Emil Cioran

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Emil Cioran

Born Emil Mihai Cioran

8 April 1911

Resinr, Austria-Hungary (present-day Rinari,

Romania)

Died 21 June 1995 (aged 84)

Paris, France

Era 20th-century philosophy

Region Western philosophy

School Philosophical pessimism

Existentialism

Main Suicide, nihilism, ethics, literature

interests

Influences[show]
 Influenced[show]

Emil Cioran (Romanian pronunciation: [emil toran] ( listen); 8 April 1911 20 June 1995) was
a Romanian philosopher and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French.
Cioran was born in Resinr (Rinari), Szeben County, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the
time. His work has been noted for its pervasive philosophical pessimism, and frequently engaged
with issues of suffering, decay, and nihilism. Among his best known works are On the Heights of
Despair (1934) and The Trouble with Being Born (1973). Cioran's first French book, A Short
History of Decay, was awarded the prestigious Rivarol Prize in 1950. 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]

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

Early life[edit]
Cioran was born in Resinr (Rinari), Szeben County, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the
time. His father, Emilian Cioran, was an Orthodox priest, while his mother, Elvira (ne
Comaniciu), was originally from Veneia de Jos, a commune near Fgra.

Cioran's house in Rinari

After focusing on Humanities at the Gheorghe Lazr High School in Sibiu (Hermannstadt),
Cioran, at age 17, entered the University of Bucharestwhere he studied Philosophy and where he
immediately met Eugne Ionesco and Mircea Eliade who became his lifelong friends. Future
Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica and future Romanian thinker Petre uea, became his
closest academic colleagues as all studied under Tudor Vianu and Nae Ionescu. Cioran, Eliade,
and uea became supporters of the ideas of Nae Ionescu, deemed Trirism
Cioran had a good command of German. His early studies revolved around Immanuel
Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and especially Friedrich Nietzsche. He became an agnostic, taking
as an axiom "the inconvenience of existence". While at the University, he was influenced by the
works of Georg Simmel, Ludwig Klages and Martin Heidegger, but also by
the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, whose contribution to Ciorans central system of thought
was the belief that life is arbitrary. Cioran's graduation thesis was on Henri Bergson whom he
later rejected, claiming Bergson did not comprehend the tragedy of life.

Career[edit]
Berlin and Romania[edit]
In 1933, he received 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",[1]while expressing his approval for the Night of the Long Knives"what has humanity
lost if the lives of a few imbeciles were taken"),[2] and, in a letter written to Petru Comarnescu,
described himself as "a Hitlerist".[3] He held similar views about Italian fascism, welcoming
victories in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, arguing that: "Fascism is a shock, without
which Italy is a compromise comparable to today's Romania".[4]
Ciorans first book, 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 Guarda 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,[5] a view which was also present in
various articles Cioran wrote at the time,[6] and which aimed to establish
"urbanization and industrialization" as "the two obsessions of a rising people".[7] 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.[8] 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".[9] 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."),[10] 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"),[11] as well as from various Iron Guard
papers.[12]
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 "Andrei aguna" high
school in Braov 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 state-
owned 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").[13]
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".[14]
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 time, Cioran published books only
in French (all were appreciated not only because of their content, but also because of their style,
which was full of lyricism and fine use of the language).
Caricature of Emil Cioran

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 of Paris became Ciorans permanent residence. He lived most of his life in
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, Henri
Michaux and Fernando Savater.
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 speculation in favor of personal reflection and passionate lyricism. "Ive invented nothing;
Ive simply 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 abortedhim). However, Cioran's pessimism (in fact, his skepticism,
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).[15]
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.
Ciorans 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 Dostoyevsky were the two great obsessions of his
life, but that while his passion for Dostoyevsky ended up diminishing somewhat, 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".
Cioran became most famous while writing not in Romanian but French, a language with which he
had struggled since his youth. During Cioran's lifetime, Saint-John Perse called him the greatest
French writer to honor our language since the death of Paul Valry.[17] Cioran's tone and usage in
his adopted language were seldom as harsh as in Romanian (though his use of Romanian is said
to be more original).[citation needed]

Legacy[edit]
After the death of Cioran's long-term companion, Simone Bou, a collection of Cioran's
manuscripts (over 30 notebooks) were found in the couple's apartment by a manager who tried,
in 2005, to auction them. A decision taken by the Court of Appeal of Paris stopped the
commercial sale of the collection. However, in March 2011, the Court of Appeal ruled that the
seller was the legitimate owner of the manuscripts. 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). This document is
probably Ciorans last unpublished work.
An aged Cioran is the main character in a play by Romanian dramatist-actor Matei
Viniec, Mansard la Paris cu vedere spre moarte ("A Paris Loft with a View on Death"). The
play, depicting an imaginary meeting between Viniec and Emil Cioran,[18] was first brought to the
stage in 2007, under the direction of Radu Afrim and with a cast of Romanian
and Luxembourgian actors; Cioran was played by Constantin Cojocaru.[19] Stagings were
organized in the Romanian city of Sibiu[18][19] and in the Luxembourg, at Esch-sur-Alzette (both
Sibiu and Luxembourg City were the year's European Capital of Culture).[18] In 2009,
the Romanian Academy granted posthumous membership to Cioran.[20]

