'intimate impasse of the speculative mind'

"One response to the collapse of philosophical system building in the nineteenth century was the rise of ideologies— aggressively anti-philosophical systems of thought,taking the form of various "positive" or descriptive sciences of man. Comte, Marx, Freud, and the pioneer figures of anthopology, sociology, and linguistics immediately come to mind.

Another response to the debacle was a new kind of philosophizing: personal (even autobiographical), aphoristic, lyrical, anti-systematic. Its foremost examples: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.
Cioran is the most distinguished figure in this tradition writing today.

The starting point for this modern post-philosophic tradition of philosophizing is the awareness that the traditional forms of philosophical discourse have been broken. What remain as leading possibilities are mutilated, incomplete discourse (the aphorism, the note or jotting) or discourse that has risked metamorphosis into other forms (the parable, the poem, the philosophical tale, the critical exegesis).

Cioran has, apparently, chosen the essay form. (...) But these are curious essays, by ordinary standards - meditative, disjunctive in argument, essencially aphoristic in style. One recognizes, in this Rumanian-born writer who studied philosophy at the University of Bucarest and who has lived in France since 1937 and writes in French, the convulsive manner of German neo-philosophical thinking, whose motto is: aphorism or eternity. (Cf. the philisophical aphorisms of Lichtenberg, Novalis, Nietzsche, passages in Rilke's Duino Elegies, and Kafka's Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way.)

Cioran's broken arguments are not the "objective" kind of aphoristic writing of a La Rochefoucauld or a Gracián, whose stopping and starting movement mirrors the disjunctive aspects of "the world". Rather, it bears witness to the most intimate impasse of the speculative mind, moving outward only to be checked and broken off by the complexity of its own stance. Not so much a principle of reality as a principle of knowing: namely, that it's the destiny of every profound idea to be chackmated by another idea which it implicitly generated."


na introdução a Temptation to Exist, de Cioran, por Susan Sontag.

Searching for Cioran

Searching for Cioran

novel

"When the average man lays claim to a destiny, then the average man can describe his own. The believe that psychology reveals our essence necessarily endears our actions to us. We imagine they possess an intrinsic or symbolic value. Then comes the snobbery of complexes which teaches us to exaggerate our wits, to be dazzled by them, to gratify our ego with faculties and depths it is obviously un-endowed with. The intimate perception of our nothingness, however, is only partially veiled by this process.

We suspect that the novelist who relies on his life is only pretending to believe in it, that he has no respect for the secrets he discovers there: he is not taken in, and we, his readers, are still less so. His characters belong to a second-rate humanity, conscious and contaminated, suspect on account of their artifices, their intrigues. We do not readily conceive of an astute King Lear ...

The vulgar, the parvenu aspect of the novel determines its characteristics: fatality inhibited, lower case destiny, romantic agony, pseudo-tragedy déclassée.

Compared with the tragic hero, so rich in the adversity that is his eternal patrimony, the contemporary novel’s main character seems like a naive candidate for ruin, horror’s cheap-jack, over-eager to destroy himself, terrified to fail. He suffers from the very uncertainty of his disaster. There is no necessity for his death. We sense that the author could have saved him, which makes us uncomfortable, spoils our pleasure as readers.

Whereas tragedy occurs on an absolute level, so to speak: the author has no influence over his heroes, he is only their servant, their instrument. They are the ones in control, and they prompt him to institute proceedings against themselves. They rule, even in the works for which they serve as a pretext. And these works affect us as realities independent of both the writer and the marionette-strings of psychology.

We read contemporary novels in an altogether different way. The novelist is always uppermost in our minds. His presence haunts us. We watch him struggle with his characters. In the long run, he is the only one who holds our attention. What is he going to do with his characters? How will he get rid of them? We wonder. Our curiosity tinged with apprehension. If someone once said that Balzac rewrote Shakespeare using failures, what can we think of today’s novelists, obliged as they are to deal with a humanity that has deteriorated still further? Bereft of cosmic inspiration, the novel’s inhabitants cannot manage to counterbalance the dissolving effect of their knowledge, their will to lucidity, their lack of character."

Cioran em 'Beyond the Novel', em Temptation to Exist.

a bit more.