On the Heights of Despair

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Bradatan, Costica (28 November 2016). "The Philosopher of Failure: Emil Cioran's Heights of Despair". Los Angeles Review of Books . Retrieved 8 January 2018. His early call for modernization was, however, hard to reconcile with the traditionalism of the Iron Guard. [16] 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". [17] 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."), [18] 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"), [19] as well as from various Iron Guard papers. [20] France [ edit ] Portrait of Cioran

It’s never easy to pin Cioran down, but when it comes to his political past it’s nearly impossible. It doesn’t help matters that, beyond vague references to the “ravings” and “enthusiasm” of his youth, the later Cioran was usually reluctant to touch on “those years.” And for good reason: he knew only too well what was there. Failure hates to travel alone: it usually prefers shame’s company. In another letter to his brother, Cioran writes: “The writer who has done some stupid things in his youth, upon his debut, is like a woman with a shameful past. Never forgiven, never forgotten.” To the end of his days, his political involvement in interwar Romania would remain Cioran’s biggest shame, his most serious, shattering failure. Everything else failed in comparison. aesthetics, antinatalism, ethics, hagiography, literary criticism, music, nihilism, poetry, religion, suicide In his books, Cioran never stopped berating the gods, except, we might say, for the god of failure, the demiurge of the Gnostics. There is something distinctly Gnostic about Cioran’s anti-cosmic philosophy and the manner of his thinking. Gnostic insights, images, and metaphors permeate his work, as scholars of Gnosticism have noticed. A Short History of Decay, The Temptation to Exist, and The New Gods, writes Jacques Lacarrière, are “texts which match the loftiest flashes of Gnostic thought.” Just like the Gnostics of old, Cioran sees creation as the result of a divine failure; human history and civilization are for him nothing but “the work of the devil,” the demiurge’s other name. In A Short History of Decay, he deems the God of this world “incompetent.” “Of all that was attempted on this side of nothingness,” he wonders, “is there anything more pathetic than this world, except for the idea which conceived it?” The French title of one of his most influential books, which in English has been published as The New Gods, is telling — Le Mauvais démiurge (1969): “the evil demiurge.” Here, with unconcealed sympathy, Cioran calls the Gnostics “fanatics of the divine nothingness” and praises them for having “grasped so well the essence of the fallen world.” La Tentation d'exister ("The Temptation to Exist"), Gallimard 1956 | English edition: ISBN 978-0-226-10675-5 Failure permeates everything. Great ideas can be stained by failure, and so can books, philosophies, institutions, and political systems. The human condition itself is for Cioran just another failed project: “No longer wanting to be a man,” he writes in The Trouble with Being Born ( De l’inconvénient d’être né, 1973), he is “dreaming of another form of failure.” The universe is one big failure, and so is life itself. “Before being a fundamental mistake,” says Cioran, “life is a failure of taste which neither death nor even poetry succeeds in correcting.” Failure rules the world like the whimsical God of the Old Testament. One of Cioran’s aphorisms reads: “‘You were wrong to count on me.’ Who can speak in such terms? God and the Failure.”

The University of Chicago Press

A friend recommended E. M. Cioran’s On the Heights of Despair (University of Chicago Press, 1996) . Cioran had a good command of German, learning the language at an early age, and proceeded to read philosophy that was available in German, but not in Romanian. Notes from Cioran's adolescence indicated a study of Friedrich Nietzsche, Honoré de Balzac, Arthur Schopenhauer and Fyodor Dostoevsky, among others. [3] He became an agnostic, taking as an axiom "the inconvenience of existence". While at the University, he was influenced by Georg Simmel, Ludwig Klages and Martin Heidegger, but also by the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, whose contribution to Cioran's 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. [ citation needed] In 1937, Cioran went to Paris with a grant from the French Institute in Bucharest and after 1940, he moved there and began writing only in French. In 1949 Gallimard, the publishing company that came to publish the majority of his books published his first French book, “A Short History of Decay”. In 1950, the book won the Rivarol Prize. Regier, Willis (2004). "Cioran's Insomnia". MLN. 119 (5): 994–1012. doi: 10.1353/mln.2005.0018. JSTOR 3251887. S2CID 170780097– via JSTOR.

FOR SOME, he was one of the most subversive thinkers of his time — a 20th-century Nietzsche, only darker and with a better sense of humor. Many, especially in his youth, thought him to be a dangerous lunatic. According to others, however, he was just a charmingly irresponsible young man, who posed no dangers to others — only to himself perhaps. When his book on mysticism went to the printers, the typesetter — a good, God-fearing man — realizing how blasphemous its contents were, refused to touch it; the publisher washed his hands of the matter and the author had to publish the blasphemy elsewhere, at his own expense. Who was this man? Weiss, Jason (1991). Writing At Risk: Interviews Uncommon Writers. University of Iowa Press. p. 9. ISBN 9781587292491. I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?.a b Pace, Eric (22 June 1995). "E. M. Cioran, 84, Novelist And Philosopher of Despair". The New York Times. The New York Times . Retrieved 13 September 2020.