Nordicist
02-12-2006, 10:45 PM
One of my favourite authors is E.M. Cioran...while a literary star in France and Germany...he’s virtually unknown in the U.S.
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1566636078.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
CRITIC AT LARGE
Drawn and Quartered: a Short History of E.M. Cioran (1911-95)
By CARLIN ROMANO
Where have we seen this story before? An influential European writer and thinker, celebrated in his mature years for works of sophisticated philosophical nuance, turns out to have been an anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler creep in his 20s.
The standard query immediately presents itself: Will the nefarious politics destroy the reputation?
Marta Petreu’s An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), inevitably hurtles humanists of a certain age back to other names and scandals — de Man, Heidegger, Eliade — with its exposé of the expatriate Romanian anointed by Susan Sontag in her 1968 introduction to The Temptation to Exist as “the most distinguished figure” then writing in the lyrical, aphoristic, antisystematic tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.
Cioran, a lapidary ironist born in Romania, fled to Paris on a scholarship in 1937 (Petreu reports that Cioran faced possible prosecution for a newspaper piece urging a “St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre” of older Romanian intellectuals). After a brief repatriation to Romania in 1940 following the fall of Paris, he returned to his beloved Left Bank in early 1941 and lived there until his death.
For much of that time, Petreu and other biographers tell us, he operated like an eternal grad student, renting hotel rooms, eating at student cafeterias, and cadging money from better-off friends. A lifelong insomniac, Cioran liked mixing with street people and prostitutes, though he also met everyone in the Parisian literary world. Having decided to stop writing in Romanian after World War II, he ended up France’s foremost stylist of existentialist one-liners ("To be is to be cornered.").
Sontag gave no evidence in her essay of knowing Cioran’s one systematic (anti-Semitic and fascist) work, The Transfiguration of Romania (1936). To her, Cioran concerned himself with “the absolute integrity of thought.” Hostile to Enlightenment reason, intolerant of tolerance, morose about the decline of European civilization, a decadent with an amoral slant on life, Cioran combined the idiosyncratic qualities and paradoxical prose outsiders often seek in bringing a French intellectual to international fame.
For Petreu, Cioran’s life and work look less majestic. To this brilliantly thorough philosophy professor at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, the slippery “fanatic without convictions” (as Cioran later dubbed himself) is the older, probably repentant successor to the messianic firebrand who applied Spengler’s philosophy of cultural development to 1930s Romania with unparalleled brutality and fervor.
In November 1933, Cioran won a Humboldt doctoral grant to Berlin, where he quickly became a fan of Hitler. “I am absolutely enthralled by the political order they’ve set up here,” he wrote to his friend Mircea Eliade, the future historian of religion, whose 1930s fascism and anti-Semitism also emerged most prominently after his death. “Some of our friends,” Cioran advised pal Petru Comarnescu, “will believe that I’ve turned Hitlerist out of sheer opportunism. The truth is that I agree with many of the things I’ve seen here.”
Nazism, Cioran wrote, possessed “greatness.” Germans had a “need for a Führer,” and Hitlerism constituted “a destiny for Germany.” Cioran supported a similar dictatorship for his country and believed that “only terror, brutality, and endless anxiety are likely to bring about a change in Romania. All Romanians should be arrested and beaten to a pulp; this is the only way a shallow nation could make a name for itself.” “Hitler’s merit,” insisted the young voice of vitalist barbarism, “consists in depriving his nation of a critical spirit.”
That kind of hyperbole marked Cioran’s style throughout his career. In The Transfiguration of Romania and his 1930s journalism, it contributed to bombastic bursts of fascism.
There, Petreu shows, Cioran revealed himself as a self-hating Romanian furious at his culture’s “dreadful impotence.” “Our entire tradition is nothing but historical filth,” he wrote. Cioran dismissed Romania as “a country of ugly, malnourished peasants” that everywhere “smells like raw earth.” He admitted, “The pride of a man born into a small culture is always hurt.”
Cioran’s rants extended beyond masochistic attacks on his country. Barely a week after the notorious “Night of the Long Knives” (June 30, 1934), on which Hitler ordered the murder of Ernst Röhm and almost 200 of his storm troopers, Cioran defended the Führer in the Bucharest weekly Vremea: “Of all politicians today, Hitler is the one I like and admire most.”
