/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14828525]

Can we have a Cioran thread? How did you get into him, what are your favourite works by him, who are some authors that you think have a similar worldview?
I'm personally obsessed with his Cahiers, I read a bit every night before bed, impossibly beautiful yet funny and comforting despite the darkness and cynicism.

[Anonymous No.14828751]

>>14828525
Haven't read much, just a book of essays and A Short History of Decay. The latter was referred to in some book I was reading at the time which piqued my interest so I bought and read it.
He's a both a beautiful and a funny writer for all the pessimism, a kind of morosely aesthetic Eeyore cum comic.
I think its neat how he remained friends all his life with the other major Romanians writing in French at the time- Ionesco, Eliade -through all the thicks and thins of structuralist and post structuralist modernism. All three, especially Eliade, were fascinating persons.
His legacy in my own reading is that along with Walter Benjamin he got me interested in Georg Simmel, among whose many wonderful books I rec The Philosophy of Money (fwiw).
Despite C's reclusiveness and early flirtation with Romanian nationalism the skinny on him is that despite his reclusiveness he was an exceptionally sweet man. What further should I read by him?

[Anonymous No.14828865]

>>14828751
read the trouble with being born next

[Anonymous No.14828874]

>In Turin, at the beginning of his madness, Nietzsche would rush to his mirror, look at himself, turn away, look again. In the train that was taking him to Basel, the one thing he always asked for was a mirror. He no longer knew who he was, kept looking for himself, and this man, so eager to protect his identity, so thirsty for himself, had no instrument at hand but the clumsiest, the most lamentable of expedients.

[Anonymous No.14829023]

His writings bore me. It's all a big tautology under different textures.

[Anonymous No.14829041]

gypsy morrissey

[Anonymous No.14829054]

He was a pseud.

[Anonymous No.14829316]

>>14829054
>>14829023
I concur and piss on Cioran's grave

[Anonymous No.14829360]

>>14828525
i find him annoying, but i do admire his adamant and noble lifetime effort of avoiding any sort of actual work.

[Anonymous No.14829967]

>>14828525
I've only read The Trouble with Being Born and some loose essays. One of the aspects that I find interesting in Cioran is his critique of history and civilization. As a reactionary he thinks that progress is just a masive delusion and that we are just making life increasingly absurd. Beneath each historic project lies the wish for eternity and trascendence and such a wish can only pursued through barbarism.When all the delusions end and barbarism is condemned as despicable then civilization dies just as West is dying.

>who are some authors that you think have a similar worldview?
Albert Caraco, though he has been barely translated to english. Darker than Cioran and an outright misanthrope. Here an example:

“…Extermination shall become the common denominator of politics to come and nature shall join in, adding its furors to ours. The end of the century shall see the Triumph of death, the world overburdened with men shall discharge the surplus deadweight of living things. Not an island shall subsist where the powerful could strip into the consensual hell which they prepare for us, and the spectacle of their agony shall be the consolation of the peoples they have led astray. The future order shall be the sole heir of our failures, and the prophets, amidst our ruins, shall gather together the survivors.”

[Anonymous No.14829972]

Reading Cioran feels like turning on a white noise machine in order to fall asleep.

[Anonymous No.14830390]

Learned of him about 3 years ago on this board, liked All Gall is Divided, it(s English translation) taxed my vocabulary, something that hasn't happened in years. Later read Fall into Time. Plan to order the commonly-available Arcade work as a chunk but this will require speaking with a clerk because that is how I roll.

>>14829316

He wouldn't begrudge you for this.

>>14829023

The thing about tautologies, is that they are yet true. It isn't the job of truth to be helpful, to "entertain". You aren't owed anything.

[Anonymous No.14830416]

>>14829967
I wouldn't call Cioran a reactionary as that implies he believes the clock can be turned back, or that doing so would be profitable or noble (whereas Cioran revels in and romanticises modern inertness). Cioran thinks that the movement from barbarism to civilisation is inevitable and its motivations creditable, but at the same time futile and self-destructive. The reactionary believes that modern man has erred and abandoned ancient wisdom and Truth and so on, has "fallen"; Cioran says man has actually attained wisdom, and become sterile for it. Decadence is the result of lucidity. Read 'Faces of Decadence' if you haven't already, it's very good.

[Anonymous No.14831364]

>>14828525
I really enjoyed A Short History of Decay, which has a beautiful translation in my language. I especially liked the form (1-3 pages long essays).