At 10, Cioran moved to Sibiu to attend school, and at 17, he was enrolled in the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Bucharest, where he met Eugène Ionesco and Mircea Eliade, who became his friends. [1] Future Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica and future Romanian thinker Petre Țuțea became his closest academic colleagues; all three studied under Tudor Vianu and Nae Ionescu. Cioran, Eliade, and Țuțea became supporters of Ionescu's ideas, known as Trăirism. [ citation needed]

Cioran often contradicts himself, but that’s the least of his worries. With him, self-contradiction is not even a weakness, but the sign a mind is alive. For writing, he believed, is not about being consistent, nor about persuasion or keeping a readership entertained; writing is not even about literature. For Cioran, just like Montaigne several centuries earlier, writing has a distinctive performative function: you write not to produce some body of text, but to act upon yourself; to bring yourself together after a personal disaster or to pull yourself out of a bad depression; to come to terms with a deadly disease or to mourn the loss of a close friend. You write not to go mad, not to kill yourself or others. In a conversation with Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater, Cioran says at one point: “If I didn’t write, I could have become an assassin.” Writing is a matter of life and death. Human existence, at its core, is endless anguish and despair, and writing can make things a bit more bearable. “A book,” said Cioran, “is a suicide postponed.”

His early call for modernization was, however, hard to reconcile with the traditionalism of the Iron Guard. [16] In 1934, he wrote, "I find that in Romania the sole fertile, creative, and invigorating nationalism can only be one which does not just dismiss tradition, but also denies and defeats it". [17] Disapproval of what he viewed as specifically Romanian traits had been present in his works ("In any maxim, in any proverb, in any reflection, our people expresses the same shyness in front of life, the same hesitation and resignation... [...] Everyday Romanian [truisms] are dumbfounding."), [18] which led to criticism from the far-right Gândirea (its editor, Nichifor Crainic, had called The Transfiguration of Romania "a bloody, merciless, massacre of today's Romania, without even [the fear] of matricide and sacrilege"), [19] as well as from various Iron Guard papers. [20] France [ edit ] Portrait of Cioran Imagining the author is part of any reading experience. For the translator, even more than for the ordinary reader, the author, or that fiction named Author, is a personal obsession. Like Jacob who wrestled a mysterious being all night long, the translator struggles silently with the author until he blesses him or lets him go. Like Jacob, he wants to know his opponent, to see him face to face, is haunted physically and spiritually by the author’s face, his name, his strength, his style. So I struggled with Cioran, and for a long time I imagined him like a spirit conjured up from the lines of his text as from a witch’s brew: a leonine head, Zarathustra’s voice, dramatic poses alternating between those of a biblical prophet and a Western dandy. Above all, I saw him as frightfully young and precocious, with an uncanny affinity for suffering and a diabolical propensity for self-torture, an enfant terrible full of somber and cruel vitality, dangerously playing at philosophy, toying with poisonous and lethal thoughts. Regier, Willis (2005). "Cioran's Nietzsche". French Forum. 30 (3): 84. doi: 10.1353/frf.2006.0012. JSTOR 40552402. S2CID 170571716– via JSTOR. Cioran, E. M. The Trouble with Being Born. Translated from the French by Richard Howard (New York: Seaver Books, 1976)

He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Bucharest and in 1932, he received a BA in philosophy with a thesis on Bergson’s thoughts. From 1933 to the end of 1935 Cioran studied philosophy in Berlin with a grant from the Humboldt Foundation.In 1933, he published his first book entitled “On the Heights of Despair”, which won the Prize of the Royal Academy for young writers. It was the first of only two literary prizes that Cioran did not reject. Read romania-insider.com's review of Cioran's 'On the heights if despair' here.

