Morbid Meditations
Emil Cioran

Alphonse de Neuville, The Huns at the Battle of Chalons

2,411 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: The following extracts are drawn from Emil Cioran, Précis de décomposition (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). The title is editorial.

There are no beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: The great persecutors are recruited among the martyrs who were not beheaded. (13)

We would not be able to last one second without deceiving ourselves: The prophet within each of us is indeed this seed of madness which enables us to prosper within our emptiness. (14)

. . . every intense suffering provokes a simulacrum of fulfillment and presents consciousness with a terrible reality which it cannot avoid, whereas suffering without matter in this temporal bereavement which is ennui does not challenge consciousness with anything which would force it towards a fruitful endeavor. (25)

It is not easy to destroy an ideal: One needs as much time as it took to promote and worship it. For it is not enough to annihilate its material symbol, which is easy enough; but its roots in the soul. (27)

How can we imagine the lives of others, even as our own seem barely conceivable? We encounter a being, we see him plunged in an impenetrable and unjustifiable world, in a mass of convictions and desires which superimpose themselves on reality like a morbid edifice. (31)

If the French have loaded nostalgia with too much clarity, if they have deprived it of a certain intimate and dangerous prestige, Sehnsucht,[1] on the other hand, exhausts what is insoluble in the conflicts of the German soul, torn between the Heimat and the Infinite. (50)

Wisdom is the last word of a dying civilization, the halo of historical sunsets, fatigue turned into a worldview, the final tolerance before the rise of fresher gods – and barbarism. It is also a vain attempt at melody amidst the wheezing of the end, which rises everywhere. For the Sage – the theorist of the untroubled death, the hero of indifference, and the symbol of the final stage of philosophy, of its degeneration and its emptiness – has solved the problem of his own death . . . and hence all other problems as well. Uniquely ridiculous, he is an extreme case, that one encounters in extreme times like an exceptional confirmation of the general pathology. (55)

The ancient sages, who took their own lives as proof of their maturity, created a discipline of suicide which the moderns have unlearned. Fated for an agony without genius, we are neither the authors of our extremities nor the arbiters of our farewells; the end is no longer our end: We lack the excellence of a singular initiative – through which we would redeem an insipid and talentless life – just as we lack that sublime cynicism, the ancient splendor of an art of perishing. Despairing creatures of habit, corpses who accept themselves, we all survive ourselves and only die to accomplish a useless formality. It’s as if our life sought only to push back the moment when we will be able to get rid of it. (59)

The great [theoretical] systems are deep down only brilliant tautologies. What is to be gained from knowing that the nature of being consists in “the will to life,” in “the idea,” or the imagination of God or of Chemistry? A mere proliferation of words, subtle movements of meaning. What is rejects the verbal embrace, and intimate experience reveals to us nothing beyond the privileged and inexpressible moment. (73)

The critical point for vitality is not sickness – which is struggle – but this hazy horror which rejects everything and deprives the desires of the strength to procreate fresh mistakes. (87)

In every man there is nothing more existing and true than his own vulgarity, the source of everything which is fundamentally alive. (90)

All inspiration stems from the faculty of exaggeration – lyricism – and the entire world of metaphor would be a pathetic excitation without this passion which inflates words to the point of bursting. (97)

It’s the lack of nonchalant bitterness which turns men into sectarian beasts: The subtlest, like the crudest crimes, have been perpetrated by those who took things seriously. Only the dilettante has no taste for blood, he alone is not a scoundrel . . . (107)

How can one not love the autumnal wisdom of limp and corrupted civilizations? The Greek’s disgust, like the Roman’s, before Hyperborean freshness and reflexes, stemmed from a revulsion for dawns, for barbarism overflowing with potentialities, and for the idiocies of health. The resplendent corruption of every historical autumn is darkened by Scythia’s closeness. No civilization’s death throes can last forever; tribes roam in the surroundings, sniffing the smell of perfumed corpses . . . Thus, the devotee of dusk contemplates the failure of all refinement and the impudent march of vitality. He has only to collect, from the whole of becoming, a few anecdotes . . . A system of events proves nothing: The great exploits have joined the fairy tales and the textbooks. The glorious endeavors of the past, like the men who sparked them, remain of interest only for the fine words which crowned them. Woe to the conqueror who lacks wit! (112-3)

Only those who stop at the right moment prosper in philosophy, those who accept the limit and the comfort of a reasonable level of worry. Every problem, if one touches the bottom, leads to bankruptcy and leaves the intellect naked: No more questions and no more answers in a space without horizons. The questions turn against the mind which conceived them: It becomes their victim. Everything becomes hostile: his own solitude, his own audacity, absolute opacity, and the manifest nothingness. Woe to he who, having reached a certain point of the essential, has not stopped! History shows that the thinkers who climbed to the limit of the ladder of questions, who laid their foot on the last rung, on that of the absurd, have given to posterity an example of sterility, whereas their peers, who stopped half-way, have fertilized the mind’s flow; they have been useful to their fellows, they have passed down some well-crafted idol, a few polished superstitions, a few errors dressed up as principles, and a system of hopes. (115-6)

The “seasons” of the mind are conditioned by an organic rhythm; “I” do not decide whether to be naïve or cynical: My truths are the sophisms of my enthusiasm or my sadness. I exist, I feel, and I think according to the moment’s whims – and despite myself. Time shapes me; I oppose it in vain – and I am. My undesired present unfolds, unfolds me; unable to command it, I comment on it; a slave to my thoughts, I play with them, like a jester of the inevitable . . . (138)

The condition conducive to the pursuit of truth or of expression is found half-way between man and woman: Shortcomings concerning “virility” are the seat of the mind . . . If the pure female, whom one can suspect of a sexual or psychic anomaly, is emptier inside than a beast, the intact male exhausts the definition of the “cretin.” – Consider any being which has held your attention or excited your fervor: In his mechanism nothing malfunctioned in his favor. We rightly despise those who have not put their flaws to good use, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not enriched themselves upon their losses, just as we despise any man who does not suffer from being a man or simply from being. (140)

Rather than at the school of philosophy, it is with that of the poets that one learns the courage of intelligence and the boldness to be oneself. The most strangely impertinent statements of the ancient sophists pale in comparison with the poets’ “affirmations.” (143)

No reasonable being has ever been worshiped, has ever left behind a name, has ever left his mark on a single event. Unfazed by any precise idea or any transparent idol, the crowd is excited by the unverifiable and false mysteries. (146)

A nation that no longer rapes is in freefall; it is by the number of rapes that it reveals its instincts, its future. Look to that war in which it ceased to practice this kind of crime on a large scale: You will have found the first symbol of its decline; the moment from which love became for it a formality and the bed a precondition for the spasm, and you will have identified the beginning of its deficiencies and the end of its hereditary barbarism. (147)

He who, freed from all customary principles, would have no gift for acting, would be the archetype of misfortune, an ideally unhappy being. There is no reason to build this model of frankness: Life is tolerable by the degree of mystification one injects into it. Such a model would mean society’s immediate ruin, the “gentleness” of life in common lying in the impossibility of acting upon the infinity of our hidden thoughts. It is because we are all impostors that we are able to bear each other. He who would not accept to lie would see the earth vanish from under him: We are all biologically compelled to falsehood. (150-1)

A Caesar is closer to a village mayor than a sovereignly lucid mind deprived of any instinct of domination. (152)

We are in the company of satraps: each – according to his means – seeks a crowd of slaves for himself or contents himself with being alone. No one is self-sufficient: The humblest will always find a friend or a partner to act upon his dream of authority. He who obeys will be obeyed in turn: The victim becomes the bully; this is the supreme desire among them all. Only beggars and sages do not feel it; – unless theirs is a subtler game . . . (152-3)

Deprive [men] of their desire to be slaves or tyrants: You would demolish society in the blink of an eye. (154)

A nation dies when it no longer has the strength to invent other gods, other myths, other absurdities: Its idols turn pale or disappear; it draws from elsewhere, and feels alone before unknown monsters. This again is decadence. (161)

Love conceived as a ritual makes the intelligence sovereign in a kingdom of stupidity. The reflexes suffer; hobbled, they lose their longing to cause an unmentionable contortion; the nerves become the scene of clear-sighted unease and shivers, finally, the feeling continues beyond its natural duration thanks to the skill of two torturers specializing in studied pleasures. This is the individual cheating the species, this is blood become too lukewarm to still intoxicate the mind, this is blood cooled and thinned by ideas, rational blood . . . (163)

Consciousness has penetrated everywhere and reigns even in the marrow; and man no longer lives in existence, but in the theory of existence . . .

He who is lucid, understands himself, explains himself, justifies himself, and masters his acts will never execute a memorable action. Psychology is the hero’s tomb. (163)

Prejudice is an organic truth, false in itself, but accumulated and passed down from generation to generation: One cannot free oneself from them with impunity. . . . The duration and consistency of a community coincides with the duration and consistency of its prejudices. The Eastern peoples owe their longevity to their faithfulness to themselves . . . (166)

A civilization develops from agriculture to the paradox. Between these two extremities occurs the struggle between barbarism and neurosis: resulting in the unstable equilibrium of creative epochs. This struggle is reaching its end: All horizons are opening without any being able to excite a curiosity at once weary and awakened. It is then up to the disabused individual to flourish in the void, up to the intellectual vampire to lap up the tainted blood of civilizations. (167)

The error of those who grasp decadence is to wish to fight it, whereas we ought to encourage it: by progressing it exhausts itself and enables the advent of other forms. The true prophet is not he who proposes a system when nobody wants one, but indeed rather he who hurries on Chaos, he is its agent and acolyte. It is vulgar to trumpet dogmas in exhausted ages where a dream of the future looks like delirium or a sham. To stroll towards the end of history with a flower at our breast – that is the only attitude worthy of time’s unfolding. (168-9)

To learn to brandish concepts – unlearning how to look at things . . . Thought was born on a day of fleeing; the result was verbal ceremony. (173)

The mind and sensation will be enough for us; from their support will be born a discipline of sterility which will preserve us from enthusiasms and anxieties. (176)

“Depth” is the dimension of those who cannot vary their thoughts and their appetites, and who explore the same region of pleasure and pain. (187)

The wonders of the Earth – and even more so those of the heavens – result from a lasting hysteria. Saintliness: an earthquake of the heart, an annihilation through belief, the culminating expression of a fanatical sensibility, a transcendent deformity . . . (188)

One is a metaphysical animal by the rottenness one harbors within oneself. (195)

There is, for the unbeliever, who loves waste and dispersion, no more disturbing spectacle than these ruminations on the absolute . . . Where do they draw such an obsession for the unverifiable, so much attention for the vague, and such zeal in trying to grasp it? They are happy, and I hold this against them. If only they hated themselves! But they prize their “soul” above the universe; – this false assessment is the source of sacrifices and renunciations of an imposing absurdity. (196)

All thinkers are failures of action who avenge their failure by means of concepts. (219)

Like wax worked by the Sun, I melt during the day and become solid at night, an oscillation that decomposes me and restores me, a metamorphosis in inertia and laziness . . . (223)

Every bitterness hides a vengeance and becomes a system: pessimism, – this cruelty of the vanquished which cannot forgive life for having betrayed their expectations. (227)

A mind only captivates us by its incompatibilities, by the tension in its movements, by the dissonance between its opinions and its penchants. Marcus Aurelius, engaged in distant expeditions, thinks more about the idea of death than that of the Empire; Julian, having become Emperor, misses the contemplative life, envies the sages, and spends his nights writing against the Christians; Luther, with a Vandal’s vitality, sinks deeper and mopes about in an obsession with sin, and without finding a balance between its subtleties and vulgarity; Rousseau, who misjudges his instincts, lives only in the idea of their sincerity; Nietzsche, whose entire œuvre is but an ode to strength, led a sickly existence, of a poignant monotony . . . (246-47)
The “Celestial Dog”
Emil Cioran

John William Waterhouse, Diogenes (1882)

872 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

One cannot know what a man must lose to have the courage to defy all conventions; one cannot know what Diogenes lost to become the man who allowed himself to do everything, who turned his most intimate thoughts into acts of a supernatural insolence, as would a god of knowledge, at once libidinous and pure. No one was more frank; an extreme case of sincerity and lucidity, as well as an example of what we could be if education and hypocrisy did not restrain our desires and actions.

