In Romania the debate was enhanced by the publication, after the collapse of communism, of Cioran’s entire work, including part of his hitherto unknown correspondence. And the appearance, after his death, in France, of two posthumous books, Mon Pays (Gallimard, 1996), and Cahiers, 1957–1972 (Gallimard, 1997) was, of course, extensively commented on in both countries. These books show that, unlike his fellow Romanian intellectuals with whom he was associated in the right-wing political movement (Eliade, Noica), Cioran was, after the war, continuously obsessed with his “guilty” youth. He viewed his political commitment to the extreme rightwing “Revolution” as a mixture of craziness and stupidity, due to the suffocating environment of his mediocre and apathetic homeland, an oppressive dead end, without past or future. “My Country! I wanted, by hook or by crook, to cavil at her but she wasn’t even there for me to cavil to,” he wrote in the early 1950s. Thinking again and again about his country, his countrymen and himself, Cioran concludes, in obvious disgust: “I hated my country, I hated everybody and the entire universe: so that, in the end, nothing was left to hate but myself: which I did, in the devious way of desperation.” And he adds: “When I look back … it is another man whom I abjure now, everything that means ‘Me’ is now elsewhere, two thousand leagues away from what I was.”
As ambiguous or superficial as his statements may still sometimes be (he thought, for instance, that the “error” of the Iron Guard was “to conceive a future for a place without one,” transferring their guilt onto the country and its people, even while he still believed the Iron Guard’s martyrs “achieved for themselves a destiny which exempted their country from having one”), it’s obvious that, after the war, Cioran was ashamed and burdened by his past political commitment, and that he kept his distance, in fact, from any political connections.
Yet, what still proved to be an impossible, never-ending, complicated, and troubled process was the taming of his genuine, innate nihilism. For better or worse, his nihilism remained the energetic spiritual force behind his creative writing, behind its originality and style. He kept his lonely struggle alive, as a writer, as a performer, a clownish philosopher mocking philosophy, I would say, a solitary apatride with a Buster Keaton mask, and as a seducer, of course, even if the seduction was rarely obtained through virtuous means. He was ever the Devil’s advocate.
The Romanian writer Marta Petreu remarked recently, in a rigorous essay, “Doctrina legionara si intelighentia interbelica” (Apostrof, 1998), that Cioran was a heretic even as he was a supporter of the Iron Guard. Knowing too well that the political project of the Iron Guard meant, in the end, a total suppression of freedom, he still wanted to be a “free man”: claiming for himself the right to rebel, to be different, unique, above the mob. His “elitism” seemed to be, as Marta Petreu emphasizes, the essential reason for his ultra-reactionary political views of the 1930s and 1940s. “An epoch of boundless liberties, of ‘sincere’ and extreme democracy, lingering indefinitely, would mean an inevitable collapse of humankind. The mob wants to be ordered about,” Cioran wrote in 1937.
Readers will recognize the obvious separation and also the lasting connection between the young and the old Cioran. Already aging, he seems, at the time of writing these “notes,” more sensitive to human suffering, more vulnerable and even more tolerant. His loneliness and lucidity still play with negation, even in some frivolous form, but his melancholy runs deeper as the consequence of a painful knowledge that the end of his earthly, pagan adventure is near. He seems, indeed, “more inclined to accept even the liberal democratic Western world with its quintessential injustice, with its vermin of businessmen and shopkeepers, with its freedoms,” as Matei Calinescu wrote in an excellent study, “Reading Cioran” (Salmagundi). And yet, Cioran still thought, in 1960, in History of Utopia that: “‘Freedoms’ prosper only in a sick body politic: tolerance and impotence are synonymous.”
As a master of paradox and, therefore, an “anti” type of thinker, a fighter of banality, canons, and standards, common sense and common taste, Cioran always followed his stubborn “anti”-ness, even when the result was not necessarily of real spiritual relevance. “Being paradoxical — embracing ideas and opinions that go against the grain, that are shocking to the common sense or to what is more or less generally accepted — becomes an imperative, a categorical aesthetic (and implicitly amoral) imperative, as it were. A certain kind of (theoretical) extremism is always involved,” proposed Matei Calinescu.
This may also be a key for reading some of the fragments from Cahiers. It may contribute, in a way, even to the understanding of the most scandalous statement, such as “There is something worse than anti-Semitism: it is anti-anti Semitism.” What exactly does Cioran mean by this? Does he equate anti-Semitism with the gas chambers? Does he see anti-anti-Semitism as a profitable “show,” a false rhetoric and demagogical militancy? And can these two be compared? He doesn’t qualify the terms: neither dark or frivolous or boring anti-Semitism, nor cheap or vigorous or inflated or boring anti-anti-Semitism. The reader should be reminded, at this point, that Cioran’s relationship with Jews and their fate was never simple. He never wrote about the Jews in the consistently harsh way he wrote about his fellow Romanians, and we, probably, cannot ask for more from a zealous nihilist and a heretic. Yet, his statements about Jews were always ambiguous and often held double meanings.
In 1937, when Romanian anti-Semitism was booming and the generic iconoclastic Rebel-Cioran was already a supporter of the extreme right-wing political movement, he proved ready to adopt the “banal” view that the Jewish “antinational spirit” was, of course, a threat to the country. He added, however, that another threat was Jewish “superiority.” This was a quite daring “paradoxical” statement, at a time when anti-Semitic laws were based on the assumption of the inferiority of the “Jewish race,” but it was not necessarily a statement of sympathy or solidarity with the “enemies” of his country. Similarly, he wrote, then, that anti-Semitism was “the greatest tribute paid to the Jews.”
During and after the war, Cioran was, it seems, shocked by the Jewish tragedy, by what happened to his Jewish friends (the novelist Mihail Sebastian, who remained in Bucharest; the Romanian-French poet Benjamin Fondane, killed at Auschwitz; the Romanian-German poet Paul Celan, who committed suicide in Paris). In his postwar essay dedicated to the Jews (“A People of Solitaries”), which Susan Sontag considered “surprisingly cursory and high-handed,” Cioran attempted a kind of codified dialogue with his prewar texts on the same topic. “I found myself loathing them with the fury of a love turned to hate … I had only a bookish commiseration for their suffering, and could not divine what was in store for them.”