E. M. Cioran

'Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one's reach.' In The Trouble With Being Born, E. M. Cioran grapples with the major questions of human existence: birth, death, God, the passing of time, how to relate to others and how to make ourselves get out of bed in the morning. In a series of interlinking aphorisms which are at once pessimistic, poetic and extremely funny, Cioran finds a kind of joy in his own despair, revelling in the absurdity and futility of our existence, and our inability to live in the world. Translated by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and critic Richard Howard, The Trouble With Being Born is a provocative, illuminating testament to a singular mind.

The Trouble With Being Born

"This book saved my life." So recalls the Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran about a book that meditates on madness and death, the absurdity of existence, and the agony of consciousness. Cioran finds in our darkest fears not only reasons to continue living but also the comic, absurd humor in doing so. This early work by Cioran, whom Susan Sontag calls "the most distinguished figure in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein," and Marc Fumaroli recently described as "a legend ... a master of French prose," portrays the philosophical mind in the crisis of its self-consuming fever. Born out of a terrible insomnia which Cioran characterizes as "a dizzying lucidity which would turn even paradise into hell," On the Heights of Despair was written in Romania in 1934 at the age of twenty-two. It presents us with the youthful Cioran, who described himself as "a Nietzsche still complete with his Zarathustra, his poses, his mystical clown's tricks, a whole circus of the heights." It also presents Cioran as a connoisseur of apocalypse, a theoretician of despair. For Cioran, writing and philosophy are closely related to physical suffering: both share the "lyrical virtues" that alone lead to metaphysical revelation. The result is a book that becomes a substitute for as well as an antidote to suicide. By enacting the struggle of the Romantic soul against God, the universe, and itself, Cioran releases a saving burst of lyrical energy that carries him safely out of his desperation. On the Heights of Despair shows the philosopher's first grappling with themes he would return to in his mature works: despair and decay, absurdity and alienation, futility and the irrationality of existence. Yet the bracing verve of Cioran's writing and his earthy good humor point toward the elegant stylist of later works. An exorcism of despair, On the Heights of Despair offers insight into the ironic anguish of this philosophical mind. It also gives readers a fascinating look at Cioran's early development, opening new perspectives on his evolution as a writer and thinker.

On the Heights of Despair

“A love of Cioran creates an urge to press his writing into someone’s hand, and is followed by an equal urge to pull it away as poison.”—The New Yorker In this volume, which reaffirms the uncompromising brilliance of his mind, Cioran strips the human condition down to its most basic components, birth and death, suggesting that disaster lies not in the prospect of death but in the fact of birth, "that laughable accident." In the lucid, aphoristic style that characterizes his work, Cioran writes of time and death, God and religion, suicide and suffering, and the temptation to silence. Through sharp observation and patient contemplation, Cioran cuts to the heart of the human experience. “In the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."—Publishers Weekly "No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity. . . . His writing . . . is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."—Boston Phoenix

The Trouble with Being Born

This collection of eleven essays originally appeared in France thirty years ago and created a literary whirlwind on the Left Bank. E.M. Cioran writes incisively about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, mystics, apostles, and philosophers. "An intellectual bombshell that blasts away at all kinds of cant, sham and conventionality. . . ". --Jonah Raskin, L.A. WEEKLY.

The Temptation to Exist

By the mid-1930s, Emil Cioran was already known as a leader of a new generation of politically committed Romanian intellectuals. Researching another, more radical book, Cioran was spending hours in a library poring over the lives of saints. As a modern hagiographer, Cioran "dreamt" himself "the chronicler of these saints' falls between heaven and earth, the intimate knower of the ardors in their hearts, the historian of God's insomniacs." Inspired by Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, Cioran "searched for the origin of tears." He asked himself if saints could be "the sources of tears' better light." "Who can tell?" he wrote in the first paragraph of this book, first published in Romania in 1937. "To be sure, tears are their trace. Tears did not enter the world through the saints; but without them we would never have known that we cry because we long for a lost paradise." By following in their traces, "wetting the soles of one's feet in their tears," Cioran hoped to understand how a human being can renounce being human. Written in Cioran's characteristic aphoristic style, this flamboyant, bold, and provocative book is one of his most important—and revelatory—works. Cioran focuses not on martyrs or heroes but on the mystics—primarily female—famous for their keening spirituality and intimate knowledge of God. Their Christianity was anti-theological, anti-institutional, and based solely on intuition and sentiment. Many, such as Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, and Saint John of the Cross, have produced classic works of mystical literature; but Cioran celebrates many more minor and unusual figures as well. Following Nietzsche, he focuses explicitly on the political element hidden in saints' lives. In his hands, however, their charitable deeds are much less interesting than their thirst for pain and their equally powerful capacity to endure it. Behind their suffering and their uncanny ability to renounce everything through ascetic practices, Cioran detects a fanatical will to power. "Like Nietzsche, Cioran is an important religious thinker. His book intertwines God and music with passion and tears. . . . [Tears and Saints] has a chillingly contemporary ring that makes this translation important here and now."—Booklist

Tears and Saints

Romanian born E.M. Cioran, who lived in Paris until his death in 1995, writes of politics, of history, and of the utopian dream. "Cioran has a claim to be regarded as among the handful of original minds . . . writing today".--NEW YORK TIMES.

