Emile Cioran article by Irish author Paul R. Hyde. Emile Cioran: A Short History of Decay, The Temptation to Exist.

Emile Cioran

"One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other." Emile Cioran.

"Cioran writes about impossible states of being, about unthinkable thoughts. Characteristically, Cioran begins an essay where another writer would end it. His is the kind of writing that's meant for readers who ... already know what he says; they have traversed these vertiginous thoughts for themselves." Susan Sontag.

For his relentless refusal of the comforts of illusion and self delusion, Cioran cannot be surpassed. A Short History of Decay is a delicious purgative for the overweight soul. One of that group of gifted Rumanian émigrés in Paris - the great sculptor Constantin Brancusi, Paul Célan, Mircea Eliade and Eugene Ionesco - Cioran, like his friend Beckett, abandoned his native language and wrote only in French. The works of this poet-philosopher, this exorcist of despair, this unyielding insomniac are indeed high-octane meditations on the decay and futility of human life born from - as Cioran stated - "a dizzying lucidity which would turn even paradise into hell." Cioran is an exquisite distiller of ennui and solitude into the purest poitin which purges the soul grown fat with self deceit. As anyone who has tasted 'the pure drop' knows, poitin is made not from earthly ingredients, but instead is distilled from the tears of angels. And Cioran is the angel-messenger whose message is that there is no paradise. No paradise means that there is only existence as an incurable illness to be endured until death. All else is mere illusion. In The Temptation to Exist (1956) Cioran writes:

"The fact still remains that our first ancestor left us, for our entire legacy, only the horror of paradise ... If we seek a remedy, we must begin by debaptizing the universe ... by removing the label which, assigned to each appearance, isolates it and lends it a simulacrum of meaning. Meanwhile, down to our nerve cells, everything in us resists paradise. To suffer: sole modality of acquiring the sensation of existence; to exist: unique means of safeguarding our destruction."*

Cioran writes from the standpoint of the exhaustion of philosophy and against history as a degeneration of eternity. In this respect he is, like Nietzsche, European to the last molecule of his mind or soul or being or whatever. Like Beckett, to whom he is often compared, Cioran wrote despite himself and knowing that there was nothing to express, no means of expression together with the urge to express. His works are a disinfectant for the soul polluted with the illusions of knowledge and with the fattened slugs of 'meaning' and are therefore a most invigorating antidote to depression.

*(quoted from The Temptation to Exist, University of Chicago Press 1998. Trans. Richard Howard.)