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All Gall Is Divided: Aphorisms

by Emil Cioran, Richard Howard (Translator)

4.2 of 5 stars 4.20 · rating details · 219 ratings · 12 reviews

As Diogenes lived in a tub, Cioran lived on the intellectual margins of the modern world. He never lectured or held an academic position. Like his friends Beckett and Ionesco, he stood apart from all the official trappings of his chosen medium, philosophy. There is a kind of manic humor in these howls of pain, a vestige of tears in these derisions: not since Nietzsche has...more

Hardcover, 128 pages

Published August 25th 1999 by Arcade Publishing (first published 1952)

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Dec 03, 2012 Jerome rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Similiar in layout to Tears and Saints, All Gall Is Divided proved to be an enjoyable, though (as always) slightly disheartening. The shorter aphorism is definitely Cioran's speciality, and it was a nice comparison to A Short History of Decay. I felt that his earlier works packed a stronger punch, but this was not objectionable in the least. Ultimately, found All Gall Is Divided to be more witty than insightful. Waiting to read Temptation to Exist and History and Utopia next.

A few favorite quot...more

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Oct 01, 2012 S©aP rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: officina-del-pensiero, filosofia, 1900, letteratura-rumena, letteratura-francese

Meno scoppiettante di altri testi di Cioran, questa raccolta di aforismi risente - a mio giudizio - dell'essere stata concepita e stesa in maniera coerente. Quasi un progetto, a capitoli precisi. L'intuizione, lo sprazzo di senso, l'idea remota e fulminante che si afferra a fatica prima che svanisca, in quanto tali non si programmano. Non si... seminano. Si possono semmai cogliere, estemporaneamente, e collezionare, passeggiando in un esistenza di pensieri. Questa lettura restituisce intatte, qu...more

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Mar 05, 2012 Jamie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: com-theory

Not as bitingly funny or intensely satisfying as "The Trouble With Being Born" or "A Short History of Decay," still I have to fall at the feet of a thinker that shook me by the collar or took me by the hand ten years ago and hasn't left me since. I found a warmth in Cioran that came from hours of devout study to the point where I was able to perceive the humor and the sublime in his works.

This collection, written when he was in his early twenties, is a nice companion piece to "A Short History o...more

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Nov 08, 2010 Linda rated it 4 of 5 stars

In this small book of aphorisms, Cioran has no problem expressing his thoughts. Although they are dark and somewhat cold, one can't help but respect his honesty and intelligence.

1 like · like · see review

May 15, 2013 Ffiamma rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"l'arte di amare? è saper unire a un temperamento di vampiro la discrezione di un anemone"

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Feb 26, 2012 Carlos rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Después de "Ese maldito yo" uno de los mejores libros de aforismos de Cioran.

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Oct 09, 2008 Sven Karel rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

La solitude, ce n'est pas d'être seul, mais le seul. [] Cioran
Hard to translate this, maybe somethin' like :
Loneliness is not to be alone, but rather the only one.
(Here's an idea of this philosopher.)

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May 09, 2008 Bill Kerwin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Cioran: the darkest, most ironic of aphorists. Strange, but his outlook is so relentlessly bleak, so completely nihilistic, that he often makes me laugh. Such honesty is rare--and bracing.

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Mar 08, 2008 Tosh rated it 5 of 5 stars

So bleak that it's almost hysterical. But really I love E. M. Cioran because I feel he sees the world in its proper light.

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Jun 14, 2012 Massimiliano Scordamaglia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recensione completa qui
http://ultimavisione.wordpress.com/20...

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Nov 14, 2010 Barbara rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Imprescindibile.
"In un mondo senza malinconia gli usignoli si metterebbero a ruttare"

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Nov 29, 2009 Cornélia rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: paperback, fiction-essais-classics

I lost count on how many time I read this book. I just loveeeee it.

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Shelves: ebook

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About Emil Cioran

Born in 1911 in Rasinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adoles...more Born in 1911 in Rasinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adolescent years in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy in the “little Paris” of Bucarest. A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair).

Influenced by the German romantics, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the Lebensphilosophie of Schelling and Bergson, by certain Russian writers, including Chestov, Rozanov, and Dostoyevsky, and by the Romanian poet Eminescu, Cioran wrote lyrical and expansive meditations that were often metaphysical in nature and whose recurrent themes were death, despair, solitude, history, music, saintliness and the mystics (cf. Tears and Saints, 1937) – all of which are themes that one finds again in his French writings. In his highly controversial book, The Transfiguration of Romania (1937), Cioran, who was at that time close to the Romanian fascists, violently criticized his country and his compatriots on the basis of a contrast between such “little nations” as Romania, which were contemptible from the perspective of universal history and great nations, such as France or Germany, which took their destiny into their own hands.

After spending two years in Germany, Cioran arrived in Paris in 1936. He continued to write in Romanian until the early 1940s (he wrote his last article in Romanian in 1943, which is also the year in which he began writing in French). The break with Romanian became definitive in 1946, when, in the course of translating Mallarmé, he suddenly decided to give up his native tongue since no one spoke it in Paris. He then began writing in French a book that, thanks to numerous intensive revisions, would eventually become the impressive A Short History of Decay (1949) -- the first of a series of ten books in which Cioran would continue to explore his perennial obsessions, with a growing detachment that allies him equally with the Greek sophists, the French moralists, and the oriental sages. He wrote existential vituperations and other destructive reflections in a classical French style that he felt was diametrically opposed to the looseness of his native Romanian; he described it as being like a “straight-jacket” that required him to control his temperamental excesses and his lyrical flights. The books in which he expressed his radical disillusionment appeared, with decreasing frequency, over a period of more than three decades, during which time he shared his solitude with his companion Simone Boué in a miniscule garret in the center of Paris, where he lived as a spectator more and more turned in on himself and maintaining an ever greater distance from a world that he rejected as much on the historical level (History and Utopia, 1960) as on the ontological (The Fall into Time, 1964), raising his misanthropy to heights of subtlety (The Trouble with being Born, 1973), while also allowing to appear from time to time a humanism composed of irony, bitterness, and preciosity (Exercices d’admiration, 1986, and the posthumously published Notebooks).

Denied the right to return to Romania during the years of the communist regime, and attracting international attention only late in his career, Cioran died in Paris in 1995.

Nicolas Cavaillès
Translated by Thomas Cousineau(less)

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“Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.” — 33 people liked it

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