E. M. Cioran was a Romanian-born essayist and aphorist living in Paris and writing in French from the age of twenty-six. Upon the publication of his first book in French, Précis de decomposition (A Short History of Decay), Cioran was hailed by Maurice Nadeau in Combat as “le prophète des temps concentrationaires et du suicide collectif [. . .] le porteur [. . .] de la mauvaise nouvelle” [“the prophet of the era of concentration camps and collective suicide [. . .] the bringer of [. . .] bad news”]. While his writings are suffused with philosophical themes, Cioran often resisted the label of philosopher, preferring an unsystematic and fragmentary approach to forging his thinking through writing. Thus his works proceed more by juxtaposition than by systematic argumentation, and the jarring nature of his series of aphorisms is an important part of what lends Cioran’s writing its force.

Emil Cioran was born April 8, 1911 in the Transylvanian village of Răşinari, the son of an Orthodox priest. Cioran often paints an idyllic picture of his childhood, which was brutally interrupted when he left his village in 1921 for further schooling in the nearby town of Sibiu. After studying philosophy at the University of Bucharest, with an undergraduate thesis on Henri Bergson, Cioran began graduate study on a Humboldt fellowship in Germany in 1933. It was during this period that he began publishing his first works, a series of books and articles in Romanian. His first book, Pe culmile disperării (On the Heights of Despair), is a lyrical portrait of despair owing a certain debt to the Romantics.

Cioran’s arrival in Germany coincided with the rise of national socialism, and Cioran became caught up in radical right-wing politics, especially in the context of his native Romania, whose fascist Iron Guard movement Cioran supported at this time. The violent tone of his highly polemical second book, Schimbarea la faţă a României (The Transformation of Romania’s Fate) betrays Cioran’s short-lived but intense involvement in political writing. Consistently throughout his later writings, Cioran dismissed these early political delusions as stupidities. A third book in Romanian, Lacrimi şi sfinţi (Tears and Saints), published in 1937, announced in its very title themes that would go on to play important roles in Cioran’s writings long after he had abandoned politics.

In 1937 he moved to Paris, ostensibly to continue his doctoral studies, but he quickly abandoned these in favor of continuing his lifelong habit of voracious reading and exploring the countryside on foot and on bicycle. Except for a brief return to Romania in the early 1940s, Cioran lived the rest of his life in Paris, entering a kind of voluntary exile and living as what he called an apatride, or man without a country, although his perception of his marginal origins was to haunt him all his life. He definitively abandoned the Romanian language in favor of French, and began cultivating what became an absolute mastery of French style and a distinctive writing persona which, not unlike that of Marcel Proust’s narrator, flirts closely with Cioran’s biographical personality without being entirely congruent with it. The first fruits of this linguistic conversion came in 1949 with his first book in French, Précis de decomposition (A Short History of Decay), which Cioran rewrote four times before its publication; it was awarded the Rivarol Prize (the only prize he accepted of the four that he won) and remains his best-known work. Cioran often referred to the French language as a “straightjacket” because it forced him to strip down the embellished style he had developed in his native tongue and write with density and concision.

There followed a series of eleven other books between 1952 and 1987, including, most notably, Syllogismes de l’amertume (Syllogisms of Bitterness) in 1952, La tentation d’exister (The Temptation to Exist) in 1956, and De l’inconvenient d’être né (The Trouble with Being Born) in 1973. During this time, and until his death from Alzheimer’s in 1995, he lived in a tiny attic apartment in the rue de l’Odéon with his companion since 1942, Simone Boué, who oversaw the posthumous publication of Cioran’s Cahiers (Notebooks) 1957-1972, in 1997. While the notebooks do give some insight into aspects of life such as conversations and country walks, they serve most often as a place where Cioran recorded thoughts similar in kind to those which would later appear in his published books.

