'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.