Interviews, conferences…
Dario Fabbri – The Cultural Element in Geopolitics
XII Festa Scienza Filosofia – Dario Fabbri – 2023/04/22 – The Cultural Element in Geopolitics – How History and Customs Influence the Trajectory of Powers. Continue reading
Umberto Galimberti – Interviews and conferences (excerpts)
Schopenhauer is considered a pessimist, of course: every time you don’t praise or exalt “the individual”, you are pessimistic, of course, right?… … Even poor Leopardi is pessimistic, isn’t he? Those who say “pessimism”… I’m like: are you looking at reality, goddammit, or do you really not want to see it? Read the full page
Why are normal people able to live (as explained by Lex Fridman)
Lex Fridman (a “normie”), explains in detail how he is able to live and not dwell on nihilism and depression, something that if you’re anything like me is fascinating and sometimes hard to fully grasp.
The bottom line is that it’s mainly how your brain is wired and its chemicals, which is consistent with the clear failure of psychotherapy in so many mental illness cases, and with the extensively demonstrated impossibility of changing the core of one’s personality – and, by contrast, with how drugs are a way more useful tool, albeit also limited and sadly inconsistent, chaotic, still not very issue-specific, and full of negative effects.
Madame – The illusion of love, and the worst fear: anhedonia
2021/03/24, Sopra le righe
They make it sound as if women give you who knows what… It’s something that lasts five minutes. Among other things: the pleasure does not last long, the effort is big, and the position is ridiculous.
Vittorio Feltri, on multiple occasions, on TV and on radio
I believe that we do not die because we fall ill, but we fall ill because we must die.
Umberto Galimberti, in various lectures
Exclusion from the sphere of labor equates to social insignificance.
Umberto Galimberti at a conference
It’s not that old people are wise: they just have a very low dose of sexuality and aggressiveness – that’s it. And at this level they are also calm, unless they have a bad temper.
Umberto Galimberti, in a lecture
The Crazy Woman Next Door – Conversation with Alda Merini
Unfortunately, the soul, which by the way is what then writes and survives […], is the part that flies over matter and is the one that’s the most attentive and the most painful: namely, seeing the deterioration of the body, this soul distress itself, it… above all, it loses its way. Continue reading
As for music being a comforting thing in times such as these, I’m sure it is for those who aren’t too depressed to still enjoy it. But music can’t compare with alcohol or drugs, which directly affect one’s emotional state as opposed to music’s indirect effect through our sense of hearing and never fail to provide an escape. Like literature, music is just a harmless form of forgetting the world and doesn’t always work as well as we’d like.
Thomas Ligotti – The Damned Interviews, Tina Hall
Excerpts of interviews to Thomas Ligotti
Three interviews. Read the full page
There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn’t they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it’s the same old lesson: everything in this life – I repeat, everything – is more trouble than it’s worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There’s a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness.
Thomas Ligotti – “Fantastic Metropolis” interview
So depressing was the subject of the human condition that humans learnt to avoid even acknowledging its existence, despite the fact that it was the real issue before us as a species. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made the point in his now-famous line, “About that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent.” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ch.7, 1921).
Jeremy Griffith – A Species In Denial (introduction)
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
If you don’t remove the world as will and representation, this mania… The principle of individuation by which we wake up in the morning, we want to kill ourselves, then two or three coffees are enough, and off we go, back to deceive, to kill time. But theatre is essentially the non-place.
Carmelo Bene at the Maurizio Costanzo Show
Erich Fromm – Normal people are the sickest
I think it’s a common fiction that people share, that the modern person is happy. Read the full page
In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.
Jacques Lacan in an interview for “L’Express”
As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her [Anne’s] fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand.
Helen Keller, in her autobiography “The Story of My Life”, recounting her experience as a deafblind child.