Romanian born E.M. Cioran, who lived in Paris until his death in 1995, writes of politics, of history, and of the utopian dream. "Cioran has a claim to be regarded as among the handful of original minds... writing today".--NEW YORK TIMES.

Dubbed “Nietzsche without his hammer” by literary critic James Wood, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran is known as much for his profound pessimism and fatalistic approach as for the lyrical, raging prose with which he communicates them. Unlike many of his other works, such as On the Heights of Despair and Tears and Saints, The New Gods eschews his usual aphoristic approach in favor of more extensive and analytic essays. Returning to many of Cioran’s favorite themes, The New Gods (...) explores humanity’s attachment to gods, death, fear, and infirmity, in essays that vary widely in form and approach. In “Paleontology” Cioran describes a visit to a museum, finding the relatively pedestrian destination rife with decay, death, and human weakness. In another chapter, Cioran explores suicide in shorter, impressionistic bursts, while “The Demiurge” is a shambolic exploration of man’s relationship with good, evil, and God. All the while, The New Gods reaffirms Cioran’s belief in “lucid despair,” and his own signature mixture of pessimism and skepticism in language that never fails to be a pleasure. Perhaps his prose itself is an argument against Cioran’s near-nihilism: there is beauty in his books. (shrink)

Born of a terrible insomnia--"a dizzying lucidity which would turn even paradise into hell"--this book presents the youthful Cioran, a self- described "Nietzsche still complete with his Zarathustra, his poses, his mystical clown's tricks, a whole circus of the heights." On the Heights of Despair shows Cioran's first grappling with themes he would return to in his mature works: despair and decay, absurdity and alienation, futility and the irrationality of existence. It also presents Cioran as a connoisseur of apocalypse, a (...) theoretician of despair, for whom writing and philosophy both share the "lyrical virtues" that alone lead to a metaphysical revelation. "No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity. . . . His writing . . . is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."--Bill Marx, Boston Phoenix "The dark, existential despair of Romanian philosopher Cioran's short meditations is paradoxically bracing and life-affirming. . . . Puts him in the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."-- Publishers Weekly, starred review "This is self-pity as epigram, the sort of dyspeptic pronouncement that gets most people kicked out of bed but that has kept Mr. Cioran going for the rest of his life."--Judith Shulevitz, New York Times Book Review Emil M. Cioran (1911-1995) is the author of numerous works, including The Fall into Time, A Short History of Decay, and Tears and Saints. (shrink)

This collection of eleven essays originally appeared in France thirty years ago and created a literary whirlwind on the Left Bank. E.M. Cioran writes incisively about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, mystics, apostles, and philosophers. "An intellectual bombshell that blasts away at all kinds of cant, sham and conventionality... ". --Jonah Raskin, L.A. WEEKLY.

The two truths -- The addict of memoirs -- After history -- Urgency of the worst -- Stabs at bewilderment.

" He asked himself if saints could be "the sources of tears' better light." "Who can tell?" he wrote in the first paragraph of this book, first published in Romania in 1937. "To be sure, tears are their trace.

Se aborda el pensamiento de E.M. Cioran desde la perspectiva de un sinsabor vital denominado sentimiento de muerte. El término, aunque aparece solo en su primer escrito, es transversal a toda su obra, puesto que para el autor los seres humanos nos intuimos como posesos de la muerte en cada momento de nuestra existencia. Esto cambia el tono normal de la vida, al poner frente a la persona una realidad carente de sentido y dominada por circunstancias radicales y limitantes como (...) el dolor y la agonía, que culmina en una atmósfera gobernada por la intuición trágica de la vida. (shrink)

RESUMEN Se aborda el pensamiento de E.M. Cioran desde la perspectiva de un sinsabor vital denominado sentimiento de muerte. El término, aunque aparece solo en su primer escrito, es transversal a toda su obra, puesto que para el autor los seres humanos nos intuimos como posesos de la muerte en cada momento de nuestra existencia. Esto cambia el tono normal de la vida, al poner frente a la persona una realidad carente de sentido y dominada por circunstancias radicales y limitantes (...) como el dolor y la agonía, que culmina en una atmósfera gobernada por la intuición trágica de la vida. ABSTRACT The article addresses the thought of E.M. Cioran from the perspective of that vital uneasiness known as the sentiment of death. Although the term appears only in his first book, the idea cuts across his entire work given that, for Cioran, human beings intuit themselves as possessed by death at every moment of their lives. When persons are faced with a meaningless reality, dominated by radical and limiting circumstances such as pain and agony, the whole tenor of life changes until it becomes a tragic intuition of life. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo vamos a otear el paisaje de la fatalidad que, sin duda, representan los escritos de Cioran, con el objetivo de analizar si es posible una solución afirmativa, al estilo de la música y el arte en Schopenhauer o el vitalismo de Simmel, a la esencia problemática de la existencia humana, lo que significa tratar de dilucidar acerca de si es posible la liberación del sufrimiento en el sujeto o, en caso de no serlo, ver en qué (...) medida podemos mitigar el dolor adoptando otro tipo de filosofías de orden terapéutico frente a otro tipo de filo-sofías de carácter pesimista que abogan por la negación de la vida como es el caso de la filosofía de la redención de Mainländer. (shrink)

