The Philosopher of Failure: Emil Cioran and On the Heights of Despair

The Philosopher of Failure: Emil Cioran and «On the Heights of Despair»

From «On the Heights of Despair» to «The Trouble with Being Born», failure runs through the whole of Cioran's work.

By Costica Bradatan[1]

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Emil Cioran (1911–1995), a Romanian-born thinker who wrote in French, is one of those figures who cannot easily be fitted into any school or category. He built no philosophical system, and instead of treatises he wrote fragments and short, biting sentences. In an essay first published in the «Los Angeles Review of Books» in November 2016, Costica Bradatan, a professor of the humanities and the author of books on philosophy and death, traces a single theme in Cioran's work that he believes is the key to his whole intellectual world: failure.

Bradatan argues that failure was never a theoretical subject, remote from life, for Cioran. He knew it intimately: in his youth he became involved in disastrous political projects that he regretted for the rest of his life, he was always an exile and an outsider, he changed his language and his country, and he refused to take any steady job. The essay shows how these experiences led to a distinctive outlook, one that sees individuals, nations and institutions, and the world and life itself, as exposed to failure, and yet finds in that very failure a kind of freedom and even a hidden joy.

From within this discussion the author also reaches the difficult chapter of Cioran's life: his youthful infatuation with fascism and the writings that he himself later called delirium. Bradatan raises this chapter not in order to exonerate him, but to understand how so heavy a failure leaves its mark on the outlook and writing of the mature Cioran. He also turns to Cioran's Gnostic leanings, that is, his belief in a bungling or malevolent creator, and to the role of writing in his life. For Cioran, writing was a means of enduring insomnia and depression, and, in his own phrase, a way of postponing suicide.

What makes the essay compelling is that it does not see failure merely as a source of sorrow. According to Bradatan, in later years Cioran distanced himself from the harsh, passionate worldview of his youth, arrived at a kind of "joyful despair," and made humor his weapon. The end of the essay, with its account of Cioran's Alzheimer's disease and the failure of even his suicide plan, is a bitter irony of history aimed at the philosopher of failure.

This piece is valuable for Persian-speaking readers in two ways: it introduces a figure some of whose works have been translated into Persian but whose life and contradictions have received little study, and it offers a critical, unreverential look at the relationship between thought and politics.

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To some, he was one of the most subversive thinkers of his time: a twentieth-century Nietzsche, only darker and with a better sense of humor. Many, especially in his youth, took him for a dangerous madman. Others thought he was merely a charming, irresponsible young man who posed no danger to anyone, except perhaps himself. When his book on mysticism went to the printer, the typesetter, a good and God-fearing man who had realized how blasphemous the book's content was, refused to touch it; the publisher washed his hands of the affair too, and the author had to publish this blasphemy elsewhere, at his own expense. Who was this man?

Emil Cioran (1911–1995) was a Romanian-born French philosopher and the author of nearly two dozen books of wild, disquieting beauty. He is an essayist in the finest French tradition, and although French was not his mother tongue, many consider him one of the most outstanding writers in that language. His style of writing is capricious, unsystematic and fragmentary, and he is renowned as one of the great masters of the aphorism. But for Cioran the "fragment" was more than a style of writing: it was a calling and a way of living; he called himself «a man of fragments» (un homme de fragment‏)[2].

Cioran contradicts himself again and again, but this is the least of his worries. For him, self-contradiction is not even a weakness; it is the sign of a living mind. In his view, writing has nothing to do with consistency, nor with persuading or entertaining the reader; writing does not even have to do with literature. Cioran, just like Montaigne several centuries before him, assigns writing an active function: you write not in order to produce a text, but in order to act upon yourself; to pull yourself together after a personal catastrophe or to climb out of a deep depression; to come to terms with a fatal illness or to mourn a close friend. You write so as not to go mad, so as not to kill yourself or others. In a conversation with the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater, Cioran says at one point: "If I hadn't written, I might have become a murderer." Writing is a matter of life and death. Human existence is, at bottom, endless sorrow and despair, and writing can make it a little more bearable. Cioran said: "A book is a postponed suicide."

