/library/oar/handle/123456789/11190 Wed, 24 Dec 2025 22:19:12 GMT 2025-12-24T22:19:12Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/13067 Title: ‘Scale’ : conference review Authors: Aquilina, Aaron Abstract: The European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSAeu) held its annual conference between the 15th and 18th of June, 2015, this year at the Grand Hotel Excelsior, Malta. The conference was hosted in collaboration with the University of Malta’s Humanities, Medicine and Sciences Programme, and with the additional support of the university’s Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Science, the Medical School, and the Department of English. It should be stated from the outset that the conference was considered by all to be both extremely well organised and very successful. Sun, 01 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT /library/oar/handle/123456789/13067 2015-11-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/13066 Title: About our contributors Abstract: Short biographies of the contributors in this issue. Sun, 01 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT /library/oar/handle/123456789/13066 2015-11-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/13065 Title: Cioran’s ‘grain of ataraxy’ : boredom, nothingness, and quietism Authors: Farrugia, James Abstract: In reading E.M. Cioran’s œuvre, one is faced with an immediate and unremitting abrasiveness that has its roots with our being born into time. Indeed, the author of The Fall into Time and The Trouble with Being Born thought that it is precisely this accidental and unredeemable temporality, an original sin that results in a life forever situated in cycles of striving and becoming, which is to be exhuastingly apprehended in the experience of boredom: ‘Life is more and less than boredom, though it is in boredom and by boredom that we discern what life is worth.’ Cioran’s pessimism never relents; even his lugubrious friend Samuel Beckett had to keep a distance after finding him ‘too pessimistic’—who else but Cioran could write that ‘leukemia is the garden where God blooms’? Despite this, in Cioran’s often autobiographical, aphoristic and essayistic writings, we find a richly-timbred boredom (ironically so) which gives us incisive observations into a multitude of related concepts and realities. Nothingness, God, silence, mysticism, suffering, and quietism (among others) all feature in Cioran’s writings on boredom, as well as in this paper’s attempt to better situate Cioran’s work with respect to his more famous pessimistic and existentialist relations’s take on the subject, namely Arthur Schopenhauer and Martin Heidegger. In exploring his work on boredom vis-à-vis his specific interest in mysticism, Taoism, nothingness, time and insomnia, this paper aims to show how the failure to attain what Cioran called ‘a grain of ataraxy’, necessarily presupposes a limited set of ‘possibilities’ and ‘prospects’ when faced with the experience of ‘the sensation of the emptiness of existence’ that is boredom (Schopenhauer). Sun, 01 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT /library/oar/handle/123456789/13065 2015-11-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/13064 Title: On the extraordinary : problematisation, flatness, and repetition Authors: Mula Ferrer, Manel Abstract: This essay reflects on the meaning and connotations of “the extraordinary” as applied to a person’s life context. To do so, it transposes to a smaller scale different concepts from philosophy of history (such as the notion of repetition in Nietzsche and Freud). These are then mainly framed with artistic (literary) examples for its capability of moment-creation in order to examine the mere condition of possibility of the emergence of something extraordinary in the personal affective sphere. In the essay, the extraordinary is defined both as an unlikely probability within a system and a moment in which various potentialities unfold, but also as a moment of flat temporality. The three conceptualizations intertwine to describe a feeling of waiting for something to happen: the extraordinary becomes only possible by its own indictment, in a version of vitalism that invests the incitement of the moment with counter-boredom. Ultimately, boredom provides a way of thinking flatness as previous to the condition of possibility, thus understanding the extraordinary as resistance against the force that orients action towards illusionary horizons. Sun, 01 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT /library/oar/handle/123456789/13064 2015-11-01T00:00:00Z