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 ·
Rășinari, 8 April 1911 · Paris, 20 June 1995
A Romanian who put down his own language in his mid-thirties 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
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.
The switch
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.
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.
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
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
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
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. In the spring of 1941 he was made cultural attaché at the Romanian legation in Vichy and lost the post within about three months, when Antonescu destroyed the Guard.
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.
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.
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.
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI