| Title | : | Searching for Cioran |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.61 (448 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0253352673 |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 312 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2009-01-07 |
| Genre | : |
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
Editorial : "This is a graceful study of a disputed period in Cioran's intellectual biography and personal life. With subtle sophistication and intimate knowledge of the subject the author has sought to recreate Cioran's Romanian roots and his local and universal intellectual sources, in what, it was hoped, would become Cioran's ultimate scholarly biography. Although the author's untimely death precluded the book's completion, no one will deny that what Zarifopol-Johnston has achieved is arguably one of the most audacious analyses to date of Cioran's life and writings. One can only hope that future studies will be as compelling and provacative, and thus complete the ambitious scholarly agenda set up by Zarifopol-Johnston." Slavic Review, Spring 2010
"An important and distinctly original contribution to the growing field of Cioran studies. Zarifopol-Johnston is a sharp, insightful observer of self and others, courageous and candid, writing in a fresh, quick-silver style." from
Professor Zarifopol-Johnston's careful analysis of Cioran's early writings (some of which she has also translated into English) sheds important light on his later, better-known French works. I highly recommend this book!. 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 m
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