The Time is Now. Essays on the Philosophy of Becoming. The time for what? In a very specific historical, political, and cultural context, Cioran crossed the chasm of exile and found his habitual center, reaching what William Carlos Williams calls the creative self s objectives.
Ciorans early life, with its abrupt change of identity, presents a fascinating story of Romantic self-transformation. The European intellectual world knows him as the ironic moralist and elegant stylist, a burnished, fixed image to go with his burnished, flawless style.
The world also knows him as the disabused Old Man. Ever since his literary triumph, Cioran, like Yeats in Sailing to Byzantium, adopted the mask of the wise and cynical old man, though he was then only thirty-eight years old. This old mans voice, which speaks in all of his French writings, creates the false impression that Cioran, even when he alludes to a younger version of himself and refers to unspecified youthful tribulations, has no other history than that of The Recluse of Saint Sulpice.
But his images of the recluse, of the abuser of the universe, its universal calumniator, are carefully constructed versions of himself. Though extraordinary, Ciorans personal saga is not unique, either in psychological or sociological terms. Psychologically, the stages of Ciorans evolution follow what Erik Erikson calls a classical pattern of repudiation and devotion. First, repudiation of a career as a Romanian intellectual; next, temporary devotion to an extreme ideology, apocalyptic nationalism, that was for him always problematic; then, the sense of a spiritual mission which gradually narrowed its focus from the nation to the self, finally mobilizing the creative capacities of the self into the born-again writer.
It resembles, for example, a pattern which Jerry Muller, in The Other God That Failed, sees as paradigmatic of the life of many German scholars of the period, including perhaps the most famous of them all, Martin Heidegger.
Mullers book, a representative biography of the German sociologist Hans Freyer , is especially interested in the formative contexts, events and patterns of behavior that Hans Freyer shared with other intellectuals, not merely the particularities of one mans life. Muller thus identifies three stages in Freyers life that are typical rather than particular: 1 alienation from the liberal welfare state and articulate advocacy of an all-encompassing state that would mobilize society and culture for the militant defense of collective particularity; 2 ingenuous support for the National Socialist movement in the hope that the movement will provide the vehicle through which the ideal state might be realized; and 3 disillusionment, disengagement and distancing of oneself in published works from the fascist tenets one previously held.
To a great extent Ciorans life pattern reproduces the cycle of political radicalization and subsequent de-radicalization of many twentieth-century intellectuals, a cycle which itself repeats a pattern already established by the European Romantic.
The cycle begins with intellectuals critique of modern society, coupled with utopian, totalitarian solutions.
It ends with their revulsion at the excesses of revolution, war, and totalitarianism, and a retreat into the de-politicized realm of art and ideas. Its dominant ideology was radical conservatism, characterized by strong antipathy toward liberal institutions and capitalist society and appealing for the restoration of civic virtues by radical, revolutionary action. Hence Cioran, along with other brilliant Romanians of the period, cuts a sorry figure when, from being an angry young man in his bookish speculations, he becomes an advocate of the fascistic Iron Guard movement.
Surprisingly little biographical work has been done on Cioran. Academic monographs have tended to ignore Ciorans Romanian life and works and concentrate on the major French philosophical themes in his work. More recent works in Romania and the Romanian emigr press discuss Cioran in the context of over-all reevaluations of the intellectual generation of the s. Some are flatly critical of his early right-wing political attachments, while others try to explain them away.
In France, where Cioran has been exclusively known as a French writer, the question of his Romanian past has only recently come to the fore. Gabriel Liiceanus Itinraires dune vie prefaces an interview with the ailing eighty-three-year-old Cioran with a biographical sketch that briefly outlines Ciorans Romanian period.
Patrice Bollons Cioran lhrtique is a more ambitious project, connecting Ciorans Romanian work to his French uvre. But Bollon concentrates exclusively on the anti-semitic aspect of Ciorans early work, which he considers a youthful error, entirely attributable to the political climate and blind prejudices of the time.
Thus for Bollon, Ciorans second birth as a French writer was a way of erasing the guilty trace from his past. Submitting himself to the rigor and discipline of the French language, Cioran, according to Bollon, gradually came to his senses, abandoned, regretted, and partially retracted his earlier anti-semitic stance.
Our century is dominated by a trial mentality, as Milan Kundera rightly observed, and the temptation to prosecute an intellectual and prove that he or she remains a fascist or a Communist at heart is an inherent danger for any biography. Introduction 11 impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden that events have placed upon usneither denying their existence nor submitting meekly to their weight as though everything that in fact happened could not have happened otherwise.
