Tag: Emil Cioran

You can buy Christopher Pankhurst’s Numinous Machines here.

2,455 words

Christopher Pankhurst
Numinous Machines
San Francisco, Calif.: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2017

Whenever I read a book with the intention of writing a review, I like to underline certain passages as well as jot notes in the margins. This quickly became an untenable approach for Christopher Pankhurst’s Numinous Machines, as there was simply too much to pull from the text. The book is a collection of essays that seeks out the numinous spirit in arts and culture in an era that is devoid of almost anything vital whatsoever. (more…)

980 words

Emil Cioran was a Romanian philosopher. Cioran was born on April 8, 1911 in Rășinari (Transylvania, then part of Austria-Hungary and today part of Romania) and died stateless in Paris on June 20, 1995. A nationalist writer in his youth, after the Second World War he achieved fame as a French-language author of essays and aphorisms of a markedly dark and apparently nihilistic bent.  (more…)

Alphonse de Neuville, The Huns at the Battle of Chalons

2,411 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: The following extracts are drawn from Emil Cioran, Précis de décomposition (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). The title is editorial.

There are no beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: The great persecutors are recruited among the martyrs who were not beheaded. (13)

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John William Waterhouse, Diogenes (1882)

872 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

One cannot know what a man must lose to have the courage to defy all conventions; one cannot know what Diogenes lost to become the man who allowed himself to do everything, who turned his most intimate thoughts into acts of a supernatural insolence, as would a god of knowledge, at once libidinous and pure. No one was more frank; an extreme case of sincerity and lucidity, as well as an example of what we could be if education and hypocrisy did not restrain our desires and actions.

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369 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Hailing from some unfortunate tribe, he paces about the West’s boulevards. Having loved one fatherland after another, he no longer hopes for any: Frozen in a timeless dusk, a citizen of the world – and of no world, – he is ineffective, nameless, and without vigor. (more…)

1,472 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: This article is translated from the French version in Emil Cioran, Apologie de la Barbarie: Berlin–Bucharest (1932-1941) (Paris: L’Herne, 2015). (more…)

497 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

We can penetrate the error of a being, reveal to him the inanity of his schemes and of his errors; but how can we tear him away from his relentlessness in time, when he hides a fanaticism as ingrained as his instincts, as ancient as his prejudices?

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1,016 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: This article is translated from the French version in Emil Cioran, Apologie de la Barbarie: Berlin – Bucharest (1932-1941) (Paris: L’Herne, 2015), pp. 67-71. (more…)

1,980 words

Emil Cioran
Apologie de la Barbarie: Berlin – Bucharest (1932-1941)
Paris: L’Herne, 2015

This is a very interesting book released by the superior publishing house L’Herne: a collection of Emil Cioran’s articles published in Romanian newspapers, mostly from before the war. (more…)

The French signing the armistice with the Germans at Compiègne on June 22, 1940.

3,210 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: The following extracts are drawn from Emil Cioran, De la France (Paris: L’Herne, 2015). The original was written in Romanian in 1941. The title is editorial.

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Sébastien Bourdon, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia

833 words

Translated by Guillaume Durocher

Translator’s Note: The following extracts are drawn from Emil Cioran, De la France (Paris: L’Herne, 2015). The original was written in Romanian in 1941.

Countries – unfortunately – exist. Each one crystallizes a sum of errors called values, which it cultivates and combines, and which it circulates and gives currency towards. Their totality constitutes the individuality of each country and its implicit pride – but also its tyranny, because it weighs unconsciously on the individual. (more…)

2,942 words

Emil Cioran
De la France 
Paris: L’Herne, 2015

This is a strange, vile little book as only Emil Cioran knew how to produce. It was only recently published, in both the original Romanian and in French translation,[1] having been written in 1941 and left to languish for decades in some cardboard box in the Cioran archives. (more…)