The Book of Delusions

E. M. Cioran

Cartea Amăgirilor, chapter five, trans with an intro by Camelia Elias

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2010. Copyright © 2010 Camelia Elias and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

Page I

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.

—Ambrose Bierce

Cioran was 25 in 1936 when he wrote his second book, The Book of Delusions (Cartea Amăgirilor). If one looks at the grown body of criticism on Cioran, or early or subsequent reviews of his work, one notices that one of the things that critics emphasize is the fact that Cioran, in his youth, although as pessimistic as he ever remained, was more of a mystic, or an existential philosopher, than he was a writer of fragments as such. These comments are often made almost as a way of making up excuses for Cioranʼs early writings, which, in places, can border on the non-sensical. What critics seem to suggest almost rhetorically is that Cioran, who has now almost become a cult figure and one of the finest Romanian/French canonized writers, cannot possibly talk nonsense, can he? (Moraru, 2006; Rogozanu, 2002)

First off, Cioran himself would dislike the very idea of being called a philosopher, and as to his interest in mysticism, or the suggestion that he was a mystical writer, he would have laughed. Second off, regardless of how Cioran saw himself or his own writings, I would suggest that the value of his early works—in terms of their literary contribution to the genre of fragmentary writing and the aphorism, which he later refined unambiguously—consists of putting a constant spin precisely on the divide between sense and nonsense, reality and prophetic vision in a space that is more dense than deep.

What critics have missed so far is the fact that, whether one reads the young Cioran or the old Cioran, one is always confronted with the same type of question.

How to escape time? Whereas, speaking of realism, the recurrent claim in Cioran is this one: “we are going to die,” prophetically he is more interested in how one does it. The modality of death, as that which can be perceived as taken out of time, or rather that should be the aim of everyone—vanquish death out of time, as it were—is clearly a topic that is for Cioran not only much more fascinating than stating the obvious, but also one that borders on an attempt to write for and on the surface of things, not their depth. Space, in other words, is the big thing. It unfolds more authentically than time because it is not bound to any linear experience. Considering this subtle framework, and then logically speaking, it does not make much sense to accuse a writer of being naively, idealistically, and youthfully pessimistic—simply because one assumes that thatʼs what immature people in their 20s are like. In space, you are neither old, nor young, neither inexperienced, nor experienced.

If Cioran prioritizes space over time, it is because he is interested in the experience of space, rather than what we do with our time, how we think it, how we get rid of it, and how we forget it. Here, then, I would like to suggest that what makes Cioranʼs writings fascinating in the extreme is that he manages to make the careful reader forget about age. You just relate. In this relation of relating there is a constant that makes both Cioran and the reader appreciate a reading experience that transcends the boundary of the dichotomy sense/nonsense. Faced with the constant question: “what is the point?”—not only the point of writing, but also the point of living—the reader can do nothing other than appreciate the proposition that “the point”—when the writer insists on offering one nonetheless—one writes and one lives after all—is to be found in the interstice between continuity and gap. In the face of “there is no point in writing” Cioranʼs scribbling endeavor can be said to be completely disinterested, and hence more authentic. If a writer always thinks, as Cioran has done, that writing is a process of delusion—as writing is arrogant, presumptuous, self-aggrandizing, and useless— if one does write nonetheless against the background of such negative creativity, then one does it not because one is interested in proving a point but because one likes more the idea of situating oneself in a position that grants the writer, if not a sense of continuity, then at least its illusion. In other words, Cioran is not into counting points, but in experiencing being one himself. This is ultimately Cioranʼs strategy of taking himself ironically all the way through and thus bypassing what critics see as his necessary and unavoidable transformation, say from a young, tormented artist into a cynical master and philosopher. Here something should be mentioned that has long since become common knowledge, at least for the avid readers of Cioran. Namely, that although he often suggests the benefits of suicide in all of his writings, he never did it himself, nor did he stop “slandering the universe” with his words—a desire expressed already in his youth—until he was in his 80s.