Avoiding both the witch-hunts of political attack and the high-minded celebrations of the Olympian Cioran of his later French years, I concentrate instead on Ciorans important formative years, his youth in a Romanian village in Transylvania, his student years in Bucharest during Romanias politically troubled inter-war period when, along with Eugne Ionesco and Mircea Eliade, he belonged to Romanias generation of angry young men, and his first years in France, roughly coinciding with the outbreak of the World War II, the occupation of Paris, and the defeat of Nazi Germany, a period which was for Cioran the crucial turning point in his life as a writer.
Throughout, I seek to answer the question of how this provincial young man made himself into the ironic moralist and elegant stylist so admired today. But, if Ciorans life is a paradigm of self-creation, the questions still remain: How well did he succeed? How does he stand out? What makes him Cioran and what explains his triumph? While acknowledging the formative events and historical contexts in Ciorans life, this biography shows another aspect of the process, whereby a young man from a place as marginal to Western culture as Transylvaniaa place that many Americans imagine exists only as the home of Draculawas radicalized by intense experiences of spiritual and political awakening during the early years of Romanias spiritual revolution.
It shows how he reconstructed himself, by a process far more complex than a simple political retrenchment or self-imposed silence, into a writer, moralist, and essayist, who is now by most accounts one of the greatest stylists in the French language. But there are dangers in contextualizing Cioran too much, reading him exclusively either as a right-wing Romanian or an apolitical Western intellectual.
Thus, to read and explain him entirely in his Romanian context is not a complete solution. On the contrary, it can be an obstacle because of the danger of Roumanizing him, reducing him again to a general rule: how he is like other Romanian intellectuals of his generation.
It would also force him back into the narrow confines of a small nation he always wanted to escape. One should read Cioran against the historical background of his early life and times to see also how he stood out and apart from his national context.
Milan Kunderas comment on Leo Janeks cultural fate is relevant for Cioran as well: If in the case of Broch, of Musil, of Gombrowicz, and in a sense Bartok, delay in recognition is due to historic catastrophes Nazism, war. On the other hand, to compare him with German right-wing intellectuals such as Hans Freyer or Martin Heidegger is also limitingfor in their cases one cannot speak of triumphs. As Muller shows, in the aftermath of the war and through the entire de-nazification period, these intellectuals were barely surviving, only precariously maintaining a livelihood and their professional reputation.
It is precisely at this point of crisis, however, that Ciorans path deviates from the general pattern: where they fall, he rises. Disenchantment with his former politicized self, instead of being debilitating, becomes the motor of Ciorans literary career in the West. At the distance of more than half a century, we tend to forget how much, in the first two decades after the war, when Cioran was making his reputation in France, the memory of the catastrophe of the war and of totalitarianism s dominated the political and cultural life of Western Europe.
Ciorans work must be understood in the pervasive climate of disappointment with political utopias. In his critique of the liberal, decadent West and the totalitarian aberrations it had led to, Cioran capitalized on the experience of the century and voiced the spirit of the age, gaining recognition as prophet of the era. He snatched his personal victory from the jaws of Europes defeat. In this triumph of failure lies Ciorans revenge, and the secret of his self-reconstruction.
Cioran actually lived the experience of the century first-hand. It was, first and foremost, his own life experience. His existential prose draws upon it. The English Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Byron, wrote and rewrote many poems about the most formative years of their lives: the time of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, a time when it was bliss to be alive, but to be young was very heaven. This was the time of Ciorans involvement with Romanias Iron Guard movement. It was then that he wrote his one political tract, Romanias Transfiguration , a wildly fanciful utopia in which he dreamt of a Romania with the destiny of France and the population of Chinaand which he disbelieved almost as soon as he imagined it.
This period full of juvenile errors, as Wordsworth called them, became the substance of Ciorans subsequent writings. As he himself observes, the spirit of the times precipitated young people into politics, exploiting the idealism and fervor natural to youth:.
Introduction 13 He, who between the age of twenty and thirty, has not subscribed to fanaticism, rage and madness is an imbecile. Misfortune is reality for young people. They are the ones who proclaim totalitarian doctrines, and who carry them out, they are the ones who clamor for blood, who revel in noise, screams, barbarity. At the time when I was young, the entire Europe believed in youth, all of Europe pushed the young into politics, urged them to take part in government.
The turbulent years were followed by his self-imposed exile to France and adoption of a new personaironic, disenchanted, and skepticala move again uncannily similar to Wordsworths retreat into the English Lake District, though in reverse, since Wordsworth retreated into natures bosom, whereas Cioran chose the most sophisticated city in Western Europe.
