what we worshipped, but our
descendants, after the catastrophe, will worship everything that we have burned.
Then, we will appear as vicious lunatics, our gods as monsters, our dogmas as
horrors, and our imperatives as nightmares. They will wonder if we were not
possessed, and rightly so, for one must be possessed to crawl in front of what we
have worshipped.

Sickness and lies form the content of our mysteries, and the substance of our legends
seems like a feverish delusion, but we will emerge from this spiritual dunghill, made
in the image of our polluted rivers, only shattered. We have become impure by
longing for purity, we have reintroduced human sacrifice, and our confusion is so
severe that we cannot conceive of our actions.

What worse can happen to us now than to continue to exist as we are? Is even the
void adequate for our crimes, and do we not deserve more than a death that is
insufficient to wipe them out? Nothingness is good, nothingness is sacred, and those
who declare nothingness to be bad wish to perpetuate evil and be perpetuated by
evil on Earth.” [P. 95]

“We will sacrifice ourselves for our dead gods and our worm-eaten idols; this act will
give us prestige in our own eyes, and from the moment we bleed for a cause, we
trust it regardless of its content.” [Fragment, P. 100]

“We cannot escape the laws of the species, and those laws, in turn, refer to the laws
that rule animal societies. The key to our behavior will be found in the abyss beneath
our feet, never above our heads. The ideal is the reflection of instinct, even when it
appears as its opposite.” [Fragment, P. 101]

“Man enjoys everything, even offering himself for consumption.” [Fragment, P. 101]

“We expect science to perform miracles, and soon we will demand the impossible
from it, but it is overwhelmed by our needs and will never satisfy them. There are too
many of us asking for paradise on earth, and it is hell that we make inevitable, with
the help of our science, under the sticks of our imbecile pastors. The future will say
that the only clairvoyants were anarchists and nihilists.” [Fragment, P. 102]

“Two generations have sufficed to double the world's population, three to triple it,
and during the fourth it will increase sevenfold. Our religious and moral authorities,
caught off guard, have only been able to babble and try to gain time, obscuring the
core of our problems. They will never be forgiven for this crime, for they will be guilty
in the eyes of the future. They have preferred their own secure power to the
happiness of the human race, and when they could have enlightened the nations and
taught them the spirit of the means, they only served to lead them astray and render
them so miserably helpless that henceforth our impotence knows no equal. That's
why the anarchists and nihilists are right; they are right to spit on the so-called moral
order, the order for chaos in the name of morality.” [Fragment, P. 103]
“Order must be replaced by order, not disorder, and morality by morality, not
immorality, just as faith must be replaced by faith, not mere emptiness, and dead
gods by newborn gods. We don't need agitators; we need prophets. We need
religious geniuses at the height of our times and our works, for all the gods and
beliefs we currently worship are, without exception, obsolete.” [Fragment, P. 104]

“Since most men have not moved beyond early childhood, they require a revelation
for even the smallest acts of their lives. Only the gods have the power to urge them
to be unfruitful when fertility threatens the survival of our species. Neither the
authorities nor entire academies full of respected scientists will ever have the
influence that only the gods can gather. Now, our gods preach neither abstinence nor
fertility; we want nothing of the two. We want the flesh to have the right to its
pleasure, and for that pleasure to be as pleasing to the gods as it is to men. We wish
for the gods to be associated with pleasure, and for men to believe that they are
honoring the gods when they enjoy it. We need a New Revelation, more precisely, a
New Paganism; a New Paganism will save the world, which the so-called revealed
religions lead astray in the labyrinth of their paradoxes - paradoxes that are now
unbearable, illegitimate and absurd. It is fertility, not fornication, that destroys the
universe, it is duty, not pleasure.” [P. 105]

“What I am putting forward may sound inhuman, but the century will become more
and more inhuman, and sermons will not change that. No matter how many men
crowd in the temples, the temples will eventually collapse on the heads of the faithful
in the shadow of a common death.” [Fragment, P. 106]

“No one has told us the truth; there are no more defenders of truth on earth. It is too
difficult to conceive, and those who grasp it are becoming fewer and fewer. This
century has witnessed the death of clear and distinct ideas. We agree on nothing
except implications, conventions, and interests; in all other respects, ambiguities
have free rein. We do not understand each other about anything, and we no longer
believe in anything. To believe in anything today, one has to be delusional. Our most
excellent minds have become tragic, which shows that they no longer have faith.”
[Fragment, P. 109]

“Once people are convinced that their own children will be more unhappy than those
who gave birth to them, and that their grandchildren will be even more unhappy;
once they are convinced that there is no remedy in the universe, that science cannot
work miracles, and that heaven is as empty as their pockets; that all priests are frauds
and all rulers are fools, that all religions are obsolete and all political systems are
impotent; they will abandon themselves to despair and vegetate in disbelief, but they
will die sterile. Sterility seems to be the form of salvation, but without despair and
disbelief, men will never agree to become sterile, and women even less so. Optimism
is what kills us, and optimism is the worst sin of all. The refusal to hope and believe
inevitably leads to the refusal to procreate: this is a correlation that people try to
deny, and even those who want to depopulate the world before it's too late will not
dare to acknowledge it. [P. 112]

“The ignorance of ecology and the contempt for biology are preparing the most tragic
future for the entire species.” [Fragment, P. 114]

“How long will we be allowed to deceive ourselves, to ignore our evidence, in the
hope that the impossible will take place? For man will not be overcome, no matter
what.” [Fragment, P. 115]

“I'm convinced that we will wake up too late and that racism has a future.”
[Fragment, P. 116]

“We speak of brotherhood, but we forget that those on the other side are beggars
and avengers, ugly, unhealthy, vicious, cruel, and despotic. They are more
treacherous than the worst among us and more mendacious than our most resolute
sophists.” [Fragment, P. 118]

“Those ahead are preparing to attack us in the name of an indefensible morality,

under the banners of a condemned order. I ask you all: what shall we oppose these
barbarians with? Tolerance and compliance? They will crush and laugh at us. And if
we approach their armies with flowers and bare hands, preaching peace, they will do
as the Mongols did in the Middle Ages, when thirty unarmed Buddhist pilgrims
offered themselves to their violence, hoping to move their hearts; they exterminated
all of them after a moment of surprise. And if someone were to tell me that the
Mongols have become Buddhists, I would reply that the pilgrims are dead. Since we
must die, let us not offer our throats and die like fools of our sentiments. Instead, let
us prove to our enemies that we are their equals in bravery, and let us treat them as
they would treat us: defeated.” [Fragment, P. 119]

“We will not agree on anything because we will lack everything. We will avoid
neither hunger nor racism. We will only be able to escape the former by
surrendering ourselves to the latter. One day, we will become racists just to eat; we
will be creatures of need in the worst sense of the word. We will be materialists and
racists, and both principles will merge, just as nationalism and socialism have merged
in our days.

For now, ideas play with men who have become stupid. Men believe they are free to
choose, but what they have chosen is already predetermined for them. Nations are
nothing but the toys of their own ideas and the objects of their own means. They
have never been more enslaved, more obsessed, or more alienated than now, and
the profound cynics who lead them are no less stupid than their ruminating subjects.

No one sees clearly anymore because there are no more clear and distinct ideas. We
are heading for a catastrophe, and all roads lead us there. We are overburdened with
more and more paradoxes, we seek simplicity, and we shall only find it in death.
That's why tomorrow's encounter with death will cause no repulsion.” [P. 120]

“Our leaders are either clowns or sophists, exorcists or hypnotists, trying to buy time
from chaos and death, but they cannot prevent the inevitable, and we are heading
straight for disaster.

