cioran

Research Subject

Emil Cioran’s name is often linked to such words as „philosopher” and „(a)moralist”. As moralist activities — i.e., interpreting ethical acts in their practical dimension — are obviously sub-species of philosophical activities, it is not hard to equate this man from Rãşinari with a person who undeniably belongs to the realm of philosophical reflection. What matters — especially in the light of this paper — is to identify what kind of philosopher Cioran was and which were the assumptions for taking „philosophy” as Object-Choice. Any critical and hermeneutical approach of Cioran’s works and biography is obviously difficult, given their huge human and theoretical complexity. Being willing to take risks, I think that blindly „psychoanalyzing” the author of Fall into Time is a scientifically honourable endeavour, and the results of such endeavour can only help to a better understanding of the man and of his reflective vision.
It should be noted that the following is only an unverifiable hypothesis, inasmuch as some Romanian intellectual circles still suffer from an almost neurotic blindness, when confronted with the revelations brought by analytical exercise. It is, after all, a common thing: the more painful revelations become, the more powerful resistance they meet.
If I am to understand correctly reactions of important and fashionable intellectual gurus in contemporary Romania, any attempt to theoretically inquire leaders of the “generation ’27” — whether their name is Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noica, Emil Cioran, Petre Ţuţea, Haig Acterian or Dragoş Protopopescu — without the usual hagiographical alterations, represents an offence, an act of treason directed against national values, as well as a distortion of their spiritual meaning. In fact, things are simpler than they seem, provided that we can look back in time, unaffected by identity traumas: if we can differentiate between political and ideological faults, on the one hand, and the scientific or artistic part of these personalities’ work — the one which hadn’t been contaminated by extremisms— on the other hand, we can rightly understand their place and their importance, in a non-subjective history of Romanian human sciences. We do not seek to destroy, annihilate or empty reputations, works and destinies. While recognizing the importance of year 1927 in the development of our modern culture, we do not accept to change this time sequence into a tabu, into the omphalos of a whole value system. Some people choose to cling to that moment, both emotionally and intellectualy, despite what after-war history and cultural postmodernity have taught us. As that particular moment is important, yet not unique, telling, yet not decisive, and undoubtedly allows many viewpoints, we can only infer that the said people have major issues regarding their individual/collective identity and cannot free themselves from the mentality of a period which belongs, after all, to history. Well, enough about that...