Again and again Cioran pulled himself back from death by writing. He wrote his first book, On the Heights of Despair (Pe culmile disperării‏, 1934)[3], at the age of twenty-three, in a matter of weeks, while suffering from dreadful insomnia. This book, which remained among his best works in both Romanian and French, was the beginning of a powerful, intimate bond between writing and sleepless nights in his life:

I have never been able to write except in the midst of the gloom (cafard‏) born of sleepless nights. For seven years I barely slept. I need this gloom, and even today, before I sit down to write, I put on a record of [sad] Hungarian Gypsy music.

That Cioran is an unsystematic thinker does not mean that his work lacks unity; on the contrary, his writings are tightly bound together not only by his unique style of writing and way of thinking, but also by a distinctive set of themes, motifs and philosophical features. Failure holds a prominent place among them. Cioran was obsessed with it: the specter of failure has haunted his work since his first Romanian book, and throughout his life he never moved away from it. He examined it, as connoisseurs do, from various angles and at different moments, and sought it out in the most unexpected places. In Cioran's view, not only individuals but societies, peoples and countries too can end in failure; countries above all. He once said: "Spain fascinated me because it set before my eyes the example of the most magnificent failure. The greatest country in the world had fallen into such decline!"

Failure seeps into everything. Great ideas can be tainted with failure, and so can books, philosophies, institutions and political systems. The human condition, too, is for Cioran nothing more than a failed project: in The Trouble with Being Born (De l'inconvénient d'être né‏, 1973)[4] he writes that someone who no longer wants to be human "dreams of another form of failure." The world is, altogether, a great failure, and so is life itself. Cioran says: "Before being a fundamental mistake, life is a failure of taste, one that neither death nor even poetry is able to redeem." Failure rules the world, like the capricious God of the Old Testament. One of Cioran's aphorisms runs: ""You were wrong to count on me." Who can speak this way? God and failure."

Cioran was able to speak of failure so masterfully because he knew it at close quarters. In his youth he became involved in disastrous political projects (which he regretted to the end of his life), changed country and language and was forced to start everything over from scratch, was a permanent exile and led a marginal life, was almost never employed and almost always stood at the edge of poverty. He must inevitably have acquired a deep familiarity with failure, even a flair and a taste for it. He knew how to appreciate a worthy failure, how to watch it unfold, how to enjoy its complexity. For failure is irreducible and unique: successful people always turn out somewhat alike, but those who fail, fail in very different ways. Every failure has its own face and its own beauty, and only a discerning connoisseur like Cioran can tell an apparently trivial but in fact great failure from a noisy but mediocre one.

He first encountered failure in the land of his birth, among his fellow Romanians. Cioran was born and raised in Transylvania, a province that for a long time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and had joined the Kingdom of Romania only shortly before, in 1918. Even today Transylvanians show a strong work ethic and value seriousness, discipline and self-restraint. But when Cioran went to Bucharest, the country's southern capital, to attend university, he stepped into a wholly new cultural world. Here the winning skills were different: the art of doing nothing, sophistry (from the half-playful to the openly cynical) that outweighed intellectual solidity, procrastination as a profession, and the squandering of one's life as a calling. A student of philosophy, Cioran got to know some of Bucharest's finest "artists" in this field. The blend of intellectual brilliance and striking sense of personal failure that he saw in some of them aroused in him an unconditional and lifelong admiration:

In Bucharest I met a great many people, many interesting people, especially losers, who came to the café, talked endlessly and did nothing. I must say that for me they were the most interesting people there. People who did nothing their whole lives, and yet were brilliant at the same time.

Cioran remained secretly indebted to that land of failure, his own country, to the end of his life. And he was right to be. Romanians have a unique relationship with failure; just as the Eskimos have countless words for snow, the Romanian language seems to have just as many words for failure. One of the most frequent constructions in Romanian, which Cioran cherished, is n-a fost să fie[5] (literally "it wasn't meant to be," but with strong overtones of destiny and fate). This country is truly a gold mine.

Cioran was famous as a misanthrope, but if there was one human type for which he had understanding and sympathy, it was le raté, the failure. In 1941, when he was already in Paris, he confesses to a Romanian friend: "I would like to write a philosophy of failure, subtitled for the exclusive use of the Romanian people, but I don't think I'm up to it." Whenever Cioran looked back on his youth, he always recalled, with a mixture of fascination, tenderness and admiration, the great losers and the endless spectacle of failure he had witnessed in Bucharest. As a budding writer he must certainly have been drawn to the country's literary scene, but not as much as to its scene of failure: "My best friends in Romania were not writers at all, they were failures." The professor of philosophy at the University of Bucharest who had the greatest influence on the young Cioran, Nae Ionescu (1890–1940)[6], was by ordinary standards a magnificent failure. He published no book, often stole his lessons from others or improvised them on the spot, and sometimes did not show up to class because he "had nothing to say." His laziness was legendary. Yet Ionescu was among the most brilliant minds of his generation, a "genius" according to many firsthand witnesses. A philosopher through and through, he even devised a small theory of failure (which, fittingly, he preferred not to publish).