The most murderous ideas await us along the way, and we will no longer be able to
escape them as our needs grab us by the throat and turn us into savages. We are
approaching the fatal edge, and as soon as we are confronted with it, we will
abandon all our humanitarian illusions and plunge our adversaries into the abyss.

Extermination will become the common denominator of future politics, and nature
will join in and add its fury to ours. At the end of the century, we will witness the
triumph of death, and the world, overburdened with human beings, will rid itself of
all the excess of living beings. There will be no refuge left for the powerful to escape
the consensual hell they have prepared for us, and watching them suffer will be a
consolation to the people they have led astray. The future order will be the sole
legatee of our failures, and the Prophets will gather the survivors amidst our ruins.”
[P. 121]

“Our theology was the supreme aberration, and we are paying for its crimes and
errors: it cursed nature, and nature took revenge. We are anti-physical, and our
so-called revealed religions have only managed to build the tomb of the human race.
The madness of the cross is now the madness of man; the desire to sacrifice is the
last of our works, and the taste of death will be the fulfillment of our ideas.”
[Fragment, P. 122]

“In the chaos into which we are sinking deeper and deeper, there is more logic than
in the order, the order of death, which we have approved for centuries and which is
breaking apart under our automatic steps.” [Fragment, P. 122]

“Young people can no longer save the world; the world cannot be saved anymore.
The idea of salvation is nothing but a false idea, and we must pay for our countless
mistakes. It's too late to fix anything. The time for redemptions has passed, and the
time for reformations has come to an end.
The most fortunate men will die fighting, and the most miserable will be left
crammed in the bottom of cellars or coupling among the flames to deceive
themselves from the agony with the help of orgasm. The world will be nothing but a
howl of pain and ecstasy, where the purest of men will only be able to avoid
self-contempt by killing each other. The choice of agony will be the only one left,
and it will come sooner than we expect.

From one day to another, we will be thrown into the abyss, and there we will
awaken, even if only in time to feel that we are perishing. Then we will see what the
Conquerors of the New World saw when whole tribes threw themselves off the tops
of their mountains as they approached, only to avoid the inevitable horror by
outwitting death through death itself…” [P. 124]

“Blessed are the dead! And thrice cursed are those who, consumed by madness,
bring forth new life! Blessed are the chaste! Blessed are the fruitless! Blessed are
even those who prefer lust to fertility!

For now, Onanists and Sodomites are less guilty than fathers and mothers, because
the former will only destroy themselves, while the latter will destroy the world by
multiplying useless mouths. Shame on the spirituals who force us to worship them
and teach us to lose reason! We would be less miserable and less ridiculous if they
did not exist, these hollow preachers and absurd comforters of the soul. They are no
longer of any use to us after having only served to deceive us about ourselves, about
them, and about our reality.

Society punishes counterfeiters, and yet spares those who live only by accrediting
false ideas? Tolerance is a fraud, and respect is but a delirium. We have paid to
understand this, and we will continue to pay for it. When all that remains is to be
consumed in the flames of hell, we shall send our leaders to death, smoothing out
the paths they have not spared us, and there shall be consummation.” [P. 125]
III. Compendium of Fragments & Aphorisms:

Sources (with abbreviations):

I = L’école des intransigeants, Nagel, 1952

II = Le Désirable et le sublime, A. La Baconnière, 1952
III = Foi, valeur et besoin, E. de Boccard, 1957
IV = Huit essais sur le mal, A. La Baconnière, 1963
V = Le tombeau de l’histoire, A. La Baconnière, 1966
VI = Le galant homme, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 1967
VII = Les races et les classes, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 1967
VIII = La Luxure et la mort, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 1968
IX = L’Ordre et le sexe, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 1970
X = Obéissance et servitude, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 1974
XI = Ma Confession, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 1975
XII = L’Homme de lettres, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 1976
XIII = Supplément à la Psychopathia Sexualis, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 1983
XIV = Écrits sur la religion, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 1984
XV = Semainier de l’an 1969, L’Âge d’Homme,Lausanne, 1985
XVI = Le Semainier de l’agonie, L’Âge d’Homme,Lausanne, 1985
XVII = Essais sur les limites de L’esprit humain. L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 1992
XVIII = Abécédaire de Martin-Bâton, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 1994
XIX = Semainier de l’incertitude, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 1994
XX = Journal d’une année. L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 2006
XXI = Post Mortem, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 2012
Translation of Fragments:

“We blush at the thought of appearing naive, but we are not ashamed to be
monstrous: cruelty confers rights.” [I, P.50]

“The villain seeks the culprits, the honest man the remedies.” [I, P.53]

“Revolutions don't break out when people are starving; they come afterwards,
occasionally in times of abundance, and then people take revenge for what they have
suffered.” [I, P.58]

“The good cause allows us to be the most unjust.” [I, P.59]

“The world is full of truths we forget and errors we resurrect.” [I, P.60]

“A stick in the hands of those who make history has more power than the artillery of
those who suffer it.” [I, P.67]

“If no man deserved death, how many would have deserved to be born? That's the
question, and the scaffold and the battlefields provide the answer.” [I, P.102]

“Reality has no rules, but it teaches us all of them.” [I, P.104]

“When the devil sought to corrupt justice, he invented charity.” [I, P.108]

“Fear creates more monsters than hate.” [I, P.125]

“What is called necessary evil is an empty word, except for the evil inherent in it.” [I,
P.126]

“The progress made doesn't legitimize the errors it corrects.” [I, P.145]

“The purpose of order is to legitimize servitude and make it desirable.” [I, P.154]

“What doesn't get better will undoubtedly get worse.” [I, P.185]

“In a lower soul, truth gives birth only to despair.” [I, P.188]

“I wish that reason were alive so that I could strangle it.” [I, P.205]

“Big fish eat small fish; the world is full of devouring beasts and those who are
devoured. We have to face the fact that if we don't eat God, we will be eaten by the
devil.” [I, P.206]
“Woe to the century in which reason appears to be a threat, despair a purpose to live,
and existence a pathetic servitude!” [I, P.270]

“If we didn't assume God to be just, evil would increase.” [I, P.282]

“The world that once seemed vast to us has now become the prison of the human
race, and the time is not far off when we will suffocate while living there.” [II, P.19]

“A people that multiplies without measure deserves a severe punishment and

condemns itself to die in greater numbers.” [II, P. 21]

“The worst crimes of these times are the work of enlightened men from honorable
families, often raised in general prosperity and eager to preserve what they have
achieved, even at the expense of countless and immeasurable atrocities.” [II, P. 26]

“Modern man is pregnant with the death of the world.” [II, P. 39]

“Sweet is the empire of nothingness, gentle the approach of death, and sleep the
citadel of bliss.” [II, P. 153]

“Think of your death, and you will find a reason to live.” [II, P. 274]

“What is left of man when a thousand gather a thousand times? A chaos of dust.
What is left of God? An empty word.” [III, P. 7]

“We save the unfortunate from everything but their own weakness, and that's why all
abuses return in the long run.” [III, P. 14]

“Our adversaries, there they are, never satiated with children nor with dead bodies,
leaving us free to be born and to perish, yet never to live.” [III, P. 49]

“The fate of man is to serve or to enslave, the task of the powerful is to deny what
exalts them, and the folly of the weak is to believe in it in the name of order and
through faith.” [III, P. 66]

