French did the opposite of freeing him, and that was the point: he called it a straitjacket that calms a madman, and said that by temperament he had wanted a drunkard's language and French refused him one. He also called it universal, impersonal and dead. The result is the Cioran everyone reads - the fragment, the balanced clause, an eighteenth-century cadence used to say things no moralist would have said. He described wanting to write in French as the only conversion he ever underwent.
BY OTHERS◆Monday, January 1, 1973
by E. M. Cioran
The insomniac who put down his own language in his mid-thirties and wrote the most exact French prose of the century in fragments. A sampler of quotations, the whole shelf as a reader's guide, the language switch, the life, and the record - including the 1930s, which this page does not skip.
tags: Cioran, aphorism, pessimism, insomnia, exile, Romania, France, fragment
· Insomnia, in two languages ·
E. M.CIORAN
Rășinari, 8 April 1911 · Paris, 20 June 1995
A Romanian who abandoned Romanian, and spent the rest of his life writing some of the most exact French prose of the century, in fragments, about the disadvantage of having been born. No job, no doctorate, one accepted prize and four refused, and nearly six decades in the same quarter of Paris - the last of them in a sixth-floor garret on the rue de l’Odéon.
Ten books in French · six in Romanian, one of them suppressed for fifty years
a stylist of despair who was, by every account, cheerful company
He is the writer people quote when they want to sound as though they have stopped hoping. This is a misreading, though an understandable one. Cioran wrote almost nothing but fragments about the catastrophe of being born, and he wrote them in a language not his own, in a sixth-floor room, with no job and no readers to speak of for the first twenty years. He also lived to eighty-four, kept one companion for fifty-three of those years, and was by the account of everyone who met him funny, warm and inexhaustible in conversation. The despair was a literary instrument. It was not a mood he was stuck in; it was the thing he made in order not to be.
What makes him worth a room rather than a quote file is that he is the last serious practitioner of a form. The aphorism had a real tradition - Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Lichtenberg, Chamfort, Nietzsche - in which a thought was allowed to be complete in three lines and was not obliged to become a system. Cioran took the form as late as anyone could and used it to say things a moralist would not: not "here is how to live" but "here is what it is like when the machinery of living stops making sense, described exactly." He is also, and this is inseparable from the writing, a man with a real political disgrace in his past. Both are below, in the same room.
The form
Fourteen lines
A sampler, in Richard Howard’s English. Draw a few, then go and get the books - the fragment is a form that only works at the length of a whole volume, opened at random.
It’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
1195 fragments
The notebook
Filter by book or by head, search a word, or pull one at random. Space draws, arrows step, C copies, slash searches. The whole index is at the foot.
SEARCH /1195
№ 1Lucidity
It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.
A bounded selection, capped so that no volume appears in full. All are in print and worth owning on paper, since the form exists to be opened at random.
Instrument
The sleepless hour
Drag the hand, or use the slider. Insomnia was not his subject - it was his method, and he said so for sixty years.
03:40
The worst hour
5.7 h awake
The worst hour
Everything he is famous for was manufactured here. Not the despair, which anyone can have, but the specific tone: lucid, unhurried, faintly amused, entirely without hope of being answered. This is the hour with no audience in it.
The switch
He put down his own language in his mid-thirties
Cioran stopped writing Romanian in the years after the war and began again in French - a language he described as a straitjacket, and chose for exactly that reason. It is the hinge of the whole body of work.
His own account of the break: in a house near Dieppe, translating Mallarmé into Romanian, he stopped and thought how absurd it was to translate Mallarmé into a language nobody knows. He dated it to around 1947; one scholarly chronology puts it in 1945. There is also a colder reading, argued most aggressively by Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine: that leaving Romanian left behind a Romanian paper trail. Cioran’s own framing was aesthetic. Both are on the table.
Where to start
The shelf
Sixteen books in two languages. Three of them are pure fragment, five are essays, and one group he tried to bury. Which you open first depends on whether you want the argument or the sparks.
His most famous book and, for most readers, the one. Twelve numbered parts with no titles, pure fragment throughout, circling the single idea in the title: that the catastrophe is not death but birth. Also the funniest of them, which people who have not read it never believe.
Section titles are the books’ own; the descriptions are mine. Every French book was put into English by Richard Howard, which is why the English Cioran has a single, consistent voice. All are in print, and the fragments are worth owning on paper, since the form exists to be opened at random.
Eighty-four years
A life spent avoiding one
No job, no doctorate, no country after twenty-six, no telephone for most of it, and one quarter of one city for fifty-eight years.