E. M. Cioran (1911-1995) hatte als junger rumänischer Stipendiat der Humboldt-Stiftung die Gelegenheit, Ende 1933 eine Gastvorlesung Ludwig Klages’ (1872-1956) an der Berliner Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu hören. Klages’ Lebensphilosophie, namentlich seine biozentrische Metaphysik, wie sie vor allem in seinem gerade erschienenen Hauptwerk Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (1929/1932) zur Sprache kommt, sollte tiefe Spuren bei Cioran hinterlassen. Zentrale Klages’sche Philosopheme ziehen sich fortan wie ein roter Faden durch Ciorans Œuvre: von dem in archaischen Zeiten stattgefundenen dämonischen Einbruch des Geistes ins (...) Leben und der damit verbundenen Entstehung des schmerzlichen, weil isolierenden Bewusstseins über die Herausbildung des rational-logisch-kausalen Denkens und des Aufkommens des Willens bis hin zum Machbarkeits- und Fortschrittswahn des Menschen, der mithilfe von Wissenschaft und Technik unausweichlich zu apokalyptischer Zerstörung führt. Die Exegeten des Cioran’schen Schaffens haben zwar den generellen Einfluss der Klages’schen Philosophie registriert, doch Ausmaß und Tragweite dieser speziellen Rezeptionsgeschichte blieben bislang unentdeckt. (shrink)

In the past 20, years the impact of progressive educational theories have become influential in nurse education particularly in relation to partnership and empowerment between lecturers and students and the development of student autonomy. The introduction of these progressive theories was in response to the criticisms that nurse education was characterized by hierarchical and asymmetrical power relationships between lecturers and students that encouraged rote learning and stifled student autonomy. This article explores how the work of Michel Foucault can be mobilized (...) to think about autonomy in three different yet overlapping ways: as a historical event; as a discursive practice; and as part of an overall strategy to produce a specific student subject position. The implications for educational practice are that, rather than a site where students are empowered, nurse education is both a factory and a laboratory where new subjectivities are continually being constructed. This suggests that empowering practices and disciplinary practices uneasily co‐exist. Critical reflection needs to be directed not only at structural dimensions of power but also on ourselves as students and lecturers by asking a Foucauldian question: How are you interested in autonomy? (shrink)

The discovery of F.M. Dostoyevsky by young E. M. Cioran marks a turning point for a better understanding of his first Romanian work and his later production in French. His first work, Pe culmile disperării [On the Heights of Despair] has a tragic breath, typically dostoyevskyan, which reminds us of the tragical and sick conscience of the hero of his Notes from the Underground.

O pensamento de E. M. Cioran (1911-1995) sempre se pautou pela omnipresença de um pessimismo existencial, em que a noção de queda informa indelevelmente o seu quadro mental. Sendo o exílio ontológico uma das pedras angulares do seu catálogo reflexivo, a tragédia capital, para Cioran, seria uma queda no ser e no tempo, a inescapabilidade da existência que encontra uma particular ressonância num título como Do Inconveniente de Ter Nascido (1973). Não negando a validade destas premissas filosóficas, o presente artigo (...) visa, no entanto, colmatar aquilo que julgamos ser uma lacuna no âmbito dos estudos cioranianos, nomeadamente uma incursão sobre a pertinência, para um correcto entendimento da obra deste autor, da presença do humor e da ironia na sua forma mentis, aludindo ao conceito de profanação explanado por Giorgio Agamben, ao conceito de humor explorado por Julio Cortázar e ao conceito de desastre de Maurice Blanchot. (shrink)

Is God's foreknowledge compatible with human freedom? One of the most attractive attempts to reconcile the two is the Ockhamistic view, which subscribes not only to human freedom and divine omniscience, but retains our most fundamental intuitions concerning God and time: that the past is immutable, that God exists and acts in time, and that there is no backward causation. In order to achieve all that, Ockhamists distinguish ‘hard facts’ about the past which cannot possibly be altered from ‘soft facts’ (...) about the past which are alterable, and argue that God's prior beliefs about human actions are soft facts about the past. (shrink)

Written over the last 18 months of his life and inspired by his interest in G. E. Moore's defence of common sense, this much discussed volume collects Wittgenstein's reflections on knowledge and certainty, on what it is to know a proposition for sure.