“The worst monsters are of good faith.” [III, P. 175]

“Solitude is the enemy of the weak and worse than death.” [III, P. 196]

“The world will cease to be hell when the interest in saving it becomes greater than
the interest in destroying it.” [III, P. 206]
“For God to be, man must be, and for man to be, he must accept to have no Father.
Then we will all be Gods, and God will be present in each of us.” [III, P.211]

“There are a hundred reasons to die, but we forget them and cling to the increasingly
rare reasons that founded our existence, simply to survive.” [IV, P. 38]

“The will to live has built nothing eternal; great works are born of the will to death,
and man will always return to it when he grows tired of being the slave of life and
refuses to fill its emptiness.” [IV, P. 39]

“It is said that pain humanizes, and some would like to make that a rule, but that rule
has more exceptions than consistent applications. Pain makes people hard, bitter,
cruel, and wrong, and if there are those whom it humanizes, they are in the minority.”
[IV, P. 50]

“We die for a moment in history, and we exhaust ourselves in perpetuating it. History
continues; it has a thousand moments, but we cling to this one more, it seems, than
to our own survival.” [IV, P. 115]

“Blood seems to be our reason to live. We always find our way back to horror by any
means, we demand victims under any pretext, and we take pleasure in their deaths in
any way possible.” [IV, P. 165]

“What do we worship? Death and torture. What do we eat? What do we prefer to

drink? Human flesh with blood, and we feel neither shame nor pain about it.” [IV, P.
165]

“To be human begins where impunity and innocence end. Man has the choice of
being either guilty or an animal.” [IV, P. 187]

“It is easier to lead men into nothingness than into the light.” [IV, P. 209]

“Look around you in all directions, what do you see? Wretched creatures multiplying
like mad, abortions giving birth to abortions in their own image. The most beautiful
people often die without offspring, the most gifted perish unfruitfully, but the pack
begets and never considers itself numerous enough. Scum bursts with self-love.” [IV,
P. 213]

“All pain will end when we work to eliminate its causes at their source. This is the final
battle to be fought and the ultimate victory to be claimed.” [IV, P. 233]
“We shouldn't prevent a man from hanging himself; we are too numerous. Instead,
we should applaud whoever pushes charity to the point of leaving a void in the midst
of the living who devour each other.” [IV, P. 241]

“The boat is so heavily loaded that men must be thrown overboard. Those who make
the jump deserve respect; blaming them is foolish.” [IV, P. 242]

“Those who have no hope seek comfort, and the more they suffer, the more they are
drawn towards pleasure, with their wife being the abyss into which their nothingness
sinks.” [IV, P. 350]

“Love has never saved anything, but only sparked hatred, which destroys everything.”
[IV, P. 357]

“Young people want to die? Let them die! Let the hero lead them! They will be
happier than what we call adults. They will bleed for an idea instead of toiling and
languishing for half a century, wrongly comforted by their bad habits.” [V, P.72]

“The fear of living is legitimate, and what life offers to most men is inferior to the
eternal rest that death provides.” [V, P. 72]

“True wisdom is not to be found in fatalism but in the unwavering acceptance of total
nothingness and in the will to abolish everything that separates us from it.” [V, P. 151]

“Take away the ideal, and disillusioned humans lose their desire for existence; they
see themselves as they truly are: ugly, poor, ignorant, unhealthy, and ridiculous.” [V, P.
196]

“To pass judgment on a nation, to understand and protect ourselves from it, we must
remember its darkest moments and never forget what it was capable of.” [V, P. 275]

“Decline teaches us our guilt, and we are guilty from the moment we are born. The
world's judgment on this has never changed, and it can't be argued with.” [V, P. 294]

“He who does not resist evil will make it grow stronger.” [V, P. 296]

“We often forget our faults and debts, along with all our misfortunes, because
acknowledging them would force us to reflect, but we prefer to suffer and therefore
deserve the miseries we complain about.” [V, P. 383]
“There are too many men in this world, and we will end up killing in war all those
who shouldn't have been born. The crime was to multiply them, and the punishment
will be to slaughter them.” [V, P. 424]

“Man has no interest in peace; he wouldn't know what to do with it. If peace were to
last, he would be obliged to reform his moral laws, all of which tend towards war.” [V,
P. 436]

“Man is first and foremost an animal; we assume that he is a beast, a machine, an

automaton, and nothing more. The rest we will call a supplement, painfully acquired
and always threatened.” [V, P. 450]

“All progress is evil by nature; even the slightest change has barbaric severity, and the
victims caused by the shadow of our variations are beyond measure. For the majority
of mankind, history is a perpetual misfortune, and people will keep suffering as long
as it continues.” [V, P. 516/517]

“Certainly, humanity is advancing, but it does so on a heap of corpses and living dead
men.” [V, P. 518]

“We are too many to live, but never enough to suffer and die.” [V, P. 519]

“I'm not a Democrat and I profess inequality. I even think that there is no salvation
outside of privilege, and that the rest is just another abortion.” [VI, P. 8]

“Death is one of the elements of all politeness, and rather than cause inconvenience
to others, the civilized man prefers to disappear.” [VI, P. 55]

“He who hangs himself will always be more respectable than he who complains. The
coward is not the one who kills himself; the coward is the one who exhausts himself
to live and seeks assistance from other people by clinging to their clothes.” [VI, P. 55]

“The refusal to die is the ultimate rudeness in a world overflowing with beings.” [VI,
P. 55]

“The will to death paves the royal road to urbanity: a man who despises life is always
an aristocrat, while he who loves it will always be a wretch, and this creates two
races, each developing its own philosophy, with most swelling the ranks of the
second, although there are several nations where those of the first are not as rare as
one would think given the majority of people.” [VI, P. 57]
“Hope is nothing more than an admission of failure.” [VI, P. 64]

“Condemning suicide while not knowing how to house or feed people is an untenable
paradox. The religion of the future shall approve of voluntary death.” [VI, P. 88/89]

“The gentleman is free from all complacency, and no resentment takes hold of him.
His primary concern is to arrange his life in such a way that he can contemplate his
end, no matter when, where, or how: this foundation supports his edifice. He builds
on his death as the wretched build on their hope.” [VI, P.118]

“Faith is not a value, it's a need.” [VI, P. 207]

“I don't believe in the goodness of nature; the beings of quality can prove their good
origin, but they can never represent the species as a whole, which is nothing but a
tangle of abortions.” [VI, P. 220]

“We are all guilty of existing; Gnosis admits that life is a burden and that the salvation
of the species lies in chastity, resulting in universal extinction. Jesus — the real Jesus,
not the one of the Catholic Church — expressed a similar sentiment when, as some
fragments of the Apocryphal Gospels show, he wished that life would cease in order
for misery to end, and that he praised a woman named Salome for being sterile,
declaring to her that he came for destroying the opera of the women. These are a
couple of rational statements that every reasonable man should adopt, but since the
majority is neither reasonable nor sensible, new abortions will be raised in misery,
shame, disease, and filth.” [VI, P. 221]

“Eating and drinking are ugly acts that reveal man's animalistic nature. A vast number
of men and women have disgusting mouths, and one could find animals that eat with
more grace than those who are supposed to be made in divine resemblance.” [VI, P.
268]

“I believe that a beautiful death is preferable to the condition of the masses. The
masses wouldn't be what they are - an eternal hodgepodge of slaves - if they thought
as I do. Men are despicable because they are enslaved by desire, and desire makes
them guilty. This entanglement seems to legitimize their disgrace, and misfortune
comes upon them without disillusionment.” [VI, P. 284]