“One day a man had him enter his finely furnished home, and told him: ‘Above all do not spit on the floor.’ Diogenes, who wanted to spit, sent his spit to the gentleman’s face, while shouting that this was the only dirty place he had found where he could do it.” (Diogenes Laërtius)

Who, after having been hosted by a rich man, has not wished to have oceans of saliva to spill over all the proprietors of the Earth? And who has not swallowed up again his bit of spittle out of fear of spitting in the face of a respected and pot-bellied thief?

We are all ridiculously prudent and timid: Cynicism was not learned at school. Nor pride.

“Menippus, in his book entitled The Virtue of Diogenes, tells of how he was made a prisoner and sold, and of how he was asked what he could do. He answered: ‘Command,’ and shouted to the herald: ‘Ask then who would like to buy a master.’”

The man who confronted Alexander and Plato, who masturbated in the public square (“By God, if only it were also enough to rub my belly to no longer be hungry!”), the man with the famous barrel and lantern, and who in his youth was a currency counterfeiter (is there a higher honor for a Cynic?), what experience must he have had of his fellows? – Certainly the same as all of us, with, however, this difference, in that he made man the sole matter of his reflection and of his contempt. Refusing to suffer the falsifications of any morality or metaphysic, he worked to strip man down to show him to us more naked and more abominable than had the comedies and the apocalypses.

“Socrates become mad,” so did Plato call him. – “Socrates become sincere,” that is what he should have been called, a Socrates giving up on the Good, on phrases, and the polis, finally become solely a psychologist. But Socrates – even when sublime – remains conventional; he remains a master, an edifying model. Only Diogenes proposes nothing; the foundation of his attitude – and of the essence of Cynicism – is determined by a testicular revulsion at the ridiculousness of being human.

The thinker who thinks without illusions on human reality, if he wishes to remain within the world, and if he eliminates mysticism as an escape outlet, arrives at a vision in which wisdom, bitterness, and practical jokes are mixed; and, if he chooses the public square as his space of solitude, he deploys his verve to rail against his “peers” or to take his disgust for a stroll; a disgust which today, with Christianity and the police, we can no longer allow ourselves. Two thousand years of sermons and penal codes have watered down our venom; what’s more, in a busy world, who would stop to answer our insults or delight in our barking?

That the man who best knew human beings was nicknamed the dog proves that at no time has man ever had the courage to accept his true image, and that he has always bluntly censured the truth. Diogenes eliminated in himself all posing. What a monster in the eyes of others! To have an honorable place in philosophy, one must be an actor, respect the rules of the game of ideas, and get all worked up about false problems. In no case must man as he is be your business. Again, according to Diogenes Laërtius: “At the Olympic games, the herald having proclaimed ‘Dioxippus has defeated the men,’ Diogenes responded: ‘He has defeated only slaves, men are my concern.’”

Indeed, he defeated them as no one else has, with more fearsome weapons than those of conquerors, he who only owned a knapsack; he, the least propertied of all beggars, a true snickering saint.

We must be thankful that, by chance, he was born before the coming of the Cross. Who knows if, grafted onto his detachment, some unhealthy temptation for a superhuman adventure would not have led him to be a generic ascetic, later canonized and lost in the mass of the blessed and the calendar? Then he would have become mad, he who was the most deeply normal being, given that he was distant from any doctrine. He was the only one to reveal to us the hideous figure of man. The merits of Cynicism were tarnished and trampled upon by a religion opposed to the self-evident. But the time has come to oppose the truths of the Son of God with those of this “celestial dog,” as he was called by a poet of his time.

Source: Emil Cioran, Précis de décomposition (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 94-97.
Travails of a Metic
Emil Cioran

369 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Hailing from some unfortunate tribe, he paces about the West’s boulevards. Having loved one fatherland after another, he no longer hopes for any: Frozen in a timeless dusk, a citizen of the world – and of no world, – he is ineffective, nameless, and without vigor. Nations who have no destiny cannot give one to their sons who, thirsty for other horizons, fall in love with them and then exhaust them until they themselves become specters of their admirations and their weariness. Having nothing to love in their own country, they place their love elsewhere, in other lands, where their zeal surprises the natives. Called upon too much, these feelings wear themselves down and deteriorate, above all admiration . . . And the Metic, dispersed on so many roads, cries:

I have fashioned for myself innumerable idols, I have raised up everywhere too many altars, and I have knelt before a crowd of gods. Now, tired of worship, I have wasted the portion of delirium which was allotted to me. One has the resources only for the absolutes of one’s own tribe, a soul like a country can only flourish within its borders: I pay the price for having crossed them, for having made the Indefinite a homeland, and of foreign gods a religion, for having bowed before the centuries which excluded my ancestors. From whence I come, I can no longer say: in the temples, I am without belief; in the cities, without zeal; among my peers, without curiosity; on this earth, without certainties. – Give me a specific desire, and I will turn the world upside-down. Free me from this shame of acts which makes me play every morning the comedy of the resurrection, and every evening that of the entombment; in between them, nothing but this torture in the shroud of ennui . . . I dream of desire – and everything I want seems priceless. Like a vandal devoured by melancholy, I go about without a goal, a self without a self, towards I no longer know what corners . . . to discover an abandoned god, an atheist god, and fall asleep in the shade of his last doubts and his last miracles.

Source: Emil Cioran, Précis de la décomposition (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 144-46
Aspects of the German Soul
Emil Cioran

1,472 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: This article is translated from the French version in Emil Cioran, Apologie de la Barbarie: Berlin–Bucharest (1932-1941) (Paris: L’Herne, 2015). pp. 73-80, originally published in Romanian as Emil Cioran, “Aspecte germane,” Vremea, November 19, 1933. The title is editorial. I have sometimes modified the paragraphing.

To understand the spirit of today’s Germany, one must love all that is exaggerated, all that comes from an excessive and overflowing passion [unreadable passage], of an irrational momentum and a disconcerting monumentality. I have always loved Germany for its Formlosigkeit to which, even if it has sometimes descended into the grotesque, we owe a part of the sublime values and accomplishments which temporarily remove us from day-to-day vulgarity. In this world, one must only love people of excess. All the others, if they are not intelligent, are mediocre, calculating, and equipped with a critical and ironic mind. But I ask them all this question: Has the time not come to liquidate all that is critical spirit, calculation, measure, and form?

If Germany today has achieved something, if the Germans live with crazed enthusiasm and admirable effervescence, it is because at a certain point they embraced the courage of a liquidation, the passion of a fecund and creative barbarism, the willingness to risk it all, and especially, a messianism which foreigners find difficult to comprehend. I am not speaking here of the position of small countries in the face of the Hitlerian phenomenon, nor of my personal position. What I am interested in knowing is whether this messianism is part or not of the immanent direction of German history. Whoever understands history, even a little, must recognize an undeniable fact: Hitlerism was a destiny for Germany.

One must have a strong feeling for fate to be able to be objective. No historic phenomenon of great proportions is intelligible if it is not considered under the sign of inevitability, of an immanent destiny, stemming from the structure and substance of a historic way of life. In the reduced historic ways of life, who do not have their own vital and internal impulse, nor a secret necessity, but only obediences, imitations, and compromises, one finds no inevitability indicating a direction; one finds a stupid and insignificant arbitrariness. The little cultures have no meaning and no value in the historic world. That is why, if one does not destroy them, they should be ignored.

Conversation with a Hitlerian

What impresses the foreigner when he chats with any German, whatever his cultural or social level, is his extreme messianism. I defy anyone to show me, in all of Germany, an ordinary citizen who is not convinced that Germany is the leading country in the world and that all the others have poor half-existences. In Romania, everyone agrees that they live in the most miserable country on Earth, a country which does not even deserve to live. So how can one not be impressed by the infinite pride of this nation, by the consciousness it has of its mission in the world and of the historic summit it has reached?

If the Russian and Jewish messianisms evoke a liberation and redemption thanks to a people charged with a divine mission whose fulfillment will lead to a solution to the historical process, German messianism starts from the excellence of an ethnic type [unreadable passage]. The two others undeniably have an apocalyptic character, an obvious intention to transcend history, to ultimately defeat it. The roots of Germanic anti-Semitism lie in this instinctive Nordic messianism, essentially German, against southern messianism, essentially Jewish. The same is true of Russian anti-Semitism [sic]. (In the historic conditions in which they live, the Jews are too gifted to either be defeated or to one day be the victors.)

Did God not suffer enough when he sent his son to the cross, to have to crucify his chosen people multiple times?

I will never forget a recent conversation with a German, a conversation begun rather symbolically before the Reichstag. He so believed in a spiritual and political pan-Germanism that he left me dumbstruck, all the more so in that his words were not due to readings but to discussions, meetings, and travels. With an exclusivism at once impressive and ferocious, he reduced all human values to essentially Germanic values. All that was grandiose, monumental, genial, and creative was Germanic. All the other cultures were mere caricatures.

France? French culture is but lies, superficial games, and pettiness at all levels of the mind. When I objected that certain cultures had cultivated the monumental – for example the Japanese, French, Greek, or Chinese cultures – he answered that he only recognized human values in the Gothic . . . The art of the Italian Renaissance was itself, in its great works, Germanic. Michelangelo was characteristic of this.

    But Michelangelo’s dynamism is explained by the transition from the Renaissance to the baroque!
    The only genuine baroque is of Germanic origin, because it is a Gothic resurgence in modernity. This is incidentally the opinion of Worringer, Wölfflin, and Spengler.
    ?
    And, think, how could the Italians have produced a Leonardo? Only a Gothic spirit could have embraced so many fields. Music is a typically German creation, as are poetry, metaphysics, and so on. [unreadable passage]
    All the German inventions and scientific discoveries were made in the interest of the community. French science has only discovered and invented a few useless things in no way involved with human communities.

If I put up with all of this, it’s because of my old love for absurdities.

    Germany is not a second-rate country. She will show Europe that she is the supreme reality in politics. The League of Nations? The biggest of French lies.
    Agreed.

The Hitlerians & Romania

    France has contributed nothing to Romania. And anyway, is Romania the product of France or of Germany?

This stupid question left me speechless.

    Whatever you Romanians may say, Romania is the product of Germany. She is the fruit of the German doggedness and education of Carol I![1] What would you have become without this King of German origin and education? Romania still has much to learn, especially concerning order and education. Bulgaria is quite superior to her in many areas.

And so forth.

The opinions of this individual are only too widespread in the German population for me not to reproduce them here. I would not have done so if I had heard them from the mouth of an intellectual, because then I would think they were the product of personal knowledge and reflection and, by this fact, less revealing of a people’s general outlook.

We parted ways after a few hours of conversation. I still remember the passionate emphasis with which he pronounced these too-frequent expressions: deutsches Volk, deutsches Wesen, deutsche Erziehung, and so on.