Cioran, however, was not content to watch failure from a distance. Soon he began practicing it himself, and with style. In 1933, as soon as he graduated from university, he received a scholarship for postgraduate study at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. Cioran had not yet set foot in Germany when he fell for the newly established Nazi regime. In November of that year he wrote to his friend Mircea Eliade[7]: "I am completely enthralled by the political order they have established here." In Hitler's Germany Cioran found something he could not find in the still relatively democratic Romania. The country was in the grip of a political hysteria and mass mobilization that Cioran knew well; the Nazi regime had given Germans a sense of "historical mission," something Romanian democracy could never give. At the same time, others saw the beginning of a catastrophe of historic proportions in Germany, but Cioran saw only promise and historical grandeur. And what exactly made Hitler so great? Cioran, in an attempt to sound like a neutral observer, answered: his ability to arouse the "irrational impulses" of the German people. Barely twenty-three years old, Cioran began practicing failure in full earnest.

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By the autumn of 1933, Cioran was a rapidly rising star of Romanian literature, and even as a student he had published several highly original essays in some of the country's literary periodicals. Now these periodicals wanted more from him, above all reports from the German political scene. In a report he sent to the weekly Vremea (December 1933), he wrote, pen in hand and without restraint: "If there is anything I like about Hitlerism, it is its worship of the irrational, the ecstasy of pure vitality, the virile expression of power, without any critical spirit, restraint or control." Exploiting a cliché beloved of the enemies of liberal democracy everywhere, Cioran lamented the "decadent" and "effeminate" European, as against the German with his "manly" pride, all muscle and noise and fury. Hitler is plainly the man in command, and Cioran, as one would expect, is impressed. A few months later (July 1934), in another report for the same periodical, he made no attempt to hide his boundless admiration for the "man of nerve": "Of all the politicians of today, Hitler is the one I love and admire most." And the worst is still to come.

Cioran is so enamored of the "manly" order Hitler has established in Germany that he cannot get enough of it and wants to graft a version of it onto his homeland. In a letter to another friend, Petre Comarnescu (December 1933), he wrote:

I agree with many of the things I have seen here, and I am convinced that our native "good-for-nothingness" can, if not be uprooted, at least be stifled by a dictatorial regime. In Romania only terror, brutality and endless anxiety can still bring about change. All Romanians should be arrested and beaten until they are crushed; only after such a beating can a shallow people make history.

In Cioran, public matters are often intertwined with more private ones. Immediately after this detailed prescription for helping his compatriots to "make history," he tosses off an entirely personal remark: he writes that "being Romanian is horrible." If you are Romanian, you "never win the trust of any woman, and serious people smile at you with contempt; when they see you are intelligent, they think you are a swindler."

This confession, though indirect, leads us straight to the drama of the young Cioran's situation. The drama unfolds on several levels. First, it is as if the strange notion had taken root in his mind that he is not allowed to separate his personal worth from the historical merits of the national community to which he belongs. Then, when he weighs the worth of that community, he finds it wanting, and severely so. In Cioran's view, Romania is historically "a failed nation," and its failure inevitably infects all Romanians as well. And as if this were not enough, leaving it is not an option either, because "separation from the nation leads to failure": he is inside failure, and outside it even more so. Thus, at a relatively young age, Cioran managed to lock himself into a very serious existential impasse. That this drama is largely of his own making does not lessen its pain. On the contrary, it is something that would deeply wound him and his work. Practicing failure can be a bloody business.

