Albert Caraco (8 July 1919 – 7 September 1971) was a French-Uruguayan philosopher, writer, essayist and poet of Turkish Jewish descent. He is best known for his two major works, Post Mortem (1968) and posthumously published Bréviaire du chaos (1982). He is often compared to the philosophers and writers such as Emil Cioran, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Nicolás Gómez Dávila and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Quotes

  • I am a racist and a colonialist.
  • I spent the first ten years of my life in Germany, the following ten in Paris, the following ten between Argentine and Uruguay.
  • 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.
    • Original: En este pequeño libro escrito con elegancia y profundidad vemos reflejados nuestros más terribles temores y nuestros más inconfesados deseos de exterminio, sin ningún tipo de lenitivo que pudiera atenuar el asco y la desesperanza frente a una humanidad cada vez más atrofiada por una serie de valores y prácticas que irremediablemente se dirigen al caos.
    • Albert Caraco, Rodrigo Santos Rivera. Breviario del caos Editorial Sexto Piso, 2006. Editorial text

Journal of 1969

Journal of 1969, p. 134; Translated and cited in: Philippe Billé. Remarks about Albert Caraco. at thephora.net, 05-26-2009

  • French, German, English and Spanish are four admirable languages and I manage to express myself in all of them with more or less skill.
    • p. 45
  • I don't hide my profession of pessimism and I'm an avowed partisan of reaction.
    • p. 104
  • I would be pleased indeed, if the universe were full of blazing ovens, and concentration camps, and people deported.
    • p. 118
  • The educated reader knows, as he reads me, that he is listening to a fugue in four voices.
    • p. 134

Ma confession (1975)

  • I was born to myself between 1946 and 1948, I then opened my eyes on the world, until that moment I have been blind
  • The more I grow older, the more the Gnosis speaks to my reason, the world isn’t ruled by a Providence, it’s intrisically evil, deeply absurd, and Creation is the dream of a blind intellect or a game of a principle without a moral.
  • The cities in which we live in are schools of death, because they are dishuman. Each one of them has become a den of noise and of stench, for each of one has became a chaos of buildings, in which we ammass ourselves in millions, losing our life’s reasons. Unfortunates without escape, we feel to have put ourselves, willing or not, in the labyrinth of the absurd, from which we will leave only when we will die, for our destiny is to continue to multiply ourselves, only to die in great numbers. At every turn of the wheel, the cities in which we live in advance slowly one against the other, desiring only to confuse with each other: it’s a run towards the absolute chaos, in the noise and in the stench. At every turn of the wheel the price of the grounds go up, and in the labyrinth which devours the free space the revenue of the investiments builds up, day after day, hundreds of walls. It’s necessary that money give revenues and that the cities in which we live in advance, so it’s right that the houses double their height at every generation, even if the water is missing half of the days. The builders only desire to escape the destiny that they prepare for us, moving towards the countryside.
  • In every saint there lurks an arrant knave, the marrow of all holyness being absolute hellishness. That is why our Saviours are of no awail, their remedies being too strong for common man, who is the puppet of his fleshly appetite and not a sinner.
    • p. 91
  • Great heed has to be taken about the fact that most of us desire to remain unconscious: felicity (in eyes of common man) is rapture and rapture seems a quenching of awareness reduced to the awareness of its obliteration... Sex and Religion are centred on it both and I dare say that their convenience will in future be to join instead of rivalling, as they are wont to do, obscenity will be religious as it was long ago.
    • Ma confession, Lausanne: L'Âge d'Homme, p. 91
  • Our moral ideas are not transcendent, our moral ideas are historical and History obeys to changing Aions, we feel that ours is fading and no authority can enforce confidence rooted in what no power includes : in Sensibility itself. To every Aion a new Sensibility adheres and to each Sensibility another Aion is related, sin is nowhere, we only see abuse and worst among abuses, the delusion of sin as such.
    • Ma confession, Lausanne: L'Âge d'Homme, p. 92
  • Most of us live betwixt quiet despair and furious nihilism.
    • p. 94
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