Georg Simmel[2] says that Nietzsche is characterized by the feeling of existence’s solemnity (Das Gefühl der Feierlichkeit des Daseins). This feeling is, to varying degrees, fundamental to all Germans. To be at every moment conscious of the symbolic nature of your action, to live at every instant as though your existence were a succession of definitive choices, your personal elaboration raising you constantly towards your ideal type, here is an existential sentiment of an absolute dynamism.

No one can experience this solemn feeling if he does not feel his individual existence as a mission which can be realized at any moment, even though it is never realized. One lives symbolically for the values one cultivates and one thinks them irreducible and absolute. No one can experience this feeling if he does not believe that his existence can become an absolute, something unconditioned, realized in itself. But this process reveals a pure intentionality, because none can accomplish a mission, none can realize himself completely, even as he already lives. The tragic is fairly graspable in this solemnity which can be a mask hiding who knows what tragedy.

The German is not a human type who lives for his moods, he does not cultivate psychologism; he lives his moods according to his values and the norms which derive from or are attached to them. Hence his excess in pedagogy and morals, his scandalous normativism, his conception of duty. Hence, also, his tendency to take life seriously. The disconnection with reality among people of the North comes from their permanent seriousness, whereas three-quarters of life’s aspects do not deserve to be taken seriously. And if one does take them seriously, one inevitably becomes extravagant, ridiculous, puerile, or saintly. But the time has not yet come for us to also overtake the Germans . . .

Notes
Unconscious Dogmas
Emil Cioran

497 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

We can penetrate the error of a being, reveal to him the inanity of his schemes and of his errors; but how can we tear him away from his relentlessness in time, when he hides a fanaticism as ingrained as his instincts, as ancient as his prejudices?

We carry in us – like an irrefutable treasure – a heap of disgraceful beliefs and certainties. And even he who manages to rid himself of them and defeat them, remains – in the desert of his lucidity – a fanatic still; he has had all his obsessions wither, but not the earth from which they sprout; he has lost all his anchor points, except for the fixedness to which they pertain. Life has dogmas that are more immutable than theology, every existence is anchored in infallibilities which put to shame the jabberings of madness or faith. The skeptic himself, who loves his doubts, shows himself to be a fanatic of skepticism. Man is the dogmatic being par excellence; and his dogmas are all the deeper insofar as he does not verbalize them, is unaware of them, and follows them.

We believe in many more things than we think, we harbor more intolerances, we tend toward blood-soaked prejudices, and, defending our ideas through extreme measures, we roam through the world like walking and irrefutable fortresses. Each being is for himself a supreme dogma: no theology protects its god as we protect our ego; and this ego, if we besiege it with doubts, and question it, it is only for the false modesty of our pride: it has won the battle even before it has begun.

How can we escape the absolute of selfhood? One would need to imagine a being devoid of instincts, who would bear no name, and whose own image would be unknown to itself. But, everything in the world reflects our traits back at us; and night itself is never dark enough to prevent us from gazing at ourselves. Too present to ourselves, our nonexistence prior to birth and after death influences us only as an idea and only for a few moments; we feel the fever of our duration like a decaying eternity, but which remains endless in principle.

He who does not worship himself is yet to be born. All that lives holds itself dear; – otherwise from whence would come this terror which reigns in the depths and the surfaces of life? Each is for himself the single fixed point in the universe. And if someone dies for an idea, it’s because it is his idea, and his idea is his life.

No critique of any reason will ever awaken man from his “dogmatic slumber.” It could undermine the unreflective certainties which abound in philosophy and substitute more flexible claims for stiff ones, but how, by such a rational approach, could it shake up that creature dozing in its own dogmas, without killing it?

Source: Emil Cioran, Précis de la décomposition (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 87-89.
Letter from the Third Reich
Emil Cioran

1,016 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: This article is translated from the French version in Emil Cioran, Apologie de la Barbarie: Berlin – Bucharest (1932-1941) (Paris: L’Herne, 2015), pp. 67-71. Originally published in Romanian as Emil Cioran, “Scrisoare germană,” Calendarul, November 14, 1933. The title is editorial. I have sometimes modified the paragraphing.

I would like to share the joy that is mine in finding myself in a world which is politicized, but which is neither sickening nor flat. I have always placed politics on the margins of spiritual life because, considered in itself, it is only a sum of infertile externals. It only busies itself with frameworks and forms, and it ignores vital comprehension and internal rhythm, qualitative complexity, and organic movements. What is quite pleasant in the political spirit of today’s Germany is that the Germans are integrating themselves into the general forms of the spirit through multiple connections and relations. This is because, in attempting to found a political phenomenon on an entire vital disposition – a collection of values independent of those of politics – they have overcome the latter’s platitudes conceived as a collection of autonomous values. This effort charms me. It consists in intentionally mixing religious, artistic, philosophical, and other values into the political sphere, thus politicizing the world without trivializing it.

When one thinks of the degree to which, in the majority of democratic countries, the sphere of political life is separated from that of other values, and of the size of the gap between politics relative to other forms which have isolated and reduced it to an irreversible nullity, one can only admire the German phenomenon, which has forcibly vitalized politics by appealing to others forms of the mind.

It is admirable to see how, in order to justify its existence, the regime changes the law, modifies religion, reorients art, builds another historical outlook, brutally eliminates three-quarters of the consecrated values, rejects with frenzy, and quivers with enthusiasm. If one objects that today’s political orientation is unacceptable, that it is founded on false values, that racism is a scientific illusion, and that German exclusivism is a collective megalomania, I would respond: What does it matter, so long as Germany feels well, fresh, and alive under such a regime?

Some say: But what about the citizen’s participation in the government, real freedom of thought, and individual expression? For my part, I respond to all democrats: in the current dictatorial regime, the citizen finds himself engaged with much more soul than he is in these insipid democracies, in which an illusory representation and a scandalous atomization have reduced political existence to an impoverished simulacrum.

Considered as an ideal orientation, in the purity of values and demands, democracy is indeed the most admirable regime. However, from the practical and historic point of view, it is henceforth external to man and inadequate. He who is unaware of this inevitability, according to which essentially inadequate forms of life become, with time, foreign to our psychological depths, this man will never resign himself to going from democracy to dictatorship.

One must ask all the democrats in the world: Why was it necessary to instate a dictatorship in Germany? In the same way one must ask all men: How can you conceive an amor fati[1] for your individual existence and refuse to accept one in politics? Nothing is more painful than to see the degree to which men are insensitive to historical necessities, the degree to which their lack of barbarism estranges them from the irrational rhythm of life.

I was on the road to Prague when a social-democratic Czech – gentle as only democrats can still be (no doubt because of an awareness of the irreparable) – told me, with the strength of conviction, that Hitlerism would fall within two months, lamenting the lack of courage and brutality of the German Social Democrats who, if they had had these qualities, would surely still be in power. This man was unconsciously praising the Hitlerians.

I can also mention a Romanian friend here in Berlin, of an extraordinary temperament and with a passion as deep as it is overflowing, who delivered a panegyric to democracy and its current necessity to me for twelve hours, without succeeding in convincing me. I have met men whose sole desire is to return to the Enlightenment, who admire the eighteenth century and wish for the return of its spirit. Let me confess another joy: that of belonging to an epoch where the irrational has entered all fields; that of finding the supreme proof for a few metaphysical suppositions.

The time has come for irrationalism to be heard philosophically, but also politically. Whoever respects forms and awaits death with indifference cannot be an irrationalist in politics. Let us accept life as an inevitability; let us fight in and with this inevitability against all that is resistance to death, irreparable. If every irrationalism is paradoxical, it’s because it expresses the paradox of life. Let us be proud unto death of the contradiction of life.

Concerning the present historical moment, rather than the rationalism of the democratic politicians, I prefer barbaric, explosive, fecund, and dynamic irrationalism which, against dead forms, legalism, and judicial rigor, marks a triumph of vitality, energy, and desperate acts. Political irrationalism starts from the vital’s frustration in its struggle against outdated frameworks, hence its mix of barbarism, enthusiasm, despair, and exaltation. If one is not organically sensitive to this mix, to this admirable confusion, to this creative effervescence, one will not understand the German phenomenon.

Great political phenomena do not develop in a linear fashion, but according to a rebellious complexity. However, its direction depends solely on immanent destiny, an organic substructure only accessible to men gifted with a vital comprehension. No country in the world can embody a politics in the grand style without having had the courage to exist, a limitless courage, an infinite exaltation, and a grand madness. What’s more, I am overwhelmed with melancholy when I think that there is a country at the mouth of the Danube which does not have the courage to exist.

Berlin, November 1933
The Greatness & Decay of France
Emil Cioran

The French signing the armistice with the Germans at Compiègne on June 22, 1940.

3,210 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: The following extracts are drawn from Emil Cioran, De la France (Paris: L’Herne, 2015). The original was written in Romanian in 1941. The title is editorial.

I do not think that the French would be so dear to me if they hadn’t been so bored throughout their history. But their ennui is deprived of the infinite. It is the ennui of clarity. It is the weariness of things understood.

Whereas for the Germans banalities are considered the honorable substance of conversation, the French prefer a well told lie to a poorly expressed truth.

An entire people suffering from the cafard.[1] Here is the most frequently used word, as much by high society as by the lower classes. Cafard is visceral or psychological depression; it is the moment invaded by a sudden emptiness, without reason – whereas ennui is the prolongation in the spiritual of an immanent emptiness of being. By comparison, Langeweile is merely the lack of things to do.

The most French century is the eighteenth. It is the salon become the universe, it is the century of intelligence in lace, of pure finesse, of pleasant and beautiful artifice. It is also the century which was the most bored, which had too much time, which worked merely to pass the time. (11-12)

* * *

What did she love, France? Styles, the pleasures of intelligence, the salons, reason, the little perfections. Expression precedes Nature. It is a culture in which form covers the elemental forces and, over all passionate resurgences, spreads the thoughtful varnish of refinement.

Life – when it is not suffering – is a game.

We must be grateful to France for having cultivated it with mastery and inspiration. It is from her that I have learned to take things seriously in private only and, in public, to make light of everything. . . . Her great art is in the distinction and grace of superficiality. To put one’s talent in insignificant things – that is to say existence and the teachings of the world – is an initiation to French doubt.

The conclusion of the eighteenth century, not yet polluted by the idea of progress: the world is a joke of the mind. (13-14)

* * *

France’s divinity: taste. Good taste.

According to which the world – to exist – must be pleasing; be well-made; consolidate itself aesthetically; have limits; be a graspable enchantment; a sweet flowering of finitude. (14-15)

* * *

The sin and the merit of France are in her sociability. The people seem made for getting together and chatting. (16)

* * *

France? The refusal of Mystery.

If we still read the Romans of the era of decline, it’s because they deepened the idea of destiny and compared it with man’s wanderings through nature. Among the French moralists – and among all the French – we do not find this. They have not created a tragic culture. Reason – and more the cult of reason than reason itself – calmed the stormy agitation of our inner life . . . France is lacking on the irrational side, that of fatal possibility. She has not been an unhappy country. Greece – whose harmony and serenity we admire – suffered the torment of the unknown. The French language cannot bear Aeschylus. He is too powerful. As for Shakespeare, he rings sweet and gentle [in French] . . . The infinite does not have a place in the French landscape. Maxims, paradoxes, notes, and attempts, yes. Greece was more complex.

It is an acosmic culture, not without land but above it. . . .

She rather resembles ancient Greece. But whereas the Greeks combined mental gymnastics with the breath of metaphysics, the French did not go so far. They were not capable – they who love paradox in conversation – to live paradox as a situation.

