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E M Cioran Richard Howard Biography & Facts

Emil Mihai Cioran (Romanian: [eˈmil tʃoˈran] , French: [emil sjɔʁɑ̃]; 8 April 1911 – 20 June 1995) was a Romanian philosopher, aphorist and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French. His work has been noted for its pervasive philosophical pessimism, style, and aphorisms. His works frequently engaged with issues of suffering, decay, and nihilism. In 1937, Cioran moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris, which became his permanent residence, wherein he lived in seclusion with his partner, Simone Boué, until his death in 1995. Early life Cioran was born in Resinár, Szeben County, Kingdom of Hungary (today Rășinari, Sibiu County, Romania). His father, Emilian Cioran, was an Orthodox priest, and his mother, Elvira, was the head of the Christian Women's League. At 10, Cioran moved to Sibiu to attend school, and at 17, he was enrolled in the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Bucharest, where he met Eugène Ionesco and Mircea Eliade, who became his friends. Future Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica and future Romanian thinker Petre Țuțea became his closest academic colleagues; all three studied under Tudor Vianu and Nae Ionescu. Cioran, Eliade, and Țuțea became supporters of Ionescu's ideas, known as Trăirism. Cioran had a good command of German, learning the language at an early age, and proceeded to read philosophy that was available in German, but not in Romanian. Notes from Cioran's adolescence indicated a study of Friedrich Nietzsche, Honoré de Balzac, Arthur Schopenhauer and Fyodor Dostoevsky, among others. He became an agnostic, taking as an axiom "the inconvenience of existence". While at the university, he was influenced by Georg Simmel, Ludwig Klages and Martin Heidegger, but also by the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, whose contribution to Cioran's central system of thought was the belief that life is arbitrary. Cioran's graduation thesis was on Henri Bergson, whom he later rejected, claiming Bergson did not comprehend the tragedy of life. From the age of 20, Cioran began to suffer from insomnia, a condition which he suffered from for the rest of his life, and permeated his writings. Cioran's decision to write about his experiences in his first book, On the Heights of Despair, came from an episode of insomnia. Career Berlin and Romania In 1933, he received a scholarship to the University of Berlin, where he studied Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Here, he came into contact with Klages and Nicolai Hartmann. While in Berlin, he became interested in the policies of the Nazi regime, contributed a column to Vremea dealing with the topic (in which Cioran confessed that "there is no present-day politician that I see as more sympathetic and admirable than Hitler", while expressing his approval for the Night of the Long Knives—"what has humanity lost if the lives of a few imbeciles were taken"), and, in a letter written to Petru Comarnescu, described himself as "a Hitlerist". He held similar views about Italian fascism, welcoming victories in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, arguing that: "Fascism is a shock, without which Italy is a compromise comparable to today's Romania". Cioran's first book, Pe culmile disperării (literally translated: "On the Heights of Despair"), was published in Romania in 1934. It was awarded the Commission's Prize and the Young Writers Prize for one of the best books written by an unpublished young writer. Regardless, Cioran later spoke negatively of it, saying "it is a very poorly written book, without any style." Successively, The Book of Delusions (1935), The Transfiguration of Romania (1936) and Tears and Saints (1937) were also published in Romania. Tears and Saints was "incredibly poorly received", and after it was published, Cioran's mother wrote him asking him to retract the book because it was causing her public embarrassment. Although Cioran was never a member of the group, it was during this time in Romania that he began taking an interest in the ideas put forth by the Iron Guard—a far right organization whose nationalist ideology he supported until the early years of World War II, despite allegedly disapproving of their violent methods. Cioran would later denounce fascism, describing it in 1970 as "the worst folly of my youth. If I am cured of one sickness, it is surely that one." Cioran revised The Transfiguration of Romania heavily in its second edition released in the 1990s, eliminating numerous passages he considered extremist or "pretentious and stupid". In its original form, the book expressed sympathy for totalitarianism, a view which was also present in various articles Cioran wrote at the time, and which aimed to establish "urbanization and industrialization" as "the two obsessions of a rising people". His early call for modernization was, however, hard to reconcile with the traditionalism of the Iron Guard. In 1934, he wrote, "I find that in Romania the sole fertile, creative, and invigorating nationalism can only be one which does not just dismiss tradition, but also denies and defeats it". Disapproval of what he viewed as specifically Romanian traits had been present in his works ("In any maxim, in any proverb, in any reflection, our people expresses the same shyness in front of life, the same hesitation and resignation... [...] Everyday Romanian [truisms] are dumbfounding."), which led to criticism from the far-right Gândirea (its editor, Nichifor Crainic, had called The Transfiguration of Romania "a bloody, merciless, massacre of today's Romania, without even [the fear] of matricide and sacrilege"), as well as from various Iron Guard papers. France After returning from Berlin in 1936, Cioran taught philosophy at the Andrei Șaguna High School in Brașov for a year. His classes were marked by confusion and he quit in a year. In 1937, he first applied for a fellowship at the Spanish Embassy in Bucharest but then the Spanish Civil War started. Then he left for Paris with a scholarship from the French Institute branch in Bucharest, which was then prolonged until 1944. He was supposedly working towards a doctoral thesis in the Sorbonne University, but he had no intention to actually work towards it, as the identity of being a student gave him access to cheap meals at the university cafeteria. This he continued until 1951 when a law passed that forbade enrollment of students older than 27. After a short stay in his home country (November 1940 – February 1941), Cioran never returned again. This last period in Romania was the one in which he exhibited a closer relationship with the Iron Guard, which by then had taken power (see National Legionary State). On 28 November, for the state-owned Romanian Radio, Cioran recorded a speech centered on the portrait of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, former leader of the movement, praising him and the Guard for, among other things, "having given Romanians a purpose". He later r.... Discover the E M Cioran Richard Howard popular books. Find the top 100 most popular E M Cioran Richard Howard books.