A month later, Petreu reports, Cioran, angered by criticism of Hitler’s actions, published an even more over-the-top apologia: “Humanitarianism is but self-delusion, and pacifism is sheer intellectual masturbation.... They say: You shall not take the life of another. ... But then I ask: What did mankind have to lose with the death of a few idiots?”
Cioran ended with justification for murder: “For the triumph of the cause to which he has dedicated his entire life, a dictator has the right to eliminate a few creatures who prevent the rise of a movement for purely subjective reasons. ... National Socialism needed blood.” Petreu considers the two articles Cioran’s “moral and intellectual nadir.”
Even then, Cioran displayed his aphoristic gift and ex cathedra tone. “Not to be a nationalist,” he wrote “is a crime against one’s people.” War amounted to “an exam faced by all nations.”
By the end of the 30s, Petreu explains, Cioran, despite an elitist, pro-European, and pro-urban bent that clashed with the folkloric, nativist impulses of the Legion of the Archangel Michael (better known as the murderous “Iron Guard” sect), Cioran became an opportunistic supporter, writing to Eliade in 1937 that the Iron Guard was “Romania’s last chance.”
In 1940, he went on Bucharest radio to read a panegyric to the Guard’s assassinated Hitler-like founder, Corneliu Codreanu, comparing him to Jesus. Cioran then received an appointment (during the Iron Guard’s brief rule over Romania) as a cultural attaché in Paris. Cioran’s post ended quickly when Marshal Ion Antonescu, Hitler’s ally, turned on the Iron Guard in 1941 and instituted a military dictatorship.
Petreu’s chapter-and-verse citation of Cioran’s 1930s hate-journalism leaves no basement of his psyche unvisited. While he ambivalently admired Jews as “the smartest, the most gifted, and the most brazen of nations,” and described anti-Semitism as “the greatest tribute paid to the Jews,” Cioran also accused them of “vampirism,” of “perverting” societies they infiltrated. The Jewish problem, Cioran wrote, was “the curse of history.” His most famous line on the subject? “If I were a Jew, I would instantly kill myself.”
After World War II, Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco, also living in Paris but a foe of the Iron Guard, wrote harshly, “I can’t stand the sight of Eliade and Cioran, even if they ‘are no longer Legionnaires’ (or so they claim).”
Does Cioran deserve the same taint that now attaches to de Man, Heidegger, Eliade? Perhaps not so dark a hue, on the familiar principle that a cover-up compounds the crime, and redemption lies in acknowledgment. The poet David Lehman, in the fullest account of the de Man scandal, Signs of the Times (Poseidon Press, 1991), showed little sympathy for the influential Yale literary theorist who, four years after his death in 1983, was exposed by a Belgian researcher as a pro-Nazi journalist in World War II Belgium. De Man, according to Lehman and others, lied about his past just as Eliade obscured aspects of his early life. Similarly books like Hugo Ott’s biography of Heidegger revealed Heidegger’s enthusiastic Nazism and shabby efforts to look like a victim of circumstances.
Cioran, by contrast, appears to have evolved from fear to regret to a mixture of self-astonishment and shame. Petreu concedes that Cioran may have been motivated by selfish reasons to distance himself from his work of the 1930s. Yet, by old age, she believes, he “had substantially reconsidered his earlier ideas and come to detest them profoundly.” He described Transfiguration in a 1979 letter as “unacceptable.”
“I used to feel an inferiority complex that bordered on madness… ,” Cioran confessed at one point about his analysis of Jews in Romania’s Transformation. “It is impossible not to see in these pages a secret passion for the Jews.” Elsewhere he blamed the book on “delirium,” echoing Nietzsche that “we are the victims of our temperaments.” In 1946 he wrote that he had become “immune to any belief.” Petreu sees his first Parisian book — A Short History of Decay (1949) as a sideways apology.
The complication in Cioran’s introspective, almost Dadaist, postwar turn is that he never gave up his desire for a bad-boy profile. The same gifted phrase maker who communicated flamboyant aestheticism by writing, “I dream of a world in which one might die for a comma,” sounded wistful at times for his pitchfork. “However much I have frequented the mystics,” he wrote, “deep down I have always sided with the devil.” He told an interviewer, “Had I not written, I might have become an assassin.”
The trouble with being exposed is that the new picture takes time to develop. “Everything must be revised,” goes one of Cioran’s aphorisms, “even sobs.”
