Skip to main content

Emile Cioran Biography

Émile Cioran

(Émile or Emil Michel Cioran; Rasinari, 1911-Paris, 1995) French philosopher of Romanian origin whose thinking is characterized by extreme pessimism and nihilism.The son of a rural priest, he studied philosophy in Bucharest, where he became friends with Eugène Ionesco and Mircea Eliade; his doctoral thesis dealt with Henri Bergson, in a few years in which he assimilated influences from Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.Later he traveled to Germany and was for a short time professor of philosophy in Brasov.In 1937 he obtained a scholarship from the French Institute of Bucharest and went to Paris, where, with some absence, he lived until his death.

Émile Cioran

He began writing in his country and in France in the Romanian language, and early composed some books anticipating his marked pessimistic and challenging attitude to ideologies and social conventions, such as En las cimas de la desparación (1934) , The book of chimeras (1936), Of tears and saints (1937), The decline of thought (1940) and Breviary of the vanquished (written during the Nazi occupation of Paris).The first had a great reception, but the third caused a strong scandal, which consolidated his decision to stay in Paris.

In 1946 he renounced his nationality and declared himself stateless.In 1947, while translating Stéphane Mallarmé into Romanian, he decided to adopt French as the language of expression. Breviary of rottenness (1949) will be his first text written in French, as a challenge to his roots and the affectivity that is linked to them and to the language.

His essay production is immense, resolved in numerous cases through aphorism and paradox, which gave him the freedom to argue without needing a system to do so, lash out and expose his opinions and analysis.His many books include Silogismos de la amargura (1952), The temptation to exist (1956), The fall in time (1964) , Of the inconvenience of being born (1973).Each one of them is a furious attack on ideologies, religions and philosophies created by human beings to justify their behavior.

His life and his work, inseparable, are located on the periphery of the established, outside of any conventionalism.Thus, he renounced the term "philosopher", adopting that of "organic thinker", according to which, every lived event, physical or intellectual, is used to mold a conceptual body.His style escapes from the usual formal rigor of philosophers, acquiring freer and more literary, even poetic ways.

His work arises from a negative inner impulse, the result of an awareness of the nonsense of existence and a desire to oppose it through the therapeutic exercise of writing.In his texts, Émile Cioran is convinced of the intrinsically evil nature of humanity, and takes pleasure in recreating the dark side of it, in order to draw conclusions that are not at all reassuring.In his later days he embraced Buddhism.

Book by book, E.M.Cioran affirmed his nihilistic and marginal personality, which, however, grew in popularity.With his radical freedom of thought (which also governed his personal life, as well as asceticism and mocking attitude towards everything around him), Cioran is one of the most creative and original thinkers of the 20th century, much as for his contempt and amusement was often described as heretic, provocateur, "esthete of despair" or "courtier of the void," because of his bitterness and corrosive vision.On the other hand, he called himself a "man without a biography" and applied other equally mocking considerations.Other works of his are Exercises in admiration (1986) and The twilight of thought (1991).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Arthur Penn Biography

Arthur Penn (Philadelphia, 1922-New York, 2010) American film director.After World War II he joined a theater company as an actor and attended drama classes at the Actor's Studio; in 1951 he entered the NBC television network as a program manager.In 1958 he made his first film, El lezurdo ; the cold reception he received at its premiere meant a temporary brake on his film career, but he prospered as a theater director in Broadway plays.In 1962 he returned to the cinema with The Miracle of Ana Sullivan, a film for which Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke won Oscars.In 1964 he suffered a new setback with Acosado (1965), while La huría humana (1966), with Marlon Brando, was received with divided opinions.His next film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), was a resounding success, finally achieving his talent.Like Bonnie and Clyde , some of his other films address the past in terms applicable to the present, and his films of the 1960s are regarded by many as the most relevant American work...

Apartheid

In the history of Africa, one of the most significant moments and periods was that of Apartheid, and that consisted of a racial segregation lived in the twentieth century that lasted until the early 90s in South Africa. It is hard to believe that in a country like Africa , and specifically in Sufafrica , the colonialism of the first white powers, will end up in a period of segregation in which the black population barely had rights and that I ended up separating them from everything. Article index How it was born and what is Apartheid: In the mid-twentieth century and although the black population was mostly over the white, appears what we know as Apartheid , derived in fact from a certain white supremacy that had been imposed since the beginning of this Century (In fact in 1910 only the whites could access the Parliament and a 1913 law on indigenous lands limited the land that could be in the hands of blacks to 21 million acres. This word is translated from African...