Behind the book he published shortly after returning from Germany lies this very drama, "the drama of insignificance," as Cioran would later call it: The Transfiguration of Romania (Schimbarea la faţă a României‏, 1936)[8]. He wrote it first of all to heal a wounded pride. This is the fate of those born into a "small culture": their pride is always wounded. He writes: "It is by no means comfortable to be born in a second-rate country. Lucidity becomes tragedy." So crushed is he by his country's minor cultural standing that, to ease the pain, he does not hesitate to sell his soul: "I would gladly give half my life if I could experience the intensity that the most insignificant Greek, Roman or Frenchman experienced, even for a moment, at the peak of his people's history." Remaking himself and becoming an "other," merely to cope with le désespoir d'être roumain ("the despair of being Romanian"), is what Cioran does all his life; self-estrangement becomes second nature to him. In The Trouble with Being Born one of the aphorisms reads: "In a ceaseless revolt against my lineage, all my life I have wanted to be something else: Spanish, Russian, cannibal, anything but what I was." He could forgive God for many things, but never for having made him Romanian. For him, being Romanian is not a biographical fact but a metaphysical catastrophe, a personal tragedy on a vast scale. Cioran asks in despair: "How can one be Romanian?" How can one be something so close to nothingness, so unlikely to be at all? In The Transfiguration of Romania he describes his compatriots as "mediocre, sluggish, submissive, sensible": appallingly docile. Cioran cannot at any price claim such a people as his own. Romanians, immensely passive and self-effacing, have missed every opportunity to leave a mark on the world. Romania is a country that has slept through history.

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But if Cioran is anything, he is contradictory. Elsewhere in the same book he "loves Romania's past with a heavy hatred" and has great dreams for its future. He imagines nothing less than a "Romania with the population of China and the destiny of France." The country is fine; it just needs a bit of a shake here and there; above all it must be "pushed" into history. What exactly he means he does not say, but he gives a hint when he assures us that he can love only "a Romania in delirium." And for such lofty ends any means is justified, is it not? In Cioran's own words: "Every means is legitimate for a nation that is opening a path for itself in the world. Terror, crime, brutality and treachery are base and immoral only in times of decadence [...] If they help a nation rise, they are virtues. All victories are moral." Once again, the politics of testosterone, naked lust for power. Only a dictatorship of the irrational, like the one Cioran had seen in Germany, could save this country from itself. Sometimes one wonders how long one can play with failure before it crushes you.

A few years later, when Romania's own fascist movement, the Iron Guard[9], with its violent antisemitism, came to power for a few months in late 1940, Cioran endorsed it, albeit in his own ambiguous way. The "Romania in delirium" he had dreamed of was finally taking shape, and it was an ugly sight: Romania's Jews were hunted down and killed in cold blood, their property looted and razed, and the non-Jewish population was subjected to a violent, fundamentalist religious brainwashing. By then Cioran was already in France, remaking himself in another language. Even so, on a brief trip home, in a text he wrote in memory of the movement's founder and leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (the "Captain," 1899–1938), and read over national radio, Cioran declared in a grandiloquent tone:

Before Corneliu Codreanu, Romania was nothing but an inhabited desert ... I had only a few conversations with Corneliu Codreanu. From the first moment I realized that I was speaking with a man in a country of human dregs ... The Captain was not "clever"; the Captain was profound.

This "profound" Captain was, among other things, a raving antisemite; he openly defended political terror and was himself a political murderer. Against the background of the shaky democratic culture of interwar Romania, and with the help of his personal charisma and an unparalleled lack of conscience, Codreanu all but single-handedly plunged the country into chaos in the 1930s. And now Cioran was praising him.

In failing, a thinker, even one with a reputation for irresponsibility like the young Cioran, could hardly have sunk lower. You ask: what was wrong with him? Just as his democratically minded friends were asking at the time. In later years Cioran himself confronted this question again and again, with a depressing urgency. When, shortly after the end of the war, he first faced the depth of his pro-fascist political stance, he hardly recognized himself in The Transfiguration of Romania and in his political journalism. The horrors of the war and the enormity of the Holocaust, in which several of his Jewish friends perished, woke him abruptly; those texts must now have seemed to him the stuff of nightmares. Then the passage of time let him see everything more clearly. In 1973 he wrote to his brother: "Sometimes I ask myself whether it was really I who wrote the ravings people quote. Enthusiasm is a kind of delirium. We were once afflicted with this sickness, a sickness from which no one wants to believe we have recovered." In a short text published after his death, My Country (Mon Pays‏, 1996), Cioran calls the contents of The Transfiguration of Romania "the ravings of a wild madman." This, incidentally, is the result of diligently practicing failure: before you know it, you have brought another person into the world. One day you look for yourself in the mirror and find only someone else staring back at you.

