1、On the Heights of Despair 站在绝望的巅峰E. M. Cioran齐奥兰Translated and with an Introduction by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston The University of Chicago Press Chicago translated and with an introduction by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. p. cm.Translation of: Pe culmile disperrii.1. Philosophy. I. Title. B99.R652C5613
2、 1990 194dc20 91-35173 CIP ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction: Imagining Cioran ix 齐奥兰之印象On Being Lyrical 3 存在中的抒情How Distant Everything Is! 6 多遥远的距离On Not Wanting to Live 8 充满不愿活着的念头The Passion for the Absurd 10 对荒谬的激情The World and I 14 世界与我Weariness and Agony 16 厌恶与苦痛Despair and the Grotesqu
3、e 18 绝望与怪物The Premonition of Madness 20 疯狂的前兆On Death 22 死亡Melancholy 29 忧郁Nothing Is Important 33 一切都不重要Ecstasy 35 着魔The World in Which Nothing Is Solved 37 陷入无法解答之谜的世界The Contradictory and the Inconsequential 39 矛盾与非逻辑On Sadness 41 悲伤中Total Dissatisfaction 43 不满的总和The Bath of Fire 45 炼狱之火Disintegr
4、ation 46 瓦解On the Reality of the Body 48 I Do Not Know 49 我确实不知道On Individual and Cosmic 孤寂和宇宙Loneliness 50 孤寂Apocalypse 52 启示The Monopoly of Suffering 54 被苦难所统治Absolute Lyricism 57 绝对的抒情The Meaning of Grace 59 别有意味的优雅The Vanity of Compassion 61 空虚的同情Eternity and Morality 62 永恒与道德Moment and Eternity
5、 64 瞬间与永恒History and Eternity 66 历史与永恒Not to Be a Man Anymore 68 绝不再是个人Magic and Fatality 70 魔法与天命Unimaginable Joy 72 不可思议The Ambiguity of Suffering 73 不确定的苦难All Is Dust 74 一切都是垃圾Enthusiasm as a Form of Love 75 狂热不过是爱的一种形式Light and Darkness 79 光明与黑暗Renunciation 81 与我无关The Blessings of Insomnia 83 不眠
6、的祝福On the Transubstantiation of Love 84 变质的爱Man, the Insomniac Animal 85 人，失眠的动物Truth, What a Word! 87 真理，世界！The Beauty of Flames 88 美丽的光芒The Paucity of Wisdom 89 智慧的微粒The Return to Chaos 90 混乱的回归Irony and Self-Irony 91 反讽与自嘲On Poverty 93 超越贫穷The Flight from the Cross 95 横插一档The Cult of Infinity 98
7、Transfiguration of Banality 101 The Burden of Sadness 103 Degradation through Work 104 The Sense of Endings 106 The Satanic Principle of Suffering 108 An Indirect Animal 111 Impossible Truth 112 Subjectivity 113Homo . . . 114 Love in Brief 115 Contents Nothing Matters 116 The Sources of Evil 117 Bea
8、utys Magic Tricks 119 Mans Inconsistency 120Capitulation 122Facing Silence 123 The Double and His Art 124 Nonsense 126 E. M. Cioran: A Short Chronology 127 AcknowledgmentsI thank E. M. Cioran for entrusting me with this book, Matei Calinescu for bringing us together, Mme. Simone Bou and Jennie Light
9、ner for their very helpful editorial suggestions, my cousin, Pedro Pidal Nano, for the peace of his house by the sea where most of this translation was completed, and last but not least, my husband, Kenneth R. Johnston, whose fine sense of the English language shines forth through the book and helpe
10、d bring it to life a second time. This translation was made possible by grants from Indiana University (Office of Research Ive done it long enough, dont you think so?“ Yes, this seemed to be the “new“ Cioran, professing that he is through with writing and that he has exhausted calumny, so different
11、from my young Cioran whose first book was brimming over with blasphemy. And yet, hearing him talk, humorously and vivaciouslyanother contradiction coming from a “writer of gloomy aphorisms“I could not help feeling that I may not have been dealing with the real-life Cioran as much as with another fic
12、tion, a new persona, and that he will soon take us by surprise yet another time, for he is a master of dramatic effects who has been described as both “candid and diabolical“ by the Italian writer Pietro Citati and as “the last dandy“ by the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater. If fictionalizing th
13、e author is part of any reading experience, an exercise of the imagination which varies in degrees of importance depending on the book, it becomes a central issue in reading On the Heights of Despair, where the author deliberately invents a fictional self through rhetorical artifices and theatrical
14、gestures, in order to save his real self. Written in a moment of crisis, when he was helplessly and desperately insomniac, the book is a substitute for suicide and represents its cure. Its title makes a direct allusion to suicide notices placed in contemporary Romanian newspapers of the period which
15、 invariably opened with the same formula: “On the heights of despair, young so-and-so took his life. . . .“A rather pompous sounding phrase, “on the heights of despair“ thus came to be recognized as a sort of generic rationale for all suicides. Using the cliche ironically, Cioran casts himself in th
16、e role of what I would call “the young barbarian“ or the “beast“ of the Apocalypse, who, with a blood- and tear-stained face, uttering a savage cry of revolt and despair from the heart of his semi-Oriental Balkans, hangs over the abyss of existential nausea. By casting himself in this character, Cio