Antoni Rubió i Lluch Biography

Antoni Rubió i Lluch (Valladolid, 1856-Barcelona, ​​1937) Catalan historian and scholar.He studied at the University of Barcelona, ​​where he was a student of Milà and Fontanals.Doctor in 1878, in 1885 he succeeded his teacher in the chair of History of Literature at the University of the Catalan capital, from which he formed several generations of disciples, until his retirement in 1928.From 1908 he also held the chair of Catalan literature founded by the Catalan University Studies. He collaborated assiduously.in Catalan and Spanish, in the main academic publications in Barcelona.He was a member of the Institute of Catalan Studies.His trips to Italy and Greece put him in contact with the documentary and monumental sources of the history of these peoples in relation to that of Catalonia and especially with that of the period of Catalan-Aragonese domination in the Duchy of Athens.As a tutor and literary critic, he methodized the teaching of the history of Castilian literature. Am...

John Bissel Carroll Biography

John Bissel Carroll (Hardford, 1916) American psychologist.Specialized in the psychology of language, he has studied the problem of different individual linguistic aptitudes and their pedagogical consequences.His works include The teaching of French as a foreign language in eight countries (1975).

Camilo Torres Restrepo Biography

Camilo Torres Restrepo (Jorge Camilo Torres Restrepo; Bogotá, 1929-San Vicente de Chucurí, Santander, 1966) Priest and Colombian guerrilla.After being ordained a priest in 1954 and completing his training with sociology studies in Belgium (1954-1959), he participated in the founding of the Faculty of Sociology of the National University of Colombia, where he taught between 1959 and 1962. Camilo Torres Restrepo Worried since his youth about deep social inequalities, the charismatic personality of Camilo Torres Restrepo, the coherence of his progressive message and his initiatives in favor of the classes most disadvantaged had made him, since his return to the country, a figure of great relevance.The expulsion from the university (1962) increased its public projection and marked the beginning of an approach to revolutionary positions, which culminated in the abandonment of the priesthood and the incorporation of the National Liberation Army into the guerrilla (1965).Since then cal...

Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant Biography

Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant (Marc Antoine Girard, lord of Saint-Amant; Quevilly, 1594-Paris, 1661) French poet.From a Protestant family, he converted to Catholicism in 1627.In Paris he became friends with Th.De Viau and frequented the literary salons, especially that of Mme.of Rambouillet.He was in the service of the Duke of Créqui and the Count of Harcourt and traveled throughout Europe.He was one of the first members of the French Academy (1634).He is the author, among other titles, of the satirical poem Ridiculous Rome (1643) and the biblical idyll Moisés saved (1643).His poetic work, condemned in his time by Boileau, has subsequently been revalued as one of the most original expressions of French lyric of his time.

Georges Clemenceau Biography

Georges Clemenceau (Mouilleron-en-Pareds, 1841-Paris, 1929) French politician and journalist.As a journalist and leader of the parliamentary left, he was one of the most influential men in French politics in the late 19th century.During his second term as Prime Minister (1917-1919), he led the war effort that led France to triumph over the Axis powers, and played an essential role in the peace talks that concluded in the Treaty of Versailles, establishing himself as one of the most important figures in politics of his time. Georges Clemenceau He was the first of six children from a humble family.Born and raised in a region of strong traditionalism, Clemenceau received, however, from a very young age, the anticlerical and progressive influence of his father, Benjamin, imbued with the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.At the age of twelve he entered the Lycée de Nantes.During his student days in that city, he was introduced, through his father, into the politic...

Hosea Biography

Hosea Old Testament prophet, the first of the group of the so-called Twelve Minor Prophets.Born around 800 BC.and died around 725 BC, he developed his ministry in the northern kingdom (Israel), where he came from.Hosea preached at the end of the reign of Jeroboam II (782-743 BC) and in the time of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah; therefore, its prophetic mission must be between 750 and 725 BC. The prophet Hosea He is credited with the authorship of the so-called Book of Hosea , in which the prophet denounces the people's infidelity towards Yahweh and it reveals the tender love of God, comparable to that of the husband who forgives his unfaithful wife or the father who loves his rebellious son.The book comprises fourteen chapters, and is divided into two parts.The first (chapters 1-3) symbolically exposes Israel's infidelity and announces her punishment and salvation in a presaged return to national unity.The second (chapters 4-14) directly challenges the people with r...

Guillermo Cabrera Infante Biography

Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Gibara, Cuba, 1929) Cuban writer, nationalized British.In 1951 he founded the Cuban Cinematheque, of which he was director until General Batista ordered its closure, a work that he combined with his articles on film criticism for the magazine Carteles, which he published under the pseudonym G.Caín (1954-1960).He also directed the literary magazine Monday of Revolution, banned in 1961 by Castro.In 1966 he published his first renowned novel, Tres tristes tigres, whose experimental nature lies in the ingenious use of language in its most colloquial register and the constant play of winks and references to other literary works.He was a diplomat in Brussels, until he definitively broke with the Castro regime and settled in London.He has written other outstanding novels, such as Vista delmanecer en el tropico (1974), Exorcismos de esti (l) o (1976) and essays such as Vidas para leerlas (1998).In 1998 he received the Cervantes Prize.