Emil Cioran

Works

• 1934On the Heights of Despair

  Cioran’s first book, written during years of insomnia: lyrical fragments on suffering, death and the impossibility of a reconciled life.

• 1949A Short History of Decay

  Cioran’s first book in French: aphorisms and essays against fanaticism, faith in progress and every conviction that kills for an idea.

• 1973The Trouble with Being Born

  Aphorisms that see the misfortune not in death but in birth, and lucidity as the only remaining dignity.

Position

Cioran’s work is a sustained attack on hope – on progress, history, utopia and every belief that promises redemption. Drawing on Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, the Gnostics and Lev Shestov, whom he called the philosopher of his generation, he moved from the lyrical despair of his Romanian books to the classical, ironic French aphorism: lucidity, not consolation, is the dignity that remains, and the real misfortune is not death but birth. In the 1930s, however, the same writer put his talent for extremity at the service of the Iron Guard. “The Transfiguration of Romania” (1936) scorned democracy and Romania’s past, called for a national revolution at any price and contained antisemitic passages; the radio address of 1940 praised Codreanu. Cioran later distanced himself, described his youthful engagement as a kind of madness and expressed shame in letters and in the posthumously published text “Mon pays”; for the new edition of 1990 he cut the most offensive passages of the book. Research since the 1990s, above all Marta Petreu (1999; English “An Infamous Past”, 2005) and Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine (“Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: l’oubli du fascisme”, 2002), has documented the extent of his engagement and his long public silence about it. The facts are not in dispute; scholars disagree on how far his later scepticism toward all fanaticism was a reckoning with that past, and how much of the early vehemence survives in the late work.

Life & context

Emil Cioran was born on 8 April 1911 in Răşinari near Sibiu in Transylvania, then part of Austria-Hungary, the son of an Orthodox priest. He studied philosophy in Bucharest from 1928 to 1932, belonged to the “young generation” around the philosopher Nae Ionescu, together with Mircea Eliade and Constantin Noica, and suffered for years from severe insomnia. His first book, “On the Heights of Despair”, appeared in 1934. From 1933 to 1935 he held a Humboldt scholarship in Berlin and Munich and wrote articles for Romanian papers praising the new regime in Germany. In 1936 he published “The Transfiguration of Romania” (Schimbarea la faţă a României). After a year as a teacher in Braşov he went to Paris in 1937 on a scholarship of the French Institute. Back in Romania under the National Legionary State, he gave a radio address in late 1940 in praise of the Iron Guard leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, killed in 1938; in 1941 he was briefly cultural attaché at the Romanian legation in Vichy. He then stayed in France, wrote only in French from the late 1940s and lived in Paris with Simone Boué, without a regular post. “A Short History of Decay” (1949) received the Prix Rivarol in 1950; later he declined most literary prizes. He died in Paris on 20 June 1995.

Further main works

• The Transfiguration of Romania (Schimbarea la faţă a României, 1936; abridged edition 1990)
• The Temptation to Exist (La Tentation d’exister, 1956)
• History and Utopia (Histoire et utopie, 1960)