“There are too many interests to overcome, too many values to contradict, too many
habits to fight, and too many needs to satisfy. Moreover, there are too many people
and individuals to house, feed, occupy, and care for in a too limited space. And yet we
want to abandon racism? What to replace it with? Has it ever been possible to live
without hatred? And even if it were, what would be the cost? Would humanity’s
friends be willing to pay it if they happened to become aware of it? Noble resolutions
don't stand up to the facts, and these facts will invalidate the views that honor us.”
[VII, P. 39]

“The idea that all men are equal means that they are all slaves, for no other equality
is conceivable.” [VII, P. 89]

“Let us never forget: killing one or two billion people is not as expensive as keeping
them alive.” [VII, P. 105]

“All problems would be solved if the sick and the poor stopped reproducing. In one
generation the world would be as good as new, restored, redeemed; we would have
paradise on earth. I will be reproached for these words, but I maintain them. I affirm
that there is nothing more absurd than the superstition of fertility, and I am not too
far from believing that it is necessary to interfere more closely and severely in these
matters. The right to give birth to miserable human beings is an abuse in itself. I wish
that fatherhood would become a privilege, and that the mass of humanity would
perish without leaving any descendants.” [VII, P. 113]

“We don't want people to be equal; we are all primarily concerned with judging
ourselves to be irreplaceable, if not incomparable.” [VII, P. 197]

“What is the sin of most men? To live. And that is why death - after countless evils -
will be their just reward.” [VII, P. 202]

“Nations take shape only to better confront each other. The war of all against all is at
hand. The world is nothing but a closed arena in which the ultimate victor will be the
universal heir of peoples and centuries.” [VII, P. 227]

“All those among us who seek to maintain the unbearable only add to the weight that
fate has suspended upon us.” [VII, P. 231]

“To love life is everything but a philosophical quality.” [VII, P. 290]

“Hatred of life is the beginning of wisdom; indifference toward it will be its apogee.”
[VII, P. 293]
“If men had a conscience, the world's population would be reduced by a third in a
generation and by three quarters in less than a century. They would disobey both
priests and masters. The desire to have fewer offspring would prevail over the urge to
live, and insoluble problems would not even arise... But they have no conscience,
they cannot have one, and they never will.” [VII, P. 339]

“Truth doesn't have the power of error and therefore has to use error to establish
itself as truth.” [VII, P. 396]

“Lust and despair preside over most births, which shows us what men are worth.”
[VII, P. 404]

“Equality is everyone's misfortune.” [VII, P. 408]

“Death refers to lust, lust refers to death, and we live in between both, tempted by
lust and determined by death.” [VIII, P. 9]

“Men are to be pitied and, if you will - despised, not redeemed.” [VIII, P. 14]

“Love - the cunning of darkness crying out for victims, the manifestation of unfulfilled
death, the search for new proxies, and the ecstasy of multiplying them.” [VIII, P. 43]

“The endless misery of our species, from which we can only escape by lying or
running away, is the work of love.” [VIII, P. 43]

“The refusal to procreate and the desire not to fornicate are a prelude to Gnosis.
Gnosis despises the world and judges that salvation lies in departing from it. Gnosis is
a death in life, and Jesus preached death to us, which is why he was crucified by the
order.” [VIII, P. 72]

“The alienation of man is the root of his fears and hatreds. The frustrated man finds
no other joy than to become his own executioner and that of those who fall under his
power. He becomes fanatical, and the more he conforms to the laws that are
supposed to be divine, the more he is possessed by darkness. He commits evil in the
name of good and makes use of chaos under the solemn mantle of order.” [VIII, P. 82]

“The God to whom we pray values nothing but bloody pleasures; he breathes only
death and fertility to supply death, nothing else. He wishes for children to be born
and men to die. It is an infallible logic.” [VIII, P. 116]
“Mystical lunatics avow that humanity is not numerous enough and that the world
could support a hundred billion fulfilled beings, happy as kings and sweet as angels.
These astonishing paradoxes are supported by physicians, economists, and
moralists…” [VIII, P. 127]

“Our morality has chosen Thanatos; Death is our supreme deity, and the banished
Eros avenges himself by spreading a spirit of vertigo over us. We worship death, and
it's towards death that we are heading, along with all our virtues and
misconceptions.” [VIII, P. 136]

“It's an iron law that one can never proceed from order to order, but only from order
to chaos and chaos to order. No order ever dies a natural death.” [VIII, P. 138]

“We relish blood too much, and that's why the world is a slaughterhouse.” [VIII, P.
202]

“We wanted to be angels, yet our virtues turn us into beasts.” [VIII, P. 204]

“Faith no longer saves men; the works that arise from faith now only contribute to
their ruin.” [VIII, P. 217]

“We despise faith, we demand the Spirit, that's the meaning of our quest. There are
no more miracles, and whoever tolerates those who profess them has committed a
sin against the Spirit.” [VIII, P. 224]

“There is no progress without regression, no renewal without injustice, and no

change without agony.” [VIII, P. 228]

“Some say: Let people pray. I have nothing against this delusion, but I believe it would
be better to let them live without remorse and not to speak of sin, for those who
have no power can't be sinners, which is the case of most forsooth.” [IX, P. 10]

“A so-called rake is often a believer whose religion has disappeared and who
therefore lacks an ideological buttress to feel calm and happy, I would say more: to
act as a moral man.” [IX, P. 10]

“Where there is coercion, evil grows more than all values.” [IX, P. 12]

“The will to live is the source of all evil, and carnal desire is the will to live in its
highest degree. The people are right against theology in making sexual intercourse
the so-called original sin, and now more than ever, since life in all its abundance
threatens survival as such and multiplies with the reasons to die, the legitimate
means to kill.” [IX, P. 16]

“Death is not terrible, life is terrible, but we see things literally and figuratively upside
down. The philosopher is the one who puts everything back in its proper place.” [IX,
P. 18]

“Our virtues were born in the shadow of death, and it's towards death that they tend.
Death is the homeland of virtuous men.” [IX, P. 78]

“The so-called natural or divine laws are neither natural nor divine; they have always
been historical and therefore man-made. However, since most don't admire what
comes from human beings because they despise themselves as such, the source of
authority lies in what is non-human, which is called the Absolute for the occasion.”
[IX, P. 222]

“Hatred is a need that grows all the stronger the more we suffer from the virtues
imposed on us. The less virtuous we are, the more tolerant we become.” [IX, P. 267]

“Law arises from abuse, and consent turns abuse into law. This demonstrates what
the law is worth and how well we can do without it.” [X, P. 18]

“The history of the vanquished is based on murder and servitude, since every nation
has exterminated or enslaved its predecessors, sometimes even absorbing them.
These facts, too often forgotten or deliberately suppressed, deprive the vanquished
of the right to complain and should suffice for the moral peace of the victors, who are
always the avengers of older victims.” [X, P. 21]

“Human institutions are meant to repress our animality, but since they are based on
it, they retain its color. In a word, they are homeopathic remedies whose virtues will
always be indisputable. If they were to humanize man, they would lose their purpose,
and man would lose his roots. We would then have the astonishing spectacle of a
world in which man would obey freely and laws would no longer have an object.” [X,
P. 33]

“Nothing is founded on humanity, justice, or holiness. The law is not the source of
what it pretends to be; its foundations are bathed in blood in the midst of darkness.”
[X, P. 32]
“The privilege of the supreme power is to violate its own laws, which it does both at
the time of its establishment and whenever it is challenged or threatened.” [X, P. 49]

