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Anathemas and Admirations
In this collection of essays and epigrams, E. M. Cioran gives us portraits and evaluations - which he calls "admirations" - of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the poet Paul Valery, and Micea Eliade, among others. In alternating sections of aphorisms - his "anathemas" - he delivers insights on such topics as solitude, flattery, v...more
Paperback, 264 pages
Published
September 15th 1998
by Arcade Publishing
(first published 1986)
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Sometimes it is possible to learn from an idiot. I read a library copy of Cioran's Anathemas and Admirations annotated by some young soi-disant deep thinker who has taken Philosophy 101 and is ready to take on the world. On the title page, under "Anathemas and Admirations," he has added "and Self-Pity." Throughout the book, his marginalia are critical of E. M. Cioran without the slightest understanding of what he is about, what he has been through, and what is his contributio...more
Jacob Wren
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E.M. Cioran writes:
Every impulse of renovation, at the very moment when it approaches its goal, when it realizes itself through the State, creeps towards the automatism of the old institutions and assumes the face of tradition. As it defines and confirms itself, it loses energy, and this is also true of ideas: the more formulated and explicit they are, the more their efficacy diminishes. A distinct idea is an idea without a future. Beyond their virtual status, thought and actio...more
Every impulse of renovation, at the very moment when it approaches its goal, when it realizes itself through the State, creeps towards the automatism of the old institutions and assumes the face of tradition. As it defines and confirms itself, it loses energy, and this is also true of ideas: the more formulated and explicit they are, the more their efficacy diminishes. A distinct idea is an idea without a future. Beyond their virtual status, thought and actio...more
I’ve never really figured out how one Cioran book is different than the other, but I love them all. Short essays interspersed with marvelously grumpy aphorisms:
My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
To have accomplished nothing and died overworked.
A faith that acknowledges other faiths, that does not believe itself to possess a monopoly on truth, is doomed to ruin, abandoning the absolute that legitimizes it, resigning i...more
My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
To have accomplished nothing and died overworked.
A faith that acknowledges other faiths, that does not believe itself to possess a monopoly on truth, is doomed to ruin, abandoning the absolute that legitimizes it, resigning i...more
Cioran's a bitch. A little bitch. He definitely values being clever-as-all-hell over being right or even consistent. My high school gym teacher back in Iowa probably would have called him a "wiseacre" or some such thing. When smart, continental types publish volumes of essays, we the readers generally get a good idea of who they as people are. Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag... all probably great people to have a beer with. Cioran would probably stub his cigarette o...more
Ler um dos últimos capítulos de Exercícios de Admiração foi como afrouxar ligeiramente a corda que Breviário de Decomposição havia enlaçado em meu pescoço.
"Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it."
Tipología del fatalismo
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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
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“However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness, and caprice.”
—
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