Infinite Resignation by Eugene Thacker

Author:Eugene Thacker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media

THE PATRON SAINTS OF PESSIMISM

The patron saints of pessimism watch over our suffering. Laconic and sullen, they never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them.

There are patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. For instance, there is the fourth-century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen-year-old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed – including the “breaking wheel” – the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate allegory for the protector of philosophers.

Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? In our search, however, even the most ardent nay-sayers lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm – Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of existential horror: Sickness Unto Death, The Concept of Dread, and Fear and Trembling – but these are complicated by their fabricated and unreliable authors. And how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life, Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, or even Adorno’s Minima Moralia? And what of the many forgotten philosophical histories of pessimism, of which Edgar Saltus’ The Philosophy of Disenchantment is emblematic? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete, as if there was still one more thing to say, one last indictment…

And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s burrowing creature, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui; the mystical pessimism of Huysmans and Strindberg; the stark and unhuman lyricism of Meng Jiao, Georg Trakl, Xavier Villarrutia; the frenetic obfuscations of Sakutaro Hagiwara, Ladislav Klíma, Fyodor Sologub; the haunted and scintillating prose of Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Izumi Kyōka, Clarice Lispector; the misanthropic rigor of Lautréamont’s Maldoror or of Bonaventura’s Nightwatches; the crumbling of reason in Artaud’s The Umbilicus of Limbo or Unica Zürn’s The House of Illnesses. Grumpy old Beckett. The list quickly expands, soon encompassing the entirety of literature itself, and beyond (…even the great pessimist stand-up comedians). In the end it’s overwhelming; all of literature becomes a candidate. All that remains are singular, anomalous statements, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into arborous fortune cookies read by no one.

So I confine myself, somewhat arbitrarily, to pessimist “philosophers,” dubious though this distinction is. But a cursory look at the history of philosophy reveals something quite different. Philosophers that stumble and trip over their own feet. Philosophers that curse themselves. Philosophers that laugh at themselves. Philosophers that abandon philosophy, but still remain “philosophers.” They deserve better than biographies, those exhaustive and tedious narratives of heroic intellectual progress. Only hagiographies will do. But the tradition of hagiography, or lives of the saints, is a peculiar kind of writing.

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