That presumably applies to his post-Petreu image. But like all aphorists, Cioran overreaches. Books and reputations can be revised. Lives cannot.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 52, Issue 22, Page B12
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1566636078.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
CRITIC AT LARGE
Drawn and Quartered: a Short History of E.M. Cioran (1911-95)
By CARLIN ROMANO
Where have we seen this story before? An influential European writer and thinker, celebrated in his mature years for works of sophisticated philosophical nuance, turns out to have been an anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler creep in his 20s.
The standard query immediately presents itself: Will the nefarious politics destroy the reputation?
Marta Petreu’s An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), inevitably hurtles humanists of a certain age back to other names and scandals — de Man, Heidegger, Eliade — with its exposé of the expatriate Romanian anointed by Susan Sontag in her 1968 introduction to The Temptation to Exist as “the most distinguished figure” then writing in the lyrical, aphoristic, antisystematic tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.
Cioran, a lapidary ironist born in Romania, fled to Paris on a scholarship in 1937 (Petreu reports that Cioran faced possible prosecution for a newspaper piece urging a “St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre” of older Romanian intellectuals). After a brief repatriation to Romania in 1940 following the fall of Paris, he returned to his beloved Left Bank in early 1941 and lived there until his death.
For much of that time, Petreu and other biographers tell us, he operated like an eternal grad student, renting hotel rooms, eating at student cafeterias, and cadging money from better-off friends. A lifelong insomniac, Cioran liked mixing with street people and prostitutes, though he also met everyone in the Parisian literary world. Having decided to stop writing in Romanian after World War II, he ended up France’s foremost stylist of existentialist one-liners ("To be is to be cornered.").
Sontag gave no evidence in her essay of knowing Cioran’s one systematic (anti-Semitic and fascist) work, The Transfiguration of Romania (1936). To her, Cioran concerned himself with “the absolute integrity of thought.” Hostile to Enlightenment reason, intolerant of tolerance, morose about the decline of European civilization, a decadent with an amoral slant on life, Cioran combined the idiosyncratic qualities and paradoxical prose outsiders often seek in bringing a French intellectual to international fame.
For Petreu, Cioran’s life and work look less majestic. To this brilliantly thorough philosophy professor at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, the slippery “fanatic without convictions” (as Cioran later dubbed himself) is the older, probably repentant successor to the messianic firebrand who applied Spengler’s philosophy of cultural development to 1930s Romania with unparalleled brutality and fervor.
In November 1933, Cioran won a Humboldt doctoral grant to Berlin, where he quickly became a fan of Hitler. “I am absolutely enthralled by the political order they’ve set up here,” he wrote to his friend Mircea Eliade, the future historian of religion, whose 1930s fascism and anti-Semitism also emerged most prominently after his death. “Some of our friends,” Cioran advised pal Petru Comarnescu, “will believe that I’ve turned Hitlerist out of sheer opportunism. The truth is that I agree with many of the things I’ve seen here.”
Nazism, Cioran wrote, possessed “greatness.” Germans had a “need for a Führer,” and Hitlerism constituted “a destiny for Germany.” Cioran supported a similar dictatorship for his country and believed that “only terror, brutality, and endless anxiety are likely to bring about a change in Romania. All Romanians should be arrested and beaten to a pulp; this is the only way a shallow nation could make a name for itself.” “Hitler’s merit,” insisted the young voice of vitalist barbarism, “consists in depriving his nation of a critical spirit.”
That kind of hyperbole marked Cioran’s style throughout his career. In The Transfiguration of Romania and his 1930s journalism, it contributed to bombastic bursts of fascism.
There, Petreu shows, Cioran revealed himself as a self-hating Romanian furious at his culture’s “dreadful impotence.” “Our entire tradition is nothing but historical filth,” he wrote. Cioran dismissed Romania as “a country of ugly, malnourished peasants” that everywhere “smells like raw earth.” He admitted, “The pride of a man born into a small culture is always hurt.”
Cioran’s rants extended beyond masochistic attacks on his country. Barely a week after the notorious “Night of the Long Knives” (June 30, 1934), on which Hitler ordered the murder of Ernst Röhm and almost 200 of his storm troopers, Cioran defended the Führer in the Bucharest weekly Vremea: “Of all politicians today, Hitler is the one I like and admire most.”
A month later, Petreu reports, Cioran, angered by criticism of Hitler’s actions, published an even more over-the-top apologia: “Humanitarianism is but self-delusion, and pacifism is sheer intellectual masturbation.... They say: You shall not take the life of another. ... But then I ask: What did mankind have to lose with the death of a few idiots?”