History and Utopia

Gözyaşları ve azizler

Dubbed “Nietzsche without his hammer” by literary critic James Wood, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran is known as much for his profound pessimism and fatalistic approach as for the lyrical, raging prose with which he communicates them. Unlike many of his other works, such as On the Heights of Despair and Tears and Saints, The New Gods eschews his usual aphoristic approach in favor of more extensive and analytic essays. Returning to many of Cioran’s favorite themes, The New Gods explores humanity’s attachment to gods, death, fear, and infirmity, in essays that vary widely in form and approach. In “Paleontology” Cioran describes a visit to a museum, finding the relatively pedestrian destination rife with decay, death, and human weakness. In another chapter, Cioran explores suicide in shorter, impressionistic bursts, while “The Demiurge” is a shambolic exploration of man’s relationship with good, evil, and God. All the while, The New Gods reaffirms Cioran’s belief in “lucid despair,” and his own signature mixture of pessimism and skepticism in language that never fails to be a pleasure. Perhaps his prose itself is an argument against Cioran’s near-nihilism: there is beauty in his books.

The New Gods

Short History of Decay

E. M. Cioran confronts the place of today's world in the context of human history—focusing on such major issues of the twentieth century as human progress, fanaticism, and science—in this nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Touching upon Man's need to worship, the feebleness of God, the downfall of the Ancient Greeks and the melancholy baseness of all existence, Cioran's pieces are pessimistic in the extreme, but also display a beautiful certainty that renders them delicate, vivid, and memorable. Illuminating and brutally honest, A Short History of Decay dissects Man's decadence in a remarkable series of moving and beautiful pieces.

A Short History of Decay

En las cimas de la desesperación

The author faces other great writers & thinkers whose ideas have shaped the world, drawing portraits of Beckett, Borges, Fitzgerald, Joseph de Maistre, & others.

Anathemas and Admirations

Here in one volume, are the essential writings in the 34 notebook's Cioran left behind at his death, not a journal but a sort of exercise manual, in which he tries out his formulations, perfects the expression of his obsessions and whims. The Notebooks are rich in anecdotes, accounts of meetings, portraits of friends and enemies, descriptions of excursions and sleepless nights. Here are the lists, day after day, of failures, sufferings, anxieties, terrors, rages, and humiliations, curiously at odds with the daytime Cioran, so mocking and tonic, so comical and various. These brief entries constitute a backstage glimpse of a tormented mind, wise in its very torments, solitary in its wisdom.

Notebooks

Now in paperback, an "antidote to a world gone mad for bedside affirmation" (Washington Post). E. M. Cioran has been called the last worthy disciple of Nietzsche and "a sort of final philosopher of the Western world" who "combines the compassion of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning" (Washington Post). All Gall Is Divided is the second book Cioran published in French after moving from his native Romania and establishing himself in Paris. It revealed him as an aphorist in a long tradition descending from the ancient Greeks through La Rochefoucault but with a gift for lacerating, subversively off-kilter insights, a twentieth-century nose for the absurdities of the human condition, and what Baudelaire called "spleen." The aphorisms collected here address themes from the atrophy of utterance and the condition of the West to the abyss, solitude, time, religion, music, the vitality of love, history, and the void. The award-winning poet and translator Richard Howard has characterized them as "manic humor, howls of pain, and a vestige of tears," but, as he notes too, in these expressions of the philosopher's existential estrangement, there glows "a certain sweetness for all of what Cioran calls 'amertume.'"

The Aphorisms of a Legendary Iconoclast

All Gall Is Divided

Del inconveniente de haber nacido

This collection focuses on the relationship between truth & action & develops the author's notion of human history & events as "a procession of delusions."

Drawn and Quartered

"Marginalia" al "Breviario de Podredumbre"

Ejercicios negativos

«Era la época de la guerra. Cioran estaba en París. Escribió con grandes trazos 1941 en su manuscrito, que tituló Sobre Francia, pensando en los moralistas del siglo XVIII, tal vez presintiendo ya que un día sería uno de ellos. ¿Acaso no esbozó su retrato premonitorio cuando los comparó con los grandes creadores extranjeros? Extraño libro, éste. Aunque aparentemente dedicado a la decadencia de Francia, es en realidad un himno a ella. Cioran escribió, aún en rumano, pero en Francia, una oda a ella, amada incluso en su caída, que no podría carecer de grandeza, por lo muy grande que fue. ¿Eran Inglaterra, Alemania, la propia Rusia, más fuertes? Seguramente, pero su corazón latía por Francia. El Cioran nuevo llegó tan deprisa, tan bruscamente, que nos preguntamos qué misterio puede ocultarse tras esa fecha: 1941.» Alain Paruit

Sobre Francia

This collection of eleven essays originally appeared in France thirty years ago and created a literary whirlwind on the Left Bank. Cioran writes incisively about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, mystics, apostles, and philosophers. The Temptation to Exist first introduced this brilliant European thinker twenty years ago to American readers, in a superb translation by Richard Howard. This literary mystique around Cioran continues to grow, and The Temptation to Exist has become an underground classic. In this work Cioran writes about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, about mystics, apostles, philosophers. For those to whom the very word philosophy brings visions of arduous reading, be assured: Cioran is crystal-clear, his style quotable and aphoristic. “A sort of final philosopher of the Western world. His statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning”—The Washington Post

E. M. Cioran

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