On The Heights Of Despair

Author : E. M. Cioran
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 154 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 1996-10
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0226106713

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On the Heights of Despair by E. M. Cioran Pdf

"Born of a terrible insomnia wchich E. M. Cioran called "a dizzying lucidity which would turn even paradise into hell," this book presents the youthful Cioran, a self-described "Nietzsche still complete with his Zarathustra, his poses, his mystical clown's tricks, a whole circus of the heights." On the Heights of Despair shows Cioran'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. It also presents Cioran as a connoisseur of apocalypse, a theoretician of despair, for whom writing and philosophy both share the "lyrical virtues" that alone lead to metaphysical revelations. An exorcism of despair, this book offers insights into the ironic anguish of Cioran's philosophic mind while providing fascinating information on his early development as a writer and thinker."

Author : E. M. Cioran
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2013-02-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781628724967

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The Trouble with Being Born by E. M. Cioran Pdf

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. “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 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

Author : Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2009-01-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780253003454

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Searching for Cioran by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston Pdf

Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston's critical biography of the Romanian-born French philosopher E. M. Cioran focuses on his crucial formative years as a mystical revolutionary attracted to right-wing nationalist politics in interwar Romania, his writings of this period, and his self-imposed exile to France in 1937. This move led to his transformation into one of the most famous French moralists of the 20th century. As an enthusiast of the anti-rationalist philosophies widely popular in Europe during the first decades of the 20th century, Cioran became an advocate of the fascistic Iron Guard. In her quest to understand how Cioran and other brilliant young intellectuals could have been attracted to such passionate national revival movements, Zarifopol-Johnston, herself a Romanian emigré, sought out the aging philosopher in Paris in the early 1990s and retraced his steps from his home village of Rasinari and youthful years in Sibiu, through his student years in Bucharest and Berlin, to his early residence in France. Her portrait of Cioran is complemented by an engaging autobiographical account of her rediscovery of her own Romanian past.

Author : E. M. Cioran
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 129 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2013-03-22
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780226037240

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The New Gods by E. M. Cioran Pdf

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.

Author : E. M. Cioran
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2012-11-13
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781628724943

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A Short History of Decay by E. M. Cioran Pdf

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.

Author : E. M. Cioran
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 155 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 1998-07-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780226106748

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Tears and Saints by E. M. Cioran Pdf

"(Cioran's) statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning".--WASHINGTON POST. In TEARS AND SAINTS, Cioran touches on nearly all the themes that would preoccupy the writer over the course of his career. Self-consciously perverse, this collection will fascinate anyone interested in saints, mysticism, philosophy, the history of Christianity, or the ultimate strangeness of the sacred.

Author : E. M. Cioran
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 104 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2012-05-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781611457469

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All Gall Is Divided by E. M. Cioran Pdf

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.'"

Author : Eugene Thacker
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 44 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2016-03-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781937561871

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Cosmic Pessimism by Eugene Thacker Pdf

“We’re doomed.” So begins the work of the philosopher whose unabashed and aphoristic indictments of the human condition have been cropping up recently in popular culture. Today we find ourselves in an increasingly inhospitable world that is, at the same time, starkly indifferent to our species-specific hopes, desires, and disappointments. In the Anthropocene, pessimism is felt everywhere but rarely given its proper place. Though pessimism may be, as Eugene Thacker says, the lowest form of philosophy, it may also contain an enigma central to understanding the horizon of the human. Written in a series of fragments, aphorisms, and prose poems, Thacker’s Cosmic Pessimism explores the varieties of pessimism and its often-conflicted relation to philosophy. “Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?”