Two peoples: the most intelligent under the Sun. (18-19)

* * *

[Paul] Valéry’s claim that man is an animal born for conversation is obvious in France and incomprehensible elsewhere. Definitions have geographical limits stricter than those of customs. (19)

* * *

. . . France has been contented with herself. Neither foreign languages, nor cultural imports, nor any curiosity towards the outside world. Such is the glorious flaw of a perfect culture – which finds, in her own law, her only way of life. (21)

* * *

In the eighteenth century, France used to lay down the law in Europe. Since then, she has only exercised her influence. (23)

* * *

A happy civilization. How could it be otherwise, when she had never known the temptation of emigration? Only Napoleon could lead the French throughout the world, they lived in the ideal province of Europe. He had to arrive from his island to shake them up a bit. He was able to give an imperialist content to their vanity, also called glory. This is perhaps why all these expeditions are inseparable from literature. They fought to have a tale worth telling. There was no need in this great adventure, they merely sought to be great in the eyes of Paris. They do not long for travel, but rather for the home, the salon, and for property. Especially the latter. (23)

* * *

One of France’s vices has been the sterility of perfection – which is never so clearly manifest as in writing. (24)

* * *

The French, since their birth, have stayed in their own country. They have a physical and intimate fatherland which they loved unconditionally and they have not been humiliated by comparisons; they have not been uprooted in their own country, they have not known the disquiet of an insatiable nostalgia. It is perhaps the only people in Europe who does not experience nostalgia – that kind of infinite sentimental incompleteness. Without folk music either, which we find in the south (Basque Country, Provence, under Spanish and Italian influence), they are not tormented by the inability to establish themselves which troubles the Slavs, the Germanics, and the Balkan peoples, and which expresses itself in various kinds of Sehnsucht.[2]

A people devastated by good fortune, gifted with clarity, capable of ennui but not of sadness, loving in its beliefs, imprecision, and – above all – having a normal history, without empty periods, without failures or absences – it has developed itself century after century, it has promoted what it believed in, it spread its ideals, and has been present in the modern era like no other. It pays for this presence with decadence; it expiates a significant lived experience, the shining achievement, the world of values it created. If it had remained inactive, its vitality would not have been compromised. For great nations, their twilight is a noble punishment. (27-28)

* * *

France does not offer you grand prospects; she teaches you form, she gives you the phrase, but not the vigor. (31)

* * *

There is nothing less German than the French eighteenth century – and nothing more French than this century. Everything in it is decorative, from the external attire to the mental trinkets. Intelligence becomes man’s exclusive ornament. Its elegant laziness and subtle chatter define its noble superficiality. It has forgotten the idea of sin: it is the century’s great excuse. Hence, its libertinism was not condemned . . . (34)

* * *

For centuries, France only believed and, when she doubted, she doubted within her beliefs. She believed, one after the other, in Classicism, in the Enlightenment, in the Revolution, in the Empire, in the Republic. She has had the ideals of the aristocracy, of the Church, of the bourgeoisie, of the proletariat; and she has suffered for each of them. These efforts, turned into phrases, she proposed to Europe and the world, who imitated, perfected, and compromised them. But France was the one who experienced their growth and their disintegration in the first instance, and with the greatest intensity. She created ideals, used them up, and practiced them to the end, to the point of disgust. However, a nation cannot perpetually generate faith, ideologies, state forms, and inner ways of life. She trips up sooner or later. The spiritual fountains dry up and she awakens before her wasteland, sitting idly, fearful for the future. (36)

* * *

If I put myself in the shoes of a Frenchman of the past decades, to what could I adhere?

To democracy? But, after a century of abusing the word peuple, after the mystique of liberty and its exhaustion, after verifying the usefulness or uselessness of the Revolution’s principles, what new content could I attribute to it? A people may have accomplished a great Revolution, imitated everywhere; the day its ideas are compromised, it loses its ideological primacy. A century dedicated to preparing the Revolution and another one to spreading it have made France unavoidable in terms of doctrine and politics. But the ideals of 1789 have changed; there remains of their prestige only an outdated grandiloquence. The greatest modern revolution ends as spiritual old tat. What was it? A combination of rationalism and myths: a rationalist mythology. To be more precise: the meeting of Descartes and the man in the street.

Democracy does not inspire any excitement anymore and, as an aspiration, it is insipid and anachronistic.

And the fatherland? But what could it still be good for? France was a fatherland already in the Middle Ages, when the other nations had not yet even become conscious of themselves. She was admired, glorified. She promoted all the ideals that she could. At no moment in her history did she inspire regret. Every period witnessed the realization of the maximum of possibilities; not one empty breath, no serious absence. Everywhere, the men had the required level. In the name of what could she still touch men? What can she propose to humanity and to herself?

The French can no longer die for anything. Cerebral skepticism has become organic. The absence of a future is the substance of the present. The hero is no longer conceivable – because no one is either unconscious or deep anymore.

A nation is creative so long as life is not its sole value, so long as its values are its standard. To believe in the fiction of freedom and to die for it; to participation in an expedition for glory; to consider the prestige of one’s country to be necessary for humanity; to replace the latter with what one believes in – here are values.

To be more attached to one’s skin than to an idea; to think with one’s stomach; to hesitate between honor and pleasure; to believe that to live is more important than anything, here is life. . . . And Decadence is no more than the exclusive worship of life. (37-39)

* * *

Decadence equals collective lucidity: expiration of the soul. To no longer have a soul. This is France’s case. How did she lose it? (40)

* * *

Their emotional anemia is not of a temporary nature, it is not a crisis of growth or a historical accident, but the conclusion of a centuries-long process, the final crowning of a destiny. Not only do they not have feelings anymore, but what’s more, they are ashamed of this. Nothing upsets a Frenchman more than the soul. A people which is mummifying itself in doubt. An Alexandrianism, without the Greco-Roman scale. An obvious end, without clamor or drama. Because this tragedy is greater for the seeker, for whom France can only be a field to verify a few philosophical and cultural themes. (41)

* * *

Whatever you would do in France, whatever measure you would take, no one will be able to convince the French to have children. When a people loves life, it implicitly renounces its continuation. Between pleasure and the family, the abyss is total. Sexual refinement is the death of the nation. . . . . The biological counterpart to lucidity, to the will to no longer be dupe,[3] has catastrophic consequences. . . .

A people without myths is on the path to depopulation. The emptiness of the French countryside is the devastating sign of the lack of a day-to-day mythology. A nation cannot live without idols, and the individual is incapable of acting without the obsession of fetishes.

As long as France could transform concepts into myths, her vital substance was not compromised. The strength to give an emotional content to ideas, to pour one’s vital substance into fictions – that is the meaning of this transformation, as well as the secret of a flourishing culture. To engender myths and to adhere to them, to fight, suffer, and die for them, that is what reveals the fecundity of a people. The “ideas” of France were vital ideas, for the validity of which they fought body and soul. If she retains a decisive role in Europe’s spiritual history, it is because she has animated ideas which she drew from the abstract nothingness of pure neutrality. To believe means to animate.

But the French can no longer either believe or animate. And they do not want to believe, for fear of being ridiculous. Decadence is the opposite of the age of greatness: the retransformation of myths into concepts. . . . .

She still has intelligence, but unattached to the heart. Therefore sterile. (42-44)

* * *

“Eternal” France, before losing herself, will become a country like the others. (45)

* * *

How great she was, France!

The Revolution of 1789 has had its day, and the bourgeoisie with it. We all may believe that at its beginning it was generous, prodigal, welcoming. But whoever has known her in her period of decay, with her miserly, quarrelsome, and petty spirit, will have understand that such a social foundation could only quickly lead to ruin. It has concentrated all the vices of the French people. Of the individualism and the cult of liberty for which, in the past, she spilled her blood, she has only retained, in her crepuscular form, money and pleasure. Her end marks the most mediocre period in the history of France. (46)

* * *

France’s deficiencies will embellish the energies of fresher nations, and will also encourage their process of disintegration. France will also serve as a model to great modern nations; she will show them where they are going and where they will finish, she will temper their enthusiasm. Because France prefigures the destiny of other countries. (49)

* * *

From the Frenchmen of the Crusades they have become the Frenchmen of the kitchen and of the bistro, bien-être and boredom.

Nothing is more awkward than to see a nation which abused – rightly – the attribute of “greatness” – grande nation, grande armée, la grandeur de la France – debase itself into a human herd panting after happiness. . . . “Le Français moyen,” le petit-bourgeois”: widespread shameful categories, which have flourished on the ruins of past exploits. (53-54)

* * *

France is the least primitive thing in the world, that is to say, the least fresh, direct, and absolute. (55)

* * *

The contamination of instinct is a catastrophic victory of the mind and culture; in its totality, it only questions biology. These questions increase proportionally with the level of spiritual refinement. The history of civilizations coincides with biological crises, which honor “life” by diminishing it.

The French are used up by the excess of being. They do not love themselves anymore, because they so greatly feel what they had once been. Patriotism emanates from an excess of vital reflexes; love of country is the least spiritual thing of all, a sentimental expression of animalistic solidarity. Nothing offends intelligence as much as patriotism. The mind, in refining itself, suffocates the ancestors in blood and erases the memory of the call of that strip of land called, in a fanatical illusion, the fatherland.

How could reason, returned to its essential vocation – the universal and the void – again push the individual, disgusted with being a citizen, towards the City’s mind-numbing palavers? The loss of her instincts has sealed France’s fate . . . (56-57)

* * *

When Europe will be draped in shadow, France will remain her liveliest tomb. (60)

* * *

When one believes in nothing, the senses become a religion. And the stomach an end in itself. The phenomenon of decadence is inseparable from that of gastronomy. (60-61)

* * *

Her decline, obvious for almost a century, has not been opposed by any of her sons with a desperate protest. (63)

* * *

If the French weren’t disgusted with themselves, they would deserve contempt. It is the first time in their history that they are experiencing this feeling. We others, chained to our approximate destinies, we feel it from our first thought, we are born with it and develop it growing up, experiencing alienation – like poor Jews spared from messianic temptations. All failed nations share in the ambiguity of the Judaic destiny: they are devoured by the obsession of implacable incompletion. As though we were not born in our element, the “fatherland” is a symbol of unending doubts, a question mark which finds no answer – neither ethnic, nor sentimental, nor even geographical.

France has existed here; she has found her place in the world at all levels. She has only lost the future. How could she avoid her own old age? . . . A decline which is not understood loses its poetry and becomes ridiculous. (64)

* * *

An advanced country does not suffer any complicity with some ideal. It concentrates in itself all that can negate the Gothic, that is to say vitality, transcendence, elevation. Its energy does not tend upwards; it hangs. France is the Notre-Dame Cathedral reflected in the Seine – a cathedral which spurns the sky. . . .

An entire country which no longer believes in anything, what an exalting and degrading spectacle! To hear them, from the lowest of citizens to the most lucid, say the obvious with detachment: “La France n’existe plus,” “Nous sommes finis,” “Nous n’avons plus d’avenir,” “Nous sommes un pays en décadence,” what a reinvigorating lesson, when you are no longer a devotee of delusions! (68-69)[4]

* * *

France’s revolutionary career is almost over. She can only fight for her stomach. Heroism, which presupposes a strange mix of blood and uselessness, can no longer be her oxygen. (73)

* * *

I cannot think of a country more lacking in marrow than France. Not a single holy illusion – and all illusions are holy – still sleeps in her bones. (88)

* * *

The nation which most promoted the idea of progress is reduced to excluding herself from it. Is this not a fine atonement and a punishment full of meaning? The concept of progress – at the historical level, a rejection of death – which grew from the most dynamic and superficial optimism, sins by a lack of a metaphysical basis. . . .

