Bøger af E. M. Cioran

E. M. Cioran (1911-1995) was one of Central Europe's most remarkable philosophers, author of what William Gass called romances on 'alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease'. A Romanian, he lived much of his life in Paris and many of his major works were written in French, including A Short History of Decay, The Trouble with Being Born and Drawn and Quartered.

Originally published c1960, Editions Gallimard.--Title page verso.

"A brilliant and original exponent of a rare genre, the philosophical essay. Once read, Cioran cannot fail to provoke reaction. New York Times Book...

"Originally published in France under the title La tentation d'exister"--T.p. verso.

Now in paperback, an antidote to a world gone mad for bedside affirmation (Washington Post). E. M. Cioran has been called the last worthy disciple of Nietzsche and a sort of final philosopher of the Western world who combines the compassion of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning (Washington Post). All Gall Is Divided is the second book Cioran published in French after moving from his native Romania and establishing himself in Paris. It revealed him as an aphorist in a long tradition descending from the ancient Greeks through La Rochefoucault but with a gift for lacerating, subversively off-kilter insights, a twentieth-century nose for the absurdities of the human condition, and what Baudelaire called spleen. The aphorisms collected here address themes from the atrophy of utterance and the condition of the West to the abyss, solitude, time, religion, music, the vitality of love, history, and the void. The award-winning poet and translator Richard Howard has characterized them as manic humor, howls of pain, and a vestige of tears, but, as he notes too, in these expressions of the philosophers existential estrangement, there glows a certain sweetness for all of what Cioran calls amertume.