Narcissism and Object-Choice

In Totem and taboo, Freud claimed that „of all [intellectual systems], animism is probably the most logic and complete, as it explains the worlds’ essence without letting anything aside”². As it laid the foundation for our civilization, animist thought shall never be outdated, irrespective of the cultural field it is re-worked in: science, religion, philosophy, art. Its persistence is a matter of the originary drives substratum, which explains any human intellectual formation through the wish for an allmighty entity, functioning as strongly as primitive beliefs. In New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933), the Viennese master emphasized the survival of such beliefs through remnants of animist thought, in the field of philosophical speculation: „you can hardly avoid coming to the conclusion that our philosophy has preserved essential traits of animistic modes of thought... It is, to be sure, an animism without magical practices”³.
Such surprising survival might be regulated along two lines: 1) a belief in the allmightiness of verbal magic and 2) our prejudice that our mode of thought can put reality in order. Our magical-born project of dominating reality is „achieved” through a mediation of cultural discourses, especially in the realm of philosophy. World’s disenchantment can only be matched by the former’s re-investment with an abstract-categorial allmightiness, as instated by scientific philosophy, and formulated according to a mode of thought that dismisses its animist quality, although it functions along the lines of the said ancient model.
However, animism is a primitive Self-centeredness, while philosophy belongs to a secondary level of rational representation, which is immediately identifiable as being based on narcissism. A narcissic act pretends to embrace the whole world, in order to instate an ideal „mirror” in which the Ego can reflect and celebrate itself. No philosophy can appear, in the absence of narcissism. In 1914 (when On Narcissism: An Introduction was published), narcissism represented in Freud’s vision an over-investment of the Ego by the libido, at the expense of the energetic investment in object relationships. The Ego is the Universe, and the objects that constitute the world (in reality) are obsolete. Hence the terrible belief (which is typical for primary narcissism) in „omnipotent ideas” and the „magical strenght of words”. Later, after the second topic’s development, the perspective changes: primary narcissism seems to be synonymous with an non-objective state, which corresponds to the non-differentiation of Ego from the Self, while the secondary narcissism consists in the libidinal investment, by the Self, of the Ego, which thus becomes the homologue of an elective object.
Philosophical narcissism is a secondary narcissism, as formulated in Freud’s essay The Ego and the Id. The Ego is enhanced by its investment as an erotic object by the id and consolidated by the primary, animist level of originary narcissism, having thus the freedom to initiate the conceptual construction of a world totally “dominated” by the phantasy of radical rationalizing, which is so typical for a philosophy of mind centered on the concept of ratio. Hence the prejudice that man is the master of his own house, governing both its inside and its outside, the soul and the world. The Consciousness is quickly identified with the whole psyché, and the Conscious easily dominates the Unconscious. These are the grounds on which the whole modern culture was built, in the age of Aufklärung. One cannot understand the major systems in classic German philosophy without taking into account this (both totalitarian and Conscious-centered) model.
In his work entitled Freud, la philosophie et les philosophes⁴, Paul-Laurent Assoun underlines that the difference between science and philosophy equates the distance between Wissenschaft and Weltanschauung, between the Ego as autonomous libido and Ego’s extension as a libidinally invested object. In the first case, the analyzer is free in relation to his object of choice, whom he conceives of in a limited way and considers controllable through experiments; in the second case, the philosopher cannot free himself of his object, which is represented as unlimited, as a world project carrying an ideal of omnipotence and excellence. As Weltanschauung, philosophy is the embodiment of an ideal, the materialization of an ideal wish (Idealwunsch) that man invests with magical belief, in order to live comfortably and secure, in relation to nature and history. As a result, philosophical systems and constructions are nothing else than remnants of desire, psychic corrections of reality.
It is a matter of debate whether such secondary narcissistic adjustments are clinically healthy — we shouldn’t forget that Sigmund Freud used to assimilate paranoia mechanisms to philosophical thought. For the paranoiac, libido’s disengagement from the object results in a terrible investment of the Ego, inasmuch as the latter’s real dimensions are over-amplified. Paranoiac’s Ego is rigid and inflated, and reaches the borders of the Universe, while the huge speculative and explanatory effort, validated by delirium and intended to control phenomena of outside world (which is disinvested as an object), is nourished by the drives of an hypertrophic Ego. One rationalizes the world in order to preserve the illusion of completely mastering the world, so that inner reality doesn’t crumble under the requests of reality. Here is, mutatis mutandis, a satisfactory definition of philosophy...

Why is Emil Cioran’s thought unsystematic?