Whatever success he had, Cioran considered it from the standpoint of his lifetime “failure project,” and he developed a habit of reading success into failure and failure into success. The most successful things he did were not his books, celebrated and translated all over the world as they became, nor his growing influence among people of philosophical taste. Not even his status as a master of the French language. “The big success of my life,” he says, “is that I’ve managed to live without having a job. At the end of the day, I’ve lived my life well. I’ve pretended it has been a failure, but it hasn’t.” In Bucharest I met lots of people, many interesting people, especially losers, who would show up at the cafe, talking endlessly and doing nothing. I have to say that, for me, these were the most interesting people there. People who did nothing all their lives, but who otherwise were brilliant. In 2003, the Project Cioran was started; its aim is to promote the study of the life, work and influence of Cioran. The cosmos is “fallen” for Cioran, but so is the social and political world. For truly nothing escapes failure for this 20th-century Gnostic. In an attempt to transcend the political failures of his youth, he sought to understand their deeper meaning and incorporate this understanding into the texture of his mature thinking. The result was a more nuanced philosophizing and a more humane thinker: his experiments with failure brought Cioran closer to a province of humanity to which he could not otherwise have had access, that of the ashamed and the humbled. You come across in his French books passages on failure of an inspired, drunken wisdom: Although pessimism perspires throughout the book, still you can find traces of optimism, which was said to define his life, rather the pessimism in his works, as in the essay “Enthusiasm as a form of love”: “the joy of achieving and the ecstasy of efficiency are the essential characteristics of the man for whom life is a leap toward heights where destructive forces lose their negative intensity.”

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Liiceanu, Gabriel. Itinerariile unei vieţi: E.M. Cioran; Apocalipsa după Cioran (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2011) For the rest of his life Cioran would remain secretly indebted to that land of failure that was his country. And he was right to do so. For Romanians entertain a unique relationship to failure; just as the Eskimos have countless words for snow, the Romanian language seems to have just as many associated with failure. One of the verbal constructions most often used in Romanian, which Cioran cherished, is n-a fost să fie (literally, “it wasn’t to be,” but with strong predestination undertones). The country is truly a goldmine. In his books, Cioran never stopped berating the gods, except, we might say, for the god of failure, the demiurge of the Gnostics. There is something distinctly Gnostic about Cioran’s anti-cosmic philosophy and the manner of his thinking. Gnostic insights, images, and metaphors permeate his work, as scholars of Gnosticism have noticed. A Short History of Decay, The Temptation to Exist, and The New Gods, writes Jacques Lacarrière, are “texts which match the loftiest flashes of Gnostic thought.” Just like the Gnostics of old, Cioran sees creation as the result of a divine failure; human history and civilization are for him nothing but “the work of the devil,” the demiurge’s other name. In A Short History of Decay, he deems the God of this world “incompetent.” “Of all that was attempted on this side of nothingness,” he wonders, “is there anything more pathetic than this world, except for the idea which conceived it?” The French title of one of his most influential books, which in English has been published as The New Gods, is telling — Le Mauvais démiurge (1969): “the evil demiurge.” Here, with unconcealed sympathy, Cioran calls the Gnostics “fanatics of the divine nothingness” and praises them for having “grasped so well the essence of the fallen world.”

William H. Gass called Cioran's The Temptation to Exist "a philosophical romance on the modern themes of alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease". [37] Before Corneliu Codreanu, Romania was but an inhabited Sahara … I had only a few conversations with Corneliu Codreanu. From the first moment I realized that I was talking to a man in a country of human dregs … The Captain was not “smart,” the Captain was profound.

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Failure permeates everything. Great ideas can be stained by failure, and so can books, philosophies, institutions, and political systems. The human condition itself is for Cioran just another failed project: “No longer wanting to be a man,” he writes in The Trouble with Being Born ( De l’inconvénient d’être né, 1973), he is “dreaming of another form of failure.” The universe is one big failure, and so is life itself. “Before being a fundamental mistake,” says Cioran, “life is a failure of taste which neither death nor even poetry succeeds in correcting.” Failure rules the world like the whimsical God of the Old Testament. One of Cioran’s aphorisms reads: “‘You were wrong to count on me.’ Who can speak in such terms? God and the Failure.” a b Regier, Willis (2005). "Cioran's Nietzsche". French Forum. 30 (3): 76. doi: 10.1353/frf.2006.0012. JSTOR 40552402. S2CID 170571716– via JSTOR. In 1995, Cioran died of Alzheimer's disease [29] and was buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery. [1] Major themes and style [ edit ] But, above all, it is a probing – the sensitivity of our fragile, ruined teeth be damned – of the vast silence that arises when we stop begging and complaining long enough to actually listen for God’s reply.