-:- an Existential Reading List by Katharena -:-

Alienation | Ambiguity | Angst or Anxiety | Awareness as Agony | Bad Faith | Being | Boredom | Christian Existentialism | Death | Demythologized | Ethics and Morality | Existence Precedes Essence | Existential | Existentialism | Faceless | Fight Club | for None and All | Futility | God is Dead! | Hell is Other People! | Individualism | Nausea | Nothingness -- Nonbeing | Phenomenology Theatre of the Absurd |

Nothingness -- Nonbeing: -- If no essences define me, and if, then, as an existentialist, I reject all of the philosophies, sciences, political theories, and religions which fail to reflect my existence as conscious being and attempt to impose a specific essentialist structure upon me and my world, then there is nothing that structures my world. I have followed Kierkegaard's lead. I have stripped myself of all unacceptable structure, the structures of knowledge, moral value, and human relationship, and I stand in anguish at the edge of the abyss. I am my own existence, but my existence is a nothingness. I live then without anything to structure my being and my world, and I am looking into emptiness and the void, hovering over the abyss in fear and trembling and living the life of dread. --T. Z. Lavine

One's condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one's being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness- the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others. --Norman Mailer

What every artist should try to prevent is the car, in which is our civilized life, plunging over the side of the precipice- the exhibitionist extremist promoter driving the whole bag of tricks into a nihilistic nothingness or zero. --Wyndham Lewis