France is ironically punished not only for her superstitious belief in progress, but also for the grand and noble phrases under which she hid her temporality. “La civilisation française,” “la France dans le monde” – have these not expressed under their concise and grandiloquent appearances the idea that the French form of civilization is unique? Does adding the adjective “national” to all her values not have no other meaning than that of individualizing a form of culture considered to be a universal symbol? But, above all, has not “la France éternelle” fixed in two words her deceptive attempt to flee the ultimate solution, that of time? . . . That no Frenchman foresaw “la France mortelle” is, of course, an omission of the truth due to fear. But the contemporary foreigner cannot allow himself such a fallacious hope when, for him, the awareness of history’s irrevocability is a glory which negatively decorates the soul. (90-92)

Notes

[1] Italicized French words were in French in the original Romanian text. Cafard means depression or doldrums.

[2] German: longing.

[3] “To be dupe” means “to be taken for a fool.”

[4] This recalls Sartre’s later claim (in the 1961 preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth) that every day since the 1930s in France, at least one Frenchman has told another, “Nous sommes foutus!” [We are messed up!]
Cioran on Civilization & Decadence
Emil Cioran

Sébastien Bourdon, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia

833 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: The following extracts are drawn from Emil Cioran, De la France (Paris: L’Herne, 2015). The original was written in Romanian in 1941.

Countries – unfortunately – exist. Each one crystallizes a sum of errors called values, which it cultivates and combines, and which it circulates and gives currency towards. Their totality constitutes the individuality of each country and its implicit pride – but also its tyranny, because it weighs unconsciously on the individual. However, the more gifted he is, the more he detaches himself from their pressure. All the same, because he forgets – because he lives – the deficiencies of his personal identity integrate him into the nation to which he belongs. That is why even saints have a national character. . . .

When we speak of France, what are we doing? We are describing the fecund errors committed by a certain segment of the Earth. To take their side or to oppose them means to accept these errors or to reject them. (20)

Style is the mind’s architecture. (25)

Without a dose of artificiality, the human spirit breaks under the weight of sincerity, that variant of barbarism. (35)

When does a civilization begin its decline? When individuals begin to become conscious; when they no longer want to be the victims of the ideals and the beliefs of the community. Once the individual is awakened, the nation loses its substance. And when all are awakened, it decomposes. Nothing is more dangerous than the wish to have not made a mistake. Collective lucidity is a sign of weariness. The tragedy of the lucid individual becomes the tragedy of a nation. Every citizen becomes a little exception, and these accumulated exceptions become the nation’s historic deficit. (35-36)

Only peoples who have not lived do not fall – and the Jews. (39)

Spiritual exhaustion leads to the mummification of a culture. (47)

Decadence is the lack of ideals, the moment where disgust for everything appears; an intolerance for the future – and, as such, a feeling that time is running out, with its inevitable consequence: the lack of prophets and, implicitly, the lack of heroes. (51)

The vitality of a people is manifested by those who are willing to die for values going beyond the limited sphere of individual interests. The hero dies with good grace. But this final consent is only possible because he is unconsciously guided by the vital force of his people. (52)

Nations make their way in sublime errors and end among arid truths. (52)

The Homeric heroes lived and died; the snobs of the West talk about pleasure and pain. (52)

A people can be considered infected when the problems penetrate its instincts, when doubts penetrate its senses, when uncertainties penetrate its reflexes. Its body reacts against the mind’s interventions. Biological decadence is an excess of rationalism among reflexes. . . . Life is full only in unconsciousness. (54)

Alexandrianism is the period of learned denials: refutation as cultural style. Man wanders nobly among ideals; the thinker has his mind subtly slither among ideas. (62)

At bottom, what is a civilization? The absurdity of life made into a system, a provisional order amidst the incomprehensible. As soon as these values exhaust themselves and no longer guide the individual to faith and to action, life reveals its meaninglessness.

He who lives on the margins of all forms of culture, who is no one’s victim, condemns himself, because he perceives by their transparency the nothingness of nature.

The succession of civilizations is a series of resistances which man raised against the dread of pure existence. (67)

A people has vitality as long as it accumulates forces dangerous for itself and for others. (67)

From the point of view of vitality, to be ahead [historically] is detrimental, because by taking a step – or even several – beyond the banalities of life, one frees oneself of the fertile burden of values. (68)

. . . archeology, the real finality of human efforts. (72)

A nation only achieves greatness by looking beyond its borders, by hating its neighbors and desiring to subjugate them. To be a great power means to not accept parallel values, to not tolerate life besides oneself, to impose oneself as the mandatory and intolerant way. (74)

While I understand infinitely better the Romans of the end – softened by vice, disbelief, and luxury – than those of the period of greatness – rough, healthy, and confident in their idols – I retain some respect for the altars of illusion and the temples unshaken by irony. When Cato the Elder said that two augurs could not honestly look each other in the face without bursting out laughing, I believe him, not without mourning these vital superstitions. Once our symbols are abolished by lucidity, life is no more than a stroll among abandoned temples. How can we live merely among the gods’ ruins? The desire to exist pushes me towards the dream of other deceits; I have not hung around decadence without feeling the need for lies of which I had only seen glimpses. The Barbarian awakened. It was the only response – that of vitality – to the doubts of knowledge. (82-83)
Italy, Mussolini, & Fascism
Emil Cioran

1,468 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: This has been retranslated from a French translation. I have improved the paragraphing. The title is editorial. Source: Emil Cioran, Apologie de la barbarie: Berlin-Bucarest 1932–1941 (Paris: L’Herne, 2015), “L’Italie est-elle une grande puissance ?,” pp. 203-209. Originally published in Vremea, May 31, 1936.

I have never been able to think anything specific concerning Italy’s meaning in the world. And if I were forced to adopt a specific attitude towards it, I would choose to remain silent. It is not a matter here of a subjective reaction, of displaying a preference or a revulsion, but merely of interesting oneself in the destiny of a country, in its transhistorical totality in a sense, in its overarching meaning. I despise those who, out of a fondness for Fascism, make Italy out to be the axis of the world. Likewise, I despise those who reject Italy under the pretext that they do not accept its [Fascist] system. I am sick of the babbling ideologues who only know the Left and the Right. I even hate the mediocrity of their thought, which simplifies history so they need not have to think about it. Today – as ever – one can only be an incurable pessimist or an incorrigible revolutionary.

Italy’s fate is very curious. This country, which was able to bring about a phenomenon like the Renaissance, does not, however, attract the world’s admiration. I mean that, up to now, I have met no serious man who trusts the Italian people. Everyone admires Italian culture, but doubts or even despises the people who gave birth to it. If I were forced to ignore Italian culture, the other cultures would not be enough for me. And yet – I do not know why – I always forget the Italian people. In this respect, world opinion at the beginning of the Italo-Abyssinian war was significant. Never has a declaration of war been accompanied by so much mockery and doubt. No one believed in Italy’s success and yet, at the end of the war, she excused herself for her triumph.[1]

The great powers that are capable of inspiring fear and strength are those that succeed in all fields, simultaneously. France burst forth into the world with the same strength, with the same zeal, in all fields of life; and these fields were not disassociated, because they drew their source from a shared primordial pulsation. Italy entered the world with a spiritual offensive, to which there was no corresponding political force of equal intensity. That is true not only of the Renaissance. The entire history of Italy is chock full of inequalities. Her most interesting period – that of Mazzini’s prophesying – is quite simply grandiose by its political insufficiency. The Italians have not remembered much of Machiavelli. Only Mussolini seems to have read him carefully . . . and he even seems to have learned a great deal from him.

I believe that right from the beginning, Mussolini grasped the deficiencies of the Italian people, its peripheral role in world politics. The delusions of grandeur that he has brought to Italy and the will to power that he has artificially inspired in the country can only explain themselves in this way. As rough as these may be, Italy’s current visibility has arisen less according to the internal evolution of peoples, than according to rational and conscious determinants. I have the impression that the Italians have resolved to be a great people. In this respect, Mussolini’s act following the entry of his armies into Addis Ababa was significant. Instead of considering this victory – which was not won principally by heroism – with modesty, he proclaimed with great pomp: from this day forward, Italy is an empire. Never have I been able to witness such an image of the artificial in history, of false greatness.

Empires are built and great conquests occur through an instinctive dynamism, a breathing so deep as to be fatal. Or, if it is in the name of an idea, there is nothing logical or controlled about this: it is fashioned organically, all along a continuity that is apparently ungraspable and yet present in all the unconscious and conscious areas of the soul. There is no Italian idea of culture, even as an incomparable Italian culture exists. If we can define ourselves relative to Fascism, it is just about impossible to define ourselves with respect to Italy. Have you not noticed the theoretical and moral crises caused by Bolshevism and Hitlerism? Here is the reason: given that Bolshevism and Hitlerism have behind them the ideas of the Russian and German cultures, and that we, for our part, want to take a position with respect to one or the other, we are necessarily made to confront these two great European finalities which are Russia and Germany.

Fascism is too political and insufficiently messianic. No messianism in the world had considered this idea to be central: the State. Yet Mussolini’s statal maximalism leaves even Hegel trailing behind. The Hitlerians have always wished to make clear that what distinguishes them from the Fascists in the first instance is the conception of the State. For Hitlerism, the people is the central and foundational idea. In its name, one can conceive a messianic vision; in the name of the State, never. The example of Russia is also very illustrative. The Russian messianism of the past century drew its roots from the people’s mysticism, in the idea that it alone holds the truth and represents real life. We know that one of the great passions of the Russian intellectuals was to “go towards the people.” This intoxicating socialization with the popular masses prefigured the convulsions of Bolshevism.

Through Fascism, Italy suggested to itself that it become a great power. The result: she has succeeded in attracting the world’s serious interest. Nothing more. I do not believe Italy is capable of creating serious conflicts in Europe, because she is not imperialist in the soul. Overpopulation and Mussolini’s political genius have obviously raised her historical level, but that has not been able to make her essentially imperialist, that is to say inspired by a thirst for conquests detached from necessity. Conquest linked to need is no great thing. In the Europe of today, only German imperialism is genuine. People will object: Do the Germans not need conquests? Yes, of course; however, even if they conquered all the territories that they need, their imperialist idea would not disappear. Imperialism is a way of breathing and an integral aspect of the orientation and the direction of German history.

Without Fascism, Italy would be a failed country. Externally, she fulfills the criteria of a great power. But does she have the necessary internal vibration? Does she know the prolonged resistance that an idea can embody, the historical dimension which a lasting affirmation can acquire? I doubt it. This people which has known unique spiritual flowerings, why is it that it waited centuries to accomplish itself politically? Italy’s political realization was late, in truth. For let us think: What conflicts has Fascism created in the world? So many problems, none of which concern it! Fascism is not, strictly speaking, a Weltanschauung. That is understandable. Firstly, Fascism has not been enriched by the Italian tradition. Just as there is no Italian idea of culture, nor a messianic vision concerning her meaning in the world, so there are neither antecedents nor a historical basis [for Fascism]. Fascism is born of immediate events and has built itself, in a sense, from them. Hence, there is a certain degree of contingency which even its fanatical admirers recognize. Messianisms are mutually exclusive. Yet, if Fascism had represented something other than a political form, it would have come into conflict with the ideas of European culture and would have violently asserted itself among them, as do, directly or indirectly, Russia and Germany. Messianic destinies create historical incompatibilities.

No one is unaware of the fact that the Abyssinian war was not very honorable for the Italians; it in no way does justice to their strength. Despite this, one thing brings them glory: their resistance in the face of the English. The people who succeeds in destroying the British monster, this monumentally artificial empire, will represent a unique ethical moment in history. If Italy really had had the scale of a great power, she would have exploited England’s tacit provocation. History is implacable and does not record half-wars. Deep down, there are only wars of exterminations. The glory of nations is raised upon bloodbaths – like all history, for that matter.

