The below is a series of short-form musings or aphorisms with a decidedly pessimistic bent, many focused on the theme of alienation from mainstream society. Cioran is quoted within.

https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/neo-feudal-aphorisms

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Hi, has anyone read the new collection of Cioran’s letters Manie Epistolaire? If so, how is it?

Are there any works that discuss perspectives on interacting with other people - about isolation and socialisizing?

Maybe one's that get you a little bit excited towards socializing, that foster a more flippant and good-willed attidue towards others...

I personally don't have any desire to socialize but I would find it interesting to have it "modeled" for me. To challenge my belifes whilst still not being completely foreing (like a Plato or some scholar that says love is the basis for the universe would be).

Any recommendations for works/passages that are not to distant from Cioran's kind of thought.

“There is a kind of knowledge that strips whatever you do of weight and scope: for such knowledge, everything is without basis except itself. Pure to the point of abhorring even the notion of an object, it translates that extreme science according to which doing or not doing something comes down to the same thing and is accompanied by an equally extreme satisfaction: that of being able to rehearse, each time, the discovery that any gesture performed is not worth defending, that nothing is enhanced by the merest vestige of substance, that “reality” falls within the province of lunacy. Such knowledge deserves to be called posthumous: it functions as if the knower were alive and not alive, a being and the memory of a being. “It’s already in the past,” he says about all that he achieves, even as he achieves it, thereby forever destitute of the present.”

Specifically, the last two sentences. Why does this knowledge deserve to be referred to as “posthumous”? I can’t seem to make the connection between divesting something of substance (I.e., having the knowledge that doing and not doing something amount to the same thing) and it treating the knower as posthumous. Thank you in advance!

This is a nice website dedicated to cioran and other pessimistic writers, you can use google translate for reading it in english in case its needed. https://portalcioranbr.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/philosophical-periods-cioran/

I can't help but wonder if Cioran's unrelenting negativity stemmed not from a clearheaded evaluation of reality, but from unconsciously holding unrealistic expectations that reality could never live up to.

Many of us have found ourselves disillusioned and despondent after enthusiastically embracing an ideology, relationship, or endeavor that turned out to be a mirage failing to satisfy our deepest yearnings. Could Cioran's radical pessimism represent a similar disillusionment projected onto the entirety of existence itself? An escape into cosmic nihilism to cope with the ego's shattered grandiosity?

In The Trouble With Being Born, Cioran says Haworth is his Mecca (due to its connection to the Brontes).

Does anyone know of he ever travelled there?

Someone asked a while ago what Cioran thought of Georges Bataille. But the account that asked has been deleted. So I repost my belated answer here for those interested:

I see OP has been deleted so perhaps no point replying; but here is what Cioran says about Bataille. All from Cahiers, with page-numbers.

1, p. 111: 'Flicking through a journal of young writers. Literature is out of the question: nothing that flows from direct experience, from something seen or from a personal drama. Everything revolves around certain writers, and always the same ones: Blanchot, Bataille, blabberers of "profundities," confused and verbose minds without sparkle or irony.'

2, p. 301: 'Sade is neither a writer nor a thinker: he is a case-study and nothing more. (The surrealists, Blanchot, Bataille, Klossowski have completely misunderstood their subject.)'

3, p. 375: 'I am not interested in the Sartre–Bataille generation, except perhaps Simone Weil.'

4, p. 950: 'I was saying yesterday evening to R.M. [Roger Michaux?] that Georges Bataille had been quite interesting, complicatedly and curiously imbalanced, but that I didn't like his way of writing; that he didn’t have means equal to his imbalance.'

Saw this and figured people might be interested

" This Element discusses the association between Samuel Beckett, and the Romanian-born philosopher, E. M. Cioran. It draws upon the known biographical detail, but, more substantially, upon the terms of Beckett's engagement with Cioran's writings, from the 1950s to the 1970s. Certain of Cioran's key conceptualisations, such as that of the 'meteque', and his version of philosophical scepticism, resonate with aspects of Beckett's writing as it evolved beyond the 'siege in the room'. More particularly, aspects of Cioran's conclusion about the formal nature that philosophy must assume chime with some of the formal decisions taken by Beckett in the mid-late prose. Through close reading of some of Beckett's key works such as Texts for Nothing and How It Is, and through consideration of Beckett's choices when translating between English and French, the issues of identity and understanding shared by these two settlers in Paris are mutually illuminated. "

released 12, April. It will have a free pdf version available

Beckett and Cioran (cambridge.org)

Does anyone know if any of Cioran's books, especially The Trouble With Being Born, are available in Hungarian, in physical book or ebook?

I just finished reading "The Trouble with Being Born". And while it is no secret that the whole book can be quite unsettling, I found the final aphorism especially spooky:

"What's wrong – what's the matter with you?" Nothing, noth­ing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for....

It's like Cioran reached insight the reader's mind (my mind!), writing down exactly what the reader thinks at the end (what I thought at the end): I reached outside my fate by reading the book and now that I am done with it, I don't know where to turn, what to run for....

This very aphorism captured my exact sentiment at the end of the book. And I am very much taken aback by how Cioran did this. Did anyone of you feel the same at the end of the book?

I remember reading that Cioran drank without problems as a young man, but as an adult he became a teetotaler, do I remember correctly? Does anyone know why or have any quotes about it?

Hello fellas What did Cioran mean when he said “What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?”

Is it because he was a French, and French do not care about things that he wrote? Like he talks about still born children and fetus being free. Those are some very ugly images but at the same time very powerful. My question is how come the general mass or govt never banned his books or censor them?

