E.M. Cioran - All Gall Is Divided: The Aphorisms of a Legendary Iconoclast

Copyright 1952, 1980, 2012 by Editions Gallimard
English-Language translation copyright 1999, 2012 by Arcade Publishing

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or arcade@skyhorsepublishing.com .

Arcade Publishing is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., a Delaware corporation.

Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com .

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-307-2
eISBN: 978-1-61145-746-9

Printed in China

CONTENTS

Translators Note

Ciorans second book in French, Syllogismes dAmerture which we have chosen to call All Gall Is Divided for reasons divulged below was something of a corrective to his first work, Prcis de Dcomposition (A Short History of Decay); that is, the French readership, as is so often the case, resisted the initial instance of an alien resonance, though one entirely intimate with that grand French tradition of epigrammatic intensity which flourished in the texts of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century moralistes. The Romanians Prcis (for a writer to change languages, he muttered, is to write a love letter with a dictionary) languished on the French publisher Gallimards shelves, and it was only years later, after these thousand sentences of manic humor, howls of pain, and a vestige of tears had appeared, that the earlier book found an audience prepared for its contradictions and discomforts. The alternation of paragraph and sentence, of essay and aphorism, has continued through the decades of Ciorans literary production till 1992 (Anathemas and Admirations), and it is a great comfort to his translator that this writers true rhythm of prose forms can now be observed in its entirety.

A wisdom broken is Francis Bacons phrase for the aphorism the very word has horizon within it, a dividing-line between sky and earth, a separation observed And there is a further identification to be heard in Eliots line: to be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk/among whispers: something subversive, something perilous, always, about the aphorism, from the pre-Socratics to Chazal. Yet it ought to be noted that for all its classical analogies with the French epigram as we encounter it in La Rochefoucauld, in Chamfort, in Valry, Ciorans breviary of estrangement fulfills the tradition with a difference. For these remarks which refuse the comforts of expansion, of explanation, of exfoliation, are nonetheless a narrative, an autobiography even, at least a confession. Not since Nietzsche has any thinker revealed himself so drastically, not since Heraclitus has the necessity of fragments been so deliriously welcomed. Hence my punning title for the syllogisms of bitterness, the allusion to Caesars partition of France and, finally, Ciorans dissection of that other gall, the acrimony, the wormwood, the effrontery which is the consequence of being born, the one regrettable act.

It was from Samuel Beckett that we first heard of Cioran, whose little blue light the author of How It Is discerned in the antres vast of consciousness, glowing with a certain sweetness for all of what Cioran calls amertume and Baudelaire calls spleen. With this early volume of aphorisms, all of Ciorans French works are now translated into English; there remain the Cahiers, that grand treasury and infernal machine of fifteen years maceration, which Arcade projects for that future Cioran viewed so darkly. If we have world enough and time, Ciorans Notebooks, 19571912, will yet assume an English dress not so different, it is hoped, from their French device.

Atrophy of Utterance

Educated by weaklings, idolators of stigmata, especially fragmentary ones, we belong to a clinical age when only cases count. We loiter over what a writer has left unspoken, what he might have said: unarticulated depths. If he leaves an oeuvre, if he is explicit, he has earned our oblivion.

Wizardry of the unrealized artist, of a loser who lets his disappointments go, unable to make them bear fruit.

So many pages, so many books which afforded us feeling and which we reread to study the quality of their adverbs, their adjectival aplomb.

Something serious about stupidity which, oriented differently, might multiply the stock of our masterpieces.

If it werent for our doubts about ourselves, all skepticism would be dead letter, conventional anxiety, philosophical doctrine.

As for verities, who can lug them around any longer? We refuse to bear their weight, to be their accomplices or their dupes. I dream of a world in which one might die for a comma.

How I love those second-order minds (Joubert, in particular) who out of delicacy lived in the shadow of other mens genius, fearing to have such a thing, rejecting their own!

If Molire had given himself up to his abyss, Pascal with his would look like a journalist.

Certainties have no style: a concern for well-chosen words is the attribute of those who cannot rest easy in a faith. Lacking solid support, they cling to words semblances of reality; while the others, strong in their convictions, despise appearances and wallow in the comfort of improvisation.

Beware of those who turn their backs on love, ambition, society. They will take their revenge for having renounced

The history of ideas is the history of the spite of certain solitaries.

Plutarch, nowadays, would write the Parallel Lives of Losers.

English Romanticism was a happy mixture of laudanum, exile, and tuberculosis; German Romanticism, of alcohol, suicide, and the provinces.

Certain minds ought to have lived in a German town in the Romantic period. How easy it is to imagine a Grard de Nerval in Tbingen or Heidelberg!

German endurance knows no limits even in madness: Nietzsche endured his eleven years, Hlderlin forty.