From about the age of twenty he barely slept for years, walking the streets all night. He named this, consistently and for the rest of his life, as the origin of his thought: not a metaphor for despair but its literal cause, and the reason the work comes in fragments rather than arguments. He also credited it with removing his capacity to take anything seriously, including himself.
The record
What to know before you quote him
The part that is not a rumour
From 1933, aged twenty-two, Cioran published texts of open Nazi and dictatorial enthusiasm in Vremea and other Bucharest papers. He wrote that there was no contemporary politician he found more admirable than Hitler; that the Night of the Long Knives had cost humanity nothing, since only a few imbeciles had died; and, in a letter to Petru Comarnescu, that he was a Hitlerist. From Germany he told friends that a dictatorial regime would succeed in conquering our native morass.
The Transfiguration of Romania (1936) is a fascistic book. It attacks his own country for its smallness and proposes a forced national transfiguration, and it contains explicit antisemitic argument - that Jews are inassimilable, that a people becoming conscious of itself must fatally come into conflict with them. Marta Petreu's analysis draws out the peculiar structure of it: envy of what he took to be Jewish productivity, fused with a nationalism that required an enemy. It is worth knowing that the book was also attacked from the far right, since Cioran wanted industry and cities rather than Orthodox tradition, and Nichifor Crainic called it a merciless massacre of present-day Romania.
He was a sympathiser and propagandist of the Iron Guard rather than a member - a distinction the scholarship makes, and not a defence. He praised its heroism which begins in brutality and ends in sacrifice, met Codreanu a few times, and in November 1940, during the National Legionary State, gave a radio eulogy for the murdered leader, printed that December as "The Interior Profile of the Captain". It opens with the claim that before Codreanu, Romania was a populated Sahara. On 3 January 1941 the Legionary government made him cultural attaché at the Romanian legation in Vichy; Antonescu destroyed the Guard three weeks after that, and Cioran was removed around May, after some two and a half months.
He never published a reckoning. What he did instead was quieter and harder to score. He suppressed the 1936 book for decades and insisted the chapter on the Jews be cut from the 1990 Romanian reissue, writing in his note to that edition that it was his duty to suppress a number of pretentious and stupid pages; elsewhere he called the excised material odious. He blocked a French translation of the Romanian political writing for the rest of his life - it appeared only in 2009. In interviews he called fascism the worst folly of my youth, and said that if he was cured of one sickness it was surely that one. He also produced the self-exculpating version: that anyone who has not subscribed to fanaticism, rage and madness between twenty and thirty is an imbecile. And he stopped writing in the language those texts were written in.
Whether that amounts to remorse is the live dispute. Petreu, reading the tract against the posthumous notebooks, finds real regret. Laignel-Lavastine argues the commitments were never abandoned, only camouflaged in the Western work by a concerted programme of omission - a case contested for its use of truncated quotation and for pursuing him too relentlessly, though no reviewer I can find overturns her factual base. None of this is a recent smear. It is in his own bibliography, and it is the thing to know before deciding how much authority to grant a writer whose subject is the worthlessness of conviction.
- Marta Petreu, An Infamous Past: E. M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania, tr. Bogdan Aldea, foreword Norman Manea (Ivan R. Dee, 2005; Romanian original 1999)
- Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: l'oubli du fascisme (PUF, 2002), and its critical reception
- Schimbarea la față a României, Humanitas reissue of 1990, with the author's note; Cahiers 1957-1972, published 1997
- "Profilul interior al Căpitanului", Glasul strămoșesc (Sibiu), an VI, nr. 10, 25 December 1940; radio address 27 November 1940
Stylist, or thinker?
The first objection is self-refutation. If everything is vanity and posturing, the claim is itself vanity and posturing; a nihilism stated this well undermines itself in the stating. Cioran knew the shape of this and did not treat it as a problem, which is either the answer or an evasion depending on your patience.
The second is that the aphorism evades argument. He puts judgments forward with no intention of building a continuous case, and the fragments contradict one another freely - so the work can never be shown wrong, and therefore never shown right. One sympathetic critic's image is that each piece is a shard of glass: sharp, illuminating, impossible to fit into a whole. His own answer, given in an interview, is the best one available: aphorisms are momentary truths, not decrees. He also said he changed his mind ten or twenty or thirty times in a single day, and saw no reason to hide it.
