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state of struggle of one who is alive, within time: sleepless.
“Three in the morning. I realize this second, then
this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for
each minute. And why all this? Because I was born.
It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the
indictment of birth.”
A special type of sleeplessness being where one is
oneself forever and knows it. It is also an indictment of
lyricism. Lyricism is sleep; the suppression of subjectivity,
the impossible denial of ‘three in the morning’.
Adorno’s call for an end to lyric poetry after Auschwitz
is a wish for the return of each subject destroyed by a
revolution lyrical to its evil core. The Volk wanted to
sleep. Then it was mass rallies at Nuremburg, now its
anything you care to name: popular culture indeed. Cioran’s
physical insomnia disallowed the easy contempt
for those who craved such sleep. He needed it too, to
stay alive. A familiar irony: Cioran’s tragedy was also
his saving. “Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet
it is melancholy that separates us from it.”
When Cioran began to write in French he had, by
then, conquered his insomnia. Exhausted by long
bicycle rides, he slept. Still, the writing tries to abide
in the old white nights of insomnia, only to collapse
into the sleep toward which literature tends. Cioran’s
writing tends to disperse the ‘three in the morning’ in
lyric expression. So, a bit of a disappointment, to say
the least.
BUY E.M. Cioran books online from and
“As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they
know they must not be impatient, that it will come soon
or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to
proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The
disabused man is different: for him, disappointment
occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to
await it, it is present.”
To say again then, his disappointment with writing
was inevitable. But this only drives one on, to divest
words of their common usage and apply them to this
moment. This one. In an interview, he tells of his
disillusionment with writing’s other products, particularly
those where disappointment is not an issue:
ideas, grand narratives, systems. “Philosophers are
constructors, positive men, positive, mind you, in a bad
sense.” Elsewhere: “Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel – three
enslavers of the mind. The worst form of despotism is
the system, in philosophy and in everything.” Yet how
can one write without constructing some system, even
if it is negative?
“’Optimists write badly’ (Valery). But pessimists do
not write.” [Maurice Blanchot]
The violence of Cioran’s work, its verbosity and
arrogance, results from a struggle with inevitable
positivism. The use of aphorism is also borne of this.
It demands our opposition. The blank following the
sentences rises up before us. Our exasperation leaves
the same silent space hovering there. This is the place-
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