Pinning Cioran down is never easy, but when it comes to his political past it is nearly impossible. What makes matters worse is that, beyond vague allusions to the "ravings" and "enthusiasm" of his youth, the later Cioran usually declined to deal with "those years." And he had good reason: he knew all too well what lay there. Failure does not like to travel alone: it usually prefers the company of shame. In another letter to his brother he writes: "A writer who did foolish things in his youth, at the beginning of his career, is like a woman with a shameful past. He is never forgiven, never forgotten." To the end of his life, his political involvement in interwar Romania remained his greatest shame and his most serious and devastating failure. Next to it, every other failure paled.

Another glimpse of Cioran's peculiar way of thinking politically comes in a letter he sent to Mircea Eliade in 1935: "My formula for all political matters is this," he writes: "fight with your whole being for things you do not believe in." Not that such a confession does much to clarify Cioran's involvement, but it places his "ravings" in a psychological perspective. This splitting of the personality was a feature of the later Cioran, and it makes sense: for a philosopher who sees the world as a failure on a vast scale, it is logical to mock the cosmic order (and oneself within it) by pretending there is meaning where there is none. You know everything is meaningless, but by behaving as if it were not, you voice your protest and undermine the schemes of the "evil demiurge." And you do this with boundless humor and irony, which are meant to confront the divine farce in earnest. He who laughs last, laughs more.

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When he returned from Germany in 1936, Cioran briefly became a high-school philosophy teacher in Brașov, in central Romania. This too was a magnificent failure, and his last attempt to hold a full-time job. In logic class, for instance, he told his students that everything in the universe is incurably sick, including the principle of identity. When a pupil once asked, "Sir, what is morality?", Cioran told him not to worry, there was no such thing. His classes were in constant chaos, and the students, like his colleagues, were bewildered by this most improbable of teachers. When Cioran finally resigned, the school principal got so drunk celebrating that he passed out.

In 1937, having realized that he could never distinguish his own failure in that land, he decided to leave Romania once more. He considered this decision "undoubtedly the most intelligent thing" he had ever done. His first choice was Spain, that same "magnificent example of failure," and he applied for a scholarship at the Spanish embassy in Bucharest, just two months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War[10], and never received a reply. Paris, he decided, was the right place for someone with his ideals: "Before the war, Paris was an ideal place for squandering one's life, and Romanians were especially known for doing so."

Cioran cut his Romanian ties and embarked on a new existence. He even chose a new name for himself: E. M. Cioran‏. At some point he began writing and speaking almost exclusively in French (he used Romanian only for swearing, for which he found French poorly equipped)[11]. Technically, Cioran had come to Paris on a postgraduate scholarship; he was supposed to attend classes at the Sorbonne and write a doctoral dissertation on a philosophical subject. But even when applying for the scholarship he knew perfectly well that he would never write it. He had finally figured out what he was after: a parasitic life! All he needed for a secure life in France was a student card, which gave him access to the cheap university cafeterias. He could have lived like that forever. And he did, at least for a while:

At forty I was still enrolled at the Sorbonne, eating in the student canteen and hoping this would last until the end of my life. Then a law was passed forbidding the enrollment of students over twenty-seven, and it drove me out of this paradise.

Now that he had been expelled from the parasites' paradise, Cioran had to take on a variety of odd jobs. Some of his better-off Romanian friends (Eugène Ionesco, for instance) helped him now and then. Otherwise he had to rely on the kindness of strangers. And Cioran proved remarkably flexible, keeping his misanthropy in check: he befriended almost anyone who held out the prospect of a free dinner. This is how he came to know the les vieilles dames ("old ladies") of Paris so well. His rigorous philosophical training came in handy; Cioran would arrive with his exquisite conversation and sing for his supper. And then there was the scene at the Paris churches: whenever he got the chance, the God-baiting Cioran would happily go to the Romanian Orthodox church to take advantage of the free food.

Cioran did everything except get a job. Getting a job would have been the failure of his life. The elderly Cioran recalled: "For me the most important thing was to preserve my freedom. If I had ever agreed to take an office job to earn a living, I would have failed." So in order not to fail, he chose a path that most people regard as failure incarnate, but Cioran knew that failure is always a complicated matter. "I avoided the degradation of a profession and of advancement at all costs [...] I preferred to live like a parasite [rather than] destroy myself by holding down a job." As all great idlers know, there is a perfection in inaction: Cioran was not only aware of it but cultivated it all his life. When an interviewer asked about his work schedule, he replied: "Most of the time I do nothing. I am the laziest man in Paris [...] The only one who works less than I do is a prostitute with no clients."

