A Short History of Decay

Introduction

“A Short History of Decay” was Cioran’s first book in French. He wrote it in Paris after the war, revising it several times, and Gallimard published it in 1949; in 1950 it received the Prix Rivarol, awarded to foreign authors writing in French. It opens with a “genealogy of fanaticism”: whoever believes absolutely in an idea becomes ready to kill for it, so that doubt and scepticism are the guardians of civilisation. In a classical, aphoristic French modelled on the moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the book turns against faith in progress, saints, heroes and every history that promises redemption. Read against his Romanian writings of the 1930s, it has also been interpreted as an implicit reckoning with his own fanaticism – a reading that remains debated. Paul Celan translated it into German in 1953.

More works by Emil Cioran

• 1934On the Heights of Despair
• 1973The Trouble with Being Born