“Life cannot help but obey rules, however, these rules are not the product of
reflection but of spontaneity, with spontaneity having only the choice to be right and
survive or to miscalculate and perish.” [X, P. 82]

“The more we moralize man, the more inhuman he becomes. The virtues we force
him to adopt are often at the cost of his humanity, so that the most virtuous mortals
appear to be the most inhuman.” [X, P. 83]

“Consciousness is an illusion; most people only reach this state for a brief moment
and cannot sustain it for even a quarter of an hour, no matter what efforts are made
to force them to do so.” [X, P. 84]

“The right to life does not imply the right to happiness.” [X, P. 163]

“To talk about respect for life and other ideological illusions at a time when the
greatest massacre in our history is being prepared is to make a mockery of human
suffering. We know that at least a billion of our fellow human beings are destined to
meet an absurd and moreover cruel end from which no God will prevent them. To
talk about life all day long and condemn executions is to take hypocrisy to the
extreme. It would be more honest to prepare ourselves for what cannot be avoided
and to warn ourselves in some way of the evils that the future already holds in store.”
[X, P. 168]

“The majority of mortals are parasites; they do nothing, create nothing, understand
nothing, and reconsider nothing. They settle in the midst of works that geniuses have
prepared for them and don't hesitate to take credit for their achievements. Even their
sensibility is borrowed, and the last effort which their minds are capable of is to turn
ideas into dogmas, facts into legends, and everything else into mysteries…” [X, P.
171]

“We are far more deluded than our fathers: they believed that paradise awaited them
in the afterlife, while we are convinced that this world, filled with children, the blind,
the deaf, automatons and monsters, half of whose countries are uninhabitable and
almost all of which are suffering from their historical delusions, can become an Eden
(through the miraculous power of socialism).” [X, P. 186/187]

“We are being punished for having expected too much from man, and I would say
that's justice.” [X, P. 347]
“Explosion is our fate, and chaos already our reason to live.” [XI, P. 20]

“Founding a family in the present century is the ultimate act of madness.” [XI, P. 21]

“Each of us is like a little Atlas, carrying the weight of the universe on our shoulders.
Each of us responds to reality, and each of us is left alone with a mountain of
unsolvable problems, hence our fatigue.” [XI, P. 28]

“I look forward to death with impatience, and I come to wish for my father's death,
not daring to kill myself before he is gone. By the time his body is cold, I will no longer
be in this world. I have no regrets, and I die despising France. They can do whatever
they want with the fifteen volumes that I leave behind. I won't even attempt to
respond here to those who would encourage me to fight for the honor of my work
and condemn me for succumbing. My work is there, far more alive than its author.
Besides, I could hope for nothing among the plethora of impostors that France is full
of.” [XI, P. 47]

“If I had to live my life over again, I wouldn't change a thing. I fully approve of what
I've done, and I'm immensely proud of myself. It's life itself that I despise, not my
existence; it's the principle, not its application, that couldn't have been better, given
the circumstances.” [XI, P. 50]

“Imagine a world in which thirty billion humans would live like the people in Asia,
cramped into a few cities the size of France, with hundred-story buildings containing a
hundred thousand rooms, where water runs for only two hours a day. Most of them
would be born, live, and die in ten-unit structures, breathing air supplied by machines
and consuming rather unappetizing food made of algae, cellulose, or even insects. Is
it any wonder that some feel the urge to destroy everything, if only to avoid a
nightmare that has now become inevitable?” [XI, P. 53]

“Our humanism has no future because it's based on an unrealistic notion of ease.
Instead of wealth, we are heading towards poverty, and we will be confronted with it
abruptly. The abundance that has been promised to us for years, with increasing
falsehood, will soon lead to disillusionment and trigger barbarism. Before the end of
the century, we will be deprived of everything. The world will be hell and the
fortunate its devils, as predicted by Gnosis, the religion of the future. Gnosis has
always proclaimed that the universe is absurd and that most people are nothing more
than a horde headed for eternal damnation.” [XI, P. 61]

“Happiness rarely leads us to intellectual adventures. Writers and artists, not to

mention philosophers, are usually dissatisfied with themselves or the world.” [XI, P.
69]

“Humanity is spreading across our globe like incurable diseases, and if all diseases
were cured, humanity would replace them all simply due to its existence, a polluting
and proliferating existence.” [XI, P. 70]

“The older I grow, the more Gnosis speaks to my reason: the world is not ruled by a
Providence, it's intrinsically evil and deeply absurd, and Creation is either the dream
of blind intelligence or the game of a principle without a moral.” [XI, P. 77]

“I applaud the desecration of the ecumene, the poisoning of the air, the pollution of
the rivers and oceans, the exhaustion of the earth, death from hunger and thirst, and
the horrors of suffocation. The only thing missing from this picture is the
cancerization of plants, animals, and humans by a universal epidemic (which is not
that unlikely). I forgot to mention impotence and sterility. I applaud the discovery of
new drugs and wish for our species to gorge itself on narcotics. I hope that the time
when people will kill, cut their throats, and rape each other in the middle of the
street is not too far off, and I don't want to disappear before I have seen it with my
own eyes, for the spectacles of vesania and bestiality refresh my asceticism.” [XI, P.
80]

“There is no beautiful memory, no more or less guilty drunkenness, and no delightful

hell. There is only the regularity and decency of men everywhere. All that remains for
me is to rejoice in the hope of the misery of mankind. It is inevitable, and I savor its
fate. I entrust these confessions to my posthumous writings because they wouldn't
be tolerated elsewhere, but I'm convinced that millions of other people think as I do,
even if they are reluctant to declare it.” [XI, P. 80]

“The few truths contained in the so-called Catholic faith lead us back to Gnosticism,
which is a precise description of universal misery and absurdity, literally doubling its
weight with death. In the light of Gnosis, we rediscover in Existentialism the
abandonment and confinement of man: he is left alone, chained, and walks among
the crowd under the closed vault of destiny, prey to loneliness and finitude. He
discovers that he did not choose the suffering he has to endure, that he was just
there, nothing else, and that he cannot transcend this situation since it is part of his
essence.” [XI, P. 85]

“In every saint there lurks an arrant knave, the marrow of all holiness being absolute
hellishness. That's why our Saviors are of no avail, their remedies being too strong for
the common man, who is the puppet of his fleshly appetite and not a sinner.” [XI, P.
91]

“We don't need a God without mercy, a faith without reason, and a lot of doctrines
without sense, since we are free and endowed with the so-called divine powers, but
unfortunately we make no better use of them than God himself, being just as
merciless.” [XI, P. 92]
“We have to keep the unsound from becoming the makers of the laws the sound have
to observe.” [XI, P. 93]

“The abyss is everywhere, and we are deepening our own in order to escape the
tumble towering above the impending nothingness. Morals have led us to the brink
of absurdity, and there we stay, not daring to recede and unable to go awry any
further. We are entering a new age, benumbed by false ideas and foul habits that
make us stumble on our very means and err from our very ends.” [XI, P. 94]

“Most of us live betwixt quiet despair and furious nihilism.” [XI, P. 94]

“Life is tremendous, and if we seek metaphysics, it proves more our misery than our
spirituality. We look for an excuse to escape the brunt of facts, and most of us even
submit to desire, hoping against their fear and merging it in fornication.” [XI, P. 97]

“The highest virtue is humanity, but unfortunately, it's not a man's virtue.” [XI, P. 105]

