Albert Caraco- Breviary Of Chaos
Albert Caraco always wanted to die. But he first intended to wait for the death of his parents, a consideration that one hardly ever finds in his philosophy. In a last letter to his publisher he is said to have announced that after the soon expected death of his father he would follow him into death by his own hand. His mother had already died, and so nothing stood in the way of his suicide in Paris on September 7, 1971.
“THE NOTHING POSSESSES A MAGIC FOR ME, WHICH THE FREAKS, WHICH POPULATE THIS PLACE NEVER WOULD HAVE AND COULD HAVE, I THANK THE SKY THAT I LIVE HERE, TO LEAVE THE WORLD COSTS NO OVERCOMING.
So he writes in a kind of epilogue to his Breviary of Chaos. These lines are not a final declaration of love for Paris, but rather a declaration of love for the decay of this city, which Albert Caraco not only registered astutely and trenchantly, but which he regarded as the only correct course of events. In this sentence his nihilistic philosophy is also summarized, his obsessions and idiosyncrasies are indicated. They all revolve around irreversibility, around the aporia of things, around a fateful, redemptive catastrophe, which the disgusted man not only foresaw with captivating intuition, but which he longed for in almost necrophilic passion. Death remains open to the modern world as the only way of redemption, Caraco was imbued with this. Much of what he wrote sounds to the ears of us today as if it were written in 2020.
Born in 1919 in what is now Istanbul, the son of wealthy Sephardic Jews, Albert Caraco came with his family via Prague, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, and finally to Uruguay, where he took Uruguayan citizenship. In 1946 the family returned to Paris. Despite his commercial training, Caraco hardly participated in working life. Withdrawn into his private retreat, he indulges in his confused and outstanding thinking, the compendium of which is available in the Breviary of Chaos.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 world clergy, which is to be prayed regularly. As in monasticism, the hours of the day are to be consecrated to God in prayer. God, in turn, allows the clergyman in these moments to step out of the course of profane life and places the day’s work in his supramundane horizon.
When Albert Caraco calls his work Breviary (once he also calls it Manifesto), he explicitly gives it a spiritual consecration and an authority derived from it. Not without reason and not without vanity he will call himself at one point an unheard prophet, who writes only for a vanishing minority of chosen ones, who have to stand out from their environment.
Nevertheless, Ulrich Horstmann warned in his review in the ZEIT in 1987, with other kindred spirits, against praying after him, because what Caraco reveals there in sections without heading or thematic arrangement is a rampage in thought. And one of the first victims, besides the intellectual-historical illusions, is political correctness.
Human or mass
Being human has consequences. The course set by human existence, especially at the beginning of modernity, steers the progress train on schedule towards the abyss. Albert Caraco joins the critics of civilization, especially the subgroup of life skeptics, which starts with Schopenhauer and becomes more and more rabid as it progresses, to end with Lautréamont (also from Uruguay), Philipp Mainländer or even H. P. Lovecraft. The dynamics, which man releases, always carry in themselves the aggressions, which he will not be able to master in the future. This is also true for the dynamics of promises of salvation of any color. Caraco’s bitter enmity is especially directed at them. Because being human begins for him where an awakening into the monstrous reality of all things, also the spiritual, happens. The guardians of every faith protect against this awakening. Even if the beginnings look promising, in the temporal unfolding “the thoughts, with which one played, begin to play with the people”, so the author completely in Nietzschean style. The disaster begins with the emergence of faith movements that could never initiate a fundamental conversion, because in their affirmation of life they also affirmed the consequences of life, and for Caraco these are: destruction of the earth through massification, overpopulation and urbanization. In this context, he utters phrases like curses:
“ARE THEY HUMAN BEINGS? NO. THE MASS OF THE DAMNED IS NEVER COMPOSED OF MEN, BECAUSE MAN BEGINS ONLY FROM THE MOMENT WHEN THE MASS BECOMES THE TOMB OF HUMANITY”.
A sentence like a spring mine in the garden of political correctness. In addition to the trance-like invectives, he sometimes coins more sublime images such as this one, which is shown to us in the evoked climate change of our days should sound familiar:
“THE DEATH OF THE SOIL IS THE SHADOW CAST BY CITIES FROM AFAR”.
For Caraco, the mass is composed only of termites or insects in general. He denies human characteristics to it, as well as to 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 would itself come from the system again and thus continue it. The sheer number of those to be healed would oppose it. Caraco writes:
“LIFE IS NO LONGER SACRED FROM THE MOMENT WHEN THE LIVING BECOME PREVALENT”.
The principle of hopelessness
Albert Caraco’s eschatology is entirely characterized by the approaching catastrophe. Chaos is in the role of the expected Messiah, death in that of a deity. To the frightened reader he exclaims:
“THE CURE IS CRUEL, THE DISEASE IS EVEN MORE SO”.
As lucidly as he has named the problems surrounding overpopulation, even at the cost of a racial undertone that can hardly be ignored, he remains vague in his description of the decisive catastrophe. Its rank in Caraco is comparable to that of the kingdom of God from the Gospels. In it he places his sado-masochistic hopes for the end of a world that repelled him and that dehumanized or had to dehumanize man, even the thinking man. Death was seen by him as an impartial objectivizer, for whom man was nothing but “one thing” among many others. He liked to entrust himself to it rather than to a personal God, whom he wanted to judge in gnostic manner only on the basis of his creation. Since this was thoroughly abortive or had to be abortive after situation of the things, he could assume at best from an abysmally bad God. Death would also free him from him.
