Dublin Opinion

Sean Baite, in a comment on the Knacker Philosopher King Size bit, mentioned Cioran’s early fascist leanings in Romania and I must admit it was news to me. That’s probably because I know little about Cioran.

But a quick search on the Web has thrown up some interesting tidbits of information.

“A thorough and vivid portrait of a Romanian gifted fascist thinker, who dreamed about a Romania with the population of China and the destiny of France.’ Like his legionary colleagues, Emil Cioran admired Hitler, justified his crimes and believed that capitalism was immoral, Judaic and anti-Christian.’ Unlike other Iron Guard ideologists, Cioran praised Lenin and envisioned a modern Romania driven by industrialization and urban values. Like his comrades, Cioran advocated a fascist dictatorship and cultivated Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the criminal führer of the Iron Guard. But unlike his friend and fellow Iron Guard ideologist, Mircea Eliade, who did not show any willingness to part with his totalitarian past, Cioran had the decency, in his productive French exile, to regret his fascist youth and break with it.” - Radu Ioanid

From a review of An Infamous Past: E. M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania

“For much of that time, Petreu and other biographers tell us, he operated like an eternal student, renting hotel rooms, eating at student cafeterias and cadging money from better-off friends. A lifelong insomniac, Cioran liked mixing with street people and prostitutes, though he also met everyone in the Parisian literary world. Having decided to stop writing in Romanian after World War II, he ended up France’s foremost stylist of existentialist one-liners (”To be is to be cornered”)………………..Hostile to Enlightenment reason, intolerant of tolerance, morose about the decline of European civilisation, a decadent with an amoral slant on life, Cioran combined the idiosyncratic qualities and paradoxical prose outsiders often seek in bringing a French intellectual to international fame.

An excerpt from an article by Carlin Romano

To be is to be cornered? Especially when you have a fascist past you can seem to shake off, which according to this interesting New Republic article actually bothered him quite a bit:

“In a letter to a friend, Cioran declared in 1971 that “when I contemplate certain of my past infatuations, I am brought up short: I don’t understand. What madness!” This would certainly seem to indicate their rejection on his part. In conversation with the author of a book about the commandant of Auschwitz, he said: “What Germany did amounts to a damnation of mankind.” There can be no question that, unlike Eliade, the issue of his previous fascism and anti-Semitism tormented the complicated, involuted, self-questioning Cioran, whose thought was always directed toward undermining all of mankind’s certainties, including his own.