Emil Cioran

Emil Cioran, known in French as Émile Michel Cioran (April 8 1911, Răşinari, Sibiu—June 20 1995, Paris), was a Romanian-French philosopher, writer, and essayist.

Life in Romania

Emil Cioran was born in Răşinari, Sibiu. His father, Emilian Cioran, was an Orthodox Priest while his mother, Elivra Cioran (surname Comaniciu), was originally from Venetia de Jos (Southern Venice), a commune near Făgăraş. Elivra’s father, Gheorghe Comaniciu, a notary, was raised to the status of a baron by the Austro-Hungarian authorities. Thus Emil Cioran, by virtue of his maternal bloodline, could be linked back to a small Transylvanian family of nobles.

After studying human sciences at the Gheorghe Lazăr high school in Sibiu, Cioran started to study philosophy at the University of Bucharest at the age of 17. Upon his entrance into the University he met Eugène Ionesco and Mircea Eliade, the three of them becoming lifelong friends. Future Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica and future Romanian thinker Petre Ţuţea, became his closest colleagues while he was under the direction of Tudor Vianu and Nae Ionescu. Knowing the German language very well, his first studies revolved around Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and especially Friedrich 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 to his central system of thought. Cioran graduated with a thesis on Henri Bergson; however, later Cioran rejected Bergson, claiming the latter didn't comprehend the tragedy of life. In 1933, he obtained a scholarship to Berlin where he came into contact with Nicolai Hartmann and Ludwig Klages.

Romanian Works

Cioran’s first book, On the Heights of Despair (more accurately translated: On the Summits of Despair), appeared in Romania in 1934. It was awarded the Commission’s Prize and the Young Writers Prize for one of the best books written by an unedited 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 have yet to be translated into English). Cioran censored The Transfiguration of Romania in its second edition released in the 90s; he eliminated the numerous passages considered extremist, “pretentious and stupid”. Marta Petreu’s An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania published in 2005 gives a very in-depth analysis of the book.

After coming back from Berlin (1936), Cioran taught philosophy at the “Andrei Şaguna” high school in Brasov for a year. In 1937 he left for Paris with a scholarship from the French Institute of Bucharest, which was then prolonged until 1944. In 1940 he started writing The Passionate Handbook, his last book written in Romanian. The book was finished by 1945, the year that Cioran moved to France definitively, but remained unedited until 1991.

French Works

1937 witnessed Cioran’s departure for France with a scholarship from the French Institute of Bucharest. After a short return to Romania (two months) in 1940, he left Romanian forever and settled in Paris. From that moment on, Cioran only published books in French, his books being appreciated not only because of their content, but also because of their style which was full of lyricism and fine use of the language. In fact, he refused to ever write in Romanian again, exaggerating his detachment from Romania to such an extent that even his letters to his parents were written in French. In 1949 his first French book, A Short History of Decay, was published by Gallimard – the publishing company which came to publish the majority of his books later on – and was awarded the Rivarol Prize in 1950. Later on, Cioran refused all of the literary prizes with which he was presented.

Iron Guard

Though Cioran was never a member, during his time in Romania Cioran began to take an interest in the ideas put forth by the Iron Guard - a far right organization whose nationalist side of their (arguably more complex) ideology he supported until the early years of World War II, despite allegedly disapproving of their violent methods. Cioran, Eliade, and Ţuţea were adherents to the ideas of their teacher Nae Ionescu - a tendency deemed Trăirism, which fused Existentialism with ideas common to various forms of Fascism.

He later renounced not only his Platonic love for the Iron Guard, but also their nationalist ideas, and frequently expressed regret and repentance for his emotional implication in it.

Theme and Style

Exhausting his interest in conservative philosophy early in his youth, Cioran denounced systematic thought and abstract speculation in favor of indulging in personal reflection and passionate lyricism. “I’ve invented nothing; I’ve simply been the secretary of my sensations” he later claimed. Pessimism characterized his later works, which many critics trace back to events in 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, his skepticism, even nihilism) is more than that of one who looks deeply into the abyss, yet is able to continue existing with the tragic wisdom he has discovered and remain, in his own particular manner, joyful; it is not a pessimism which can be traced to such simple origins, single origins themselves being questionable. When Cioran's mother spoke to him of abortion, 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, noting that everything is without substance. Existence is chance.

His works often depicted an atmosphere of torment and torture, states which Cioran experienced, and came to be dominated by lyricism often prone to expressing violent feelings. The books he wrote in Romanian when he was young are best identified with this characteristic. Preoccupied with the problem of death and suffering, he was attracted to the idea of suicide, believing it to be an idea which could help one go on living, an idea which he fully explored in On the Heights of Despair. 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?”