Both writers recreated themselves in exile, Cioran as the last of the French moralistes, Wordsworth as the first great English nature poet. The new self-image these authors presented to the public was in both cases apparently removed from the nightmare of history and politics, but only apparently.
It is only at the level of sublimation of the personal that Cioran could appeal to the Western public. No one would have listened in to the confessions of a marginal, a passport-less alien, a sans papiers. To have remained specific, to have played up his Romanian origins, would really have been the death of him.
He would not have become Cioran but merely a footnote in history. Thus we need to interpret Ciorans texts in a closer relation to his life than has yet been done: not as direct reflections of the life but as his own interpretations of it.
And this is, in fact, the approach Cioran himself advocates. As he put it in an interview, all my books are more or less veiled confessions.
In spite of appearances, the aphoristic Cioran is a profoundly autobiographical writer. His works are autobiographical precisely because they dont seem to be. For, as he put it in De lincovnient dtre n, lunique confession sincre est celle que nous faisons indirectementen parlant des autres [the only sincere confession is the one we make indirectlywhile speaking of others].
One must read his indirect confessions on two registers at once: the autobiographical, personal and the aphoristic, universal. The two levels interact dialogically: the autobiographical detail or fact shapes the general thought while, at the same time, the thought requires the projection of an authors figure. A passage from La tentation dexister illustrates Ciorans manner of indirect confession. Embedded in an attack on biographical writing, we find his definition of life as a wound, of writing as a cure, and of the author as a martyr undergoing meaningless suffering.
Simultaneously autobiographical and therapeutic writing both conceals and reveals the writers life:. The Romanian Life of Emil Cioran In the age of biographies, no one covers his wounds without running the risk of having the bandage torn off and the wounds exposed for all to see; and, if they fail to expose them, we go away totally disappointed. And even he who ended on the cross, it is not because he suffered for us that he still matters to us, but because he suffered without end and gave out some cries that were as profound as they were free of charge.
The metaphor of the wound of life, dressed in layers of writing, nowhere makes sense so well as in Ciorans own work. In this respect, Cioran resembles Luther, or rather Kierkegaards perception of Luther: a lifestyle of patienthood as a sense of imposed suffering, of an intense need for cure, and a passion for expressing and describing ones suffering.
It was Ciorans first successful attempt at a writing cure. Though all of Ciorans works are autobiographies in disguise, his earlier Romanian writings have an almost visceral quality: in them the wound of life is still raw, unhealed, close to the surface. They are intensely lyrical, almost savage in their passionate selfexpression. They have a barbaric quality; they are made of blood and tears. In them, Cioran groans and cries out in despair, reveling in descriptions of his inner torments.
There is a lot of dramatic posturing in these early books that some readers find off-putting, but they are the signs of a genuine affliction, the difficulty Cioran has in finding a central direction to his life.
Since he is not an imbecile, he experiences his identity crisis as an illness. He gropes for an identity as for a cure throughout this early Romanian period, and his flights of passion alternate with flights of despair in his books, like red lines on a fever chart.
In his early writings, Cioran lets us in on the evolution of an idea, the thinkers hesitations and tribulations before he reaches his thought. He thus gives the reader the impression that he is witness to a most intimate process, and creates between the reader and himself intellectual tension and excitement. Ciorans later writings are more intellectual and less obviously autobiographical. In them, any trace of the process of thought elaboration is eliminated, but the bons mots, the aphorisms, the paradoxes, spectacular as they are as linguistic and intellectual tours de force, retain their confessional and intimate, lived quality; they are as much cris du cur as they are philosophical fireworks, or as Cioran himself put it, they remain tears turned into thoughts.
They are still about the same juvenile errors, but Cioran is now a contemplative commentator on his own past. The wound is now. The bandagewritingis the wounds only trace, and the sufferer, now a master of style, is in control of his agony.
His personal agony has become aestheticized to the point that one can speak of a tortured dandyism. By now Cioran has turned passion into a style, a lifestyle.
If Ciorans early writings are too self-revelatory and therefore guilty of clearing up too many of those misunderstandings essential to a writers secret fame as Cioran said of Paul Valry, his later writings, though obsessively returning to the same life experiences, treat them in a universal rather than personal way, with a drier, distanced, aphoristic style. When the question of identity is thus reoriented towards the entire humanity, the last traces of anxiety disappear, and Cioran, eternally obsessed with his roots, can finally escape from the metaphysical trap of stigmatization.