17、ran commits suicide metaphorically while managing to survive the call of death by releasing through his invented character the surplus of lyrical energy surging in him: “The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you s
18、ave part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness.“ The impulse to write in order to free himself of his obsessions has always motivated Ciorans work. As he put it in a recent interview with Savate
19、r, “Writing is for me a form of therapy, nothing more.“ Like the young Goethe of the Sturm und Drang period, who invented the suicidal Werther in order to survive a personal crisis, Cioran also creates a character out of his anguished self. But unlike Goethe, for whom Werther was a private demon he
20、managed to exorcise “so well that he did not suffer at all,“ a mere accident in a career so “limpid,“ and devoid of “sublime or sordid secrets“ that it is “discouraging,“ Cioran, who confesses he has “no organ of feeling for Goethe“ (Syllogismes de Iamertume, 22), sees his destiny as inextricably li
21、nked to the sufferer who first comes to life in On the Heights of Despair: I hate wise men because they are lazy, cowardly and prudent. . . . So much more complex is the man who suffers from limitless anxiety. The wise mans life is empty and sterile, for it is free from contradiction and despair. An
22、 existence full of irreconcilable contradictions is so much richer and creative. On the Heights of Despair is a Romantic crisis poem in prose whose main topic is the self at grips with itself, God, and the universe. The selfs personal obsessions, predilections, and manias become clear from a glance
23、at some of the chapter titles: “The Passion for the Absurd,“ “The Blessings of Insomnia,“ “Weariness and Agony,“ “The Premonition of Madness,“ “On Death,“ “On Sadness,“ “Nothing Is Important,“ “Total Dissatisfaction,“ “The Monopoly of Suffering,“ “Not to Be a Man Anymore,“ “Man, the Insomniac Animal
24、,“ “Degradation through Work,“ “The Flight from the Cross,“ “Absolute Lyricism,“ “Nonsense.“ Though not poetry, On the Heights of Despair is a very lyrical work, a “song of myself“ in which the confessional mood becomes a philosophical meditation and where the great philosophical topics like death,
25、God, infinity, time, eternity, history, truth, good, and evil are no longer abstract but acquire an organic reality, a living meaning: There are experiences and obsessions with which one Introduction: Imagining Cioran cannot live. Isnt it then salvation to confess them? . . . To be lyrical means you
26、 cannot stay closed up inside yourself. The need to externalize is the more intense, the more the lyricism is interiorized, profound, and concentrated. . . . The deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the original source of life. The origin of th
27、is song, part cry from the heart, part reflective meditation, lies in suffering from a real organic affliction- insomniaand from the crisis of despair that it induced. When Cioran writes that “the lyricism of suffering is a song of the blood, the flesh, and the nerves,“ he gives us a basic definitio
28、n of his writing, in this book as well as in subsequent works (despite their more subdued lyrical effusions): a writing in which tears turn into thoughts. Writing and philosophizing are for Cioran organically related to suffering. A running theme throughout On the Heights of Despair is that sickness
29、 and suffering have “lyrical virtues“ which alone lead to “metaphysical revelations.“ “To suf- fer is to generate knowledge,“ he will write later in Le mauvais de- miurge. His life and his work are the metamorphosis of tears: “They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are tran
30、sformed tears“ (Le mauvais demiurge, 131). The lyrical state being “beyond forms and systems,“ Ciorans writing is grotesque, formless. The chapters of his book are like a chart of his lyrical fevers, monitoring the rise and fall of his intense inner life, faithfully tracing the course of his “disper
31、sion of subjectivity.“ They are unequal both in length and in tone. Long meditations on philosophical themes are interspersed with brief lyrical outbursts, repetitive to the point of being obsessive, often comical and humorous even though the prevalent mood is one of despair. At other times, especia
32、lly in the second half of the book, they tend increasingly toward aphorism and paradox, the trademark of his later writing. The style of the book, by turns lyrical and ironical, poetical and paradoxical, rejects the technique of dry philosophical argument in favor of suggestive and vivid imagery, an
33、d reveals the intellectual and spiritual agony of the phiIntroduction: Imagining Cioran losophers mind in playful yet gripping ways, anticipating the later Ciorans unique combination of elegant style and profoundly felt thought. This kind of “grotesque“ writing self-consciously sets itself against a
