Cioran’s Essay: Influences, Affinities and Debts

Emil Cioran (1911–95), a key figure in the development of the philosophical essay as praxis, was regarded as one of the greatest Romanian-born French philosophers of the twentieth century, who contributed to the ‘splendor’ of French culture. However, in the Anglo-American world of letters, Cioran remains little known despite being translated into English by Richard Howard, having one major biography in English, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston’s Searching for Cioran, entries in Encyclopedia of the Essay, Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought and The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief and an introduction to his work written by philosopher Susan Sontag.

On the one hand, we may ask why Cioran was included in Tracy Chevalier’s and John Murray’s encyclopedias with consistent entries in which Marc Lits presented Cioran as a philosopher and essayist who ‘rejects all systems and exorcises his fears by means of incisive aphorisms’ and escapes ‘the overweening presumption of philosophy while still writing rigorously’; on the other hand, we may wonder why Sontag equated his work with ‘the convulsive manner of German neo-philosophical thinking, whose motto is: aphorism or eternity’. The answers cannot be found in any statements that Cioran would have made about the essay, since, in his position of enfant terrible, he was never interested in theorizing it but rather in using its form.

As far as the form of the essay is concerned, G. Douglas Atkins has demonstrated that the essay occupies a middle position between fiction and philosophy and ‘can be so distinguished precisely because it is not absolutely different from either’. According to Atkins, the essay borrows ‘reflection, analysis, and judgement’ but also brings its own unicity, which consists of ‘reflection upon experience’, from philosophy in which reflection is ‘the province of philosophy’ and ‘experience is that of fiction’. Atkins states that while the former involves ‘the transcendent world of ideas’ and ‘works on questions of being’, the latter involves immanence, being rooted ‘in the material’ and presenting ‘ideas embodied in form, in characters, and events’. Cioran’s essays put forward his judgments without the intention of creating a continuous argument, which may often frustrate the reader.