Searching for Cioran

Foreword

Foreword In the 1970s and 1980s, during my visits from the United States to Paris, I always made a point to call Cioran and offer to accompany him on one of his long daily walks, usually solitary, through the streets of his beloved Latin Quarter and the Luxembourg gardens. We would meet in front of the old building at 21, rue de l’Odéon, where he lived in a tiny garret on the sixth floor. In the late 1980s, when he first invited me to have dinner at his place, which he shared with his life-long companion, Simone Boué, he was ambivalent about the recent installation of an elevator. It was an amenity for his rare guests, he admitted, but a temptation—hard to resist—for himself, who had for years taken advantage of climbing the stairs several times a day as healthy exercise, good for blood circulation and the heart. And indeed it wasn’t an ailing heart or other physical impairment that would cause his death (on June 20, 1995, at age eighty-four), but a long battle with an illness, Alzheimer’s, that shattered his extraordinary mind and made him spend the last two years of his life in the geriatric pavilion of a Parisian hospital. By then, Cioran had become a famous figure on the stage of French intellectual life, the admired author of several books of iconoclastic aphorisms, bitter and supremely elegant, apocalyptic and ironic, vertiginously intelligent and memorable. They seemed to represent, in the second half of the twentieth century, an unlikely revival of a great French tradition, that of the moralistes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Chamfort, Vauvenragues. With the difference that this new La Rochefoucauld had read with particular attention, among many others, the works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Surprisingly, Cioran wasn’t even French: he came from an obscure corner of Eastern Europe, from a country few people in Paris had heard (or cared) about. And he wasn’t even young, though he burst upon the French intellectual scene in 1949 as a certifiable enfant terrible. He was thirty-eight, and before deciding to write in French, he had published, before the war, several books in his obscure native language. xvi Foreword Intriguingly, he showed himself ready to share in his adopted country’s amazement at the very existence of his nation, repeatedly asking himself, “How can one be a Romanian?” Needless to say, this was a recurrent topic in our peripatetic discussions. Much younger than him, I too was nevertheless, as I would put it in jest, an “escapee from the future.” That is, from the Communist regime that had been imposed by the Red Army after World War II not only on our country but on Eastern Europe as a whole, claiming to represent the inevitable future of humanity. Our conversations were exclusively in French—which he spoke flawlessly, rapidly, but with a heavy accent that marked him as a foreigner. In an amiable, friendly way he would correct my mistakes in his adopted language. At the time when I was introduced to him, Cioran enjoyed a solid, if still somewhat “clandestine” (as he liked to joke), reputation. He appeared to relish that imagined “clandestinity,” as well as his being an “exile” in France—a marginal, an apatride or stateless person. Not fortuitously did he write, in the mid-1970s, about Borges, in a wry eulogy later included in Anathemas and Admirations: “The misfortune of being recognized has befallen him. He deserved better.” Did he realize that the same misfortune was in store for himself? On the point of becoming—appallingly, from his own perspective—a cult figure in France toward the end of his life, his buried Romanian pre-war past caught up with him. His foolish admiration for Hitler in 1933–34, the delirious if deeply ambivalent nationalism expressed in his Transfiguration of Romania (1936), his allegiance to the fascistic and anti-Semitic Iron Guard of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, which continued to haunt him secretly long after he had renounced his native Romanian and had begun writing (and speaking) exclusively in French, suddenly became public knowledge. And thus, ironically , the obituaries published in the French press at Cioran’s death in 1995 became a replay in miniature of l’affaire Heidegger of the previous decade. Unlike Heidegger’s engagement with the Nazis, however, Cioran’s fleeting intoxication with the mysticalterrorist Iron Guard could be understood as an unfortunate episode...