Although on various occasions, Emil Cioran claimed to be a non-philosopher or an anti-philosopher, he can nevertheless be considered within the realm of philosophical reflection. He enjoyed academic training in philosophy, delivered a dissertation on Bergsonian intuitionism (which was rather original, than academic in terms of interpretation), taught philosophy in a high school, took doctoral courses in Sorbonne (without actually finishing his doctoral thesis), and his knowledge was impressive, as regards the variety and the substance of his philosophical interests. However, he chose to practice a philosophy which was unsystematic, non-academic, anti-scientifical, allergic to the very idea of lecture and immune to any temptations of writing a treatise. Cioran’s „war” against the categorial-systematic philosophy was so radical, that he rejected even essayistic writing, by favoring a style based on aphorisms and fragmentation.
According to Romanian philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu, Cioran’s mode of thought is freely associative and can be subsumed — in terms of style — in the so-called artistic genres of philosophical exercise, that also include: discourse, epistle, diary, fragment, dialogue, epic of ideas and essay⁵. In his first book, On the Heights of Despair, the moralist himself claimed that „I have no interest in form”. It is a memorable sentence, which he observed tale quale during his whole life. Many have noticed Cioran’s persistence in cultivating his allergy to the system, both in his Romanian and in his French works. I do not intend to follow them, as there are dozens and hundreds of quotations that testify to that end.
Of a greater interest — at least from the perspective of the Freudian coordinates stated earlier: the equation of secondary narcissism with philosophy, of animist thought with speculation, of Weltanschauung with paranoia — is the fact, from his very beginnings as a thinker, Emil Cioran unknowingly re-discovered these concepts, formulated not long before by Sigmund Freud. Here are a few excerpts from Crepuscule of Thoughts, a book he published in 1940: „In philosophy, everything is second and third rate… Nothing is direct. A system is built through derivations and represents, in itself, a mere derivation. As for the philopher, he is nothing more than an indirect genius”⁶. Or: „[...] Philosophy’s mediocrity is explainable, given the fact that it can only think at low temperatures. When you master your fever, you manipulate thoughts as they were puppets, you pull the ideas’ strings and the public cannot escape illusion. On the contrary, when any look upon yourself is a fire or a shipwreck, when your inner landscape is a splendid disaster, with flames dancing at seas’ horizon — it is then that you can unleash your thoughts.”⁷
Later in life, in his dialogue with Fernando Savater, the author of Drawn and Quartered re-worked the above youthful ideas: „I think philosophy is no longer possible, unless it is fragmentary. You can no longer write chapter after chapter, and thus construct a treatise... We are all fragmentarians now, even when we write appearantly coordinated books. It fits our present civilisation”⁸. A few lines below, we find out that „[...] this is the tragedy of any structured thought, the fact that it doesn’t allow contradictions. This makes you a fraud, and you lie to protect coherence. Otherwise, if you only create fragments, you can tell both one thing and its opposite, in the course of a single day. Why? Because any fragment originates from a different experience... A fragmented thought reflects all aspects of your experience; a systematic thought reflects but one aspect, the controlled, therefore empoverished, aspect”⁹. Biographical data can also add to arguments supporting Cioran’s unsystemic thought: while in Bucharest, he preffered Nae Ionescu to Mircea Florian, in Berlin, he chose the company of Ludwig Klages against Nicolai Hartmann, and in Paris, he used to read Confucius and to ignore Jean-Paul Sartre...
Why did he prefer unsystematic thought, after all, why did he favor aphorisms and fragments? In my opinion, the answer is to be found in the philosopher’s past, especially in his family history. His father, an orthodox priest, had a symbolical, ritualic omnipotence. He was priviliged to had been initiated in the mystery of divine service, and to perpetuate this mystery. Religious dogma, especially in the orthodox canon, is a closed, perfect and rightful expression of revelated teaching. Nothing can be added to the canonical corpus and no interpretation is allowed, when it doesn’t respect the hermeneutically accepted guideline to the letter. While formally invested with a terrible, mysterious excellence, the father is also omnipotent on a textual level, where it operates a forbiddance of any interpretation.
Years later, Cioran’s blasphemic essay Tears and Saints (1937) would represent a postponed defiance of the hermeneutical taboo instated by his father, throughout his childhood. We meet there an authentic incestuous delirium, in which the young man engages in orgiastic acts with saints and furiously attack dogma’s purity.
It is thus that the boy’s Oedipian freedom to libidinaly invest in objects of the outside world is countered by the monopoly instated through the father’s castratory figure, over a desired realm of reality: the religious Weltanschauung. God is love, and the child wishes to meet his Maker. He would like to do it freely, to discover Him in his own way. However, he has to confront his father’s proffesional presence — a presence he has already faced, as an enemy against possesing the mother. He has been denied access to the mother, and is now denied access to the perfect character in the Biblical story, by the same authority: the paternal authority. Given such circumstances, how could a mature Cioran trust a totalizing view of the world, be it of a religious or philosophical kind? How could the moralist avoid equating the construction of a coherent, close understanding of the world with a mortifying gesture? For Emil Cioran, contradiction, ideas’ incoherence (and I do not refer to his thematic obsessions!), histrionism, the playful pleasure to puzzle his readers — all these relate to his unconscious belief that by such artifices, he can avoid castration from his Oedipal age. To be alive means to be different from your father — that past owner of a complete, perfect Anschauung.
Religion is very close to philosophy. By choosing philosophy as his academic specialization, the young man was compulsively operating a symbolic repairing act: „am I able to re-engage, on my own, in the formerly refused adventure of cognitively mastering the world, now, as a grown-up”? The student was thus trying to consolidate his self, to disinvest his fragmented, common appearance and to libidinal reprofilate an Ego to which he was entitled, because of his unresolved primary narcissism. It was obviously a failed attempt. The whole body of Cioran’s works testify for this failure. We know that the process of Ego reconstruction Cioran ventured in, during his academic years, was complex and tensed, therefore not free from the remains of a dominating Oedip. He engaged in exhausting private research, in relentless and erratic readings, which were dictated not by curriculums, but by his personal jouissance. The Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica used to „scold” his younger friend, criticizing his tendency to prefer second-rate, obscure thinkers — authors nobody was interested in, anymore.
Therefore, despite constantly writing in the first person, as unable to assume something else beside his explosive individuality, Emil Cioran never adhered to the secondary narcissism that accompanies any great philosophical paradigm. I don’t mean that he had not a personal vision of the world — on the contrary — but his Weltanschauung was unsystematic and fragmentary and could only be expressed through an aphoristic style. Being a skeptical and a nihilist, Cioran practiced not as much a philosophy, as a literary embelished wisdom. We are very far from the paranoid model of cognitive allmightiness and world’s control, which is so typical for common philosophical thought.