The third is the standing verdict that he is a stylist and not a thinker - routinely praised as one of the last great stylists of Western philosophy, which is a compliment doing double duty as a demotion. The scholarship on him works explicitly against a received view that he is a self-contradictory writer with stylistic qualities, at the margin of philosophical debate. He is not taught in most philosophy curricula. Sontag, who admired him, conceded the premise and reversed the valence: he makes none of the usual efforts to persuade, and that is the form working, not failing.
The fourth is the pose. A man who wrote that being born is a catastrophe lived to eighty-four, kept the same companion for fifty-three years, and was by universal report delightful company - talkative, funny, generous with his time. Detractors call this proof the despair was a costume. He half-conceded it himself, granting a touch of fakery in the tragic among Western thinkers, himself included. The better reading is the one the notebooks support: the writing was the mechanism that made the life liveable. As he put it, he invented nothing, and had been the sole secretary of his own sensations.
The company he kept, and the line he closed
Paul Celan translated A Short History of Decay into German in 1953 - Lehre vom Zerfall, four years after the French. Susan Sontag brought him into English in 1968, first as "On Cioran" in TriQuarterly and then as "Thinking Against Oneself" in Styles of Radical Will. Saint-John Perse's much-quoted verdict was that Cioran was one of the greatest French writers to honour the language since the death of Valéry - the flat superlative that circulates online overstates what the blurb actually said. Henri Michaux, Benjamin Fondane, Eugène Ionesco and Mircea Eliade were friends; the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater built his reputation in Spanish almost single-handed.
Beckett is the relationship people most want, and it was asymmetric. They met at the Closerie des Lilas in 1961. Beckett cooled on it, feeling they had less in common than he had assumed; Cioran's admiration lasted, and the Beckett portrait in Exercices d'admiration is among the few unguardedly warm things he wrote. There is a note from 1968 in which he sees Beckett absorbed in a book on a path near the Luxembourg and decides not to approach him.
His reputation was made outside academic philosophy and has stayed there: canonical as an aphorist, a fixture of philosophical pessimism, and retroactively claimed by antinatalism, an argument he never made systematically but whose sentences he supplied. His work was banned under Ceaușescu; Franco's censors banned The New Gods in Spain in 1974 as atheist and blasphemous. The Romanian Academy elected him posthumously in 2009.
The more durable influence is formal. If you have read anyone who writes serious thought in short paragraphs with no connective tissue and no conclusion - and a very large number of people now do - the line runs back through him to Nietzsche, Lichtenberg, Chamfort and Pascal. He may be the last major writer in it. He is also, unavoidably, everywhere online, circulating stripped of his books, his language and his history - which is exactly the fate he said all writing comes to.
Instrument
Why he stopped building systems
Take one piece out of each. They do not fail the same way, and that asymmetry is the whole case for the form he chose.
A system
Every node carries load. Click one to pull it out.
Fragments
Nothing here holds anything else up. Click to remove.
This is not an argument that fragments are better. It is an argument about what each form risks. A system can be refuted; a fragment can only be disagreed with - which is either its honesty or its escape hatch, and he used it as both.
Why the fragment
There is an argument for the form itself, and Cioran made the best version of it by accident. A system has to be defended at every point; a fragment only has to be true once. That sounds like a licence to be irresponsible, and it is - he contradicts himself within a single book, and said so cheerfully, calling aphorisms momentary truths rather than decrees. But it also means the form can carry something an argument cannot: the record of a mind at a particular hour, under a particular pressure, with nothing smoothed out for the sake of consistency.
This is why the books have to be read whole and at random rather than quoted. A single Cioran line, pulled out and posted, is a bumper sticker for despair. Two hundred of them in sequence are something else entirely - you start to see the oscillation, the jokes, the days he woke up almost happy and said so, the passages where the pose drops and he is simply a man describing insomnia. The book is the unit. The line is bait.
Colophon
The quotations on this page are a sampler of fourteen short lines, each attributed to its book, its year and Richard Howard’s translation. Everything else - the language switch, the reader’s guides, the timeline, the reception - is my own summary rather than quotation. Section and chapter titles are taken from the books themselves.
Biography, bibliography and reception were checked against the standard sources rather than written from memory; where the scholarship disagrees on a date, the page says so instead of picking. The 1930s section leans on Marta Petreu’s An Infamous Past and on the critical literature around Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine’s L’oubli du fascisme, and it exists because a page about a writer whose subject is the worthlessness of conviction owes the reader an account of what he was once convinced of.
All sixteen books are in copyright and in print. The guides are a way in, not a substitute.