“You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?”  ― Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’

fly on

The body - and everything that touches it: diet, climate, and, soil - is the domain of the Herkunft. The body manifests the stigmata of past experience and also gives rise to desires, failings, and errors. These elements may join in a body where they achieve a sudden expression, but as often, their encounter is an engagement in which they efface each other, where the body becomes the pretext of their insurmountable conflict. The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by lan­guage and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body. 

— Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History

Nietzsche's pain

I have given a name to my pain and call it 'dog': it is just as faithful, just as obtrusive and shameless, just as entertaining, just as clever as any other dog—and I can scold it and vent my bad moods on it, as others do with their dogs, servants, and wives. 

~ Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Walter Arnold Kaufmann. 1974. The Gay Science. 1st ed. New York: Random House.

amor fati

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

After Buddha was dead, people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave,—an immense frightful shadow. God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow.—And we—we have still to overcome his shadow!

En vieillissant je me rapprochais moi-même de Nietzsche, comme c’est sans doute inévitable quand on a des problèmes de plomberie.

Michel Houellebecq - Soumission

hahaha

Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker

Fabrice Luchini si Michel Onfray la La grande Librairie, mari miau
multe chestii de invatat si de apreciat
filosofie si umor

vă propun o întâlnire cu a treia şcoală de psihoterapie vieneză

He who has a WHY to live for can bear almost any HOW.

Friedrich Nietzsche

(A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how")

cartea serii: a moving account by Viktor E. Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning

Eternal Recurrence

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every mood we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht).

If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.

But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/nonbeing. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?

Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative.

Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.

mort

Dieu est mort - Nietzsche 1883
L'auteur est mort - Barthes 1967

originea lumii, mmmhmm

And when you gaze long into an abyss,
 the abyss also gazes into you.