“Most people would be better off if they had no conscience at all and lived like
children or animals. Being human makes them either weaklings or monsters,
burdening them with a freedom of will they don't want and whose consequences
they desperately fear.” [XI, P. 106/107]

“The hero is the ideal of man, but what’s the point of heroism in a world where
nothing can be fought without endangering order and committing crimes against the
law?” [XI, P. 110]

“History is a series of unpunished crimes.” [XI, P. 141]

“It would have been better if two or three countries had shared the universe and
crushed, if not annihilated, anyone who opposed them.” [XI, P. 144]

“According to Gnosis, the universe is the prison of the species and is virtually
embraced by fate, which is reminiscent of Sartre despite all the differences in
expression. We enter the world through a gate that requires no explanation: we are
the outcasts of women. We emerge from the womb and are thrust into something we
didn't choose, which is essentially Heidegger's concept of "thrownness." Our mothers
cast us into the world, and we awaken as prisoners. When our eyes open, we find
ourselves in chains. Our existence is like Plato's cave, where we perceive only the
shadows of things.” [XI, P. 158]

“Each Gnostic doctrine confesses a general chaos; this chaos is always the starting
point of Gnosticism, its common denominator. In this respect, Gnostic theology is
radically different from both the Old Testament and the pagan religions dating back to
Homer or ancient Rome. Instead of accepting the order proclaimed in Genesis or in
the priestly traditions of classical antiquity, instead of believing in the harmony of the
world and universal justice, instead of holding an optimism that denies evil in the
name of a greater good, Gnosticism rejects order and negates harmony. Gnosticism
does not acknowledge justice and sees evil as the foundation of reality. Therefore, it
goes without saying that no authority can tolerate Gnosticism, and heresy is
practically condemned to persecution. Hence the masks behind which heretics hide,
hence their ambiguities and paradoxes, hence their deliberate contradictions and
tireless deceptions in which one gets lost as in a labyrinth.” [XI, P. 159]

“If the world is the work of evil - whether that evil is intentional, based on stupidity.
or powerlessness (all three theses have their advocates) - the only problem left is
where the good comes from. How is the good possible? Heidegger also addresses a
similar question about Being. Gnosis answers that the good has nothing to do with
the world; the world has never known it, and cannot know it. This brings to mind the
Gospel of John and its famous prologue, a prime example of Gnosticism, as well as
various sections of the Secret Revelation.” [XI, P. 159]

“In the terrible world that we are preparing for our children, Gnosis will reflect reality
as a means to cope with its horror.” [XI, P. 160]

“Live in such a way that you don't need to be saved, and don't expect anything from
salvation, for it is an illusion that you will otherwise end up paying dearly for.” [XI, P.
173]

“Instead of seeking my compassion, I advise those who are suffering to simply perish.
In my eyes, death is the universal remedy and the solution to most of our problems.”
[XI, P. 223]

“When the poor nations have understood that there is no way out of misery and that
starvation awaits them before the eyes of an indifferent world - if they do not stop
reproducing, if they imagine their fate as nations suffocating in misery from which not
even their children can be saved, if they finally give up their religious-moral, political,
and pseudo-scientific illusions about the goodness of God, paradise on earth, and
similar stupidities - only then will we find order, a firmly established, moderate, and
objective order. We only have the choice between disillusionment and catastrophe; a
third possibility does not exist.” [XI, P. 249]

“I see chaos and death as attributes of God, and if someone claims that there are
others, I will reply that death and chaos have now gained the upper hand. God
reveals his dark side to us, and it seems to me worthy of adoration. My atheism is
shaken; the dark side is so tempting that I have become a believer. I am satisfied with
this version of God: the more monstrous he is, the more I am convinced of his
existence. There are moments in history when destruction appears as a sign of grace,
and we are close to these predestined moments.” [XI, P. 250]

“Nothing is as legitimate as the fear of living. Escaping from life is often the only
remedy, and we cannot forget a world in which sentiment leads man to misery,
pleasure to slavery, and self-abandonment to death.” [XII, P. 39]

“We are well aware that pain is extolled and the need to endure it is preached; it's
one of those follies made fashionable by Romanticism.” [XII, P. 40]

“Evil is where many come together.” [XII, P. 60]

“The idea of justice is an illusion; the world we live in is a lottery.” [XII, P. 63]

“One teaches that the last word of Socratic wisdom may be summed up in the
proposition that no matter what one does, one ends by regretting it and then
exclaiming that life is terrible. With this, one can cure the most sensitive men of their
scruples and the most vicious of their remorse. It's the most wonderful lesson in
immorality one could wish for.” [XIII, P. 29]

“Over the course of five thousand years, the progress we congratulate ourselves on
has led to the genocide of millions of men and women, yea, turned them into
barbarians while relying on metaphysics, and despite changes in our vocabulary, we
still haven't reached the end of the thorn's path.” [XIII, P. 51/52]

“I don't know the course of history, but it seems remarkable to me, and I venture to
make a plea on behalf of a considerable number of people who will consume
themselves in their rooms, persist unhappily, and die misunderstood, without
achieving the self-fulfillment to which each of us is entitled.” [XIII, P. 108]
“The world will perish if it doesn't unite, but in order to unite, a hundred nations will
have to disappear, and this at a time when the fury of the so-called national spirit is at
its height.” [XIV, P. 21]

“Men will always be too numerous to be happy; their will to live and multiply will
forever be the source of their misfortune.” [XIV, P. 122]

“We spend our time deceiving ourselves, and even punish those who expose our
illusions. This bias is not subject to change, and thus we conform to it.” [XIV, P. 147]

“Men are born to suffer without cause and to die without end.” [XIV, P. 203]

“Knowing oneself is the prerequisite for any Humanism.” [XIV, P. 204]

“Men are abortions who dream of being gods.” [XIV, P. 256]

“Only atheists deserve to rule this world, for atheism and virtue walk on the same
line, whereas faith is opposed to virtue.” [XIV, P. 333]

“We will always be inhuman in some way; back then we have been in the name of
theology, and now we are so in the name of science.” [XIV, P. 409]

“Inhumanity becomes beneficial when paired with virtues, and some virtues are only
appropriate to inhumanity, although morality and religion refuse to admit it.” [XV, P.
25]

“The most powerful cause of war is to be found in our morals, which make us only
manly to wage it and only virtuous to harden us against ourselves and all living
creatures. I accuse our lofty principles of being the fosterers of violence, and I dare
say that they give room to war for the sake of their own preservation, since peace
undermines their authority and opens a way for trends that might impair them by
degrees.” [XV, P. 25]

“We are heading straight for the most terrible future, where we will lack everything:
space, air and water, not to mention reasons to live, for there will only be reasons to
kill. We need a thesis on Pessimism, together with an anthology of its
representatives, including Diderot and his reflections on slavery, which were
published under the name of Grimm, in addition to the paragraph dealing with the
misfortune of progress when it exceeds human limits. I would also like to add Joseph
de Maistre and Donoso Cortès, and of course Schopenhauer, who predicted that
overpopulation would be hell on a planetary scale. Dostoevsky and Nietzsche would
provide enough pages, as would historians such as Burckhardt and Spengler, and a
multitude of essayists such as Ortega, Drieu de la Rochelle, Bouthoul and Curtius...
We would see that we have never lacked prophets. A reasoned anthology of
Pessimism would be the Apocalypse of our times, revealing that the best minds have
despaired of the future and that politicians are blind.” [XV, P. 28/29]