Cioran’s first writings in French were acclaimed by writers such as Gabriel Marcel, André Maurois, and Raymond Queneau; later writings were less widely noticed, in part because Cioran was a self-declared “ennemi de la gloire” [“enemy of glory”] who refused to play the role of public intellectual in France in order to maintain his marginal status. The interviews to which he did agree were almost exclusively in European countries excluding France. Many of his books were nonetheless translated widely, even though they appeared at times when other kinds of thought, particularly poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, were more in vogue than the kind of modernist aphoristic approach that Cioran favored. Persona non grata in Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu, Cioran has nonetheless enjoyed great admiration from Romanian intellectuals in addition to his status in Western Europe.

While he sought an original or organic, quasi-prophetic voice, Cioran owes much to the authors he most admired, notably Fyodor Dostoyevsky and William Shakespeare (the two writers Cioran mentions most frequently), but also Blaise Pascal and the seventeenth and eighteenth-century French moralists (François de la Rochefoucauld, Jean de la Bruyère, and Nicolas Chamfort in particular). If he borrowed from these writers a preference for aphorism and an acerbic critique of human society, other more modern influences are clearly visible from writers such as Charles Baudelaire, who informs Cioran’s critique of modernity through a quasi-theological preoccupation with original sin and the devastating effects of ennui. The pessimistic and tragic-comic sense of the absurdity and futility of human endeavor, the failure of modernity and concomitant end of history, which figures in the works of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, both of whom were friends of Cioran, also features prominently in his works.

Cioran strives above all for lucidity in his vision of the world, an honest evaluation of the human condition devoid of any illusions triggered by notions of happiness, progress, or perfectibility. He notes repeatedly that the origins of his worldview are to be found in his struggles with insomnia, most prominent when Cioran was in his early twenties but intermittently present all of his life. The insomniac sees existence without the intervals of nothingness which sleeps affords, and thus sees the world honestly and without hypocrisy or illusion; he is alone with himself as only God would be, outside of interaction and outside of history and particularly given to ruminations on death and the void: “Or en pleine nuit on ne se demande pas si telle ou telle formulation est ou non dangereuse. Car rien n’existe. Il n’y a pas d’avenir, pas le lendemain. [. . .] Il n’y a pas d’histoire, tout s’est arrêté. Et la formulation échappe au temps, échappe à l’histoire, est au-delà de l’histoire” [“In the middle of the night one doesn’t ask whether such and such a formulation is dangerous or not. For nothing exists. There is no future, no following day. [. . .] There is no history, all is stopped. And the formulation escapes time, escapes history, is beyond history”] (Entretiens 174).

God and history are complex and frequently recurring themes in Cioran’s writings. While he categorically denies the existence of God, his thought turns constantly around religious questions, with special reference to Christian mystic saints and certain aspects of Buddhist thought. Religious discourse allows Cioran to highlight another fundamental aspect of his worldview, the centrality of suffering, which is the basis of lucid thought and, for Cioran, also a criterion by which we may judge a thinker. He is thus drawn to Christianity’s traditional valorization of suffering, but rejects its injunction to love: “Je le vérifie tous les jours: on peut avoir pitié des hommes; mais les aimer, cela est impossible. C’est là, à ce point central et précis, que le christianisme est dans le faux” [“I verify it every day: one can pity men, but loving them is impossible. It is there, at this central and precise point, that Christianity is wrong”] (Cahiers 143). Similarly, while intrigued by aspects of Buddhist teaching, most notably its emphasis on negation and illusion, he rejects its practice on account of the impossibility of ultimately triumphing over the self. On the question of suffering as well, he parts ways with Buddhist ideas and falls back upon Christian notions: “La douleur ne condamne pas la vie, la douleur la rachète. (Pourquoi je ne suis pas bouddhiste.)” [“Pain does not condemn life, pain redeems it. (Why I am not a Buddhist.)”] (Cahiers 143).

Doubt is Cioran’s principal response to religious faith, and to all certain claims of knowledge. While doubt is often a motor of his writings, it is ultimately a source of paralysis in lived experience, since it is the inevitable result of the kind of journey to the depths of experience that lucidity requires; yet doubt paralyzes us, since knowing too much inhibits action. In fact, Cioran goes so far as to say that even madness would be preferable to seeing things as they really are. It is here, at the outer reaches of Cioran’s purposely unsystematic thought experiments, that philosophy becomes for him, in Susan Sontag’s words, “tortured thinking” (Sontag 14).