Mussolini’s greatest merit is to have invented Italy’s strength, because Italy did not slide towards her fate, nor did she evolve naturally towards her greatness. Fascism was a shock without which Italy would be a compromise comparable to the current Romanian democracy.
Cioran on Decline
Emil Cioran

873 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: The following are some rare more-or-less political comments from the post-war Emil Cioran, more in keeping with his pessimistic outlook. These are translated from Emil Cioran, De l’inconvénient d’être né (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). The title is editorial.

To revolt against heredity is to revolt against billions of years, against the first cell. (11)

In allowing man to exist, nature has done something much worse than a miscalculation: an attack against itself. (94)

Any nation, at a certain point in its career, believes itself to be chosen. That is when they bring out the best and the worst in themselves. (147)

If the nations were to become apathetic all at the same time, there would be no more conflicts, no more wars, no more empires. But misfortune commands that there be young peoples, and young people period – a major obstacle to the philanthropists’ dreams: ensuring that all men reach the same degree of weariness or sloth[1] . . . (149)

Only false values have currency, because everyone can adopt them, counterfeit them (second-degree falsehood). A successful idea is necessarily a pseudo-idea. (149)

Revolutions are the sublime form of bad literature. (149)

The decadent Romans only appreciated Greek leisure (otium greacum), that which they had most despised when they had been vigorous. The analogy with the civilized nations of today is so flagrant that it would be indecent to belabor the point. (151)

The West: sweet-smelling rot, a perfumed corpse. (152)

All these peoples were great because they had great prejudices. They no longer have any. Are they still nations? At most, disaggregated crowds. (152)

The whites more and more deserve the name of palefaces given to them by the Indians of America. (152)

So long as a nation retains consciousness of its superiority, it is ferocious, and respected. As soon as it loses it, it becomes humanized and no longer counts for much. (153)

Morally, Carneades and his companions were as deadly [to the Romans] as the Carthaginians had been militarily. Rising nations fear above all the absence of prejudices and taboos, intellectual indecency, which make for the attractiveness of dying civilizations. (155)

For having been too successful in all his endeavors, Heracles was punished. Similarly, too happy, Troy had to die. Considering this common vision of tragedies, one is despite oneself brought to think that the so-called free world, blessed with all good fortunes, will inevitably know the fate of Ilium, because the gods’ jealousy survives their disappearance. (155)

A society is doomed when it no longer has the strength to be narrow-minded. With an open, too open mind, how could it protect itself from the excesses, the mortal threats of liberty? (156)

A people which has exhausted its mission is like an author who repeats himself. Scratch that, like an author who has nothing more to say. Because to repeat oneself is to prove that one still believes in oneself and what one has stood for. But a finished nation does not even have the strength to harp on about its old slogans, which had ensured its preeminence and its brilliance. (156)

This head of state’s strength is in being chimerical and cynical. An unscrupulous dreamer. (159)

History, strictly speaking, does not repeat itself. But as the delusions of which man is capable are limited in number, they always come back under another disguise, giving some tired old crap[2] an air of novelty and a tragic veneer.

Montaigne, a sage, had no posterity; Rousseau, a hysteric, is still stirring the nations. I only like thinkers who have inspired no orators. (165)

In 1441, at the Council of Florence, it was decreed that pagans, Jews, heretics, and schismatics would have no share of “eternal life” and that all, unless turned before death to the true religion, would go straight to Hell. It was in the days when the Church professed such outrageous absurdities that it really was still the Church. An institution is only alive and strong if it rejects all that isn’t itself. Unfortunately, the same is true for a nation or a regime. (165)

The Aztecs were right to think that we had to appease the gods, to offer them human blood every day to prevent the universe from collapsing and falling back again into chaos. We have long ceased believing in the gods for a long time and we no longer offer them sacrifices. The world is still here, however. No doubt. Only we no longer have the good fortune of knowing why it doesn’t collapse immediately. (167)

Trees massacred. Houses rise. Gobs, gobs everywhere. Man spreads. Man is the cancer of the Earth. (199)

A nation achieves preeminence and conserves it only so long as it accepts necessarily inept conventions and that it is subservient to its prejudices, without understanding them to be so. As soon as she calls them by their name, all is unmasked, all is compromised. The will to dominate, to play a role, to lay down the law, cannot exist without a strong dose of stupidity: history, in its essence, is stupid . . . It continues, it advances, because the nations liquidate their prejudices one after the other. If they were to get rid of them all at the same time, there would no more than a blissful universal disintegration. (222-23)
The Motivational Cioran
Emil Cioran

1,097 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: Emil Cioran is notorious as perhaps the most pessimistic philosopher of all time. Nonetheless, I was able to find some aphorisms of his which I would consider inspiring. These are translated from Emil Cioran, De l’inconvénient d’être né (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).

Any overcoming of desire empowers us. We have all the more control over this world as we take our distance from it, when we do not commit to it. Renunciation confers limitless power. (44)

A work exists only if it is carefully prepared in the dark, with the care of an assassin contemplating his attack. In both cases, what counts is the will to strike. (51)

Detachment cannot be learned: it is written in a civilization. One does not tend towards it, one discovers it in oneself. That is what I thought when reading that a missionary, after eighteen years in Japan, could not count more than sixty converts all in all, and what’s more, they were old. And they escaped him at the last minute: they died in the Nipponese fashion, without regrets, without suffering, as worthy descendants of their ancestors who, to harden themselves during the struggles against the Mongols, let themselves be imbued by the nothingness of all things and by their own nothingness. (62-63)

Do we have the right to be mad with someone who calls us a monster? The monster is alone by definition, and solitude, even infamy, presupposes something positive, a rather special appointment, but an appointment nonetheless, undeniably. (91)

“An enemy is as useful as a Buddha.” That’s quite right. Because our enemy watches over us, he prevents us from letting ourselves go. By raising, by divulging the slightest of our failings, he leads us straight towards our salvation. He does everything to make sure that we are not unworthy of the idea he has of us. Our gratitude towards him should also be limitless. (96-97)

We get a grip on ourselves, and we commit all the more to being, by reacting against nay-saying, corrosive books [livres négateurs, dissolvants], against their noxious power. These are, in short, books that fortify, because they summon the energy which contradicts them. The more poison they contain, the greater their salutary effect, as long as we read them against the grain, as we should read any book, starting with the catechism. (97)

The greatest service we can render an author is to forbid him from working for a time. Short periods of tyranny would be necessary to force him to suspend his intellectual activity. Freedom of expression without any interruption exposes talents to a mortal peril. It forces them to spend themselves beyond their means and prevents them from accumulating sensations and experiences. Limitless freedom is a crime against the mind. (97)

I like to read books as a housewife does it: by identifying with the author and the book. Any other approach makes me think of a dismemberer of corpses [dépeceur de cadavre]. (112)

Lucidity without the corrective of ambition leads to the doldrums. One needs to be supported by the other, that one fights the other without defeating it, for a work and for a life to be possible. (116)

For our actions, or simply for our vitality, the pretense of lucidity is as dire as lucidity itself. (116)

If your hardships do not make you grow, and do not put you in a state of energetic euphoria, but rather depress and embitter you, know that you have no spiritual vocation. (123)

A monster, as horrible as he may be, secretly attracts us, pursues us, haunts us. He represents and enlarges our advantages and our miseries, he proclaims us, he is our standard-bearer. (125)

The bothersome or hurtful questions we are asked by the ill-bred; they irritate us, trouble us, and can have the same effect on us as certain Oriental techniques. Why would some crude, aggressive stupidity not spark enlightenment? It’s at least as good as a whack to the head with a stick. (133)

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, the luck they have in not knowing the extent to which they are unhappy. (134)

I will only fully admire a dishonored – and happy – man. There’s someone, I will think, who does not care about the opinion of his peers and who draws his happiness and consolation solely from himself. (135)

It is loved ones, among all others, who are most keen to question our merits. The rule is universal; Buddha himself did not escape it. It was one of his cousins who worked hardest against him, and only secondly against Mara, the devil. (137)

To defeat a panic attack or a stubborn worry, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, accessible to all. To not have to resort to this too often during the day, it is best to feel its benefits just as you jump out of bed. Or otherwise to only use it in exceptional moments, like Pope Innocent IX, who, having ordered a painting in which he was represented on his deathbed, would glance at it every time he had to make an important decision. (139)

When enough time passes, nothing is good or bad anymore. The historian who judges the past is doing journalism in another century. (158)

Must one despise one’s century or all centuries? Can we imagine Buddha leaving the world because of his contemporaries? (159)

In periods of sterility, we should hibernate, sleep night and day to conserve our strength, instead of spending it in mortifications and rages. (174)

The empty time of meditation is, in truth, the only full time. We should not be embarrassed in accumulating vacant moments. Vacant in appearance, actually full. To meditate is the supreme leisure, the secret to which has been lost. (180)

To go to the furthest edges of one’s art and, more still, of one’s being, that is the law of whoever considers themselves to be, even in the slightest, elect. (184)

Be wary of euphemisms! They worsen the horror that they are supposed to cover up. (191)

If I do not deny my origins, it is because it is better, in the end, to be nothing at all than an imitation of something. (195)

One teaches philosophy only in the agora, in the garden, or at home. The university chair is the philosopher’s grave, the death of all living thought, the chair is the mind in mourning. (216)

To express oneself, to work, in any area, is due to a more or less concealed fanaticism. If we don’t consider ourselves to be charged with a mission, to exist is difficult; to act, impossible. (224)
An Infamous Past
Christopher Nason

2,524 words

Marta Petreu
An Infamous Past: E. M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005

‘The Romanians, what have they ever done for us, eh?’ So might Emil Cioran, himself a Romanian, have wondered when he wrote his third book The Transfiguration of Romania, published in 1936. Bewailing Romania’s insignificant past and culture, he proposed a program that would transform the country in parallel with the contemporary national revivals in Germany and Italy then underway.

In An Infamous Past, Matra Petreu divides Cioran’s career into three chronological time periods. During his early and late periods, Cioran was an apolitical writer of philosophical essays, in Romanian and French, respectively. The middle period, the time of The Transfiguration, from roughly 1933 to 1945, marks the occasion Cioran stuck his head above the parapet of political neutrality, providing him with his titular ‘infamous past’. Petreu points out how anomalous The Transfiguration is in relation to Cioran’s other work, attributing its genesis to Cioran’s political awakening in Nazi Germany. She then outlines the doctrines of Cornelius Codreanu’s Legionary movement, a significant Romanian far-right organisation contemporary with Cioran, and contrasts the Legion’s doctrines with Cioran’s thought in The Transfiguration. Petreu examines the main philosophical influences on Cioran. She devotes a chapter to ‘foreigners’ — the the most controversial topic dealt with in Cioran’s book — and examines the details of the revolution Cioran wanted to bring to interwar Romania. Finally, she describes the public’s reaction to The Transfiguration and the aftermath for its author.

Cioran is best known for the third period of his career, from 1947 onwards, as a writer of philosophical aphorisms in French. Nevertheless, in an age when celebrities are famous for being famous, he was famous for being unknown. Apart from accepting a prize for A Short History of Decay (1949), his first work in French, he refused all literary honors and eschewed all publicity, preferring instead to live as a sort of latter-day Diogenes.

