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E.M. Cioran (1911-1995) |
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Romanian born philosopher, aphorist, and essayist, who moved to Paris on the eve of World War II and from 1949 published his writings in French. Émile Cioran was an uncompromising pessimist and moralist, whose major themes were dread, despair, and the irrationality of existence. "Music is the sound track of askesis. Could one make love after Bach? Not even after Handel, whose unearthliness does not have heavenly perfume. Music is a tomb of delights, beatitude which buries us." (Tears and Saints by E.M. Cioran, translated and with an introduction by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 8; original title: Lacrimi şi sfinţi, 1937) Émile Michel Cioran was born in the mountain village of
Rasinari. The region is known for its natural beauty. Cioran's
childhood was happy but later he said in The Temptation to Exist (1956)
that, "Hating my people, my country, its timeless peasants enamoured of
their own torpor and almost bursting with hebetude, I blushed to be
descended from them." ('Introduction: Imagining Cioran' by Ilinca
Zarifopol-Johnston, in On the Heights of
Despair, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. xii; original title: Pe culmile disperării, 1934) His
parents were deported by the Hungarians
during the First World War. Emilian Cioran
was a Greek Orthodox priest. Elvira Cioran, née
Comanici, was head of the Christian Women's League. Cioran's interest in religion – not Russian but Romanian form
of Orthodox Christianity – is evident through his literary career, but
he
became painfully aware of the gap between his thinking and the Orthodox
faith after undergoing a spiritual crisis is Brasov. It has been
said, that Cioran can rightly be called a "mystic without a God." (Cioran: A Dionysiac with the Voluptuousness of Doubt by Ion Dur, Wilmington: Delaware: Vernon Press, 2019,
p. xiv) At the age of 10, Cioran left his native village. ". . . my world collapsed. I will never forget the day, or, rather, the hour in which my father brought me to Sibiu; we had rented a horse-drawn wagon for the purpose and I wept during the entire journey, wept incessantly, for I had a sort of premonition that Paradise had been lost." ('Wakefulness and Obsession: An Interview with E.M. Cioran' by Michel Jakob, Salmagundi, No. 103, Summer 1994, p. 123; https://www.jstor.org/stable/40548762. Accesed 1 July 2025) Cioran studied at the "Gheorghe Lazar" High School in Sibiu (Hermannstadt). He then entered the University of Bucharest, where he studied philosophy and wrote a thesis on Henri Bergson. Along with Mircea Eliade, Eugene Ionesco, Constantin Noica, and other "angry young men," he participated in Romania's cultural Renaissance during the 1930s. Pe culmile disperării (1934, On the Heights of Despair), Cioran's first book, was born of depression caused by insomnia. This work, influenced by Nietzsche and Baudelaire, attracted wide critical attention and received the King Carol II Foundation Art and Literature Award. Its title refers to suicide notes published in Romanian newspapers of the period, opening with the words, "On the heights of despair, young so-and-so took his life . . . " ('Introduction: Imagining Cioran,' in On the Heights of Despair, p. xv) In 1934-35 Cioran studied in Germany on a fellowship and then
taught philosophy at the Andrei Saguna High-School in Brasov. Schimbarea
la fata a României
(1936), Cioran's third book, was influenced by
Spengler's theories and dedicated to the issue of Romanianism. Cioran
argued that Romanian culture lacked greatness, and intellectuals were
unable to understand the "problems related to the agony of
civilizations." Especially this book, but also some other articles, in
which Cioran expressed anti-Semitic views and enthusiastically
supported Adolf Hitler's national socialism, haunted him the rest of
his life. "Of all politicians today, Hitler is the one I like and
admire most," Cioran declared in 1934. (Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association by Cristina A. Bejan, Cham: Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 56) At
the lowest point of his intellectual quest Cioran suggested setting up a
concentration camp for Romanian politicians. "If a man has
not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form
of extremism," Cioran defended later his early beliefs, "I don't know
whether
he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse." (History and Utopia by E.M. Cioran, translated from the French by Richard Howard, New York: Seaver Books, 1960, p. 3; translation of Histoire et utopie, 1960) Lacrimi şi sfinţi (1937, Tears and Saints), influenced by Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil,
was about mystics and suffering. "Could saints have a will to power? Is
their world imperialistic," he asked. "The answer is yes, but one must
take into account the change of direction. While we waste our energy in
the struggle for temporary gains, their great pride makes them aspire
the absolute possession. For them, the space to conquer is the sky, and
their weapon, suffering." (Ibid., p. 45) Although mystics attracted Cioran, he realized that he did not possess the ability to believe. Insomnia plagued Cioran from his youth. "Sleepless
nights devour the last vestiges of our common sense, our modesty, and
would rob us of our reason, if the fear of ridicule didn't come to save
us." (The Trouble with Being
Born, translated from the French by Richard Howard, 1976, New York: The Viking Press, p. 59; original title: De l'inconvénient d'être né, 1973) After
winning a studend fellowship from the French Institute,
Bucharest, Cioran left Romania for Paris, and settled there
permanently. To see to real country, not only Paris, Cioran bought a
bicycle and made with it month-long trips across France. ". . . my
greatest pleasure was to stop in country cemeteries, to stretch out
between two graves, and to smoke for hours on end. I think of those
