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Emil Cioran
Apologie de la Barbarie: Berlin – Bucharest (1932-1941)
Paris: L’Herne, 2015
This is a very interesting book released by the superior publishing house L’Herne: a collection of Emil Cioran’s articles published in Romanian newspapers, mostly from before the war. Besides becoming a famous aphorist in later years, before the Allied victory, Cioran was still free to be a perceptive and biting cultural critic and political analyst.
While reading the book, I was chiefly interested in understanding the motivations behind Cioran’s support for nationalism and fascism. We can identify a few recurring themes:
- A sense of humiliation at Romania’s underdevelopment, historical irrelevance, and cultural/intellectual dependence with regard to the West: “That is why the Romanian always agrees with the latest author he has read” (22).
- A pronounced Germanophilia, appreciating German artists’ and intellectuals’ intensity, pathos, and diagnostic of Western decadence.
- Frustration with democratic politics as leading selfish individualism and political impotence.
- A marked preference for belief and irrational creativity over sterile rationalism and skepticism.
Cioran, who had already been well acquainted with German high culture during his studies in Romania, really took to Hitlerian Germany when he moved in 1933 there on a scholarship from the Humboldt Foundation. He writes:
In Germany, I realized that I was mistaken in believing that one can perfectly integrate a foreign culture. I hoped to identify myself perfectly with the values of German history, to cut my Romanian cultural roots to assimilate completely into German culture. I will not comment here on the absurdity of this illusion. (100)
The influence of Cioran’s German sources clearly shines through, including Nietzsche, Spengler, and Hitler himself.[1] [2] Cioran’s infatuation proved lasting. He wrote in 1937: “I think there are few people – even in Germany – who admire Hitler more than I do” (240).
On one level, Cioran’s politics are eminently realistic, frankly acknowledging the tragic side of human existence. He admires Italian Fascism and especially German National Socialism because these political movements had restored strong beliefs and had heightened the historical level and international power of these nations. If liberties must be trampled upon and certain individuals marginalized for a community to flourish, so be it. On foreign policy, he favors national self-sufficiency and Realpolitik as against dependence upon unstable or sentimental alliances.
Cioran is extremely skeptical of pacifist and universalist movements, convinced that great nations each have their own historical direction. Human history, in his view, would not necessarily converge and ought to remain pluralistic. If Europe was to converge to one culture, this would tragically require the triumph and imposition of one culture on the others. In particular, he believed Franco-German peace would be impossible without the collapse of one nation or the other (little did he suspect both would be crushed). Diversity and a degree of tension between nations and civilizations were good, providing “the essential antinomies which are the basis of life” (98).
Alongside these rather realistic considerations, spoken in a generally detached and level-headed tone, Cioran’s politics and in particular his nationalism were powerfully motivated by a sense of despair at the state of Romania. Cioran viscerally identified with his nation and intensely felt what he considered to be its deficiencies as a bucolic and peripheral culture. He then makes an at once passionate and desperate plea a zealous nationalist and totalitarian dictatorship which could spark Romania’s spark geopolitical, historical, and cultural renewal. Only such a regime, on the German model, could organize the youth and redeem an otherwise irrelevant nation. The continuation of democracy, by contrast, would mean only the disintegration of the nation into a collection of fissiparous and spoiled individuals: “Another period of ‘democracy’ and Romania will inevitably confirm its status of historical accident” (225).
A rare and stimulating combination in Cioran’s writings: unsentimental observation and intense pathos.
Cioran’s nationalism was highly idiosyncratic. He writes with amusing condescension of the local tradition of nostalgic and parochial patriotic writing: “To be sure, the geographical nationalism which we have witnessed up to now, with all its literature of patriotic exaltation and its idyllic vision of our historical existence, has its merits and its rights” (150). He was also uninterested in a nationalism as merely a moralistic defensive conservatism, defined merely as the maintenance of the borders of the Greater Romania which, with the annexation of Transylvania, had been miraculously established in the wake of the First World War.
