Product Description
More than any other study of Cioran, Marta Petreu's intensive investigation of his life and work confronts the central problem of his biography: his relationship with political extremism. The scene of Cioran's excesses is Romania and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, a time of xenophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, Nazism, and Stalinism. Norman Manea's Foreword reminds us of Cioran's stature in Western intellectual circles and explains the critical importance of An Infamous Past. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Reading this is like listening to a broken record
The book is excellently researched (kudos to the author, Marta Petreu). However, even the best biographer must find it difficult to summarize someone like Emil Cioran, who had trouble organizing his own words into a coherent text. Reading about the articles and books he wrote is like listening to a broken record: I'm ashamed to be a Romanian. Romania will never become a culture (nation). They can't blame anyone but themselves for being a total historic failure. On and on.

The author did a great job of trying to present his one-track exposition (though he changed trains of thought in his later life). Actually, the best summary of Cioran's youthful, radical philosophy was given near the end of the book, when Marta organized his words into his "confession."

In spite of its drawbacks (Cioran was, after all, only a "bit player" in the generation of 1927 compared to Mircea Eliade or even professor Nae Ionescu), it's a book that's worth reading. I especially enjoyed Chapter 10 ("Cioran and the Ideologies of His Time"), which compared the thoughts of others in his generation to those of Cioran.

Before I read the book, I had no positive or negative thoughts about Cioran. After I read the book, I grew to dislike the guy who sponged off of others, refusing to work, pretending to be an intellectual. But I guess these were the kind of people who made a difference in inter-war Romania. And worth reading for that reason.

Cioran's apology
"An Infamous Past" concentrates on Cioran's early days and his infatuation with the legionary movement and its rise and effect on Romania's intelligentsia in the 1930's.

While the book is excellent, and Marta Petreu has performed both impressive research and drawn reasonable conclusions, the translation by Bogdan Aldea (who incorrectly translates "Totul Pentru Tara" as "Everything for the Fatherland" (the word "patria" means fatherland while the word "tara" means country), and the failure to acknowledge Codreanu's eventual abandonment of antisemitism and violence as a means (both actions which perpetuate a distortion of Romanian history), earn this book a one star demerit.

The Best Book on Cioran in English
The Chicago publisher Ivan R. Dee has already published one major Romanian book in English translation, Mihail Sebastian's JOURNAL 1933-1945.Petreu's book is something different--a clear, serious, and straightforward scholarly study, a type of book seldom undertaken by an American commercial publisher.It is well chosen, though its future depends entirely on the reputation of Cioran, and it will do little to enhance that reputation.
Petreu is intimately familar with Cioran's writings, and quotes from them liberally.That alone would make this book an important source for readers of Cioran who cannot read Romanian.She has also troubled to read his 1930s journalism and his correspondence (some of which she has collected and published in Cluj), texts unavailable in English.There is some repetitiveness, but with good reason.
Petreu also is a student of history and is able to place Cioran's "lyrical philosophy" and praise of fascism (and of Hitler) in the context of Romanian politics.This by no means excuses Cioran.Rather, Petreu shows how and why fascism appealed to him in his twenties, when his literary ambitions, his dismay at European contempt for Romania, and his faith in destiny converged in opportunistic rant.Later in life, Cioran bitterly regretted these years.Petreu provides the ugly details, showing how much he had to regret.
Finally, her discussion of the Iron Guard, the blackshirts of Romania, who murdered and marauded in the name of pure Christianity, is a frightening reminder of what militant Christian politics can do.
Petreu writes that Cioran's "fundamental nature--decadent, amoral, aesthetic" (p. 182) was a fertile ground for his commitment to Romanian fascism.Cioran's current fame as a writer and a philosopher rests on the books he published in Paris after World War II.Petreu's book provides vital background for his Parisian career, showing how his fascist years continued to affect his later work, sometimes with hints, often with suppression, and always with fear and revulsion.

