On the Heights of Despair

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Although Cioran gained a following among French intellectuals during his later years, the response to his early work in his home country of Romania was overwhelmingly negative. Cioran's father was a priest, and his mother was head of a local Christian Women's League. The blasphemous nature of Cioran's work forced his parents to maintain a low profile. [16] His mother once said that if she had known how miserable he would become, she would have aborted him, a statement which Cioran described as "liberating". Despite this, she still read his works, whereas his father refused, because of his profession: "Everything that I wrote bothered him and he didn't know how to react. But my mother understood me." [17] Cioran's works were banned under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu. [2] See also [ edit ] An aged Cioran is the main character in a play by Romanian dramatist-actor Matei Vișniec, Mansardă la Paris cu vedere spre moarte ("A Paris Loft with a View on Death"). The play, depicting an imaginary meeting between Vișniec and Cioran, [40] was first brought to the stage in 2007, under the direction of Radu Afrim and with a cast of Romanian and Luxembourgian actors; Cioran was played by Constantin Cojocaru. [41] Stagings were organized in the Romanian city of Sibiu [40] [41] and in the Luxembourg, at Esch-sur-Alzette (both Sibiu and Luxembourg City were the year's European Capital of Culture). [40] In 2009, the Romanian Academy granted posthumous membership to Cioran. [42] A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people. The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul. The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.

Regier, Willis (2005). "Cioran's Nietzsche". French Forum. 30 (3): 78. doi: 10.1353/frf.2006.0012. JSTOR 40552402. S2CID 170571716– via JSTOR. Quotes [ edit ] On the Heights of Despair (1934) [ edit ] We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication. Romanian title: Pe culmile disperării

You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness. If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned — a saint or a corpse. To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; the past reborn in the overflow of fragrances; the smell, through which we conquer time; the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; to deepen yourself in the intangible; to touch the world airborne by smell; aerial dialogue and gliding dissolution; to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation... 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.

His early call for modernization was, however, hard to reconcile with the traditionalism of the Iron Guard. [16] In 1934, he wrote, "I find that in Romania the sole fertile, creative, and invigorating nationalism can only be one which does not just dismiss tradition, but also denies and defeats it". [17] Disapproval of what he viewed as specifically Romanian traits had been present in his works ("In any maxim, in any proverb, in any reflection, our people expresses the same shyness in front of life, the same hesitation and resignation... [...] Everyday Romanian [truisms] are dumbfounding."), [18] which led to criticism from the far-right Gândirea (its editor, Nichifor Crainic, had called The Transfiguration of Romania "a bloody, merciless, massacre of today's Romania, without even [the fear] of matricide and sacrilege"), [19] as well as from various Iron Guard papers. [20] France [ edit ] Portrait of Cioran Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour. The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity... Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore. 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. A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with lifeCioran's works encompass many other themes as well: original sin, the tragic sense of history, the end of civilization, the refusal of consolation through faith, the obsession with the absolute, life as an expression of man's metaphysical exile, etc. He was a thinker passionate about history; widely reading the writers that were associated with the " Decadent movement". One of these writers was Oswald Spengler who influenced Cioran's political philosophy in that he offered Gnostic reflections on the destiny of man and civilization. According to Cioran, as long as man has kept in touch with his origins and hasn't cut himself off from himself, he has resisted decadence. Today, he is on his way to his own destruction through self-objectification, impeccable production and reproduction, excess of self-analysis and transparency, and artificial triumph. [ citation needed]

Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears. To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known. Man should stop being—or becoming—a rational animal. He should become a lunatic, risking everything for the sake of his dangerous fantasies, capable of exaltations, ready to die for all that the world has as well as what it has not. [5]Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis. Great joys, why do they bring us sadness? Because there remains from these excesses only a feeling of irrevocable loss and desertion which reaches a high degree of negative intensity. At such moments, instead of a gain, one keenly feels loss. sadness accompanies all those events in which life expends itself. its intensity is equal to its loss. Thus death causes the greatest sadness. He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Bucharest and in 1932, he received a BA in philosophy with a thesis on Bergson’s thoughts. From 1933 to the end of 1935 Cioran studied philosophy in Berlin with a grant from the Humboldt Foundation.

Emil Cioran was born in 1911 in Rasinari, a small village in Romania. At the age of 14, he was reading Diderot, Balzac, Tagore, the aphorist Lichtenberg, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Schopenhauer and above all, Nietzsche.

The dark, existential despair of Romanian philosopher Cioran's short meditations is paradoxically bracing and life-affirming. . . . Puts him in the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."— Publishers Weekly, starred review