In a sense, Cioran is a very derivative writer. According to the author, his influences are mainly German. Arthur Schopenhauer is a major influence, especially his metaphysical belief that the fundamental reality is the will to live, and his conclusion that human life is some kind of mistake. Another influence is Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly his proclamation of the death of God and the cosmic insignificance this subsequently entails: the Earth is a rock, spinning and floating in the void, going nowhere, and awaiting annihilation by an asteroid strike or a solar flare. Unlike in Nietzsche, however, Cioran makes no attempt to transcend nihilism: whereas Nietzsche wrote, ‘that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’; Cioran might have written, ‘that which doesn’t kill me merely delays the inevitable.’ A third influence, particularly for The Transfiguration, is Spengler’s philosophical history, The Decline of the West. The crepuscular atmosphere of a spent civilisation, however, pervades his entire corpus.

During and after WWII Cioran lived in Paris, never returning to Romania. Despite living there in obscurity and poverty, Cioran also lived fearing that The Transfiguration and his ‘infamous past’ would not remain dead and buried. For Cioran, the insomniac philosopher, had sleepwalked into Nazi Germany, on a scholarship, and was awakened from his apolitical slumber by Adolf Hitler: “The organised megalomania”! “The cult of irrationality”! “The disconcerting monumentality”! After the precise trivializing of academic philosophy and the mediocrity of Romanian democracy, Hitler’s Germany came as a revelation to him. His reaction was unlike that of his mentor Spengler, who was not enamoured by Hitler and the Nazis. Cioran, on the other hand, was particularly impressed with the uniformed, marching Hitler Youth: he thought they could become an inspiration for Romanian youth. He admitted, however, that he could have been as impressed by Communist youth, because what mattered to Cioran was not ideology, but fanaticism and extremism. It was through such forces he envisaged the revival of a moribund Romania.

For Cioran, Romania had always been a marginal country. For centuries it was occupied by Roman border legions defending the Empire from the Goths and other Germanic tribes. Cioran described Romania as ‘daubed with Latinity’. This daubing, almost a mark of shame, implied a superficial Westernization. For despite its language, in terms of both its history — it wasn’t until the 1870s that Romania won independence from the Ottoman Empire — and its Orthodox faith, Romania faced the Orient. Amid the collapse of empires following WWI, Romania had gained the new territories of Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bukovina. These gains brought problems as Romania went from a homogeneous nation to an ethnically diverse one, which now included Hungarians, Germans, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, and Bulgarians. These minorities amounted to just over five million, almost a third of the population. Diversity is, of course, a strength; what it strengthened was ethnic tension as the Romanian majority perceived the Hungarians, Germans, and Jews as economically better-off than themselves. As Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America, democracy tends to generate an atomized society where people are reduced to numbers. Democracy in Romania was, unsurprisingly, unable to deal with its newly acquired minorities and its rising nationalism.

Cioran saw history and culture in Spenglerian terms. Spengler’s morphology of culture was quasi-biological: major cultures are like organisms in that they experience cycles of growth and decay. Spengler saw Europe at that moment as having entered the period of transition from culture to civilization, which marks the process of irreversible decline. Spengler compared this period in Europe to the last phases of the Roman Empire. The fate of Rome provided the key to understanding our own future. Europe was like the other civilizations that had preceded it, and like them would also suffer an inevitable denouement. Cioran, however, didn’t see the Spenglerian model applying to Romania since it was not a major culture. Romania was, rather, an ahistorical peasant culture condemned to eternal stagnation. Cioran thought Romania could never build a Gothic cathedral — the archetypal symbol of Faustian culture — because Romanian culture was too much ‘of the moment,’ lacking both a viable heritage and destiny. To escape this cultural nothingness, to enter the ontological space of history, Cioran proposed a leap — inspired by the ideas of Nae Ionescu, his professor of philosophy — which would synchronise Romania with the rest of Europe through a seven-year plan of rapid urbanization and industrialization. Only a dictatorship could unleash the forces necessary for such a transformation. Cioran thought democracy unable to revolutionize the country because the individualism it engenders resists any organizational principle. Having failed to pass through the organic stages of cultural birth, growth and maturity, Romania needed to follow the path of Eugen Lovinescu’s ‘imitative revolution,’ inspired by the models of Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia, and thus by ‘cutting corners’ could join ‘the sinking of the lands of evening’. (Lovinescu being another major influence on Cioran.) Cioran believed Europe even in dissolution was preferable to Romania in paralysis. Decline, in any case, was inevitable; there was little the individual could do to alter destiny. To imagine an alternative outcome is, for both Spengler and Cioran, optimism; optimism for both is a form of cowardice.

Certainly no one could accuse Cioran of optimism, except perhaps during the time period of The Transfiguration, when he uncharacteristically placed faith in reason and politics to deliver some future fulfilment for Romania. The author contrasts the radicalism of Cioran with the reactionary Codreanu: both radical and reactionary (or conservative) thought arise from modernity’s loss of roots, but whereas radicalism sees this loss as inevitable, reactionism and conservatism sees it as tragic. Although Cioran was atheist, there is a marked religious dimension in his thought; explicable, perhaps, given that his father was a Greek Orthodox priest. The very title of his work speaks of an almost religious transformation, or transfiguration, of Romania. The messianism of The Transfiguration, although limited to secular salvation, can be traced to religious roots. Similarly, his sense of the material realm being a transient illusion and his preoccupation with eschatology are both characteristic themes of Orthodox Christianity. Influenced by both Nietzsche and Spengler, however, Cioran saw religious belief as no longer authentically possible, but rather as lying in a culture’s past. This contrasts with the Legion, who venerated tradition, particularly Orthodox Christianity. The Legionaires considered the people — which included the living, the dead and the unborn — and the nation as one. They believed Orthodox Christianity could produce the ‘new man,’ namely, the perfect Christian. Cioran was sceptical about ‘the new man’; he doubted that Orthodox Christianity would be able to energise Romania because it was itself too passive and contemplative. Despite being obsessed with death and proclaiming himself ‘an expert in the matter of death,’ Cioran had no sympathy with the idea of ‘the Legionaire’s death,’ i.e., martyrdom for the cause of Romania. Although Cioran doesn’t mention Codreanu or the Legion in The Transfiguration, and despite their significant differences, he nevertheless believed that the Legion’s fanaticism could foist dictatorship on the country.

Apart from his admiration of the Führer, it was Cioran’s writings on the Jews, and to a lesser extent the Hungarians, which constitutes his ‘infamous past’. When The Transfiguration came to be republished in 1990, Cioran deleted the chapter dealing with the Jewish question. Originally, Cioran was much more ambivalent than the overtly anti-Semitic Legion on the issue of the Jews. Cioran thought the Legion was excessively dominated by xenophobia. Unlike the Legion, he believed it was the Romanians themselves and not the Jews who were responsible for the country’s plight. Although he allowed that the Jews were defined by ‘vampirism’ — not the Count Dracula (another Romanian!) variety, but rather exploitation of the peoples they managed to infiltrate — he nonetheless believed they were only a peripheral problem. He doesn’t seem to have made the link between the Jews and Communism and didn’t hold them responsible for the Bolshevik revolution. Paradoxically, he sees the Jewish problem as ‘the curse of history,’ impossible to solve. For Cioran, however, opposition to the Jews was a mark of the health of the nation: they were enemies to nationalism other than their own and Romanian democracy was in the service of the Jews. Like the Legionaires, he believed that Romania had far too many Jews. For him a small number would have been acceptable as they tended to quicken the pace of historical development; too many, however, and the fabric of the nation becomes threatened. If what constituted the correct quantity remained vague so did his solution to the problem: the ‘isolation of foreigners’. On this point, the Legionaires were unequivocal: the expulsion of the Jews.

WWI was one of the greatest catastrophes in European history. The war undermined the belief in progress and the faith in human reason which had gained prominence over the course of the 19th century. The dominant characteristic of WWI was that it seemed to lack purpose or meaning. The war itself, however, was seen as the symptom of a much deeper crisis for which intellectuals of the generation between the wars sought solutions in political extremes. Cioran, as part of this generation, wasn’t immune from this extremism, but he sought solutions in the extremes of both the right and the left rather than one or the other. (Perhaps, for Cioran, at the extremities these ideologies merge.) Certainly, aspects of Marxism influenced Cioran: he saw capitalism and the bourgeois world as doomed; he also saw that the purpose of philosophy — during his political phase — is to change the world, rather than merely to understand it. The reason Cioran’s radicalism should be considered right-wing, however, is its emphasis on the collective entity of the Romanian nation; left-wing radicalism is typically internationalistic.

The Transformation is a work of metapolitics, and therefore does not deal much with how to attain political power. Codreanu’s Legionaires on the other hand, apart from having worked out a program for the acquisition of power, were explicitly Christian. Given their fundamental differences, it is unsurprising that Codreanu should write Cioran a polite but dismissive letter following publication of The Transfiguration. Like many other such works, The Transfiguration fell stillborn from the press. With the failure of his political ambition, Cioran moved to Paris — ostensibly on another scholarship — where gradually his interest in Romania and politics declined. He abandoned all hope in political solutions and came to see the need for solutions as the problem. In Paris he lived a parasitical existence, refusing to work, and resumed acquaintance with whores, winos, and derelicts, feeling he would learn more about life from them than from professors of philosophy.

The idea of some crime or mistake in the past coming to haunt the present is at least as old as Oedipus Rex. As Petreu suggests in An Infamous Past, Cioran was plagued by the guilt that he had committed such a mistake: the primordial mistake of writing less-than-complimentary things about the Jews. But even if, as judged by the most feverish snowflake, Cioran’s writings constitute a crime; surely, in a Godless universe there is no necessary connection between crime and punishment. It is also difficult to see what could constitute a mistake in terms of Cioran’s philosophy, where truth and falsehood are conflated with one another. (Perhaps the feeling of being a charlatan is inescapable for the philosopher, as the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski said.) Although he subsequently revised his opinion of Hitler and the Jews, Cioran regretted he had ever entered the treacherous shallows of political commitment.

It may have been his association with the likes of Samuel Beckett which exacerbated his sense of guilt. Beckett, a writer who dwelt on similar themes of angst, despair and exhaustion, chose to fight the Nazis by joining the French Resistance, although there is nothing in his (Beckett’s) writing to suggest his motivation for doing so. Like Josef K in The Trial, Cioran felt that punishment is drawn remorselessly towards guilt, but unlike Josef K, Cioran seems to have suffered no actual punishment. The only evidence the author cites of such is the Romanian playwright Eugen Ionesco, who said he could never forgive Cioran for his fascist past, and the Legionaires, who denounced him as a traitor and a philo-Semite.

Indeed there is evidence that his ‘infamous past’ was exonerated, which the author fails to mention. No less an éminence grise than Susan Sontag (of the infamous quote, ‘the White race is the cancer of human history,’ who herself ironically enough was to die of cancer) granted Cioran an imprimatur, writing the introduction to the English translation of his collection The Temptation to Exist (1956); she only awarded a B-, however, for ‘A Solitary People,’ his revised essay on the Jews. Perhaps the thought that he could have done better prompted the remark Cioran made on his deathbed, “I…am…not…an…anti-…Semite.” A comparison with Nietzsche again seems appropriate: Nietzsche stared into the abyss, saw there is no God and went mad; Cioran stared into the abyss, saw there is no God and worried that people might think him anti-Semitic. After all, as Revilo P. Oliver put it: God is the Big Jew of the Old Testament.
Hitler in the German Consciousness
Emil Cioran

cioran_in_romania968 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note:

Translated from the French. Improvements from the original Romanian are therefore welcome.

No politician in the world today inspires as much sympathy and admiration in me as Hitler. There is something irresistible about the destiny of this man, for whom every act of life has significance only by its symbolic participation in the historic destiny of a nation. For Hitler is a man who does not have what is called a private life. Since the war, his life is an abnegation and a sacrifice. A politician’s lifestyle acquires profoundness only when the desire for power and the imperialist will to conquer are accompanied by a great ability for abnegation.