My own point here then is to suggest that Cioran at 25 is no more naïve, innocent, immature, or refined a writer than he was at 80, at least where theme and theology is concerned. Cioran is Cioran. And the main themes in his works, whether early or late, are the same: infinity, life on a continuous line or surface, and death in the ground as the main structural divider between thought and action. These never left Cioran. Nor did he ever renounce being a theologian par excellence, in spite of his utter disgust of religion and institutionalized religious thought. On the other hand, if one insists on talking about conceptual or stylistic transformations in the manʼs oeuvre, then one would have to say that what keeps Cioranʼs energy going is his desire to be precise. Almost mathematically precise.

Against this background, what is delectable in Cioranʼs writings, particularly in The Book of Delusions, is the fact that alongside precision there is a desire to perform also and precisely the illusion of precision. If Cioran had been more versed in mathematics, especially set theory, he would have liked the way in which mathematicians such as Georg Cantor challenged universal beliefs of dimension theory. For Cantor, the interval between 0 and 1 is so densely populated with what he called transfinite numbers (numbers that donʼt have recurrent patterns, but are infinitely unpredictably uncountable (pi is such a number)) that it is virtually impossible to ever get from 0 to 1 if one were to take the time to count on the linear line 1, 2, 3, and so on (Cantor, 1874). I find what Cioran does in his writing similar to the idea of density in mathematical analysis. Leaving, however, the mathematical argument out of this discussion, my point is that when you perform density in space, as it were, it doesnʼt matter how old you are anymore. Nor does it matter how successful you are in getting a precise message across that has its roots in a mystical experience. When Cioran goes from prophetic rambling à la, “lo, and evil shall kick a pregnant woman in her belly” to offering slogan-like guidance on how to avoid being melancholic, in formulations such as these: “think the world politically,” “become a margin to yourself,” one gets the impression that one is invited within a space where reading for the plot is not an option anymore. There, one starts reading for the ax. While one would like to know what happens to the dead babies, one ends up constricting oneʼs desire to reach the end of that story to experiencing its essential extraction in the dense form of the killer aphorism: “Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity.”

Some readers may consider the passages that go mystical as writing in poor taste, and may be grateful for the well wrought bottom line that keeps reminding us that, whatever we do, there is no point to anything whatsoever. But nothing is written accidentally, or is devoid of a conscious aesthetic awareness in Cioran. So there must be a point to the pointless. In the Book of Delusions the constant tension between reading for the plot and reading for the ax, which is yet not rendered in any binary or structural way, is mediated by the density of experiencing the letter in its subjunctive mode. Which is to say that delusion is rendered as a form of failed anthropodicy, a failed justification of man to himself. It is as if what Cioran says, by literally employing the subjunctive mode—the kind of writing which is often hard to translate as it is always interrupted by interjections and modal expressions such as lo, let there be, if only, would there be—is that he who has not tried being ʻcontinuouslyʼ sad has not read anything that is ʻtrulyʼ dense. Cioran targets this density with the clearest of his arrows. But insofar as the experience of a continuous space is punctured by interruptions that mark some degree of skepticism and uncertainty as to oneʼs state of mind—am I sad or am I not?—the role of the subjunctive is nonetheless to reestablish a relation to the continuous dimension. In Cioranʼs theology of disillusionment, the reader is invited to join his private musical offering in this chant: who does not find the words, “and let there be light,” comforting? Let there then be dense light on reading.

Thus, I give you here a fragment from this as yet untranslated book into English of Cioran—the whole of chapter 5 (out of 7). As I have tried to translate Cioran à la lettre—nothing else would cut it in my opinion—there is only one poetic license that I would like to take, namely name the nameless chapter five “Densiture.” On the surface of delusion, the literature of the pointless and dense experience gives us one Cioran who deserves to have all of his works available in as many languages as possible. For the only justification we can make to ourselves for creating distinctions between and preferences for certain types of literatures that we choose to read, translate, or invent must be this: we like to be hit by an armor-piercing yet mysterious point: namely, that one never finishes with counting oneʼs blessings where inspired words that go right through us, and words that take an infinite flight in our gut are concerned. If he were still alive, Cioran would call this point in the anatomical space cosmic catachresis.

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