PATXI LANCEROS
Sunday, January 19, 2020 - 02:08
- Share on Facebook
- Share on Twitter
- Send by email
- Philosophy. From death to life
It is the mere coincidence, that fatal contingency that affects every birth and that is going to be one of the fundamental themes of Emil Cioran's thinking and writing, which justifies, slightly , the ironic title of this text. Well, although professional or stateless stateless person, Cioran was born (because at first, and against all odds, was born) in Transylvania , surrounded, or escorted, by the Carpathians. It would not be correct at all to say that he was born Romanian, because at the height of 1911, the future writer was a subject more of the Kakania of Robert Musil: of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire.
That his youth coincided with the time of the Empire's explosion , with the period of greatest turbulence in a Europe wounded by death, with the promotion of a philosophy of anguish, fear and despair, or with a literature of the catastrophe (also a painting, or a music) that turned life and, above all, death into the main actors of historical drama is not irrelevant. But it is the starting point of a fundamental discrepancy .
Because Cioran, much less fictional, much less romantic and much more subtle, also places life and death at the center of his thinking: but not as characters in a story or as extremes of an action, but as axes around which one of the most imposing literatures of the last century. And, without a doubt, one of the most provocative and fascinating. Not a tragedy, but rather a comedy , perhaps macabre.
"... And life is not good, noble, or sacred." It makes perfect sense to bring up that exact and terrible verse of Federico García Lorca in his impressive Ode to Walt Whitman , of Poet in New York ; and it makes sense, because that verse summarizes much of Cioran's philosophy, and perhaps gives a clue to approaching the Transylvanian stateless's style. Anticipatory verse, written between 1929 and 1930, when the philosopher (I will never spare that name for Cioran, which is sometimes discussed) had not yet completed his studies or adopted the language, French, which would eventually be his means of expression.
In fact, an event became popular for a while, only half-ironic: "The two best contemporary French writers are Romanian Cioran and Czech Kundera ."
But let's go to the trajectory, the one that leads Cioran to fulfill the imperative of the Pindárico becomes what you are: in your case, one of the greatest writers in the French language; and one of the indispensable philosophers of the bitter, desperate, tearful and rotten 20th century. The occasion, mere occasion, is an ephemeris: the fact that on June 20, the death of Cioran will be fulfilled (because in the end, and against all odds, he died); and the fact that the Tusquets publishing house has reissued In the tops of despair (early work, 1934) and a cyclopean version of its Notebooks (1957-1972), in addition to promising The Book of Chimeras and The Sunset of Thought , among other.
Cioran remembers with affection his childhood and his first adolescence of Rasinari and Sibiu: affection perhaps transferred from nostalgia, or from more pathological melancholy. But that region, protected by the Carpathians, was their paradise . And, like every paradise worth its salt, it will be a lost paradise. Bucharest first, the reason is his admission to university, will be the beginning of his uprooting and the beginning of the experience that is at the base of his thinking. There, by the way, he would meet two people (not yet characters), certainly notable or perhaps outstanding, who will be part of his scarce club of permanent friendships: Mircea Eliade and Eugéne Ionesco (two other non-Romanians who expressed themselves, preferably, in French language)
Also at that time, or a little later, there was his approach to the most radical sectors of politics, including the fascist commands led by Corneliu Codrianu. Like paradise lost, contact with visceral nationalism was instructive: Ciorán abandoned the nationalist virus and patriotic passion forever.
Perhaps from melancholy, perhaps from despair, perhaps from exile, the philosopher was born. The genuine, unbearable and tenacious philosopher . The one who trained a look often charged with reproach, but, above all, driven by irony. The philosopher, I do not regret disagreeing with the usual opinion, does not suit him at all as the pessimist.
How to reconcile this last judgment with the title of one of his works ?: Syllogisms of bitterness, On the tops of despair, Breviary of rot, Of the inconvenience of being born, The temptation to exist , just to name a few.
I think you can. And I think you can, thus, invite the reading of an always untimely thinker, lucid to cruelty. The answer is irony.
It is known that the eiron was that character of the classic comedy, precedent of the jester in other times, who takes his strength from the arguments, or from the mere routines, of his interlocutor. It is that character, victorious in the dialectical duel, superb in the dramatic challenge , that tells the truth, although the truth is offensive or uncomfortable: or precisely because it is. It is also that figure that permanently moves in the surroundings of the excess, or that cultivates the hyperbole until it becomes a work of art and a figure of thought.
Cioran is the eiron of contemporary comedy. And I think you earn a lot when you address your reading in a comic and not in a tragic code.
There is no common place that Cioran has not made his own . There is no routine or laziness of speech that I have not reported. If he has moved within the limits of the absurd, if he has opted for the most radical and absolute impertinence (that is, not belonging to anything or anyone), he has done so with full awareness: full of reasons and passions. We are talking about a writing, a style. Not from a man. Because Cioran is the name of a prodigious text, of a brave text, of a risky text to the extremes: without disregarding the extremes of excess and error , even ridicule.
To transit these margins, dangerous as few, built a delicate, precise prose. Aphorisms that interrogate, injuring paragraphs, sentences that ruin long-established convictions: about life and death, birth and suicide, reason and madness , love and desire, God and Nothing.
Hegel famously said that there are two types of philosophy: systematic and uplifting ; or philosophy of the concept and philosophy of life. Cioran, against Hegel, against the world and against God, makes philosophy of life. That is, philosophy of death. You cannot review its pages, again and again, without appreciating, in every sense of the term, the will to demolish all the usual idols: without the possibility, comforting after all, that these idols are replaced by others.
May life - mine, yours - be a contingency and a condemnation; that life is a mere arrogance, or chulería, of matter, is a rigorous and accurate finding. Cioran's voice, his writing, makes that finding, perhaps terrible, pleasant, almost happy. I confess: I have never been able to read Cioran without a smile , without a gesture of complicity: even where his prose hurts.
"Because you are part of your century, of his barbaric revelry," wrote a poet, Spanish and young (which is not necessarily a condemnation; or two). Barbarian and revelry; revelry and barbarian . Cioran described that century: and that century is all.
When one reads Cioran's diaries, when the stench of dead flesh is hinted at in prose, one imagines the Carpathian philosopher (a bit like Dracula, his countryman) coming out of the coffin, contemplating the scene with sarcasm, and writing : «I had already said it». And I am nobody, and I am nothing.
And then, with a smile, he recovers the replica of the eiron, the impeccable prose of the jester , the sacred jester, who speaks to you in the ear of tears, rot and bitterness. The one who reads life from the evidence of death.
Cioran, essential. There, in his coffin and with his death, which is not that of everyone but that of each one, he will verify the words of another poet, César Vallejo: «But the corpse, alas! He kept dying ».
....................
Patxi Lanceros is a professor of Political Philosophy and Cultural Theories at the University of Deusto and author of 'Out of the Law. Power, justice and excess'. among others
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more- Philosophy
- culture
- literature
George RR Martin opens a bookstore, the paradise of Game of Thrones fans
Language The RAE chooses 14 words that explain 2019: self-determination, feminize, climate, Eurosceptic ...
Language Pedro Álvarez de Miranda: "There is little room for rebellion in the language"