For someone with such an intimate relationship with failure, it is no surprise that he was suspicious of success: "There is something of the impostor in everyone who succeeds in any field," he wrote, and, apart from the Rivarol Prize, he refused every award the French literary establishment offered him. When public fame finally came his way, he gave few interviews and always kept a low profile. "Je suis un ennemi de la gloire‏" ("I am an enemy of fame") was his motto. Of Borges he once said: "The misfortune of being known has befallen him. He deserved better." In The Trouble with Being Born Cioran speaks of "an existence continually transformed by failure" as an enviable project for a life. Such an existence would be serenity incarnate, wisdom in flesh and blood: all "luxe, calme et volupté‏"[12].

Failure, then, was Cioran's close companion, a faithful goddess, his chief inspiration. With its unflinching eyes he looks at the world: at people, events and situations. He gauges the depth of someone's inner life, for example, by the way he confronts failure: "This is how we recognize a man given to inner search: he prefers failure to any success." Why? Because, in Cioran's view, failure, "which is always intrinsic, shows us to ourselves, lets us see ourselves as God sees us; whereas success distances us from our innermost part, and indeed from the innermost part of everything." Show me how you cope with failure and I will tell you more about yourself. Only "in failure, in the grandeur of a catastrophe, can one come to know someone."

Whatever success he had, Cioran viewed it from the perspective of his lifelong "project of failure," and he grew used to reading success in failure and failure in success. His most successful achievements were not his books, even though they were praised and translated around the world, nor his growing influence among those of philosophical taste. Not even his standing as a master of the French language. He says: "The great success of my life is that I have managed to live without a job. At the end of the day, I have lived my life well. I pretended it was a failure, but it wasn't."

In his books Cioran never stopped cursing the gods, except, one might say, the god of failure, namely the Gnostic demiurge. There is something unmistakably Gnostic in Cioran's anti-cosmic philosophy and in his way of thinking. Gnostic insights, images and metaphors, as scholars of Gnosticism have observed[13], pervade his work. Jacques Lacarrière writes that A Short History of Decay (Précis de décomposition‏)[14], The Temptation to Exist and The New Gods are "texts that rival the highest sparks of Gnostic thought." Just like the ancient Gnostics, Cioran sees creation as the product of a divine failure; human history and civilization are for him nothing but "the work of the Devil," which is another name for the demiurge. In A Short History of Decay he deems the god of this world "inept." He asks: "Of all that was attempted on this side of nothingness, is there anything more pathetic than this world, except the idea that conceived it?" The French title of one of his most influential books, published in English as The New Gods, is telling: Le Mauvais démiurge (1969), "The Evil Demiurge." Here, with evident sympathy, he calls the Gnostics "fanatics of divine nothingness" and praises them for having "so well grasped the essence of the fallen world."

The cosmos is "fallen" for Cioran, but so is the social and political world. For to this twentieth-century Gnostic nothing is truly safe from failure. In an effort to move beyond the political failures of his youth, he tried to grasp their deeper meaning and to let that understanding enter the fabric of his mature thought. The result was a more refined philosophizing and a more humane thinker: Cioran's trials with failure brought him closer to a realm of humanity to which he would otherwise have had no access, the realm of the ashamed and the humbled. In his French books you come across passages on failure of inspired, intoxicated wisdom:

At the height of failure, at the moment when shame is about to finish us off, a wave of pride suddenly seizes us, which lasts only long enough to drain us, leave us powerless and, along with our strength, lessen the intensity of our shame.

A lifelong practice of failure, together with obsessive thinking about it, eventually changed Cioran. With age he became more tolerant and more accepting of the follies and oddities of others. Not that the French Cioran suddenly became a "democratic" thinker. God forbid; that would never have happened. To the end he remained the prophet of the "decline of the West" and the thinker of dark, apocalyptic anxieties. In History and Utopia (Histoire et Utopie‏, 1960)[15], for example, he notes:

Whenever I am in a big city, I am astonished that there is not a riot every day: massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings live together in such a confined space without destroying one another, without hating one another to the death? In fact they do hate one another, but not as much as they might. It is this very mediocrity, this very incapacity, that saves society, that ensures its continuity and stability.