days as the most active period of my life." (Ibid., p. 60) As a result of the physical exertion, Cioran overcame insomnia. During the German occupation of France, Cioran lived hand-to-mouth existence. Moreover, there was a risk, that he would be arrested and sent back to Romania to serve in the army. For a period Cioran studied at the Sorbonne, but eventually abandoned the idea of taking a degree and never finished his thesis on the ethics of Nietzsche. Instead he devoted himself to the task of learning French after failing to translate Mallarmé into Romanian. Cioran re-emerged as a writer with Précis de décomposition (1949, A Short History of Decay), which won the Rivarol Prize. It was the first book he published in French. The final work he wrote in Romanian, Indreptar patimas, was finished in 1944, but it came out in 1991. From 1949 he worked as a part-time translator and manuscript reader for various publishing houses. Cioran
insisted, that when there is no hope, one is not
threatened anymore. Love was a subject that interested Cioran less than
loneliness, despair, and nothingness. Nevertheles, for a short
period in his old age Cioran nurtured some kind of hope to feel
closeness to another person. He fell in
love with Friedgard Thoma, a young German student. Upon learning that
she had had a relationship with another man, Cioran was consumed with
jealousy. Simone Boue, an
English teacher, was Cioran's companion for most of his life. From 1960 onwards, Cioran lived on the Left Bank, on the Rue de l'Odéon, in a modest attic flat, filled with books and manuscripts, working at his compact writing desk. The poet and painter Henri Michaux lived in his neighborhood. They went to see scientific films together. Cioran found the boring. In an interview he once said that "I write to rid myself of my obsessions, of my anguish". ('Philosophers: Visionary of Darkness,' Time, August 9, 1968) At one point, During the Communist reign in Romania, his books were not sold or published in translation, and all traces of his influence on the cultural scene in the 1930s was wiped away. The first edition of Syllogismes de l'amertume (1952,
All Gall is Divided), a collection of aphorisms in which he followed
the model of Nicolas Chamfort,
went unnoticed and sold only about 60
copies. Existentialism dominated the philosophical and literary scene,
there was no room for the philosophical scepticism which run through
all Cioran's writings. It was not until the 1970s, when the second
edition came out,
the work was recognized as a classic in the best tradition of the
genre, and Cioran also began to gain international attention. The poet Paul Celan translated his work into German. Coinciding with the
publishing of Aveux et anathèmes
(1987) Cioran felt he had
written enough. He withdrew from literary and public society, but he
did
not move from Paris for the surrounding countryside. In addition to his daily routine of
reading and writing, he enjoyed walks through the Luxemburg garden.
When the French Academy honored him with the Paul Morand Prize, he
declined the award. Samuel Beckett helped him financially to complete De l'inconvénent d'être né. In the last period of his life, Cioran suffered from Alzheimer's disease. Émile Cioran died on June 20, 1995, in Paris. Three years after his death, a cleaning lady found 37 spiral notebooks in the basement of his house. They were sold at an auction for EUR 400,000. Considering his nihilistic habit of mind, it is no wonder that Cioran was an admirer of Nietzsche,
who preached the death of philosophy itself, and Schopenhauer, sharing
his view that individual existence is really a mistake. An
uncompromising thinker with a taste for paradoxes, Cioran used
aphoristic, sarcastic language in order to convey his message, with an
ambivalent attitude towards truth and his own vocation: "becoming a
writer—using one's mind in public—is a problematic, partly shameful
act; always suspect; in the last analysis, something obscene, socially
as well as individually." ('Introduction' by Susan Sontag, in The Temptation to Exist, translated from the French by Richard Howard, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968, p. 16; published originally as La Tentation d'Exiter, 1956) Politically Cioran was a conservative, who accepted the finitude and incompleteness of the human condition. He enjoyed cemetery walks. On surface, Cioran seemed to be convinced of the futility of philosophizing, but the bulk of his writing posed more or less philosophical/existential problems. problems. For further reading: Thought as Experience in Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset by Joseph Acquisto (2024); Cioran, omul incomplet by Alexandru Seres (2021); Cioran: ultimul om liber by Andrei Crăciun (2020); Cioran: A Dionysiac with the Voluptuousness of Doubt by Ion Dur (2019); 'Death without Death: Kierkegaard and Cioran about Agony' by Ştefan Bolea, in Death within the Text: Social, Philosophical and Aesthetic Approaches to Literature, edited by Adriana Teodorescu (2019); Tormented by God: The Mystic Nihilism of Emil Cioran by Mirko Integlia (2019); "Meine Mission ist zu zweifeln": Emil Cioran zwischen Skepsis und Mystik by Ulrike Bardt and Werner Moskopp (2017); The Fall out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy by Joseph Acquisto (2015); Eremiten i Paris: Emil Cioran och pessimismen som levnadskonst by Tobias Dahlkvist (2013); Searching for Cioran by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (2008); 'Emile Cioran', in Memoirs of a Nomadic Humorist by Branko Bokun (2007); 'Found in Translation: The Two Lives of E. M. Cioran; or How Can One Be a Comparatist?' by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 44, Number 1-2 (2007); An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania by Marta Petreu (2005): 'Jälkisanat: E.M. Cioran' by Juhani Ihanus, in Katkeruuden syllogismeja by E.M. Cioran, translated by Juhani Ihanus and Carla Schubert (2004); Essays on E.M. Cioran, edited by Aleksandra Gruzinska (1999); The Temptations of Emile Cioran by William Kluback and Michael Finkenthal (1997); Cioran, ou, le dernier homme by Sylvie Jaudeau (1990); 'Cioran, E(mile) M.,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); Styles of Radical Will by Susan Sontag (1969) Selected works:
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