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9 Conclusion: The Lyrical Virtues of Totalitarianism Given the spectacle of their teeming successes, the nations of the West had no trouble exalting history. . . . It belonged to them, they were its agents: hence it must take a rational course. . . . Consequently they placed it under the patronage, by turns, of Providence, of Reason, and of Progress. What they lacked was a sense of fatality, which they are at last beginning to acquire, overwhelmed by the absence which lies in wait for them, by the prospect of their eclipse. Once subjects, they have become objects, forever dispossessed of that luminescence, that admirable megalomania which had hitherto protected them from the irreparable. . . . France, England, Germany have their age of expansion and madness behind them. Then comes the end of insanity, the beginning of the defensive wars. No more collective crusades, no more citizens, but wan and disabused individuals, still ready to answer the call of utopia, though on the condition that it come from somewhere else, on the condition that they need not bother to conceive it themselves.1 This quotation from “On a Winded Civilization,” in La tentation d’exister (1956), illustrates the essential French Cioran: beautiful style placed in the service of the most melancholy of themes, the decadence of Western civilizations. The death of the West from a combination of impotence and old age, whose symptoms are liberalism, 142 The Romanian Life of Emil Cioran democracy, and the parliamentary system, and a view of the republic as a “paradis de débilité” [paradise of stupidity] are principal idées fixes in Cioran’s obsession-riddled French œuvre. But hidden at the heart of Cioran’s somber ruminations on the rise and fall of Western empires, cloaked in the language of disappointment, lies his now barely spoken longing for a utopia, “un délire neuf” [a new delirium] capable of exciting the collective imagination of a nation and incite it to revolution—the trace or echo of his early Romanian voice. Cioran dreams, if only indirectly and in-between the lines, of a healthy, vigorous, virile society, whose vitality is measured against a naked assertion of its will to power: in other words, a totalitarian society. Such a society would agree “not to annihilate itself,” as the tolerant, democratic West tends to do, “but to liquidate its failures by undertaking impossible tasks, opposed to that dreadful good sense,” which is the cause of the West’s decline.2 Cioran bitterly reproaches Western civilization for its many missed opportunities to achieve this social dream. Thus, in Histoire et Utopie, he writes that the West “has not initiated the revolution that was its imperative, the revolution that its entire past demanded, nor has it carried to their conclusion the upheavals of which it was the instigator. . . . Not content with having betrayed all those precursors, all those schismatics who have prepared it and formed it from Luther to Marx, it [the West] still supposes that someone will come, from outside, to initiate its revolution, to bring back its utopias and its dreams.”3 Impotent because, liberal and tolerant, the West allowed Russia and its satellites to botch its dreams of utopia. But even the type of “utopian” society built by Soviet Russia, its inequities notwithstanding, is closer to Cioran’s ideal of social and political order because it possessed a vitality/virility that never fails to draw his praise: “Those tsars with their look of dried-up divinities . . . they were, as are these recent tyrants who have replaced them, closer to a geological vitality than to human anemia, despots perpetuating in our time the primordial sap, the primordial spoilage, and triumphing over us all by their inexhaustible resources of chaos.”4 Cioran’s love of tyrants and totalitarian regimes manifests itself only cautiously in his later, French work. In the essay “À l’école des tyrans,” from Histoire et Utopie, for example, Cioran gives us the psychological portrait—drawn in the true French moralist tradition—of the tyrant as a type illustrating one kind of human folly, the madness of self-aggrandizement. Cioran analyzes the travails of tyranny inside the human psyche with a dispassionate, clinical eye, and his stance is so full of irony, his authorial pronouncements are delivered from such a superior vantage point, that it is not easy to grasp the undercurrent of his own persistent admiration for tyranny. In the opening lines of his essay, Cioran writes: “Whoever has not known the temptation to be first in the city will understand...

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