Why is Emil Cioran aphoristic?

As a metaphysical thinker, as a man reflecting about existence, Cioran couldn’t avoid relying on residues of magical thinking. While having little trust in man’s ability to master and ordinate world through ideas, he had become a fanatic of bright expressions, an adept of memorable formulations, an artisan of magical words. As he did not posses a monolithical Weltanschauung, but a rather exceptional ability to handle expressive (thus magical) language and writing resources, he chose a different way to relate to the universe, thus constructing an animist-based relation wholly devoid of any extravagant, systematized omnipotence delirium.
His very option for fragmentarism can be traced back to the Oedipal stage in his first childhood. In my opinion, the maternal figure and Cioran’s relationship with her can explain his preference for the free-associative thought and for the aphorism as a vehicle for expressing himself, given the considerations on the Freudian work formulated earlier in this article. Emil Cioran’s mother, whose figure is sparsely, yet over-respectfully mentioned in his correspondence with his brother Relu, seems to have been an authoritarian and independent woman, whose religious belief was not exemplary, despite her husband’s liturgic proffesion.
From the philosopher’s desire to give up his mother tongue, we can only hint at his terrible relation to maternity, as re-positioning oneself linguistically means operating an act of rejecting the mother, of renouncing her body for a second, and ultimate, time. Cioran’s inability to date women, others than Sibiu prostitutes, his lack of desire to possess a woman in terms of an equal, responsible partnership, his late love-comradeship for and with Simone Boué, his radical rejection of the idea of becoming a father, as well as his testifying for the horrible episode in which his mother had told him that she wished having aborted him, rather that witnessing him tortured by existential crises — all these details offer a very gloomy view to his relationship with his mother.
Although she probably preserved her over-protective maternal status, Mrs. Cioran must have turned all her affection to her new-born Relu, when the latter revealed his need to be loved and to initiate the kind of libidinal exchange Emil must have feld permanently, sometimes to a paroxistic degree. „Betrayed” by his mother and unable to compete with his father, either on an incestuous or a symbolic, religious level, the boy indulges in sinister acts, such as playing football with skulls, in the Rãşinari graveyard. Overprotection is really an equivalent of castration; it thus generates a persistent angst and a structured phantasy to repress, both recurrent as images and themes throughout Cioran’s work. His obsession with death and his pleasure of representing suicide as a practical joke are traditional obsessions in the writings of our future philosopher.
His feeling of having been left by his mother, after a painful separation from the Rãºinari nature in order to move to Sibiu, was triggered by his uneasy relationship with the universe, with the outside world. It is thus that we should interpret his insomnia: how can you sleep, how can you rest when almost everything is for you, the abandoned one, a perpetual threat, a continuous and potentially lethal agression? His refusal to approach women— other than whores on the Sibiu Corso — signifies a restless, painful search for the Woman-identical-with-Mother, a dramatic reiteration of a reconstruction, on healthy grounds, of his Oedipal relationship with a true and loyal, therefore good, mother. Hence the syllogism: if you get involved in a relationship, otherwise than superficially and sexually, you risk to abandon the straight neurotic-compulsive route to the promised land, to the mother of amniotic nostalgia.
However, such psychic reality can only exist in an unstructured, almost psychotic, almost diformed form, amid terrible disorganisation and radical dismemberment. Banished from Paradise10, and unwilling to live a normal life in a land in which he was (troubled to having been) born, Cioran engages in a schizoid act, by cutting the world in a bad, exterior reality and a good, interior one. While the outside world crumples, the inner world becomes a place of introspection. His compromising device is his very expression, style, writing. He needs to compromise, in order to survive, in a world in which he has been thrown by a forgetting mother; it is a world which lack cohesion and horizon, a horrible place that makes any engagement useless and stupid.
On the other hand, the moralist dares not to venture in the realm of holistic constructing a secondary narcissist type, because he has internalized the forbidding paternal canon. Cioran is unable to libidinally cling to the objects of a repulsive and unsystematic world, as well as to return, in order to regress to primary narcissism. He lives the almost psychotic drama of an incomplete, schizophrenia-like state, which forbids him any achievement and makes him fail into a destiny neurosis with paranoid episodes. This atypical, irregular inner state, as well as his unclassifiable, either stylistically or medically, radicalism, announce a mixed psychic structure, very close to a histrionic vision of borderline. Cioran doesn’t belong to this world, unless in his phantasy re-creation of his own mythology, and his healing involves practicing a confessive writing, acting as an antidote.

