Emil Cioran ( ; April 8, 1911 – June 20, 1995) was a Romanian philosopher and essayist.

Early life

Emil Cioran was born in Răşinari, Sibiu County, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time. His father, Emilian Cioran, was a Romanian Orthodox priest, while his mother, Elvira Cioran (born Comaniciu), was originally from Veneţia de Jos, a commune near Făgăraş.

After studying humanities at the Gheorghe Lazăr High School in Sibiu (Hermannstadt), Cioran, aged 17, started to study philosophy at the University of Bucharest. 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 for they all had Tudor Vianu and Nae Ionescu as their professors. Cioran, Eliade, and Ţuţea became supporters of the ideas that their philosophy professor, Nae Ionescu, had become a fervent advocate of – a tendency deemed Trăirism, 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 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 Cioran’s central 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

Berlin and Romania

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 measures taken by 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", while expressing his approval for the Night of the Long Knives — "what has humanity lost if the lives of a few imbeciles were taken"), and, in a letter written to Petru Comarnescu, described himself as "a Hitlerist". 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".

Cioran’s first book, On the Heights of Despair (more accurately translated: "On the Summits of Despair"), was published 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 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 censored The Transfiguration of Romania in its second edition released in the 1990s; he eliminated numerous passages considered extremist or "pretentious and stupid". The volume expressed sympathy for totalitarianism, a view which was also present in various articles Cioran wrote at the time, and which aimed to establish "urbanization and industrialization" as "the two obsessions of a rising people". 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. 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". 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."), which led to criticism from the far right Gândirea (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"), as well as from various Iron Guard papers.

France

After coming back from Berlin (1936), Cioran taught philosophy at the "Andrei Şaguna" high school in Braşov 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 November 28, 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").

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".

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 delicate and lyrical aphorisms demented by infinite pessimism.

1937 witnessed Cioran’s departure for France with a scholarship from the French Institute of Bucharest. From the moment of his departure, 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 lyricism and fine use of the language).

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 every literary prize with which he was presented.

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, Eugène Ionesco, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, and Henri Michaux.

He is buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery.

Major themes and style

Exhausting his interest for conservative philosophy early in his youth, Cioran denounced systematic thought and abstract speculation in favor of indulgence in personal reflection and passionate lyricism. "I’ve invented nothing; I’ve simply been the secretary of my sensations" , he later claimed.

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, 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) .

His works often depict an atmosphere of torment and torture, states that Cioran experienced, and came to be dominated by lyricism often prone to expressing violent feelings. The books he wrote in Romanian 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 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?"

Cioran’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 can not be regarded a complete failure".

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".

Rather ironically, Cioran became famous while writing in French, a language with which he had struggled since youth. His use of the adopted language was seldom as harsh as his use of Romanian, while the latter offered resources of originality in tone.

Legacy

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 major interest to readers and editors, and is probably Cioran’s last unpublished work.

An aged Cioran is the main character in a play by Romanian dramatist-actor Matei Vişniec, Mansardă la Paris cu vedere spre moarte ("A Paris Loft with a View on Death"). The play, depicting an imaginary meeting between Vişniec and Emil Cioran, 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. Stagings were organized in the Romanian city of Sibiu and in the Luxembourg, at Esch-sur-Alzette (both Sibiu and Luxembourg City were the year's European Capital of Culture).

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
• Schimbarea 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 0-226-10675-6
• 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
• Écartèlement (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
• Œuvres (Collected works), Gallimard-Quatro 1995
• Des larmes et des saints , L'Herne
• Sur les cimes du désespoir, L'Herne,
• Le crépuscule des pensées, L'Herne,
• Jadis et naguère, L'Herne
• Valéry face à ses idoles, L'Herne, 1970, 2006
• De la France, L’Herne, 2009
• Transfiguration de la Roumanie, L’Herne, 2009
• Cahier Cioran, L’Herne, 2009 (Several unpublished documents, letters and photographies).

See also

• Diogenes of Sinope
• Misotheism
• Misanthropy

Notes

1. Cioran, 1933, in Ornea, p.191
2. Cioran, 1934, in Ornea, p.192
3. Cioran, 1933, in Ornea, p.190
4. Cioran, 1936, in Ornea, p.192
5. Ornea, p.40
6. Ornea, p.50-52, 98
7. Cioran, in Ornea, p.98
8. Ornea, p.127, 130, 137-141
9. Cioran, 1934, in Ornea, p.127
10. Cioran, 1936, in Ornea, p.141
11. Crainic, 1937, in Ornea, p.143
12. Ornea, p.143-144
13. Cioran, 1940, in Ornea, p.197
14. Cioran, 1972, in Ornea, p.198
15. Cioran, December 4, 1989, in Newsweek
16. "Teatru românesc în Luxemburg", at HotNews.ro; retrieved November 15, 2007
17. Ioan T. Morar, "Cronică de lângă teatre. A făcut Emil Cioran karate?", in Academia Caţavencu, 45/2007, p.30

References

External links

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