For Cioran nationalism had to serve a great political project, it had to have a set of values and ambitions enabling a great historical flourishing, rather than be merely a sentimental or selfish end in itself. He writes of A. C. Cuza, a prominent politician who made anti-Semitism his signature issue:
Nationalism, as a sentimental formula, lacking in any ideological backbone or political perspectives, has no value. The dishonorable destiny of A. C. Cuza has no other explanation than the agitations of an apolitical man whose fanaticism, which has never gone further than anti-Semitism, was never able to become a fatality for Romania. If we had had no Jews, A. C. Cuza would never have thought of his country. (214)
Similarly, Cioran argues that the embrace of nationalism is dependent on time and purpose:
One is a nationalist only in a given time, when to not be a nationalist is a crime against the nation. In a given time means in a historical moment when everyone’s participation is a matter of conscience. The demands of the historical moment also mean: one is not [only] a nationalist, one is also a nationalist. (149-50)
Cioran was also – at least in this selection of articles – uninterested in Christianity and aggressively rejected Romania’s past and traditions, in favor a revolutionary project of martial organization, planned industrialization, and national independence. For Cioran, Romania needed nothing less than a “national revolution” requiring “a long-lasting megalomania” (154).
All this seems far removed from the agrarian traditionalism and Christian mysticism of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s Iron Guard. Cioran did, however, hail the Guard as a Romanian “awakening” and after Codreanu’s murder wrote a moving ode to the Captain [3]. By contrast, Cioran excoriates the consensual Transylvanian politician Iulia Maniu as an ineffectual and corrosive “Balkan buddhist,” peddling “political leukemia” (220).
A friend of mine observed that at least some aspects of Cioran’s program resembles Nicolae Ceaușescu’s later formula: perhaps late Romanian communism did seek to reflect some of the nation’s deep-seated aspirations concerning its place in the world.
One is struck by the contrast between Cioran’s lyricism on Germany, his desperate call to “transfigurate” Romania, and his perfectly lucid and quite balanced assessment of Fascist Italy [4]. There is something quite unreasonable in Cioran’s revolutionary ambitions. Fascism, certainly, is an effective way of instating political stability, steady leadership, and civil peace, annihilating communism, maximizing national power and independence, and educating and systematically organizing the nation according to whatever values you hold dear.
But fascism cannot work miracles. Politics must work with the human material and historical trajectory that one has. That is being true to oneself. To wish for total transformation and the tabula rasa is to invite disaster. Such revolutions are generally an exercise in self-harm. Once the passions and intoxications have settled, one finds the nation stunted and lessened: by civil war, by tyranny, by self-mutilation and deformation in the stubborn in the name of utopian goals. The historic gap with the ‘advanced’ nations is widened further still by the ordeal.
In the case of Romania, I can imagine that a spirited, moderate, and progressive authoritarian regime might have been able to raise the country’s historical level, just as Fascism had in Italy. Romania could aspire to be a Balkan hegemon. Beyond this, raising Romania would have required generations of careful and steady work, not hysterical outbursts, notably concerning population policy. The country had a comparatively low population density – a territory twice the size as England, but with half the population. There was a vigorous and progressive eugenics movement in interwar Romania [5] which also sought to improve the people’s biological stock, but this came to naught.
Another very striking aspect of Cioran’s fascism and nationalism is that he does not take race seriously. He says in his first article written from Germany (November 14, 1933):
If one objects that today’s political orientation [in Germany] is unacceptable, that it is founded on false values, that racism is a scientific illusion, and that German exclusivism is a collective megalomania, I would respond: What does it matter, so long as Germany feels well, fresh, and alive under such a regime?
Reducing National Socialism’s appeal to mere emotional power, although that is important, will certainly puzzle progressive racialists and evolutionary humanists.[2] [6] In the same vein, Cioran occasionally expresses sympathy for communism, because of that ideology’s ability to inspire belief. There is something irresponsible in all this. And yet, living in an order of rot and incoherence, we can only share in Cioran’s hope: “We have no other mission than to work for the intensification of the process of fatal collapse” (51).
One wonders how Cioran’s disenchantment with Hitlerian Germany occurred. The fact that he wrote his conversion note [7]On France [7] in 1941, before the major reversals for the Axis, is certainly intriguing.
Cioran’s comments on Romania’s ineptitude are striking and sadly well in line with the current state of the Balkans. Cioran hailed from Transylvania, which though having a Romanian majority, had significant Saxon and Hungarian minorities and a tradition of Austro-Hungarian government. Cioran contrasts the stolid Saxons with the erratic Romanians, the staid Transylvanian “citizens” with the corrupt “patriots” of the old-Romanian provinces (Wallachia, Moldova). So while he rejected any idea of Romania becoming merely a respectable, prosperous “Switzerland,” Cioran also desired some good old-fashioned (bourgeois?) competence. He indeed calls Transylvania “Romania’s Prussia.”
