Word: cioran
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...peers rework existing ideas to justify media-hyped, crowd-pleasing moralism. "BHL has taken up all the great causes of our time," Cohen writes. "BHL is a bit to literature what Mondavi is to wine." Asked to respond to Cohen's book, Lévy quotes Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran ("I've always asked myself how it is the mere risk of having a biographer doesn't dissuade us from having a life"), then says he's content to let people decide for themselves. He also argues that modern French thinkers aren't so different from past generations. "The great...
...Have we not, in the face of universal dilettantism, the consolation of possessing, with regard to pain, a professional competence?" asks the Rumanian philosopher E.M. Cioran, no mean student of suffering himself. The answer is an emphatic yes, as every publisher's list of autobiographies proves...
...here and now, to eliminate the "depth" consciousness of a metaphysical void and the need to transcend it, to find happiness by other means than spiritual self-aggrandizement, and to destroy the historicizing consciousness that piles up layers of immobilizing interpretations, ambiguities, expectations, and despairs that inhibit what Cioran calls "the temptation to exist...
What is the remedy for that walking case of psychic diseases, overcivilized man-meaning Cioran, meaning ourselves? One Cioran suggestion is "screaming-rooms" where we can, through howls, relieve "ourselves of the horror of others and of the horror of ourselves...
...Clearly Cioran has the desperate sense of excess to qualify him as a 1970s man. Professional doubters, too, are a dime a dozen these days. But the special value of Cioran is that, with all his heart, he doubts even doubt itself. He is the man with no answers who tests everybody else's answers with a skepticism at the pitch of fanaticism. No age should be without such a man; no age needs more than...