“Since nothingness is the reward of all, let men enjoy their miserable lives and pity
them, for they are worms creeping in the shades of lofty delusions from deceit to
deceit, having only an ever-decaying body that gives them nothing but the few
rubbish it can hold.” [XV, P. 36]

“The fact that we suffer doesn't necessarily imply that pain is meaningful; quite the
contrary! It's always pointless to endure pain, but our vanity refuses to admit it, and
therefore builds castles in the air to amuse itself with illusions, which is also called
metaphysics.” [XV, P. 37]

“Love is an illusion that floats in front of us, and whose downside is called necessity,
in which pleasure and suffering are paired to chain man to the species, but as an
object, not as a person.” [XV, P. 48/49]

“In this life of ours, only death is at our beck and call. But the strong man, who knows
this, grows stronger, and mourning leaves him unchallenged: he makes new weapons
of his sorrows and dashes against nothingness, full of the contempt he feels toward
being.” [XV, P. 54]

“Pessimism has never been in fashion because no order could stand it; it's a luxury of
the mind, and thus beyond the reach of the common man.” [XV, P. 57]

“The fortunate of this world are often more pessimistic than the miserable, and this
seems to be one of the reasons for their happiness.” [XV, P. 57]

“Every child believes in its parents: that seems to be the first mistake, for they are
usually not gods but ordinary people, and a child will never reach manhood unless it
sees through this deception. The free man must be unfaithful to his roots; otherwise,
he becomes a servant.” [XV, P. 62]

“Men roll the restless stone of lust, only to fall back into the chasm of despair and
duty. Lust makes us all alike, and that is why Asceticism lifts us above the human
condition and raises us in our own esteem.” [XV, P. 71]
“Love ebbs and flows with bodily secretions: it ought to make all lovers humble, for
they are nothing more than the puppets of our genus and the automatons of order,
never alone and never free, in spite of what they imagine, linked by their delusions to
sorrow and pain, or, better said, by vanishing lust to everlasting duty.” [XV, P. 95]

“I would be pleased indeed, if the universe were full of blazing ovens, concentration
camps, and people deported.” [XV, P. 118]

“All of my acquaintances were gray and ordinary people, and my relatives were no
different. Is anything better possible on earth, and are there still artists of life out
there? I've never come across beings of such kind.” [XV, P. 127]

“No life is worth a penny, ours is no exception.” [XV, P. 127]

“I am sick of the whole balderdash; I am disgusted with the Church. The so-called
sacrifice of Jesus may impress the basest among cowards: to suffer and die is nothing,
martyrdom remains a foul argument, and let us not forget that in the time of Christ,
men and women were nailed to the cross by the thousands.” [XV, P. 127]

“The more unaccountable an idea seems, the more profits we reap from its
employment.” [XV, P. 133]

“My entire existence is a methodical NO.” [XV, P. 140]

“Discomfort often teaches a man virtue, which is why perfect health is usually
detrimental to the life of the mind.” [XV, P. 146]

“Most revolutions are useless: abuses merely change sides instead of being
abolished.” [XVI, P. 43]

“False ideas are more harmful than murders, and those who profess them are worse
than criminals.” [XVI, P. 54]

“I love death, and those who cherish it are my brothers in spirit. The taste for death
pervades my work, and the hatred of life is the fundamental source of my thought.”
[XVI, P. 70]

“My mission is to pave the way for the Antichrist; the Antichrist is the solution to our
problems. The world needs ritual sacrifices; it's about preparing them for what's to
come. My work tends to be for nothing else…” [XVI, P. 89]
“We are living in the last days of Pompeii, and tomorrow the Vesuvius of history will
erupt. I don't care if I die in the midst of these shadow beings, and I rejoice in what
fate has in store for them. I tread with delight on a ground that will perish along with
castles and cathedrals. I look upon what will sink into rubble and ashes all around me,
and I contemplate with love the promise of nothingness that will be the prelude to
true order. Hail, you cradles full of atonement! Blessed are those who call them into
the world, so that the wrath of the Eternal may be appeased and the altars may
collapse under the weight of offerings! It will be said that the mad brought forth the
dead while the sword hung over their heads.” [XVI, P. 92]

“Animals mate and reproduce, and moralists invite us to be like them, which is what
too many moral systems come down to. Reducing carnal needs to mere needs under
the guise of legitimacy in no way elevates us above the level of beasts.” [XVI, P. 96]

“Most families are nothing but plagues where children will pick up the worst habits.”
[XVI, P. 97]

“Scientists are crying out warnings as they see the world covered with creatures
wriggling like worms on the corpse of this planet, polluting the air, land and water.
However, our spiritual leaders refuse to listen and tremble for the status of Catholic
families. They want children - more and more children - and would gladly sacrifice our
species to their system of morality. They prefer the destruction of the Ecumene to
changing their principles. Who are man's worst enemies? His sworn redeemers.” [XVI,
P. 161]

“A vast number of innocents will be caught up in the downfall of the guilty, and this
will relieve the earth of the excess of men it bears.” [XVI, P. 205]

“Who are the most wicked of men? It's the optimists.” [XVI, P. 247]

“For me, nothingness has a charm that the abortions that populate this place could
never have and never will have. I thank heaven that I live here; leaving this world
doesn't take any effort.” [XVI, P. 288]

“Our morality is a world population machine; our customs call for unlimited
proliferation. Without war and epidemic, only famine would remain, and if by some
miracle, famine were overcome, a world of a hundred billion people would still have
to kill a dozen each generation in order not to suffocate in this human chaos.” [XVI, P.
292]
“Our present world will cost us a billion corpses, if not two, but we will promptly
console ourselves and feel at ease, for the fewer we are, the happier, more just, more
human, and more charitable we will be…” [XVI, P. 298]

“Tolerance is a form of contempt, and one that doesn't reveal itself as such. We
tolerate those whom we don't truly esteem and whom we dare not to suppress.”
[XVII, P.224]

“There is no moral progress; there are only changes in sensibility.” [XVIII, P.19]

“Men are not incomprehensible monsters, but rather poor beings who don't
understand what's happening to them.” [XVIII, P.42]

“If we were more certain of our own humanity, we would have fewer doubts about
the humanity of others.” [XVIII, P. 49]

“The world is tired of being saved by those who don't save the world.” [XVIII, P. 83]

“Unpunished and forgotten crimes will always be the cause of our privileges, and
that's why we cast a veil of darkness over the silence of history.” [XVIII, P. 101]

“No one dares to be pessimistic anymore, and that frightens me. There is nothing
worse among us than such omens; they always precede catastrophes.” [XVIII, P. 115]

“The history of good intentions is nothing but a series of platitudes and disasters. The
intention to do the right thing is a miserable excuse once the evidence turns against
it.” [XVIII, P. 134]

“Our sins have given life to too many people, and I aspire to ruin them forever.” [XVIII,
P.140]

“The Third World must remain as it is, for our survival depends on it. If all countries
were to industrialize, chaos would ensue, and the only remedy would be a simplifying
despotism in accordance with our paradoxes.” [XVIII, P.148]

“Tolerance is a shameful disease that tends to strike the elderly, for impotence and
frigidity seem to be its necessary conditions.” [XVIII, P. 149]

“There will soon be no space left to mitigate rampant fanaticism, and racial creed
might be the worst, owing to its simplicity and the good faith it gives to the common
man. We cannot gainsay prejudice if it agrees with common sense, and common
sense worships simplicity in spite of reason, morals, history, and faith.” [XIX, P. 8]