He chose to write in a language that was, by his own definition, universal, impersonal, and dead, and therefore best suited to his new condition as a writer without a language and without a country or a past. Un idiome napproche de luniversalit que lorsquil smancipe de ses origines, sen loigne et les renie [A language only approaches universality when it is emancipated from its origins, distances itself from them and repudiates them].
Alerted to this transformation, any reader of Cioran, and his intellectual biographer in particular, must question Ciorans French reputation as a skeptical apatride man without a country and read all of his work in light of his life and times, as writings and rewritings of those years when the young Cioran was marching in step with his generation to the trumpets of History.
Figure 1. Courtesy of Aurelian Cioran. Figure 3. Cioran on army duty. Fall Spring Figure 4. Figure 5. Ciorans student ID card at the Sorbonne, for the academic year He used the card more for admission to the cheap student dining halls than for lectures or libraries.
Figure 6. The fierce young existentialist, at the time of his self-exile to France, ca. Rinari, Transylvania, I havent written with my blood, I have written with all the tears I have never shed. Even if I had been a logician, I would still have been an elegiacal man.
Every day I relive the expulsion from Paradise with the same passion and the same regret as the one who was first banished. Cioran, Cahiers, I am not from here; condition of inner exile; Im nowhere at home absolute rootlessness. Paradise lost,my constant obsession. Cioran, Cahiers, 19 I have lived all my life with the feeling that I was chased away from my true place. If the phrase metaphysical exile had been deprived of meaning, my existence alone would have sufficed to give it one.
Cioran, De linconvnient dtre n, uvres, The Pasts Omnipresence: 21, rue de lOdon, Paris, July He lay fully clothed on his narrow cot in the unfamiliar attic room, staring at the gray light filtered through a small skylight in the ceiling.
He preferred overcast skies; blue skies were troubling, stirring up ones wanderlust. And now he had stopped wandering: for ten years, while living in furnished hotel rooms, Cioran had been dreaming. The dream had finally come true, but now it gave him little satisfaction. Having a home: if only God would forgive him such decadence! He was nowhere at home, he was the exile par excellence.
He thought himself a passant, en instance de depart, realit provisoire [on the point of departure, provisional reality]. Rinari and Paris: the beginning and the end of his lifes journey. Farthest apart in time and space, they shared one advantage for him: they were both places out of time. The former was his childhood paradise, the latter was the home of his exile, which fed his vocation for marginality.
Between them, they spanned history, and he abhorred history. He saw himself, a sturdy, fair-haired child of ten, dressed in the stiff new school uniform, sitting on a load of hay in the back of a horse-drawn cart.
His parents sat on the box in front. Though a priest, his father had enough of the peasant left in him to drive the horses himself. His robust back, draped in priestly black robes, rose straight and massive in front of his sons eyes like an insurmountable obstacle or a terrible menace.
The cart advanced slowly in the blue haze of an early September morning. The villagers on their way to their fields stopped and respectfully lifted their hats to greet them. They stared after the cart. The village priests son was going away to school. Like a wedding or a funeral, it was an event worthy of their attention. As the towers of Sibius churches gradually came into view, his heart sank with despair.
He burst into tears, sobbing with uncontrollable and unmitigated grief. His father was tearing him away from the village he adored to the point of idolatry. He had been used to running barefoot in the fields and hills of his native village from May to November, totally free.
Suddenly he felt trapped. The outskirts of the approaching city were the new limits of his freedom, and his fathers bulky black shape, their guardian. His new clothes itched, his new shoes pinched. He felt as if his feet had sunk into an anthill and were being slowly eaten by the tireless insects.
He shook with helpless rage. He wished the new school would disappear, wiped away by some disaster. One of his childhood friends had thought up an ingenious method to do away with school: he had rubbed their old country school with lard, hoping the dogs would eat it.
It was an action of protest worthy of Rabelaiss Panurge. How well he understood the feeling that had prompted it! Still crying, he was duly delivered into the competent hands of two German sisters who ran a boarding house in Sibiu. On that fateful day, after his parents had left, he spent a long time at the window of his new home, looking sorrowfully after their cart, looking back toward the one place in the world [he] loved most, the village which for him was the end of the world, or rather, the center.
It was a place to which he afterward returned only briefly for summer vacations, and where he would never go back to live again. But he entertained fantasies of return all his life, for the farther the place is, the more attached to it one becomes. As he grew older, childhood memories gained more and more terrain, pushing out all other memories.
They were stored up in images that trampled on his thoughts. They threw themselves at him in disjointed fashion. They did not exactly prevent him from thinking, but they prevented his thoughts from expanding. Nostalgia boiled like poison in his blood. His childhood exploded like a bomb in front of his eyes.
