One can gauge the significance, or at least the independence, of a thinker not least by how long and by what means he eludes his emulators, even those who purport to be faithful commentators or to have been called upon to develop his impulses. In this respect, Cioran might without further inquiry have to be reckoned among the most significant philosophical writers of the twentieth century, since in a manner other than the star philosophers of existentialism, Critical Theory, or poststructuralism, who achieved their goals in protest of imitation, Cioran invested his intellectual suffering entirely in his inimitability. Yet the concept of significance does not do justice to the phenomenon that is Cioran, since the fundamental impetus of his thought is not that of seeing his name registered in a history of ideas or in an account of great authors. Rather, he wants to see that his pride in defending his inimitability against students and copycats is satisfied. While the great masters of the modern culture of dissidence, that is to say, Heidegger, Sartre, Adorno, and Derrida, could reckon their successes in multitudes of emulators, Cioran, more proud, more demonic, more despairing than they were, recognizes his success in discouraging potential emulators already when they are on the brink of making the attempt. He knew that all emulation ends up in parody and that whoever takes his ideas more seriously than their success shields them from the parodies that follow their impact.
The question is thus how one manages to transition from emulative negativity, which as revolutionary engagement, radical critique, aesthetic anarchism, or deconstructivist subversion forms a school, to an inimitable, completely idiosyncratic negativity that nonetheless shines light on the whole. In this context, we might recall the relevant difference in late ancient Egyptian and Syrian monasticism between friars living in cloisters and anchorites, of which the first, according to an observation by Hugo Ball, existed as athletes of mourning, while the second existed as athletes of despair. It cannot be doubted that Cioran’s place in this alternative must be sought among the anchorites, those who have withdrawn and cut themselves off from the terrestrial realm. In this position, it is no longer a matter of struggling with and reworking beings according to critical methods, but rather of putting God and the world on trial by holding one’s own shattered existence against them as proof of their failure and waywardness. While critical or subversive negativity has the effect of forming schools to the degree that its standpoint can be charted, established, copied, and simulated in beings, despairing negativity withdraws into an exile that cannot be taught, is fathomless, and cannot be emulated. In the elaboration of this position of exile lie Cioran’s singular strengths. After Kierkegaard, he is the only thinker of distinction who had the irrevocable insight that no one can despair according to sure methods.
Whoever intends to obtain his doctorat should not take the trouble to first ask Cioran whether he would like to supervise the work. The distance from the world that is characteristic of critical theorists, aesthetic anarchists, and deconstructivists is always based on a reserve from which the respective schools claim, not unjustly, that within limits they can be learned by means of a method. What Husserl called the epochē, the break with the natural attitude, means nothing other than the perfectible practice of opting out of the stream of gesticulating, intending, involved life. To this belongs the methodical cheerfulness of theory’s spectating disposition, even for mournful miens. In contrast, Cioran works with a pathological epochē, of which it cannot be ascertained how one should copy or convey it. His uprootedness is not grounded in a theoretical distancing from a normal and naive life; it arises from the curse of finding oneself to be a really existing anomaly. His reserve is anything but methodological, it is demonic. In his case, critique was preceded by torture. While ordinary critical theory, to say nothing of ordinary positive theory, distances itself from merely living out one’s life, in order to emancipate the thinker from his conditions and provide him with the resources to resist and rework the real, desperate theory is only interested in bearing witness to the failure of the construct of reality as such. Its distance is not taken up arbitrarily, but rather can be found already before all theory as an effect of a suffering in the thinker.
Cioran’s Archimedean point, from which he unhinges the normative view of the world and its philosophical and ethical superstructure, is the discovery of the privilege of sleeping, from which all other minds, not least such as take themselves to be relentlessly critical, profit as though from something self-evident. His unparalleled clear-sightedness in the disenchantment of all positive and utopian constructs has its basis in the pervasive stigma of his existence—in a sleeplessness that was undoubtedly of a psychogenic character and which marked him for years in his formative phase. This is what lends an envenomed epochē to the thinker, Cioran. The insomniac knows, in contradistinction to the critic, that he is not the master of his premises. Insomnia is not an assumption that is made, not a disposition of the practicing subject, not a provisional vacation from one’s own life in support of a pure attentiveness, and certainly not a theoretical preparatory exercise for practical revolution. A putting into question of existence and its fictions imposes itself on the insomniac, which reaches deeper than any reflective, subversive, or aggressive deconstruction. For the subject of insomnia the evidence is produced, in a way that is not sought, that all acts of both the naive and the critical life are descendants of the privilege of sleep, which again and again makes possible for its possessors the return to a minimal vital illusion. Sleep fulfills the tired human being’s demand for relief by means of discreet downfalls of the world; it is the small change of the redemption from evil; its coming to pass answers the natural prayer of fatigue. Cioran’s insomniaapriori, in contrast, opens up for thought the possibility that the subject’s plea for a temporary cancellation of the world’s compulsion of life is not answered. It is in this sense the meditation of the unanswered, which must be endured as continual wakefulness. Such an existence is a kind of torture in which the torturer is not identified and his questions not precisely posed. Already the early Cioran thinks from the position of a permanent ontological crucifixion that never reaches the point at which the victim may say consummatum est. Because sleeplessness is not a work, neither one that redeems nor one that is enlightening, it can never be declared to be finished. The insomniac is not nailed to the cross of reality, but rather is included in the gelatinous mass of the half-real. He finds out that what is gelatinous is more implacable than what is hard. While one is shattered by the latter and meets his end, one is wrecked by the former and remains spared for endless continuations. Sleeplessness is deconstruction without deconstructivists.