The mystique of the Führer in Germany is perfectly justified. Even those who consider themselves passionate opponents of Hitler, and who claim to hate him, are in reality carried away by the flows of this mystique which has erected his personality into a myth. During the Röhm conspiracy, when nothing official was yet made known, I heard so many people who, the eve, criticized Hitler unreservedly, exclaiming: “Let’s hope nothing has happened to him!”

His speeches are marked by a pathos and frenzy which only the visions of a prophetic spirit can reach. Goebbels is finer, more subtle, has a more discrete irony, he has nuanced gestures and all the appearances of a refined and skillful intellectual, but he is not capable of the volcanic and torrential explosions which deprive you of your critical spirit. Hitler’s merit is to have deprived a nation of its critical spirit. One can dynamize something, one can create effervescence only insofar as one deprives men of that freedom which is their distance between each other and themselves [entre eux et soi]. The fecundity of a vision is revealed only by its ability to seduce. To be able to accuse of irresponsibility those who have chosen another path, here is the dramatic destiny and the responsibility of any visionary, dictator, and prophet.

With Hitler, the ability to seduce is all the more impressive in that it is not assisted by the charm of an expressive physiognomy. His face never expressed anything else than energy and sadness. Because one must know: Hitler is a sad person. This sadness stems from too much seriousness. This characterizes the entire German people, a hopelessly serious people, compared to which the Latin nations are jokester-nations.

I had the opportunity to witness one day, in Berlin, a sort of collective ecstasy before the Führer. During a celebration, at the moment when Hitler was passing on Unter den Linden, the population rushed forward and surrounded his car, without being able to pronounce a single word, paralyzed. Hitler is so rooted in German consciousness that there would need to be big disappointments for people to distance themselves from worship of him. It is perfectly curious to see that Hitler has risen in the confidence of the nation after the recent crisis of the party.

Those who voice reservations regarding him mention his “lack of culture.” As if, to lead a nation, one needed to cite Goethe in every speech! What matters is an infinite vibration of the soul, an absolute will to realization in history, an intense exaltation up to the absurd, an irrational élan to sacrifice one’s life. Let us admit that, in the dictatorships of Europe today, this great tension is present. It is necessary to become a power. We must also seriously ask ourselves if small nations can advance without resorting to [passer par] dictatorship.

It is equally true that dictatorships represent crises of the spirit. Each marks an emptiness in the historical progress of culture. A fair number of National Socialists concede this. Lack of universality, that is the problem of German culture. And National Socialism has made even the illusion of a universality disappear. Judging it from a strictly political viewpoint, it is a movement of an astounding magnitude. An extraordinary dynamism has seized the nation and has imprinted upon it a rhythm of unheard of intensity. In only a year, National Socialism has created more than Fascism in ten. Mussolini is perhaps more gifted than Hitler; but let us not forget that Hitler has fought longer, that he has encountered incomparable difficulties, and that the destiny of Germany is infinitely more complex and dramatic than that of Italy. A genuine social tragedy is taking place in Germany: in the current conditions, it is humanly impossible to defeat unemployment. The nation’s tension is so great that, given the impossibility of bringing immediate and concrete solutions to many insoluble problems for the moment, one persists in an atmosphere of “perpetual dynamic” whose dangers were highlighted by [Vice Chancellor Franz] von Papen in his Marburg speech, a harsh criticism of the regime, made in the name of the Catholic opposition.

The opposition of the Catholics is undeniably great. The pope having forbidden young Catholics from joining the Hitler-Jugend, the Hitlerian pressure and reactions have led to a serious conflict with the Catholics. The Bavarians, who are strongly practicing Catholics, would not hesitate an instant if they had to choose between their faith and National Socialism.

But Hitler means more for the German people than I-know-not-what pope who gets involved in the internal affairs of a people in the name of a Christianity trivialized by politics and called Catholicism.

Hitler has passionately set ablaze the political struggles and dynamized by one messianic breath an entire domain of values which democratic rationalism had made flat and trivial. We all need a mystique, for we are all tired of so many truths which do not burst forth from the flames.

Munich, July 4, 1934

Source: Emil Cioran, Apologie de la Barbarie: Berlin-Bucarest (1932–1941) (Paris: L’Herne, 2015), “Hitler dans la conscience allemande,” 129–33. First published in Vremea, July 15, 1934.
Ode to the Captain
Emil Cioran

1,364 words
Corneliu Codreanu

Corneliu Codreanu

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note:

Emil Cioran was a Romanian philosopher who, before becoming a noted esthete of nihilism in the Parisian literary scene, dared to be a hopeful fascist. Translated from the French. Improvements from the original Romanian are therefore welcome. The title is editorial. 

Before Corneliu Codreanu, Romania was an inhabited Sahara. Those who found themselves between earth and sky had no content, other than waiting. Someone had to come.

We all traversed the Romanian desert, incapable of anything. Contempt itself seemed an effort to us.

We could only contemplate our country under a negative light. In our moments of maddest hope, we granted it the momentary justification of a good joke. And Romania was no more than a good joke.

We spun around in the free air, empty of past and present, enjoying the sweet debauchery and the lack of destiny.

This poor country was a vast pause between a beginning without greatness and a vague possibility. In us the future moaned. In one, it boiled. And him, he broke the sweet silence of our existence and forced us to be. The virtues of a people were incarnated in him. The Romania of the possibilities was heading towards the Romania of power.
Emil Cioran

Emil Cioran

I only had a few meetings with Corneliu Codreanu. I immediately understood that I spoke with a man, in a land of puppets. His presence was troubling and I never left him without feeling the irremediable breath, the crucial breath which accompanies existences marked by the inevitable.  Why would I not admit that a strange fear took hold of me, a sort of enthusiasm full of forebodings?

The world of books appeared useless to me; the categories, inoperative; the prestige of intelligence, drab; the subterfuges of subtlety, vain.

The Captain did not suffer from the fundamental vice of the so-called Romanian intellectual. The Captain was not “intelligent,” the Captain was deep.

The spiritual disaster of Romania stems from thought without content, from intelligence. Spirit’s lack of consistence transforms problems into elements of abstract games and steals from the spirit its character of destiny. Intelligence degrades even suffering into chattering.

But those of the Captain, weighty and rare, rose from Destiny. They were made somewhere, far away. Hence the impression of a universe of the heart, of a universe of the eyes and of the thoughts.

When, in 1934, I told him how interesting it would be to tell the story of his life, he told me: “I have not spent my life in libraries. I don’t like reading. I stand here, and I think.”

These here thoughts have founded our raison d’être. In them, breathe nature and the sky.

And when they began their realization, the historical foundations of the country were shaken by it.

Corneliu Codreanu did not pose the problem of the immediate Romania, of modern contemporary Romania. That was much too little. This would not have accorded either with the scope of his vision, or of our expectations. He posed the problem in ultimate terms, in the totality of the national becoming. He did not want to correct the approximate misery of our condition, but to introduce the absolute into the day-to-day breathing of Romania. Not a revolution of a historical moment, but that of history. The Legion would then have to not only create Romania, but to redeem her past, fertilized by an immemorial absence, to save, by an inspired and unique folly, the enormous time lost.

The Legionary passion is the expression of a reaction, in the face of an unlucky past. This nation has shone in the world only by its permanence in misfortune. Never has it been otherwise. Our substance is an infinite negative. Hence the impossibility of overcoming the oscillation between a dissolving bitterness and an optimistic fury.

In a moment of discouragement, I told the Captain: “Captain, I do not believe Romania has a meaning in the world. No sign in her past justifies any such hope.”

“You are right,” he answered me. “Yet there are certain signs.”

“The Legionary Movement,” I added.

And then he showed me how he perceived the resurrection of the Dacian virtues. And I understood that between the Dacians and the Legionnaires was the pause in our being, because we are living Romania’s second beginning.

The Captain gave a meaning to Romania. Before him, the Romanian was only Romanian, that is to say a human material made up of drowsiness and humility. The Legionnaire is a Romanian of substance, a dangerous Romanian, an inevitability for himself and for others, an infinitely menacing human storm. The Iron Guard, a fanatical forest . . . The Legionnaire must be a man in which pride suffers from insomnia.

We were used to the second-hand patriot, gelatinous and empty. In his place, appears the individual who considered the country and its problems with a terrible relentlessness. There is a difference of spiritual density.

He who has given to the country another direction and also another structure united in him elementary passion and spiritual detachment. His solutions are valid in the immediate and in the eternal. History does not know, in this world, a visionary with a more practical mind and with such skill, sustained by the soul of a saint. Equally, it does not know another movement in which the problem of redemption goes hand in hand with the peasantry.

To build and to save, politics and mystique, here are the irreducibles, which he made his end [auxquelles il a mis fin]. He interested himself, in equal measure, to the organization of a mess hall and to the question of sin, to commerce and to faith. No one must forget it:

The Captain was a peasant established in the Absolute.

Each believed he understood him. However, he eluded everyone. He had surpassed the limits of Romania. He proposed to the Movement itself a way of life which surpassed Romanian endurance. He was too great. One is sometimes inclined to believe that he did not stem from the conflict between his greatness and our smallness. It is however no less true that the time of persecution has made emerge personalities that even the most confident utopia would not have suspected. 

In a nation of slaves he introduced honor, and in a spineless cattle, pride. His influence has not only shaped his disciples, but, in a certain sense, also his enemies. For these, the scoundrels, have become monsters. He (this) forced him(self) to be strong, he imposed upon them a character in evil. They would not have become hellish caricatures, if the greatness of the Captain had not demanded the negative equivalent. We would be unfair to the butchers, if we considered them to be failures. All realized themselves. One step more, and they would have aroused the Devil’s jealousy. 

Around the Captain, no one remained lukewarm. A new shiver passed over the country. A human land haunted by the essential. Suffering becomes the criteria of value, and death, that of vocation. In a few years, Romania has known a tragic palpitation, whose intensity consoles us for the cowardice of a thousand years of non-history. The faith of a man has given birth to a world, which surpasses Shakespeare’s ancient tragedy. And this in the Balkans! 

On an absolute level, if I had to choose between Romania and the Captain, I would not hesitate for a second. 

After his death, each felt himself to be even more alone, but beyond our loneliness was rising that of Romania. 

No quill dipped in the ink of misfortune could describe the misfortune of our fate. However, we must be cowards, and console ourselves. With the exception of Jesus, no death has been more present among the living. Could someone have forgotten it? “Henceforth, Romania will be led by a dead man,” a friend told me on the banks of the Seine. 

This dead man has spread the scent of eternity over our human muck, and returned a sky to Romania.

Source: Emil Cioran, Apologie de la barbarie: Berlin-Bucarest 1932–1941 (Paris: L’Herne, 2015), “Le profil intérieur du Capitaine,” 261–267. Originally spoken on Romanian radio on November 27, 1940 and published in Glasul strămoșesc, December 25, 1940.
Cioran, E. M. The Trouble with Being Born. Translated from the French by Richard Howard (New York: Seaver Books, 1976)

Cioran, E. M. A Short History of Decay. Translated by Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976)

Cioran, Emil. Schimbarea la faţă a României (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1990)

Cioran, E. M. Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1995)

Cioran, E. M. Entretiens (Paris: Gallimard, 1995)

Cioran, E. M. Cahiers: 1957–1972 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997)

Cioran, E. M. History and Utopia. Translated by Richard Howard. Foreword by Eugene Thacker (New York: Arcade, 2015)