He saw it in small fragments, a shred of memory here, a splinter there. He was made for a savage existence, for total solitude, outside of time, enclosed in a crepuscular paradise.
Rinari, his mountain village, what a splendid paradise! There, in that time before time, a young boy of six, dressed in white peasant clothes, ran barefoot through a narrow cobbled-stone lane, from after breakfast until noon, and then again from lunch till late at nighta pair of ragged pants, a coarse linen shirt flowing loose behind him.
He ran toward the forbidden site, the gypsy settlement at the end of his village. Rounding up his friends with a promise of the raw sugar candy called bear shit caca de urs stolen from his grandmothers store, the children played hide-and-seek de-a hoii i jandarii on a nearby hillhis beloved Coasta Boacii Hill of the Boacis till night closed in on them.
No one checked or interrupted his games. Why did he ever leave Coasta Boacii? He was not just at home in nature. He was a child of nature, a wild beast, fostered and reared by the river that ran behind his house and by the nearby wooded hills, which stretched toward the village like three knotty, rough fingers of a giant hand, reaching down from the lofty heights of the Carpathian mountains on the horizon. The river was Rul Caselor, river of the houses. He practically lived in it, like a water creature.
Through its clear, shallow water, he could see the bottom lined with round pebbles and small boulders, all smooth, shiny, slippery, covered with a thick short fur of yellow algae. Download Free PDF. Searching for Cioran Marius Turda. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
Rather than seek ing personal aggrandizement or enjoyment from their possessions, the aristocrats Krueger discusses wanted to dedicate their patrimony to the public, for its own good. But this enlightened style of aristocratic nationalism that Krueger so sympathetically describes would soon be eclipsed by a more Romantic and exclusionary doctrine that pitted Czech against German. Ironically, the very institutions the Bohemian aristocrats helped to create, and the very people they befriended and assisted, would be crucial in this process.
After the revolutions of , the nobles themselves would be branded as reactionary and not sufficiently national. This book is exceedingly well written and covers a period that has been neglected in the English-language literature on this region, making it of great use to Habsburg histo rians. Krueger misses the opportunity to make her story more widely relevant, however. The book would have been strengthened by either linking it to the explosion of work on national conflict in Bohemia after or by showing how the Bohemian aristocrats' at tempts to link science, progress, and nation compared to efforts by nobles elsewhere in Europe to weather the transition to the modern world.
By Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Kenneth R. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Add this book to your favorite list ». Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Searching for Cioran. Oct 17, AC Thanks all those who have refollowed! A sad, haunting, melancholic book - a meditation on the totalitarian impulse of the lyrical.
Some fabulous material in Part I. Part II the author's personal diary can be skipped. Even part I is a stump, as illness and death prevented its completion. But the final pages, completed by the author's husband, are themselves stunning. View all 5 comments. Nov 14, Sam Schulman rated it liked it.
Very sad because the woman who wrote it escaped from Romania at the age of 22 and died at the age of 52 in - after having married a very nice Wordsworthian teaching at IU when she was young.
And she was so pretty, and so aristocratic-for-a-Romanian she was a relative of the great Romanian conductor Zarifopol.
So much of this book was unfinished and un-thought out, and the second part descends into the struggles between Romanian exiles that Bellow depicts in the Dean's December - which make Very sad because the woman who wrote it escaped from Romania at the age of 22 and died at the age of 52 in - after having married a very nice Wordsworthian teaching at IU when she was young. So much of this book was unfinished and un-thought out, and the second part descends into the struggles between Romanian exiles that Bellow depicts in the Dean's December - which makes it more fascinating than a book on Cioran alone might have been.
Here's what's remarkable about it - she tells what is like to be relatively young and attractive and to be an object of pleasure for an aging literary genius - it's a charming moment. She describes, and lives, the frustration of coming from a country that is too small for one - and she adds to the picture of the generation of Eliade and Cioran, and their brief fling with totalitarianism, now so unforgiveable in retrospect flogged by literary opportunists ; now so common in our public life - re-enacted by nice guys like Tom Friedman whose China-philism is exactly akin to the appeal of Mussolini and Hitler to journalists and politicians in the early s.
Cioran merely writes better than Friedman, as Z-J describes him: "beautiful style places in the service of the most melancholy of themes, the decadence of Western civilizations. The death of the west Blah blah blah - you can read it in NYRB and in Friedman's columns and those of Martin Wolf these days, and will for the next few years. Not longer, one hopes. Aug 29, Tatyana rated it liked it Shelves: emil-cioran.
0コメント