“The idea of race will lead to the severance of all ties: it appears to be both
revolutionary and counter-revolutionary... in fact, it may shatter most human bonds
both inside and outside the state. The steady increase of mankind will foster it, and
future historians will call it the Nemesis of unbound demography and patriarchal
morals.” [XIX, P. 8]

“I'm a pessimist because I'm not inhuman.” [XIX, P. 9]

“The world is full of witnesses who will be slaughtered without the Spirit gaining from
their sacrifice.” [XIX, P. 9]

“One spoke of Revaluation, yet everything stands as solid as a rock and will remain so
until the house collapses; perhaps it must come to pass that people die and only a
remnant reshapes life.” [XIX, P. 10]

“If there were a God and all human beings were His children, there would be only one
race on earth, and much misery would be avoided.” [XIX, P. 14]

“Mankind is rather prompt to bleed and die than prone to think and change.” [XIX, P.
17]

“It was a mistake to wake people up, for now they are dreaming of murderous
half-truths in broad daylight.” [XIX, P. 17]

“The admonition to love one another has proved to be the most hollow of moral
duties, for love cannot be commanded, let alone earned. No future will take place on
such an assumption: we need much less in order to have more.” [XIX, P. 21]

“Science has overstepped the limits of Humanism, and since we cannot retrocede, we
have to fight our way through nonsense and barbarity... there is no other choice,
alas!” [XIX, P. 23]

“The unity of mankind is a nightmare, and between this horror and ourselves we see
an endless chasm which we shall fill with our corpses.” [XIX, P. 25]

“The essence of a people is hatred; only hatred binds, and that's why St. Augustine
was right when he saw Cain as the founder of the state.” [XIX, P. 27]
“The grossest sin is to be there without being wanted, and that will be the curse of
most: they pay for it without even knowing the cause of their own doom, accursed in
the womb and twice when they beget a child, as a new link of their own fetters.” [XIX,
P. 30]

“Most people have to die, that's a fact, and the sooner the better. Racism is a
murderous ideology that seems to fit our needs in an overcrowded universe.” [XIX, P.
31]

“Provided the human race outlives its fate, it shall restore Archaic Morals and Pure
Formalism, those masterpieces unequalled since.” [XIX, P. 35]

“We cannot change the world, but what we can do is not to give life to those who
would suffer as much as we do, for this time we would be to blame for it.” [XIX, P. 38]

“Only the strong receive their due meed of recognition, yea, even more than they
deserve, for the world is a stock exchange where our merits rise and fall not
according to virtue but to power.” [XIX, P. 40]

“The prerequisites for Racism are at hand, and if we have an economical collapse, we
shall soon see its outburst, for the world is overcrowded and ideologies are outworn.”
[XIX, P. 44]

“Life is stench, and he who loves life loves stench and revels in filth.” [XIX, P. 48]

“The free man is pure and devoted to his death, for the stench of life no longer
possesses him. He lives not simply to exist, but to create. His work frees him from fear
and restrains every longing. He neither desires nor fears anything. He is a son of the
Spirit dwelling in the Light.” [XIX, P. 48]

“Science will be the doom of man, since it allows those in power to misuse it and to
fully domesticate the King of Creation like the vilest of animals.” [XIX, P. 49]

“It's because life itself is inhuman that men are not human.” [XIX, P. 52]

“Politeness may improve us even more than religion or morals, for we are afraid to
feel ourselves despised by men whom we esteem and at the same time approved by
men whom we despise. The scorn of people is harder to bear than the anger of God.”
[XIX, P. 56]

“Let us be exquisite men in a sad world.” [XIX, P. 58]

“Since hope to improve ourselves can never withstand facts, and since progress is a
pious delusion out of the realm of things, my aim is to polish the unbearable and to
articulate the unordained.” [XIX, P. 62]

“The worst criminals are no longer murderers, but those who call us into this world
without any idea of what will become of them or what kind of existence they have
prepared for us. Instead of blaming society, which is a machine for crushing men, we
should despise our fathers and mothers if we don't feel comfortable in it.” [XIX, P. 64]

“I was born a berserker, that's for sure, and my books prove it. Of course, I'm also a
perfect gentleman; both are in full accordance.” [XIX, P. 77]

“The best of life seems to forget all of life.” [XIX, P. 86]

“The shift from sense to nonsense is the result of unbounded progress, which man is
able to promote but not to keep up with, inasmuch as he cannot improve his own
nature and, being bound to it, lacks all the parts that might encompass his
inventions.” [XIX, P. 119]

“There is no hope for change and no moral progress to be expected. Men remain as
they are: half-blind and powerless against their inner moods, vile puppets among
facts they don't understand and moved by propensities they refuse to acknowledge.”
[XIX, P. 119]

“I despise the idea of God; it's the refuge of the oppressed, and the defeated are the
poison of the world. Most nations ought to perish and disappear without a trace so
that the world may heal, for it's sick with the despair of all those who want to live just
to live, whether as animals or believers.” [XIX, P. 122]

“Good will is captured by bad faith and good faith by bad will; good will alone is blind
and good faith powerless.” [XIX, P. 130]

“Disease, old age, and death cannot be avoided, nor can poverty in the vast majority
of cases, which means that nine times out of ten it would have been better for
human beings not to have been born, and that's why reasonable and sensible people
don't multiply.” [XIX, P. 135]

“We cannot launch a full-scale drive against Racism, since we are all more or less
prone to it, without perhaps knowing our own weakness.” [XIX, P. 138]

“The lack of tolerance is a proof of spiritual health, for tolerance is a creeping disease,
the end of which is spiritual collapse.” [XIX, P. 149]

“A poet dreams of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell: we witness that of Virtue and
Evil, which makes Evil stronger than before and Virtue even worse than Vice.” [XIX, P.
156]

“A man who doesn't love himself has no obligations towards others; he loves nothing
and therefore enjoys a great freedom of indifference.” [XIX, P. 161]

“A brain without memory is a beautiful death.” [XX, P. 23]

“If the fornicators sin, those who impregnate sin a hundred times more.” [XX, P. 143]

“Death is the way not to be a slave.” [XX, P. 143]

“I would like to add two forgotten articles to the Declaration of Rights: I. Every man is
the master of his own life and the judge of the moment when he chooses to end it. II.
Every man has the right to reject life, and no one has the right to condemn them for
doing so, for life cannot be good in the eyes of everyone.” [XX, P. 145]

“I feel distant from both men and women; their union seems rather ridiculous to me.
I prefer solitude to marriage and nothingness to fatherhood.” [XXI, P. 18]

“What could be more atrocious than our ideal of fertility? We reduce women to the
status of mere instruments and force them to give birth to those who will necessarily
be sacrificed.” [XXI, P. 20]

“Noble beings rarely love life, they prefer to have reasons to live. Those who are
content with life are always ignoble.” [XXI, P. 22]

“Death is a good thing; only the blind are afraid of it.” [XXI, P. 50]
“We love what must die, and we only love because we feel mortal and threatened.”
[XXI, P. 54]

“Mysticism is basically just a form of narcissism, and the concept of a personal God is
but an absurdity. The need of the wretched for consolation only proves their
humiliation, not the reality of the figures they imagine…” [XXI, P. 55]

“The idea of salvation seems to me a delirium; to be saved is nothing but a

metaphysical rape.” [XXI, P. 55]

“Life is a support, not a reason; life is necessary but not enough.” [XXI, P. 99]
IV. Additional content:

If Cioran opens the door to the darkness, Caraco is the darkness

An Essay about Albert Caraco