Author : E. M. Cioran
Publisher : Skyhorse Publishing Inc.
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2012-11-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781611456967

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Drawn and Quartered by E. M. Cioran Pdf

"A brilliant and original exponent of a rare genre, the philosophical essay. Once read, Cioran cannot fail to provoke reaction.”—New York Times Book Review

Author : E. M. Cioran
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2015-01-20
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781628724660

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History and Utopia by E. M. Cioran Pdf

“Only a monster can allow himself the luxury of seeing things as they are,” writes E. M. Cioran, the Romanian-born philosopher who has rightly been compared to Samuel Beckett. In History and Utopia, Cioran the monster writes of politics in its broadest sense, of history, and of the utopian dream. His views are, to say the least, provocative. In one essay he casts a scathing look at democracy, that “festival of mediocrity”; in another he turns his uncompromising gaze on Russia, its history, its evolution, and what he calls “the virtues of liberty.” In the dark shadow of Stalin and Hitler, he writes of tyrants and tyranny with rare lucidity and convincing logic. In “Odyssey of Rancor,” he examines the deep-rooted dream in all of us to “hate our neighbors,” to take immediate and irremediable revenge. And, in the final essay, he analyzes the notion of the “golden age,” the biblical Eden, the utopia of so many poets and thinkers.

Author : Ion Dur
Publisher : Vernon Press
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2019-08-31
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781622735761

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Cioran – A Dionysiac with the voluptuousness of doubt by Ion Dur Pdf

Since its inception philosophical thought has been fixated by death. Death, as much as life, has been the unrelenting driving force behind some of history’s greatest thinkers. Yet, for Emil Cioran, a Romanian-French philosopher, even philosophy cannot attempt to understand nor contain the inevitable unknown. Considered to be an anti-philosopher, Cioran approached and reflected on the human experience with a despairing pessimism. His works are characterised by a brooding, fatalistic temperament that reveals and defines itself in his irony, black humour and inimitable style. Although Cioran’s later works have received much scholarly recognition, little attention has been paid to the texts he wrote in his adolescent. Grounded in the historical context of interwar Romania, this book presents for the first time an analysis of the little-known works of this pioneering Romanian thinker. Deeply affected by his upbringing, this book offers a glimpse into Cioran’s first attempts to delve into philosophical enterprise, before turning its attention to his later works, On the Heights of Despair (1934), The Transfiguration of Romania (1936) and Twilight of thoughts (1940; written in France). Using both the French and Romanian editions of these works, but also their original manuscripts, this volume seeks to provide a re-reading that takes language rather than a social or political critique as its focal point. As an important and provocative contribution to the existing literature on Cioran, this book will be an essential point of reference for students and researchers, alike.

Author : Robyn Marasco
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2015-03-24
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780231538893

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The Highway of Despair by Robyn Marasco Pdf

Hegel's "highway of despair," introduced in his Phenomenology of Spirit, is the tortured path traveled by "natural consciousness" on its way to freedom. Despair, the passionate residue of Hegelian critique, also indicates fugitive opportunities for freedom and preserves the principle of hope against all hope. Analyzing the works of an eclectic cast of thinkers, Robyn Marasco considers the dynamism of despair as a critical passion, reckoning with the forms of historical life forged along Hegel's highway. The Highway of Despair follows Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, and Frantz Fanon as they each read, resist, and reconfigure a strand of thought in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Confronting the twentieth-century collapse of a certain revolutionary dialectic, these thinkers struggle to revalue critical philosophy and recast Left Hegelianism within the contexts of genocidal racism, world war, and colonial domination. Each thinker also re-centers the role of passion in critique. Arguing against more recent trends in critical theory that promise an escape from despair, Marasco shows how passion frustrates the resolutions of reason and faith. Embracing the extremism of what Marx, in the spirit of Hegel, called the "ruthless critique of everything existing," she affirms the contemporary purchase of radical critical theory, resulting in a passionate approach to political thought.

Author : Emile M. Cioran
Publisher : Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Company
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 1970
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : UVA:X000532841

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The Fall Into Time by Emile M. Cioran Pdf

Author : E. M. Cioran
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2013-02-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781628724950

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The Temptation to Exist by E. M. Cioran Pdf

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

Author : Marta Petreu
Publisher : Ivan R. Dee Publisher
Page : 360 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : UOM:39015062619567

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An Infamous Past by Marta Petreu Pdf

Cioran was one of the greatest scholars of the twentieth century to be seduced by totalitarianism. The scene of Cioran's excesses is Romania and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, a time of xenophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, Nazism, and Stalinism.