Summary
Rumanian writer in French, subject of “Amateur of the Insoluble”, the third essay in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, which begins at PDF p.48 and continues past this part (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.48-50).
Details
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His essays’ subject is a choice made, in his phrase as Said gives it, for “a break with the quietude of Unity” (PDF p.49).
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His essays in The Temptation to Exist give “knowledge without information.” (PDF p.49); his project in writing is “to pulverize the acquired” (quoted PDF p.49), which he calls the essential tendency of the modern mind.
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His consciousness is explicitly based on self-hatred: “It is from self-hatred that consciousness emerges, hence it is in self-hatred that we must seek the point of departure of the human phenomenon. I hate myself: I am absolutely a man.” (quoted PDF p.50)
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He is a Rumanian who writes French, in Richard Howard’s translation in English with the same jerky intellectual queerness; his Hudson Review essays of the past five years, translated by Marthiel Mathews and Frederick Brown, bear the marks of the hybrid intellectual, a talent for “voyeurism of the void” (PDF p.50).
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He has written on Joseph de Maistre, Machiavelli and utopias, but above all on decomposition, and suffers, in Said’s account of his own view, from the inability “to take place” (PDF p.50).
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Essay 3 concludes at PDF p.53: Cioran is “a fanatic without convictions”, firmly, even hysterically, committed to the amateurism of the insoluble, and his highest praise is for the Jews, who have always represented what his writing wishes to accomplish, “failure on the move” (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.52).
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In the conclusion Cioran is to the essay what Borges is to fiction: in both we are constantly in the presence of the mask and of the apocryphal utterance, one undercutting the other (PDF p.52).