No, Cioran did not become a champion of liberal democracy. But he must nonetheless have learned to enjoy the comedy of the world, and even to take a nimble part in loosening cosmic failure. The later Cioran's thought has a strange feature that, for lack of a better term, one might call joyful despair (Cioran described himself as un pessimiste joyeux). The pattern recurs again and again: something apparently scandalous and altogether bad turns out to carry, in its very badness, the seed of its own redemption. Life can be unbearable, insomnia is deadly, le cafard slowly eats you away, and yet this is something that can be managed by writing. Cioran declares: "Whatever is expressed becomes more bearable." Writing is a wondrous sorcery that works on its practitioners and makes their lives more bearable. The negative never comes in a pure state; there is always something that loosens it; catastrophe, insofar as it can be put into words, carries its own redemption within.

One of the most fascinating things in the later Cioran's writings is his voice as a political critic. In History and Utopia there is a chapter called "Letter to a Faraway Friend." This text really was a letter, and it first appeared in 1957 in La Nouvelle Revue Française. The "faraway friend," who lived behind the Iron Curtain, was the Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica[16]. In his letter, as one would expect, Cioran targets the political regime the Soviet Union had established in Eastern Europe, because it had made a mockery of an important philosophical idea. He writes: "The main charge that can be brought against your regime is that it has corrupted utopia, which is the principle of renewal in institutions and in men alike." Cioran cannot sympathize with a regime that needs Russian tanks to be established and to endure. Such a communist political regime has in effect killed the communist idea itself.

More important, however, Cioran criticizes the West in the same letter, nearly as harshly. Here he writes: "We are dealing with two kinds of society, both intolerable. And what is worse, the abuses in your society allow this one to persist in its own abuses and to offer its horrors as a counterweight to what is being cultivated among you." The West should not congratulate itself for having "saved" civilization. Cioran believes decay is so advanced that nothing can be saved any longer, except perhaps appearances. The two "kinds of society" do not differ much. In the final analysis, it is only a matter of refinement:

The difference between the regimes matters less than it seems; you are alone by force, we are alone without compulsion. Is the distance between a hell and a ruinous paradise really so great? All societies are bad; but there are degrees, I admit, and if I have chosen this one, it is because I can distinguish among the nuances of deceptive appearance.

For all its analytical and stylistic merits, Cioran's letter turned out to be a political blunder. For its recipient, Constantin Noica, who was trying to stay out of sight in the Romanian countryside, was accustomed to taking correspondence seriously, and Cioran's text provoked him into writing a sharp philosophical essay in reply. Noica was also an extraordinarily naive man. When he finished the essay he addressed it to his friend in Paris and confidently dropped the envelope into a street mailbox. The Romanian secret police, whose fingers were everywhere, including in every mailbox in the country, did not miss this exchange. But their philosophical tastes were somewhat different, and as a result Noica had to pay for it with several years of political imprisonment. When Cioran heard that his friend had been arrested and jailed, he must have wondered, bewildered, just how bottomless failure really is. After all, you never stop failing.

¤

E. M. Cioran died on June 20, 1995. But in a sense he had left before his death. In his last few years he had Alzheimer's and was confined to the Broca Hospital in Paris. He had dreaded such an end and had drawn up a suicide plan. Cioran and his longtime partner, Simone Boué, were to die together, like the Koestlers[17]. But the illness was faster, the plan failed, and Cioran had to die the most humiliating death, one that took several years to do its work. At first there were only troubling signs: one day Cioran could not find his way home from the city, a city he knew like the back of his hand, he being a consummate walker. Then he lost some of his memories; at times he had no clear sense of himself. His legendary sense of humor, apparently, was the last thing to go. One day a passer-by in the street asked him: "Aren't you Cioran, by any chance?" His answer was: "I used to be." But the signs multiplied and grew serious: Cioran was forgetting at an alarming rate and had to be hospitalized. Eventually the words left him: one of the finest writers of his time could no longer name the most elementary things. Then it was the mind's turn. In the end he forgot entirely who he was.

At one point in his long final suffering, in a brief moment of lucidity, Cioran murmured to himself: "C'est la démission totale‏!" ("It is total resignation!") This was the great, ultimate failure, and in recognizing it for what it was, he did not flinch.

¤

Author's note: This essay will be included in a book titled In Praise of Failure‏, to be published by Harvard University Press, with which a contract has been signed.