To this day, besides Bucharest, the wealthier and more functional parts of the country are to be found in Transylvania. In the 2014 presidential elections, there was an eerie overlap [8] between the vote for the liberal-conservative candidate Klaus Iohannes and the historical boundaries of Austria-Hungary.
What I find most stimulating in Cioran is his dialectic between his concerns as a pure intellectual – lucidity, the vanity of things, universal truth – and his recognition of and desire for the intoxicating needs of Life: belief, action in the here-and-now, ruthlessness, and passion. Cioran writes:
The oscillation between preoccupations that could not be further from current events and the need to adopt, within the historical process, an immediate attitude, produces, in the mind of certain contemporary intellectuals, a strange frenzy, a constant irritation, and an exasperating tension. (117)
I was shocked to encounter the following passage and yet the thought had also occurred to me:
In Germany, I began to study Buddhism in order not to be intoxicated or contaminated with Hitlerism. But my meditation on the void brought me to understand, by the contrast, Hitlerism better than did any ideological book. Immediate positivity and the terror of temporal decision, the total lack of transcendence of politics, but especially the bowing before the merciless empire of becoming, all these grow in a dictatorship to the point of exasperation. A suffocating rhythm, alternating with a megalomaniacal breath, gives it a particular psychology. The profile of dictatorship is a monumental chiaroscuro. (233-34)
Nature, ‘red in tooth and claw,’ and the inevitable void: a fertile dialectic, from which we may hope Life with prevail.
Notes
[1] [9] E.g. Cioran observes that fears surrounding Hungary’s ambition to reconquer Transylvania from Romania only existed due to Romania’s own internal political weakness: “[There is an] unacceptable illusion among us according to which foreign relations could compensate for an internal deficiency, whereas in fact the value of these relations depends, at bottom, on our inner strength” (171). A classic Hitlerian point.
[2] [10] Elsewhere, Cioran denounces, in the name of a lucid Realpolitik, overdependence on the unreliable alliance with France and sympathy for the “Latin sister nation” Italy, which was then supporting Hungary: “Concerning affinities of blood and race, who knows how many illusions are not hidden in such beliefs?” (172). Certainly, people have often confused linguistic proximity with actual blood kinship.
Yes, Elementarteilchen was an immediate sensation and a huge bestseller. 
La phase du « Travailleur » a toutefois été très brève dans la longue vie de Jünger. Mais même après sa sortie sereine et graduelle hors de l’idéologie techniciste , Jünger refuse tout « escapisme romantique » : il rejette l’attitude de Cassandre et veut regarder les phénomènes en face, sereinement. Pour lui, il faut pousser le processus jusqu’au bout afin de provoquer, à terme, un véritablement renversement, sans s’encombrer de barrages ténus, érigés avec des matériaux surannés, faits de bric et de broc. Sa position ne relève aucunement du technicisme naïf et bourgeois de la fin du 19ème siècle : pour lui, l’Etat, la chose politique, le pouvoir sera déterminé par la technique, par la catégorie du « Travail ». Dans cette perspective, la technique n’est pas la source de petites commodités pour agrémenter la vie bourgeoise mais une force titanesque qui démultipliera démesurément le pouvoir politique. L’individu, cher au libéralisme de la Belle Epoque, fera place au « Type », qui renoncera aux limites désuètes de l’idéal bourgeois et se posera comme un simple rouage, sans affects et sans sentimentalités inutiles, de la machine étatique nouvelle, qu’il servira comme le soldat sert sa mitrailleuse, son char, son avion, son sous-marin. Le « Type » ne souffre pas sous la machine, comme l’idéologie anti-techniciste le voudrait, il s’est lié physiquement et psychiquement à son instrument d’acier comme le paysan éternel est lié charnellement et mentalement à sa glèbe. Jünger : « Celui qui vit la technique comme une agression contre sa substance, se place en dehors de la figure du Travailleur ». Parce que le Travailleur, le Type du Travailleur, s’est soumis volontairement à la Machine, il en deviendra le maître parce qu’il s’est plongé dans le flux qu’elle appelle par le fait même de sa présence, de sa puissance et de sa croissance. Le Type s’immerge dans le flux et refuse d’être barrage bloquant, figeant.
4) Abordons maintenant votre nouvel ouvrage Wewelsburg, histoire d’un nouveau Montsalvat. Celui-ci retrace l’histoire de ce lieu énigmatique pour beaucoup, fantasmé par certains. Que fut en réalité Wewelsburg ?