34、 whole tradition of “civilized“ writing and, with its emphasis on death, suffering, and chaos, situates itself outside the domain of the aesthetic: “Compared to the refined culture of forms and frames, which mask everything, the lyrical mode is ut- terly barbarian in its expression. Its value reside
35、s precisely in its savage quality: it is only blood, sincerity, and fire.“ The young barbarians horror of the refinements of sclerotic cultures is a theme that will reappear in Ciorans portrayal of the French in The Temptation to Exist. But another, more fundamental aspect of Ciorans philosophy is p
36、resent here in his profession of faith in the resources of “absolute lyricism,“ namely, his lucidity as a thinker who discovers and mercilessly exposes the hollowness of all philosophical systems. On the Heights of Despair is a drama enacted between the suffering problematic man, that is, the organi
37、c and lyrical thinker who is Ciorans sufferer, and his archenemy, the philosopher or the sage, the abstract man, a distinction reminiscent of Nietzsches Dionysian and Socratic man. Thus Cioran writes that “Out of the shadow of the abstract man, who thinks for the pleasure of thinking, emerges the or
38、ganic man, who thinks because of a vital imbalance, and who is beyond science and art.“ The organic or lyrical thinker is the man who turns his tears into thoughts and whose thoughts are obsessions. Here is his confession: “I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a th
39、ousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to an empty abstraction.“ In the clutches of utter despair, that state of heightened lucidity which is the “negative equivalent of ecstasy,“ the lyrical thinker contemptuously rejects the intellectual optimism of the abstract man:
40、 Despair is the state in which anxiety and restlessness are immanent to existence. Nobody in despair suffers from Introduction: Imagining Cioran “problems,“ but from his own inner torment and fire. Its a pity that nothing can be solved in this world. Yet there never was and there never will be anyon
41、e who would commit suicide for this reason. So much for the power that intellectual anxiety has over the total anxiety of our being! That is why I prefer the dramatic life, consumed by inner fires and tortured by destiny, to the intellectual, caught up in abstractions which do not engage the es- sen
42、ce of our subjectivity. I despise the absence of risks, madness, and passion in abstract thinking. How fertile live, passionate thinking is! Lyricism feeds it like blood pumped into the heart! Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, criticizes the optimism or “Greek cheerfulness“ that goes with the Plat
43、onic ideal of the “dying Socrates, as the human being whom knowledge and reason have liberated from the fear of death.“ Those who pursue this ideal ultimately discover that “logic coils up at the boundaries of science and finally bites its own tail,“ whereupon “a new form of insight breaks through,
44、tragic insight. “ Similarly, Cioran attacks “those who try to eliminate the fear of death through artificial reasoning . . . because it is absolutely impossible to cancel an organic fear by way of abstract constructs.“ For Cioran, not only is the philosophers attempt to found a system an impossible
45、endeavor; it is also a sterile one, since the source of genuine human creativity lies precisely in suffering, blood, tears, and the agony of death. “All important things bear the sign of death:“ Havent people learned yet that the time of superficial in- tellectual games is over, that agony is infini
46、tely more im- portant than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears al- ways have deeper roots than smiles? In this spirit, an attitude which characterizes his later works as well (Valry face ses idoles), Cioran rejects philosophical systems whi
47、ch only manage to reduce the profound to the expressible: Those who write under the spell of inspiration, for whom thought is an expression of their organic nervous Introduction: Imagining Cioran disposition, do not concern themselves with unity and systems. Such concerns, contradictions, and facile
48、 paradoxes indicate an impoverished and insipid personal life. Only great and dangerous contradictions betoken a rich spiritual life because only they constitute a mode of real- ization for lifes abundant inner flow. Savater calls Ciorans philosophical discourse “antipedagogical.“ It tackles major p
49、hilosophical themes but deliberately resists taking shape as an informative and constructive discourse. It does not aspire to produce anything “new“ on the subject, thus renouncing all false pretensions to originality. “It never recommends anything except the horrible and the impossible and even that only ironically.“ Cioran never tires of saying that he believes in nothing. His “destructive“ discourse, going against the grain of traditional philosophical practice, unremittingly seeks to expose the contradictions inherent in any philosophical system and cu