Brilliance and Evil often go together
Wagner is the Western Archetype of the Evil, ugly person who creates what is in the opinion of many great Art. Cioran is another example. Carlin Romano in a concise and powerful review of this book which appears in the 'Daily Chronicle of Higher Education' traces Petreu's uncovering of Cioran's Nazi past. She exposes his identification with murderous barbarity even against his own Romanian people.
Cioran's Nazi past was covered up in the Post- War years when his aesthetic flamboyance made him an intellectual star. But even in the stardom there were common elements with the old Nazi sympathizer. Misanthropy, a hatred of anything which seemed to not share his own distorted view of things.
This book exposes a certain double-sidedness in Cioran , on the one hand anadmiration for Jewish creative powers, and on the other a vicious anti -Semitic fear of alleged Jewish spoiling of ' pure national cultures'.
Cioran according to Romano spend most of his life in Paris leeching off friends , and diatribing against among others fellow Romanians. He seems to have been a singular unpleasant character , and one who like Nietzsche profited in literary terms, from the human love of spiteful things said against other human beings.
Without knowing anything about his Nazi pastI tried very hard years ago to read his work, and found myself running up against a tremendous amount of strongly declarative unproved utterance, aphorisms at their worse.
This book gives us a Cioran of mostly warts. The rest would advisedly be silence. ... Read more

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Les achats comprennent une adhésion à l'essai gratuite au club de livres de l'éditeur, dans lequel vous pouvez choisir parmi plus d'un million d'ouvrages, sans frais. Le livre consiste d'articles Wikipedia sur : Marquis de Sade, Denis Diderot, Karl Marx, Georges Bataille, Émile Littré, Bruce Lee, Emil Cioran, Giacomo Leopardi, Auguste Comte, Jürgen Habermas, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ayn Rand, Noam Chomsky, David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Renan, Michel Clouscard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacob Burckhardt, Lénine, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Meslier, Albert Camus, Michel Onfray, Erich Fromm, Nicolas de Condorcet, Charles Sanders Peirce, Ernst Haeckel, Marcel Gauchet, Max Stirner, Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin, Julian Huxley, Jean-Baptiste Say, Henri Lefebvre, Ludwig Büchner, George Edward Moore, Alexandre Kojève, John Stuart Mill, William Godwin, Marcel Conche, Prosper Alfaric, Jean-François Revel, André Comte-Sponville, Henry Sidgwick, John Dewey, Jeremy Bentham, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Alexandre Zinoviev, Paul Henri Thiry D'holbach, John Ralston Saul, Henri Wallon, Friedrich Engels, Douglas Hofstadter, Thomas Samuel Kuhn, Ludwig Feuerbach, Wilfrid Sellars, Bruno Bauer, Wilhelm Wundt, Manuel de Diéguez, Alfred Tarski, Paul-Louis Couchoud, Daniel Bensaïd, Robert Nozick, Allan Bloom, Gilbert Boss, Gueorgui Plekhanov, Massimo Cacciari, Egon Bondy, Thomas Nagel, Ollivier Pourriol, Peter Singer, William Kingdon Clifford, Daniel Parrochia, Nicolas Fréret, Ernst Bloch, Michael Martin, Cristoforo Bonavino, Théodore L'athée, Kai Nielsen, Mario Bunge, Patrick Declerck, Guy Haarscher, Fernando Savater, Leszek Kołakowski, Daniel Dennett, Benedetto Croce, Bernard Williams, Jean-Marc Piotte, Paul Kurtz, Gaétan Soucy, David Chalmers, Joseph Dietzgen, Massimo Pigliucci, Joseph Xaupi, Diagoras de Mélos, Burghart Schmidt, James Mill, Michael Shermer, Pierre Bertrand, Kazimierz Łyszczyński, John Moore, Paul Churchland, Patricia Churc...http://booksllc.net/?l=fr ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Siempre!, published by Edicional Siempre on September 10, 1998. The length of the article is 1147 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Recuento. (carta sobre el escritor Jorge Luis Borges)(TT: Recount) (TA: letter about writer Jorge Luis Borges)
Author: Sealtiel Alatriste
Publication: Siempre! (Refereed)
Date: September 10, 1998
Publisher: Edicional Siempre
Volume: v45Issue: n2360Page: p69(1)

