Emil Cioran

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Emil Cioran

Caricature of Emil Cioran

Born

Emil Mihai Cioran

8 April 1911
Rinari, Austro-Hungary[1] (today Romania)

Died

20 June 1995 (aged 84)

Paris, France

Era

20th-century philosophy

Region

Western philosophy

School

Philosophical pessimism,Existentialism

Main interests

Suicide, nihilism, ethics, literature

Influences[show]

Emil M. Cioran (Romanian pronunciation: e i

(
listen); 8 April 1911 20 June 1995) was
a Romanian philosopher and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French. Cioran
w sb
i Ri i, Sibiu C u y, which w s p
f Aus i -Hungary at the time. His first French
book, A Short History of Decay, was awarded the prestigious Rivarol Prize in 1950. It was the only
book for which he accepted an award given to him, claiming that it would have been insolent of him
to refuse it. The Latin Quarter of Paris was his permanent residence and he lived much of his life in
isolation with his partner Simone Bou.
Contents
[hide]

1 Early life
2 Career
o 2.1 Berlin and Romania
o 2.2 France
3 Major themes and style
4 Legacy
5 Major works
o 5.1 Romanian
o 5.2 French
6 See also
7 Notes
8 References
9 External links

Early life[edit]
Cioran was born in Ri i, Sibiu County, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time. His father,
Emilian Cioran, was anorthodox priest, while his mother, Elvira Cioran (born Comaniciu), was
originally from Ve ei de J s, a commune near Fg .

Cioran's house in Ri

After studying humanities at the Ghe ghe L z High School in Sibiu (Hermannstadt), Cioran, aged
17, started to study philosophyat the University of Bucharest. Upon his entrance into the University,
he met Eugne Ionesco and Mircea Eliade, the three of them becoming lifelong friends. Future
Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica and future Romanian thinker Pe e ue , became his
closest colleagues for they all had Tudor Vianu and Nae Ionescu as their professors. Cioran, Eliade,
and ue bec e supp e s f he ide s h hei phi s phy p fess , N e I escu, h d c e
to fervently advocate a tendency deemed Trirism, which fused Existentialism with ideas common
in various forms of Fascism.

Cioran had a good command of German. His first studies revolved around Immanuel Kant, Arthur
Schopenhauer, and especiallyFriedrich Nietzsche. He became an agnostic, taking as an axiom "the
inconvenience of existence". During his studies at the University he was also influenced by the
works of Georg Simmel, Ludwig Klages and Martin Heidegger, but also by
the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, who added the belief that life is arbitrary Ci
s ce
system of thought. He then graduated with a thesis on Henri Bergson (however, Cioran later rejected
Bergson, claiming the latter did not comprehend the tragedy of life).

Career[edit]

Emil Cioran

Berlin and Romania[edit]

In 1933, he obtained a scholarship to the University of Berlin, where he came into contact with
Klages and Nicolai Hartmann. While in Berlin, he became interested in the policies of the Nazi
regime, contributed a column to Vremea dealing with the topic (in which Cioran confessed that "there
is no present-day politician that I see as more sympathetic and admirable than Hitler",[2] while
expressing his approval for the Night of the Long Knives "what has humanity lost if the lives of a
few imbeciles were taken"),[3] and, in a letter written to Petru Comarnescu, described himself as
"a Hitlerist".[4] He held similar views about Italian fascism, welcoming victories in the Second ItaloAbyssinian War, arguing that: "Fascism is a shock, without which Italy is a compromise comparable
to today's Romania".[5]
Ci
s fi s b k, On the Heights of Despair (literally translated: "On the Summits of Despair"), was
published in Romania in 1934. It was awarded the Commissions Prize and the Young Writers
Prize for one of the best books written by an unpublished young writer. Successively,The Book of
Delusions (1935), The Transfiguration of Romania (1936), and Tears and Saints (1937), were also
published in Romania (the first two titles have yet to be translated into English).
Although Cioran was never a member of the group, it was during this time in Romania that he began
taking an interest in the ideas put forth by the Iron Guard - a far right organization
whose nationalist ideology he supported until the early years of World War II, despite allegedly
disapproving of their violent methods.

Cioran revised The Transfiguration of Romania heavily in its second edition released in the 1990s,
eliminating numerous passages he considered extremist or "pretentious and stupid". In its original
form, the book expressed sympathy for totalitarianism,[6] a view which was also present in various
articles Cioran wrote at the time,[7] and which aimed to establish "urbanization and industrialization"
as "the two obsessions of a rising people".[8] Marta Petreu's An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the
Rise of Fascism in Romania, published in English in 2005, gives an in-depth analysis of The
Transfiguration.
His early call for modernization was, however, hard to reconcile with the traditionalism of the Iron
Guard.[9] In 1934, he wrote, "I find that in Romania the sole fertile, creative, and invigorating
nationalism can only be one which does not just dismiss tradition, but also denies and defeats
it".[10] Disapproval of what he viewed as specifically Romanian traits had been present in his works
("In any maxim, in any proverb, in any reflection, our people expresses the same shyness in front of
life, the same hesitation and resignation... [...] Everyday Romanian [truisms] are
dumbfounding."),[11] which led to criticism from the far right Gndirea (its editor, Nichifor Crainic, had
called The Transfiguration of Romania "a bloody, merciless, massacre of today's Romania, without
even [the fear] of matricide and sacrilege"),[12] as well as from various Iron Guard papers.[13]