En un trabajo anterior ya quisimos hacer una aproximación antropológica al concepto spengleriano de la Técnica[i] . El presente trabajo quiere ser una prolongación del mismo, profundizando en los conceptos spenglerianos sobre la tecnicidad y lo hacemos por medio de un comentario detenido de las páginas de su pequeña obra El Hombre y la Técnica.[ii] Este breve texto spengleriano aclara muchos aspectos de la filosofía, poco sistemática y, a veces, impresionista, del gran pensador alemán, el creador de la magna obra La Decadencia de Occidente. Este breve libro traza un cuadro evolutivo de la técnica en la historia natural y cultural del hombre. Pero hace algo más: esboza de una manera dialéctica el destino fatal de los pueblos de Occidente, pueblos que han desarrollado toda su tecnicidad hasta ponerla en manos de sus enemigos. Este examen detenido de los párrafos enérgicos y vibrantes del librito puede ayudar a comprender la peculiar dialéctica pesimista –a diferencia de la optimista hegeliana- del pensador alemán Oswald Spengler. En vez de alcanzar un progresivo dominio técnico del mundo, encaminado a su mayor comodidad y salud, el hombre y sus antepasados simplemente han ido diferenciando cualidades sensitivo-etológicas desde hace millones de años, cualidades en las que ya está presente la tecnicidad, aun cuando todavía nuestros antepasados no era capaces de fabricar herramientas, o sólo empleaban órganos y partes sensomotoras de su cuerpo para ejercer su dominio. Por ello, en nuestro comentario empleamos el término tecnicidad, contrapuesto a "técnica" para hacer referencia a esas capacidades generales implícitas a la hora de ejercer dominio, control o alteración del propio medio envolvente, con independencia de la existencia de herramientas, armas u otros objetos extra-somáticos. La tecnicidad es la cualidad o el carácter técnico de algo o alguien, y no se debe circunscribir a los productos de las artes humanas o proto-humanas ni al aspecto normativo o envolvente del Espíritu Objetivo. Nuestro comentario, pues, se enmarca en el espacio antropológico. Queremos ahondar en la antropología spengleriana, tal y como llevamos haciendo desde hace unos años. [iii]
Das ist der andre Fehler, der hier vermieden werden muß: Technik ist nicht vom Werkzeug her zu verstehen. Es kommt nicht auf die Herstellung von Dingen an, sondern auf das Verfahren mit ihnen, nicht auf die Waffe, sondern auf den Kampf
"La planta vive; aunque sólo en sentido limitado, es un ser viviente. En realidad, más que vivir puede decirse que en ella y en torno a ella está la vida. “Ella” respira, “ella” se alimenta, “ella” se multiplica; y, sin embargo, no es propiamente más que el escenario de esos procesos, que constituyen una unidad con los procesos de la naturaleza circundante, con el día y la noche, con los rayos del sol y la fermentación del suelo; de suerte que la planta misma no puede ni querer ni elegir. Todo acontece con ella y en ella. Ella no busca ni su lugar propio, ni su alimento, ni las demás plantas con quienes engendra su sucesión. No se mueve, sino que son el viento, el calor, la luz, quienes la mueven." [x]
Esa mirada poderosa, unida a ese sentimiento de poder, es el germen de la Historia. Y la Historia se individualiza. No se trata de una historia de las masas. Las masas no poseen la historia. Antes de alzarse culturas individualizadas, en la fase zoológica y pre-cultural, la Historia la hacen los individuos. El animal de presa destaca y se recorta ante el animal de rebaño. El herbívoro precisa de muchos como él, y entre ellos (como luego, en las sociedades de masas) una muchedumbre de iguales constituye ya el individuo. Ha de verse aquí, en El Hombre y la Técnica, no una teoría, en el sentido riguroso o científico, sino una analogía. Spengler discurre por analogías, y esas analogías presiden toda su filosofía de la historia. Si una Cultura es, toda ella, un ser vivo dotado de su morfología propia y de su propio ciclo vital, un herbívoro es un análogo de un "hombre masa". El hombre masa del siglo XIX y XX es un retroceso hacia la animalización, pero hacia la animalización del escalón inferior, la de la presa, la del cobarde herbívoro.