Final remarks

In the light of Cioran’s fate, „philosophy” as an Object-Choice seems paradoxical and arises difficulties to the exterior understanding of psychoanalytical exercise. Emil Cioran conservatively resorts to the depths of his own Ego. It is, however, an uncompleted instance, because his Ego is not mature and he cannot escape from the Oedipian heritage, i.e. from the construction of the Ego as an organizer and puppeteer of our coherent representation of the world, nor does he resort to a phantasy in which the Self is more comfortable than a deconstructed vision of the worls. Emil Cioran is doomed to practice a philosophy he doesn’t trust, yet cannot leave out. His only sollution is that of Buddhist-stoic wisdom, „molded” into a writing with radical magical and restorative qualities. As he turns to the excellency of a transparent style, Cioran is more and more at peace with the diseases and solitude created by a strange universe. Any reported and written trauma looses its intensity and becoms bearable...

[1]Doctoral thesis delivered by Valentin Protopopescu at the University of Bucharest, 2004, Emil Cioran. Anatomy of a Rejected Past, Chapter 5.
[2]Romanian edition, translated by Leonard Gavriliu, Editura ªtiinþificã, Bucharest, 1991, p. 85.
[3]Gesammelte Werke, Imago Publishing Co., XV, p. 178.
[4]Romanian edition, translated by Valentin Protopopescu, Editura Trei, Bucharest, 1996, p. 114.
[5]See (The Quarrel with Philosophy), Editura Humanitas, Bucharest, 1992, p. 57.
[6]Editura Dacia Traianã, Sibiu, 1940, p. 21.
[7]Op. cit., p. 19.
[8]Entretiens, translated by Friederike Schanz-Pandelescu, Sorin Mãrculescu, Thomas Kleininger, Gabriel Liiceanu, Claudia Dumitriu, Grete Tartler, Andrei Brezianu, Cristian Petru, George Carpat-Foche, Mariana ªtefãnescu, Editura Humanitas, Bucharest, 1993, p. 22.
[9]Ibid., p. 23.
[10]This is a much more probable meaning of one of Cioran’s obsessions, which is synonymous to his Fall Into Time, not to an obscure, rationalizing gnostic filiation.