I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole· digging his tunnels is ambitious. Ambition is in effect everywhere, and we see its traces on the faces of the dead themselves.

Such as the mind of Emil Cioran's

Found in The temptation to exist, which is sadly my least fav book of his

As Kant and Schopenhauer said, reasoning and understanding are mere superficial. Human beings act on their feelings.

So far, none of the philosophers have said that the feelings are reasonable. Until I read Cioran's quote

"It is our discomforts which provoke, which create consciousness; their task accomplished, they weaken and disappear one after the other. Consciousness however remains and survives them, without recalling what it' owes to them, without even ever having known. Hence it continually proclaims its autonomy, its sovereignty, even when it loathes itself and would do away with itself. "

Assuming feelings are a manifestation of consciousness, isn't there a historical reasoning why the feelings and instincts are subjectively right?

For e.g. a man who has been bitten by snakes in the dark, and upon trying to find what bit him, finds nothing. So, the man is always afraid of the dark. Even if he forgets in next 10 years this incident, he would still be afraid of the dark, without being able to understand why he is afraid of the dark.

Perhaps, the consciousness also transcends generations, how else could we explain the fear of death in brutes, in Schopenhauerian terms?

Reading Cioran helped to sharpen and refine my opinion on politics, much like him my ideological journey began with courting right wing ideas shifting to Marxism and then reaching outright, abject pessimism about humanity. I do however, get accused of being "Privileged" and "Apathetic" in my friend circles but that is par for the course in this reductionist world where people are quick to judge, Reading him made me realize that one should be interested in eternity not time. How has reading Cioran changed your views on society and world ?

Quoted from Faces of Decadence (A short history of decay, Chapter 2)

"There is a plenitude of decline in every overripe civilization. Instincts slacken; pleasures dilate and no longer correspond to their biological function; the voluptuous becomes an end in itself, its prolongation an art, the avoidance of orgasm a technique, sexuality a science. Methods and literary inspirations to multiply the channels of desire, the imagination tormented in order to diversify the preliminaries of release, the mind itself involved in a realm alien to its nature and over which it should have no purchase—all so many symptoms of the impoverishment of the blood and the morbid intellectualization of the flesh."

"According to Montesquieu, at the end of the Empire the Roman army consisted entirely of cavalry. But he neglects to supply us with the reason for this. Imagine the legionary saturated with glory, wealth, and debauchery after having traversed countless lands and having lost his faith and his force on contact with so many temples and vices—imagine such a man on foot! He has conquered the world as an infantryman; he will lose it on horseback. Indolence invariably reveals a physiological incapacity to adhere any longer to the myths of the City. The emancipated soldier and the lucid citizen succumb to the barbarian. The discovery of Life annihilates life."

"A nation dies when it no longer has the strength to invent new gods, new myths, new absurdities; its idols blur and vanish; it seeks them elsewhere, and feels alone before unknown monsters. This too is decadence. But if one of these monsters prevails, another world sets itself in motion, crude, dim, intolerant, until it exhausts its god and emancipates itself from him; for man is free—and sterile—only in the interval when the gods die; slave—and creative—only in the interval when, as tyrants, they flourish."

It most be pointed out Cioran seems to me rather ambiguous about the degree to which a a "dying" nation is a bad. Personally, I view modern obsessions regarding a heightened sensitivity to language to not step on anyone toes (e.g. vitiating languages with genders such as German) and trying to tear down prejudices so vigorously that new one's, often worse, are created, rather skeptically.

"The mistake of those who apprehend decadence is to try to oppose it whereas it must be encouraged: by developing it exhausts itself and permits the advent of other forms. The true harbinger is not the man who offers a system when no one wants it, but rather the man who precipitates Chaos, its agent and incense-bearer."

Seriously, does anyone understand just half of what he is saying? I'm reading "A short history on decay" right now and although I'm frequenting a dictionary via a reading app, it's tough. My wpm is <100 and I don't get most. When I think I understand something, when I'm in sync with his prose, I usually feel like someone just managed to articulate something I've always felt but have never been able to put in words.

The "inconvenience of etre ne" was, imo, a much easier read because the aphorisms where short and plentiful.

Anyone feeling the same way?

JW: Were you reading Nietzsche then?
EMC: When I was studying philosophy I wasn't reading Nietzsche. I read serious philosophers. [Laughs.] It's when I finished studying it, at the point when I stopped believing in philosophy, that I began to read Nietzsche. Well, I realized that he wasn't a philosopher, but was more: a temperament. So, I read him but never systematically, now and then. But really I don't read him any more. I consider his letters his most authentic work, because in them he's truthful, while in his other work he's prisoner to his vision. In his letters one sees that he's just a poor fellow, that he's ill, exactly the opposite of every thing he claimed.
JW: You write in The Trouble with Being Born that you stopped reading him because you found him "too naive."
EMC: [Laughs.] That's a bit excessive, yes. It's because that whole grandiose vision of the will to power and all that, he imposed it on himself because he was a pitiful invalid. Its whole basis was false, nonexistent. His work is an unspeakable megalomania. When one reads the letters he wrote at the same time, one sees that he's lamentable, it's very touching, like a character out of Chekhov. I was attached to him in my youth, but not after. He's a great writer, though, a great stylist.
JW: Yet critics often compare you to him, saying you follow in his tracks.
EMC: No, that's a mistake, though its obvious that his way of writing made an impression on me. He had things that other Germans didn't, because he read a lot of the French writers. That's very important.

Weiss, Jason, and E. M. Cioran. “An Interview with Cioran.” Grand Street, vol. 5, no. 3, 1986, pp. 105–40. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/25006875. Accessed 18 Jan. 2024.