Major works[edit]
Romanian[edit]
 Pe culmile disperrii (literally On the Summits of Despair; translated "On the Heights of
Despair"), Editura "Fundaia pentru Literatur i Art", Bucharest 1934
Cartea amgirilor ("The Book of Delusions), Bucharest 1936
Schimbarea la fa a Romniei ("The Transfiguration of Romania), Bucharest 1936
Lacrimi i Sfini ("Tears and Saints"), "Editura autorului" 1937
ndreptar ptima ("The Passionate Handbook), Humanitas, Bucharest 1991
French[edit]

Prcis de dcomposition ("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 978-0-226-10675-5
Histoire et utopie ("History and Utopia"), Gallimard 1960
La Chute dans le temps ("The Fall into Time"), Gallimard 1964
Le Mauvais dmiurge (literally The Evil Demiurge; tr. "The New Gods"), Gallimard 1969
De l'inconvnient d'tre n ("The Trouble With Being Born"), Gallimard 1973
cartlement (tr. "Drawn and Quartered"), Gallimard 1979
Exercices d'admiration 1986, and Aveux et anathmes 1987 (tr. and grouped as "Anathemas
and Admirations")
uvres (Collected works), Gallimard-Quatro 1995
Mon pays/ara mea ("My country, written in French, the book was first published in Romania
in a bilingual volume), Humanitas, Bucharest, 1996
Cahiers ("Notebooks"), Gallimard 1997
Des larmes et des saints , L'Herne | English edition: ISBN 978-0-226-10672-4
Sur les cimes du dsespoir, L'Herne, | English edition: ISBN 978-0-226-10670-0
Le Crpuscule des penses, L'Herne,
Jadis et nagure, L'Herne
Valry face ses idoles, L'Herne, 1970, 2006
De la France, LHerne, 2009
Transfiguration de la Roumanie, LHerne, 2009
Cahier Cioran, LHerne, 2009 (Several unpublished documents, letters and photographs).

See also[edit]
Antinatalism
Diogenes of Sinope
Romanian philosophy
Misanthropy

Notes[edit]
1. Jump up^ Cioran, 1933, in Ornea, p.191
2. Jump up^ Cioran, 1934, in Ornea, p.192
3. Jump up^ Cioran, 1933, in Ornea, p.190
4. Jump up^ Cioran, 1936, in Ornea, p.192
5. Jump up^ Ornea, p.40
6. Jump up^ Ornea, p.50-52, 98
7. Jump up^ Cioran, in Ornea, p.98
8. Jump up^ Ornea, p.127, 130, 137-141
9. Jump up^ Cioran, 1934, in Ornea, p.127
10. Jump up^ Cioran, 1936, in Ornea, p.141
11. Jump up^ Crainic, 1937, in Ornea, p.143
 12. Jump up^ Ornea, p.143-144
13. Jump up^ Cioran, 1940, in Ornea, p.197
14. Jump up^ Cioran, 1972, in Ornea, p.198
15. Jump up^ Weiss, Jason (1991). Writing At Risk: Interviews Uncommon Writers. University of Iowa
Press. ISBN 9781587292491.
16. Jump up^ Cioran, December 4, 1989, in Newsweek
17. Jump up^ Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, Searching for Cioran (Indiana University Press), p.6
18. ^ Jump up to:a b c (in Romanian) "Teatru romnesc n Luxemburg", at HotNews.ro; retrieved
November 15, 2007
19. ^ Jump up to:a b Ioan T. Morar, "Cronic de lng teatre. A fcut Emil Cioran karate?", in Academia
Caavencu, 45/2007, p.30
20. Jump up^ (in Romanian) Membrii post-mortem al Academiei Romne, at the Romanian
Academy site

References[edit]
Ornea, Z. (1995). Anii treizeci. Extrema dreapt romneasc. Bucharest: Fundaiei Culturale
Romne. ISBN 973-9155-43-X. OCLC 33346781.

External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has
media related to Emil
Cioran.

Wikiquote has quotations

related to: Emil Cioran

Cioran.eu - Project Cioran: texts, interviews, multimedia, links.

E.M. Cioran on Samuel Beckett The website states that: "Scattered throughout the one
thousand pages of Cioran's Cahiers 1957-1972 are many intriguing remarks about Beckett
and his work, of which the following are among the more memorable."
[1] The Book of Delusions [Cartea amgirilor] (chapter 5), translated with an introduction by
Camelia Elias. Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, Vol. V, Issue 1, MAY 2010.
Manuscripts by Romanian Philosopher Cioran Fetch 400,000
The Riches of Uncertainty: Queneau and Cioran an essay by Jean-Pierre Longre, translated
from the French by Rosemary Lloyd (The Black Herald, October 2013)