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Product Description
Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston's critical biography of the Romanian-born French philosopher E. M. Cioran focuses on his crucial formative years as a mystical revolutionary attracted to right-wing nationalist politics in interwar Romania, his writings of this period, and his self-imposed exile to France in 1937. This move led to his transformation into one of the most famous French moralists of the 20th century. As an enthusiast of the anti-rationalist philosophies widely popular in Europe during the first decades of the 20th century, Cioran became an advocate of the fascistic Iron Guard. In her quest to understand how Cioran and other brilliant young intellectuals could have been attracted to such passionate national revival movements, Zarifopol-Johnston, herself a Romanian emigré, sought out the aging philosopher in Paris in the early 1990s and retraced his steps from his home village of Rasinari and youthful years in Sibiu, through his student years in Bucharest and Berlin, to his early residence in France. Her portrait of Cioran is complemented by an engaging autobiographical account of her rediscovery of her own Romanian past. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

"To despair is to be Romanian"
If you have read any of Cioran's books and been astonished by them, by their relentless spirit of twilight negativity and acerbic melancholy, if you have marveled at this man who writes in such a personally lyrical and at the same time perversely declarative manner, then this book will be a most welcome addition to your understanding of whatever you might have read of this Romanian author's works and been left to ponder.

Almost all of Cioran's works are now available in English translation (with the sore exceptions of his 1930s political tract "Romania's Transfiguration" and the "Cahiers" (Notebooks), but until the appearance of this book penned by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, the capable translator of his Romanian-language works who sadly died in 2005, and which in turn was completed by her husband, Kenneth Johnston,there was for English-language readers nothing like a biography or a critical study of his work that was intended for general audiences.Prior to that, if you wanted to know anything about Cioran's life or intellectual development, then you had to cobble together the scraps provided in some of the introductions accompanying the translated works or wade through a handful of ponderous academic monographs not always written in English.

This book is still not a full and comprehensive study of Cioran's life or his output as a writer since it focuses on the early Cioran, from his birth in 1911 to the time of his departure from Romania and arrival in the West, taking him through Germany and finally to Paris, where he would spend the rest of his life from 1937 until his death in 1995, but it is a marvelous study in its own right full of critical insights and sympathetic enough examinations of the man's own inner workings and authorial obsessions.Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston was ideally suited for writing an intellectual biography of the man, but her own untimely death cut the project short and the materials she had assembled for the second half of the book intended to deal with the later "French" Cioran had to be collected and edited by her husband.

But in its own ironic way the latter half of the book, which is largely anecdotal in nature and deals with her own personal encounters and interviews with Cioran in Paris (they include a searing account of Cioran's decline into the mental oblivion of Alzheimer's disease), and though it lacks the more comprehensive biographical treatment of the earlier narratives, it forms a fascinating supplement to the fuller "Romanian" sections precisely because the episodes it contains are fragmentary and thus serve to reflect certain aspects of the existence that Cioran cultivated in his self-imposed state of anonymous exile from his homeland.

Finally, we should be forever grateful to Zarifopol-Johnston for the way in which she deals head-on with the cloudy issue of Cioran's political beliefs and activities, and she comes to some compelling conclusions that allow her to transcend the stale and hypocritical pieties that govern what Milan Kundera has described as the ""absolute tribunal mentality" of the twentieth century" (p. 114).The two chapters in this book that deal with Cioran's so-called fascist sympathies and his seeming enthusiasm for totalitarianism as expressed in his still untranslated work "Romania's Transfiguration" are, in my opinion, the best and most illuminating in the book, especially when they are read in connection with the first half's final chapter, "Conclusion: The Lyrical Virtues of Totalitarianism".

(Note:I continue to be flabbergasted by the self-seeking liberties taken by publishers who do not hesitate to print the most false and misleading things about the books they are offering.The dustjacket of this otherwise excellent work bears the description: "A critical portrait of French philosopher and mystic E.M. Cioran".It is simply wrong on three counts--Cioran was not French, he steadfastly refused to be called a philosopher, and if he knew that someone was labelling him a mystic he would have laughed himself silly.)


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