Liiceanu, Gabriel. Itinerariile unei vieţi: E.M. Cioran; Apocalipsa după Cioran (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2011) La Tentation d'exister ("The Temptation to Exist"), Gallimard 1956 | English edition: ISBN 978-0-226-10675-5 Cioran started writing The Passionate Handbook in 1940 and finished it by 1945. It was the last book he wrote in Romanian, though not the last to deal with pessimism and misanthropy through lyrical aphorisms. Cioran published books only in French thereafter. It was at this point that Cioran's apparent contempt for the Romanian people emerged. He told a friend that he "wanted to write a Philosophy of Failure, with the subtitle For the exclusive use of the Romanian People". [24] Furthermore, he described his move to Paris as "by far the most intelligent thing" he had ever done, and in The Trouble with Being Born he says, "In continual rebellion against my ancestry, I have spent my whole life wanting to be something else: Spanish, Russian, cannibal—anything, except what I was." [25] Imagining the author is part of any reading experience. For the translator, even more than for the ordinary reader, the author, or that fiction named Author, is a personal obsession. Like Jacob who wrestled a mysterious being all night long, the translator struggles silently with the author until he blesses him or lets him go. Like Jacob, he wants to know his opponent, to see him face to face, is haunted physically and spiritually by the author’s face, his name, his strength, his style. So I struggled with Cioran, and for a long time I imagined him like a spirit conjured up from the lines of his text as from a witch’s brew: a leonine head, Zarathustra’s voice, dramatic poses alternating between those of a biblical prophet and a Western dandy. Above all, I saw him as frightfully young and precocious, with an uncanny affinity for suffering and a diabolical propensity for self-torture, an enfant terrible full of somber and cruel vitality, dangerously playing at philosophy, toying with poisonous and lethal thoughts.

Bradatan, Costica (28 November 2016). "The Philosopher of Failure: Emil Cioran's Heights of Despair". Los Angeles Review of Books . Retrieved 8 January 2018. In 2007, Cioran was the main character of a Romanian play called “A Paris Loft with a View on Death” that was staged by Romanian and Luxembourgian actors. On May 2010, Emil Cioran’s book “A Short History of Decay” was part of the Penguin Books project entitled Ten extraordinary Central European Classics.Costica Bradatan is the author most recently of Dying for Ideas. The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers (Bloomsbury, 2015). He serves as the religion/comparative studies editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books .

Cioran’s works cover themes such as despair, death, loneliness, disease, suffering, the abyss, nothingness, anguish, agony, madness, and the absurd. But, in the end, I find him too melodramatic, too Romantic. Perhaps this is inevitable given that I am comfortable, happily employed, well-fed, in excellent health, and in love with my wife. Acquisto, Joseph (2015). The Fall out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy. Bloomsbury Academic. p.142. But, above all, it is a probing – the sensitivity of our fragile, ruined teeth be damned – of the vast silence that arises when we stop begging and complaining long enough to actually listen for God’s reply.Author’s Note: This essay will be included in a book, In Praise of Failure, contracted with Harvard University Press.

a b Regier, Willis (2005). "Cioran's Nietzsche". French Forum. 30 (3): 76. doi: 10.1353/frf.2006.0012. JSTOR 40552402. S2CID 170571716– via JSTOR. By fall 1933, Cioran was already a rapidly rising star in the Romanian letters, having even as an undergraduate contributed a handful of strikingly original essays in some of the country’s literary outlets. Now these periodicals wanted more from him; they wanted, especially, coverage of the German political scene. In a dispatch he sent to the weekly Vremea (December 1933), Cioran wrote, pen firmly in hand: “If I like something about Hitlerism, it is the cult of the irrational, the exultation of pure vitality, the virile expression of strength, without any critical spirit, restraint, or control.” Abusing a cliché much loved by the enemies of liberal democracy everywhere, Cioran pities here a “decadent” and “effeminate” Europe against a proudly “masculine” Germany, all muscles, noise, and fury. Hitler is conspicuously the man in charge, and Cioran is appropriately impressed . Several months later (July 1934), in another dispatch to the same periodical, he wasn’t shy at all about expressing his unbound admiration for the one with balls: “Of all politicians today, Hitler is the one I like and admire most.” And yet the worst is still to come.Cioran's first book, Pe culmile disperării (literally translated: "On the Heights of Despair"), was published in Romania in 1934. It was awarded the Commission's Prize and the Young Writers Prize for one of the best books written by an unpublished young writer. Regardless, Cioran later spoke negatively of it, saying "it is a very poorly written book, without any style." [10] Manuscripts by Romanian Philosopher Cioran Fetch €400,000". Balkan Insight. 8 April 2011 . Retrieved 22 March 2021. Danish neofolk musician Kim Larsen re-enacted Cioran's choking arms photograph on the cover of the 2021 album Your Love Can't Hold This Wreath of Sorrow.

Regier, Willis (2004). "Cioran's Insomnia". MLN. 119 (5): 994–1012. doi: 10.1353/mln.2005.0018. JSTOR 3251887. S2CID 170780097– via JSTOR. Cioran often contradicts himself, but that’s the least of his worries. With him, self-contradiction is not even a weakness, but the sign a mind is alive. For writing, he believed, is not about being consistent, nor about persuasion or keeping a readership entertained; writing is not even about literature. For Cioran, just like Montaigne several centuries earlier, writing has a distinctive performative function: you write not to produce some body of text, but to act upon yourself; to bring yourself together after a personal disaster or to pull yourself out of a bad depression; to come to terms with a deadly disease or to mourn the loss of a close friend. You write not to go mad, not to kill yourself or others. In a conversation with Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater, Cioran says at one point: “If I didn’t write, I could have become an assassin.” Writing is a matter of life and death. Human existence, at its core, is endless anguish and despair, and writing can make things a bit more bearable. “A book,” said Cioran, “is a suicide postponed.”Although pessimism perspires throughout the book, still you can find traces of optimism, which was said to define his life, rather the pessimism in his works, as in the essay “Enthusiasm as a form of love”: “the joy of achieving and the ecstasy of efficiency are the essential characteristics of the man for whom life is a leap toward heights where destructive forces lose their negative intensity.” I thank E. M. Cioran for entrusting me with this book, Matei Calinescu for bringing us together, Mme. Simone Bou?and Jennie Lightner for their very helpful editorial suggestions, my cousin, Pedro Pidal Nano, for the peace of his house by the sea where most of this translation was completed, and last but not least, my husband, Kenneth R. Johnston, whose fine sense of the English language shines forth through the book and helped bring it to life a second time. FOR SOME, he was one of the most subversive thinkers of his time — a 20th-century Nietzsche, only darker and with a better sense of humor. Many, especially in his youth, thought him to be a dangerous lunatic. According to others, however, he was just a charmingly irresponsible young man, who posed no dangers to others — only to himself perhaps. When his book on mysticism went to the printers, the typesetter — a good, God-fearing man — realizing how blasphemous its contents were, refused to touch it; the publisher washed his hands of the matter and the author had to publish the blasphemy elsewhere, at his own expense. Who was this man?