¤

Costica Bradatan's most recent book is Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers (Bloomsbury, 2015). He is the religion/comparative studies editor of the «Los Angeles Review of Books».

Further Reading

Cioran, E. M‏. The Trouble with Being Born‏. Translated from the French by Richard Howard (New York‏: Seaver Books, 1976)

Cioran, E. M‏. A Short History of Decay‏. Translated by Richard Howard (Oxford‏: Basil Blackwell, 1976)

Cioran, Emil‏. Schimbarea la faţă a României (Bucharest‏: Humanitas, 1990)

Cioran, E. M‏. Oeuvres (Paris‏: Gallimard, 1995)

Cioran, E. M‏. Entretiens (Paris‏: Gallimard, 1995)

Cioran, E. M‏. Cahiers‏: 1957–1972 (Paris‏: Gallimard, 1997)

Cioran, E. M‏. History and Utopia‏. Translated by Richard Howard. Foreword by Eugene Thacker (New York‏: Arcade, 2015)

Liiceanu, Gabriel‏. Itinerariile unei vieţi‏: E.M. Cioran; Apocalipsa după Cioran (Bucharest‏: Humanitas, 2011)

Petreu, Marta‏. An Infamous Past‏: E. M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania‏. Translated from the Romanian by Bogdan Aldea. With a Foreword by Norman Manea (Chicago‏: Ivan R. Dee, 2005)

Zarifopol-Johnston, Ilinca‏. Searching for Cioran‏. Edited by Kenneth R. Johnston. Foreword by Matei Calinescu (Bloomington‏: Indiana University Press, 2008)

[1]Costica Bradatan, “The Philosopher of Failure‏: Emil Cioran’s Heights of Despair‏”, Los Angeles Review of Books, November 2016‏. This translation was made from the English text of the essay, not from the Romanian or French originals of Cioran's works; the quotations are therefore renderings of that English text. Book titles, too, except where a specific Persian translation is meant, are the translator's renderings of the English or original titles.

[2]"Fragment" here refers both to the form of Cioran's writing, that is, his fragmentary style and aphorisms, and to his outlook on the world and on life.

[3]The Romanian title Pe culmile disperării corresponds to the Persian «بر قله‌های نومیدی»; in English it is known as On the Heights of Despair.

[4]Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, trans. Richard Howard (New York‏: Seaver Books, 1976).

[5]This Romanian expression is used to say that something was not "fated" or "destined."

[6]Nae Ionescu‏, a Romanian philosopher, journalist and professor at the University of Bucharest; he should not be confused with Eugène Ionesco (Eugène Ionesco)‏, the playwright, who is named later in the essay as one of Cioran's friends.

[7]Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), a Romanian historian of religions and writer, and one of Cioran's close friends in his youth.

[8]Emil Cioran, Schimbarea la faţă a României (Bucharest‏: Humanitas, 1990).

[9]The Iron Guard (Garda de Fier)‏ was a Romanian fascist and antisemitic movement founded by Codreanu in 1927. On Cioran's political past, see: Marta Petreu, An Infamous Past‏: E. M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania, trans. Bogdan Aldea (Chicago‏: Ivan R. Dee, 2005).

[10]The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936. Thus, on the basis of the dates the essay itself gives, Cioran's application to the Spanish embassy must have been made before his actual departure for Paris in 1937.

[11]On Cioran's life in Paris and his transition from Romanian to French, see:

Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, Searching for Cioran, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston (Bloomington‏: Indiana University Press, 2008).

[12]"Luxury, calm and voluptuousness"; a line from the poem "L'invitation au voyage" (L’invitation au voyage) by Charles Baudelaire in The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal)‏.

[13]Gnosticism (Gnosticism) was a religious and philosophical movement of the first centuries CE that held the material world to be the work of a lesser, flawed or malevolent god, the "demiurge," and not of the supreme, good God.

[14]Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford‏: Basil Blackwell, 1976). Jacques Lacarrière (Jacques Lacarrière) was a French writer who also wrote about the Gnostics.

[15]E. M. Cioran, History and Utopia, trans. Richard Howard, foreword by Eugene Thacker (New York‏: Arcade, 2015).

[16]Constantin Noica‏, a Romanian philosopher who was imprisoned under the communist regime.

[17]A reference to the writer Arthur Koestler and his wife Cynthia, who took their own lives together in 1983.