Cioran’s works encompass many other themes as well: original sin, the tragic sense of history, the end of civilization, the refusal of consolidation through faith, the obsession of the absolute, life as an expression of man’s metaphysical exile, etc. Cioran was a thinker passionate about history, which he knew very much of through his vast lectures at the University and reading of the authors that sprung from the periods of decadence. These authors, such as Oswald Spengler, influenced Cioran’s political philosophy in that they offered Gnostic and anti-modernist reflections about the destiny of man and civilization. They claimed that “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 through artificial triumph.”

Cioran’s destiny took an ironic turn in that it wanted for Cioran to become famous while writing in French, a language with which he had struggled since youth. If the French idiom relaxed his excesses and gave him the secret of form and formulation, his Romanian roots secured the sap and vitality which made his works shine.

William H. Gass called Cioran's work "a philosophical romance on modern themes of alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as an agony, reason as disease."

Regarding God, Cioran has noted "without Bach, God would be complete second rate figure" and "Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe can not be regarded a complete failure". (interview to Benjamin Ivry, in Newsweek, December 4, 1989, p 42).

Life in Paris

The Latin Quarter of Paris became Cioran’s permanent residence. He lived most of his life in isolation, avoiding the public. Yet, he still maintained numerous friends with which he conversed often such as: Mircea Eliade, Eugene Ionesco, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, Henri Michaux, etc. He thus showed himself to be a remarkable man of letters.

Post Scriptum

After the death of Simone Boué, Cioran’s companion for most of his life, a series of manuscripts (over 30 notebooks) written by Cioran were found in their apartment by a manager who tried, in 2005, to auction them. However, a decision made by the Court of Appeal of Paris stopped their commercialization; the trial is still taking place in France. Amid the manuscripts which were mainly drafts of works that had already been published, an unedited journal was found which encompassed his life after 1972 (the year in which his Notebooks end). The document is of exceptional interest to readers and editors, and is probably Cioran’s last unedited work.

Selected Quotes

Cruelty -- A Luxury

In normal doses, fear, indespensable to action and thought, stimulates our senses and our mind; without it, no action at all. But when it is excessive, when it invades and overwhelms us, fear is transformed into a harmful principle, into cruelty. A man who trembles dreams of making others tremble, a man who lives in terror ends his days in ferocity. Hence the case of the roman emperors. Anticipating their own murders, they consoled themselves by massacres... The discovery of a first conspiracy awakened and released in them the monster. And it was into cruelty that they withdrew in order to forget fear.

But we, ordinary mortals who cannot permit ourselves the luxury of being cruel to others -- it is upon ourselves, upon our flesh and our minds that we must exercise and indeed exorcise our terrors. The tyrant in us trembles; he must act, discharge his rage, take revenge; and it is upon ourselves that he does so. So decides the modesty of our condition. Amid our terrors, more than one of us evokes a Nero who, lacking an empire, would have had only his own conscience to persecute.

- E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exsist, pg 182

List of Major Works

Romanian

Pe culmile disperării (literally On the Summits of Despair; translated "On the Heights of Despair"), Editura "Fundaţia pentru Literatură şi Artă", Bucharest 1934
Cartea amăgirilor ("The Book of Delusions”), Bucharest 1936
Schimbare la faţă a României ("The Transfiguration of Romania”), Bucharest 1936
Lacrimi şi Sfinţi ("Tears and Saints"), "Editura autorului" 1937
Îndreptar pătimaş ("The Passionate Handbook”) , Humanitas, Bucharest 1991

French

Mon pays/Ţara mea ("My country”, written in french, the book was first published in Romania in a bilingual volume), Humanitas, Bucharest, 1996
Précis de décomposition ("A Short History of Decay"), Gallimard 1949
Syllogismes de l'amertume (tr. "All Gall Is Divided"), Gallimard 1952
La tentation d'exister ("The Temptation to Exist"), Gallimard 1956 English edition: ISBN 0226106756
Histoire et utopie ("History and Utopia"), Gallimard 1960
La chute dans le temps ("The Fall into Time"), Gallimard 1964
Le mauvais démiurge (literally The Poor Demiurge; tr. "The New Gods"), Gallimard 1969
De l'inconvénient d'être né ("The Trouble With Being Born"), Gallimard 1973
Écartelèment (tr. "Drawn and Quartered"), Gallimard 1979
Exercices d'admiration 1986, and Aveux et anathèmes 1987 (tr. and grouped as "Anathemas and Admirations")
Cahiers ("Notebooks"), Gallimard 1997 (English translation published April 3, 2006, only to be released in 2007)

External links

Planet Cioran - All about Cioran. Extensive multilingual linkspage.

To Infinity And Beyond - Spike Magazine's overview of the work of E.M.Cioran.

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