Cioran ended with justification for murder: “For the triumph of the cause to which he has dedicated his entire life, a dictator has the right to eliminate a few creatures who prevent the rise of a movement for purely subjective reasons. ... National Socialism needed blood.” Petreu considers the two articles Cioran’s “moral and intellectual nadir.”
Even then, Cioran displayed his aphoristic gift and ex cathedra tone. “Not to be a nationalist,” he wrote “is a crime against one’s people.” War amounted to “an exam faced by all nations.”
By the end of the 30s, Petreu explains, Cioran, despite an elitist, pro-European, and pro-urban bent that clashed with the folkloric, nativist impulses of the Legion of the Archangel Michael (better known as the murderous “Iron Guard” sect), Cioran became an opportunistic supporter, writing to Eliade in 1937 that the Iron Guard was “Romania’s last chance.”
In 1940, he went on Bucharest radio to read a panegyric to the Guard’s assassinated Hitler-like founder, Corneliu Codreanu, comparing him to Jesus. Cioran then received an appointment (during the Iron Guard’s brief rule over Romania) as a cultural attaché in Paris. Cioran’s post ended quickly when Marshal Ion Antonescu, Hitler’s ally, turned on the Iron Guard in 1941 and instituted a military dictatorship.
Petreu’s chapter-and-verse citation of Cioran’s 1930s hate-journalism leaves no basement of his psyche unvisited. While he ambivalently admired Jews as “the smartest, the most gifted, and the most brazen of nations,” and described anti-Semitism as “the greatest tribute paid to the Jews,” Cioran also accused them of “vampirism,” of “perverting” societies they infiltrated. The Jewish problem, Cioran wrote, was “the curse of history.” His most famous line on the subject? “If I were a Jew, I would instantly kill myself.”
After World War II, Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco, also living in Paris but a foe of the Iron Guard, wrote harshly, “I can’t stand the sight of Eliade and Cioran, even if they ‘are no longer Legionnaires’ (or so they claim).”
Does Cioran deserve the same taint that now attaches to de Man, Heidegger, Eliade? Perhaps not so dark a hue, on the familiar principle that a cover-up compounds the crime, and redemption lies in acknowledgment. The poet David Lehman, in the fullest account of the de Man scandal, Signs of the Times (Poseidon Press, 1991), showed little sympathy for the influential Yale literary theorist who, four years after his death in 1983, was exposed by a Belgian researcher as a pro-Nazi journalist in World War II Belgium. De Man, according to Lehman and others, lied about his past just as Eliade obscured aspects of his early life. Similarly books like Hugo Ott’s biography of Heidegger revealed Heidegger’s enthusiastic Nazism and shabby efforts to look like a victim of circumstances.
Cioran, by contrast, appears to have evolved from fear to regret to a mixture of self-astonishment and shame. Petreu concedes that Cioran may have been motivated by selfish reasons to distance himself from his work of the 1930s. Yet, by old age, she believes, he “had substantially reconsidered his earlier ideas and come to detest them profoundly.” He described Transfiguration in a 1979 letter as “unacceptable.”
“I used to feel an inferiority complex that bordered on madness… ,” Cioran confessed at one point about his analysis of Jews in Romania’s Transformation. “It is impossible not to see in these pages a secret passion for the Jews.” Elsewhere he blamed the book on “delirium,” echoing Nietzsche that “we are the victims of our temperaments.” In 1946 he wrote that he had become “immune to any belief.” Petreu sees his first Parisian book — A Short History of Decay (1949) as a sideways apology.
The complication in Cioran’s introspective, almost Dadaist, postwar turn is that he never gave up his desire for a bad-boy profile. The same gifted phrase maker who communicated flamboyant aestheticism by writing, “I dream of a world in which one might die for a comma,” sounded wistful at times for his pitchfork. “However much I have frequented the mystics,” he wrote, “deep down I have always sided with the devil.” He told an interviewer, “Had I not written, I might have become an assassin.”
The trouble with being exposed is that the new picture takes time to develop. “Everything must be revised,” goes one of Cioran’s aphorisms, “even sobs.”
That presumably applies to his post-Petreu image. But like all aphorists, Cioran overreaches. Books and reputations can be revised. Lives cannot.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 52, Issue 22, Page B12