The act of writing, however, stands between despair and the writer, and buffers him against it. In fact, despair and suffering become the fuel of Cioran’s writing, and sardonic wit frequently shines in his texts. Furthermore, the act of publishing can even liberate one from torturous concentration on the self: “Produire est un extraordinaire soulagement. Et publier non moins. Un livre qui paraît, c’est votre vie ou une partie de votre vie qui vous devient extérieure [. . .]. L’expression [. . .] vous vide, donc elle vous sauve” [“Producing is an extraordinary relief. And publishing just as much. A book which appears is your life or a part of your life that becomes exterior [. . .]. Expression [. . .] empties you, and thus it saves you”] (Œuvres 1629). Thinking and writing are also what save us, according to Cioran, from suicide, which is one of his obsessive themes. Time after time, he affirms that the very idea of suicide is what kept him from the act, that the potential to kill oneself, the very freedom to choose, fortifies us and makes life bearable: “Cette pensée au lieu d’être dévitalisante, déprimante, est une pensée exaltante” [“This thought, rather than being devitalizing, depressing, is an exalting thought”] (Entretiens 94). Potential violence against oneself or others is thus channeled by Cioran, the self-styled “philosophe hurleur” [“roaring philosopher”], into maxims or aphorisms, which, in their concision, imply a kind of verbal violence that substitutes for the actual physical act: “Mes idées, si idées il y a, aboient; elles n’expliquent rien, elles éclatent” [“My ideas, if there are any ideas, bark; they don’t explain anything, they explode”] (Cahiers 14).

Thus Cioran’s is, for all the bleakness of his vision, his marked antihumanism and misanthropy, and his firm resistance to utopian visions, an ultimately joyful pessimism: “‘Tout est démuni d’assise et de substance’, je ne me le redis jamais sans ressentir quelque chose qui ressemble au bonheur. L’ennui est qu’il y a quantité de moments où je ne parviens pas à me le redire” [“‘Everything is without firm basis, without substance’: I never repeat it to myself without feeling something resembling happiness. The trouble is that there are many moments when I do not repeat it to myself”] (Œuvres 1314). The very realization of meaninglessness and of the void can be a kind of liberation from it; this ‘temporary freedom’ can also by given by the act of writing or by music (Bach’s music in particular), which was consistently for Cioran a means of escape from tortured thought and about which he speaks in quasi-theological terms, calling it “le seul art qui confère un sens au mot absolu. C’est l’absolu vécu, vécu cependant par le truchement d'une immense illusion, puisqu’il se dissipe sitôt le silence rétabli. C’est un absolu éphémère, en somme un paradoxe” [“the only art that confers meaning on the word absolute. It’s the absolute vanquished, vanquished however through an immense illusion, since it dissipates as soon as silence is restablished”] (Entretiens 228). It is only when one is no longer able to pursue the heights of intellectual and aesthetic experience which music and poetry reserve for us that Cioran imagines a life not worth living, a time when “pour être allés plus loin que la musique ou la mort, nous trébucherons, aveugles, vers une funèbre immortalité…” [“for having gone further than music or death, we will stumble, blind, towards a mournful immortality”] (Précis 88).

Works cited

Cioran, E.M. Cahiers 1957-1972. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
---. Entretiens. Paris: Gallimard, 1995.
---. Œuvres. Paris: Gallimard, 1995.
Sontag, Susan. “Introduction” to E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, tr. Richard Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Further reading

Bollon, Patrice. Cioran l’hérétique. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.
Dienstag, Joshua Foa. Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Laignel-Lavastine, Alexandra. Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: L’oubli du fascisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002.
Petreu, Marta. An Infamous Past: E. M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005.
Zarifopol-Jonhston, Ilinca. Searching for Cioran. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.

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Citation: Acquisto, Joseph. "Emil Cioran". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 February 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12517, accessed 05 July 2025.]