Cioran often noted that the characteristic impulse of his thought and writing was the reversal of a curse into a distinction. But how can the crippling effect of lost sleep be reversed into an active disposition? In a twofold way: insofar as the author, as he says himself, changes his being worn down into something chosen, and insofar as he gains an intense desire for vengeance from his forced vigilance.
With both turnings, Cioran proves himself to be a Judeo-Christian theologian in the Nietzschean sense of the term. The analyses from Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality on the origin of the spirit of the theologian from out of ressentiment are initially fully accurate when applied to him. Cioran is in fact a theologian of reactive wrath, who imputes to the creator God his failure and to the created world its inability to take him in. In the mode of his reaction, Cioran reveals himself to be a dark doppelganger of Heidegger. Where the latter elaborated the crypto-Catholic thesis that thinking means thanking, Cioran unfolds the black-Gnostic counter-thesis that thinking means avenging oneself. In both cases thinking is a corresponding: a logical gathering and giving back of that which was sent to the thinker as a gift of Being. But while Heidegger’s thoughtful giving back—after its heroic beginnings—subsides into a mild, positive wanting-to-be-an-answer, in Cioran the instinct for an immense restitution remains acute. It is always clear to him that where there is a gift there is always a giver who remains to be exposed. While the spirit of the fundamental ontologist, relieved by sleep, continually and gratefully meditates anew on Being as giver and gift [Gabe], the consciousness which revolts, continually sharpened by the deprivation of sleep, devotes itself to the task of transforming the poison of Being [Seinsgift] in its own existence into precise powers of immunity and of denouncing the poisoner. Nihil contra venenum nisi venenum ispe.1Cioran’s singularity can be recognized in the fact that he developed a systematically revanchist praxis of thinking. He did not declaim against the temptations of Being and invitations to faith as an avenger in some private affair, nor as someone debased and aggrieved in the sociological sense, but rather as a medium of a transcendental wrath and as an agent of an offensive skepticism. He is a wrathful Job, who displays his defects as striking arguments against the sadistic creator. As the guardian of a chosen wrath he is as selfless as only the founder of an ascetic order could be. As guardian of his pride in this wrath he is as egomaniacal as only a Satanist could be. His philosophical revanchism is the negative of thoughtful thankfulness. Like no one else in this or any century he made it clear that thinking is a thankless occupation—especially when the intelligible future today belongs less than ever before to thinking, which is not able to move beyond meditating and stewing in its wrath, than it does to the will that formulates projects and sets operations in motion. Cioran is only lucid in not-willing, while willing for him—as for his distant kinsman Heidegger—remains an alien mode. He never sets foot in the world of willing; his whole life long he will hear nothing of what is pragmatic. He is suspicious of those who are able to believe. His hatred applies to those who are able to will.
His thankless thought lapsed into absurdity, because in him the impulse for vengeance against God extends further than does the belief in God. Under the auspices of the absurd, Cioran, the son of a priest, reaped an anachronistic aftercrop of the era of religious metaphysics, by contriving for himself the role of the reactionary blasphemer. He toppled the idols that were no longer up to date; he holed up in his garret like an anchorite, whose ascetic practice consists in piling up disappointments. By virtue of his revanchism, Cioran held onto a juvenile, vicious negativity his whole life long. It was his early and never revised pride in not lowering himself to maturity. This is what makes his writings so uniquely dense, insistent, and monotonous. He knew that his malaise was his strength and that he as an author should only treat a single theme so as not to sink into arbitrariness. He grasped it early enough: his only chance consisted in repeating himself. Sartre’s critical words, that vice is on principle the love of failure,2 registers what Cioran should have chosen as his motto. In contrast to Nietzsche, another son of a clergyman of whom there is continual talk, Cioran marked an important point through his insistence on revenge. If the former was committed to the attempt to bank his thought completely on aristocratic, affirmative, and non-reactive drives, Cioran abandoned himself to a descent into the hell of a non-aristocratism and reaction. On the basis of his degradation he also bore within himself the discovery that there is a magnanimity of vengeance which rivals allaffirming thought. His work is vengeance without an avenger and payback that knows no loss.
For this reason, his writings have therapeutic effects. Their clarity in forlornness immunizes against the temptation to amorphously surrender. In a manner different than Nietzsche, Cioran did not behave like someone who has overcome his own decadence, perhaps because he even saw through Nietzsche’s ultimate illusion, the sick dream of a great health. He accepted his decadence, his morbidity, his foreordained condemnation to skepticism as poisons of Being and distilled his writings as antidotes. The knowers and the needy may make use of this as it seems wise to them. Yet the emulators will not find in Cioran’s apothecary what their ambition seeks.
I recall a conversation with the old Cioran in the German House of the Cité Universitaire in Paris in the mid-1980s, in the course of which I brought the conversation around to his suspicious and disparaging statements about Epicurus. He immediately seemed to understand what I had in mind with my query. He candidly explained that he recanted his claims and now felt Epicurus to be very close, that he saw in him today one of the real benefactors of humanity. The word ‘benefactor,’ quietly uttered aloud, sounded oddly significant on his tongue. For on this occasion he dispensed with any sarcasm. Perhaps the recognition had ripened in the garden of his sleeplessness that there is need of a special kind of generosity that allows the human being a retreat from the fronts of the real, and that this world can less than ever do without teachers of retreat. Our century has known none more decisive than him.
Not Saved
Essays after Heidegger
Peter Sloterdijk
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