France[edit]

21 rue de l'Odon (red point)

from Coasta Boacii to the Rue de l'Odon

After coming back from Berlin (1936), Cioran taught philosophy at the "A d ei gu " high school
in B v for a year. In 1937, he left for Paris with a scholarship from the French Institute
of Bucharest, which was then prolonged until 1944. After a short stay in his home country
(November 1940-February 1941), Cioran never returned again. This last period in Romania was the
one in which he exhibited a closer relationship with the Iron Guard, which had, by then, taken power

(see National Legionary State) on 28 November, he recorded a speech for the stateowned Romanian Radio, one centered on the portrait of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, former leader of
the movement, who had been killed two years before (praising him and the Guard for, among other
things, "having given Romanians a purpose").[14]
He later renounced not only his support for the Iron Guard, but also their nationalist ideas, and
frequently expressed regret and repentance for his emotional implication in it. For example, in a
1972 interview, he condemned it as "a complex of movements; more than this, a demented sect and
a party", and avowed: "I found out then [...] what it means to be carried by the wave without the
faintest trace of conviction. [...] I am now immune to it".[15]
In 1940, he started writing The Passionate Handbook, and finished it by 1945. It was to be the last
book that he would write in Romanian, although not the last to deal with pessimism and misanthropy
through delicate and lyrical aphorisms. From this point on Cioran only published books in French (all
were appreciated not only because of their content, but also because of their style which was full
of lyricismand fine use of the language).

The tomb of Cioran and Simone Bou

In 1949 his first French book, A Short History of Decay, was published by Gallimard and was
awarded the Rivarol Prize in 1950. Later on, Cioran refused every literary prize with which he was
presented.
The Latin Quarter f P is bec e Ci
s pe
e eside ce. He ived
s f his ife i
isolation, avoiding the public. Yet, he still maintained numerous friends with whom he conversed
often such as Mircea Eliade, Eugne Ionesco, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, andHenri Michaux.
He is buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery.

Major themes and style[edit]

Professing a lack of interest in conventional philosophy in his early youth, Cioran dismissed abstract
specu i i f v
f pe s
ef ec i
d p ssi
e y icis . "Ive i ve ed
hi g; Ive si p y
been the secretary of my sensations",[citation needed] he later said.
Pessimism characterizes all of his works, which many critics trace back to events of his childhood (in
1935 his mother is reputed to have told him that if she had known he was going to be so unhappy
she would have aborted him). However, Cioran's pessimism (in fact, hisskepticism, even nihilism)
remains both inexhaustible and, in its own particular manner, joyful; it is not the sort of pessimism
which can be traced back to simple origins, single origins themselves being questionable. When
Cioran's mother spoke to him of abortion, he confessed that it did not disturb him, but made an
extraordinary impression which led to an insight about the nature of existence ("I'm simply an
accident. Why take it all so seriously?" is what he later said in reference to the incident)[this quote needs a
citation]
.

His works often depict an atmosphere of torment, a state that Cioran himself experienced, and came
to be dominated by lyricism and, often, the expression of intense and even violent feeling. The books
he wrote in Romanian especially display this latter characteristic. Preoccupied with the problems of
death and suffering, he was attracted to the idea of suicide, believing it to be an idea that could help
one go on living, an idea which he fully explored in On the Heights of Despair. He revisits suicide in
depth in The New Gods, which contains a section of aphorisms devoted to the subject. The theme of
human alienation, the most prominent existentialist theme, presented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert
Camus, is thus formulated, in 1932, by young Cioran: "Is it possible that existence is our exile and
nothingness our home?" in On the Heights of Despair.
Ci
s works encompass many other themes as well: original sin, the tragic sense of history, the
end of civilization, the refusal of consolation through faith, the obsession with the absolute, life as an
expression of man's metaphysical exile, etc. He was a thinker passionate about history; widely
reading the writers that were associated with the period of "decadent". One of these writers
was Oswald Spengler who influenced Cioran's political philosophy in that he
offered Gnostic reflections on the destiny of man and civilization. According to Cioran, as long as
man has kept in touch with his origins and hasn't cut himself off from himself, he has resisted
decadence. Today, he is on his way to his own destruction through self-objectification, impeccable
production and reproduction, excess of self-analysis and transparency, and artificial triumph.
Regarding God, Cioran has noted that "without Bach, God would be a complete second rate figure"
and that "Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded
as a complete failure".[16] In an interview he stated that Bach had been a "kind of religion" for him. He
mentioned that Bach and Dostoevsky were the two great obsessions of his life, but that while his
passion for Dostoevsky somewhat ended up diminishing, his obsession with Bach "remained intact".
William H. Gass called Cioran's work "a philosophical romance on the modern themes of alienation,
absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as
agony, reason as disease".