El hombre es artífice de su táctica vital [Der Mensch ist der Schöpfer seiner Lebenstaktik geworden]. Esta palabra, "táctica", es crucial para comprender la gran analogía belicista que recorre por igual la filosofía de la naturaleza y la filosofía de la historia spenglerianas. De esa creación libre brota, no obstante, un plano nuevo de coacción y de condena sobre los aprendices de brujo que son los humanos. El Espíritu Objetivo podrá verse, hegelianamente, como un fruto de la libertad esencial de los hombres, pero, a la par, se alza como envoltorio determinante y coactivo que canaliza y bloquea los cursos en principio libres de los sujetos. Es una libertad que se auto-restringe al devenir objetivo. La cultura no es ya, sin más, el Reino de la Libertad confrontado al Reino de la Necesidad (material y físico-química). La optimista dualidad kantiana, como en general la optimista y felicitaría dualidad teológico-cristiana de la que partía, ya ha quedado atrás. De la cultura también procede un destino, una fatalidad [Verhängnis].
La forma o figura [Gestalt] de la mano determina la de la herramienta, y viceversa. La garra no precisa de herramientas. Cuando la garra del simio comienza a tomar palos y emplearlos, inicial y esencialmente como armas, ésta garra ya deviene mano. Y en este momento ya nace un nuevo tipo de depredador: no es sólo el depredador de los ojos, con un pensamiento ocular, sino un pensar de la mano. Ojo y manos, en el plano sensomotor, representan por analogía la doble faceta del pensar humano, el plano cognoscitivo: el pensar intelectual (relaciones causa-efecto) y el pensar práctico (relaciones medio-fin).
Der ursprüngliche Zweck des Sprechens ist die Durchführung einer Tat nach Absicht, Zeit, Ort, Mitteln. Die klare, eindeutige Fassung derselben ist das Erste, und aus der Schwierigkeit, sich verständlich zu machen, den eigenen Willen anderen aufzuerlegen, ergibt sich die Technik derGrammatik, die Technik der Bildung von Sätzen und Satzarten, des richtigen Befehlens, Fragens, Antwortens, der Ausbildung von Wortklassen auf Grund der praktischen, nicht der theoretischen Absichten und Ziele. Das theoretische Nachdenken hat am Entstehen des Sprechens in Sätzen so gut wie gar keinen Anteil. Alles Sprechen ist praktischer Natur und geht vom »Denken der Hand« aus.
Spengler se sitúa resueltamente entre los filósofos anti-igualitarios, en la misma línea de los clásicos Platón y Aristóteles y seguida por Nietzsche. La diferencia entre los hombres es un "hecho" [Tatsache] acerca del cual cabe poca o nula discusión. La vida práctica de los individuos sólo empieza a comprenderse en el seno de una organización, cuya decadencia civilizada es "masa", pero cuya existencia "en forma" se denomina Estado. El origen del Estado estriba en esa tecnicidad devenida en forma de organización militar. En la milicia existe ya un Estado in nuce. La organización de la empresa humana, especialmente ante enemigos potenciales exteriores, es el Ejército, la institución que encarna la tecnicidad elevada al plano institucional, objetivo-espiritual: […] der Staat ist die innere Ordnung eines Volkes für den äußeren Zweck. Der Staat ist als Form, als Möglichkeit, was die Geschichte eines Volkes als Wirklichkeit ist. Geschichte aber ist Kriegsgeschichte, damals wie heute. Politik ist nur der vorübergehende Ersatz des Krieges durch den Kampf mit geistigeren Waffen. Und die Mannschaft eines Volkes ist ursprünglich gleichbedeutend mit seinem Heer. Der Charakter des freien Raubtieres ist in wesentlichen Zügen vom einzelnen auf das organisierte Volk übergegangen, das Tier mit einer Seele und vielen Händen. Regierungs-, Kriegs- und diplomatische Technik haben dieselbe Wurzel und zu allen Zeiten eine tief innerliche Verwandtschaft.
La decadencia de Occidente se ilumina plenamente mirando esta civilización bajo el aspecto de la técnica. La técnica, nacida en toda cultura humana básicamente como arma y como potenciación del ojo y la mano depredadora, ya en fase mecanista pasa a ser la tumba de la civilización que con más energía y saña la desarrolló, la civilización europea de Occidente. Otros pueblos se beneficiarán de aquellos logros de la cultura fáustica. Los frailes escolásticos europeos, en torno a los siglos XII y XIII introdujeron el verdadero Renacimiento[xxvi]. Spengler no duda en llamarlos "vikingos del espíritu". Sin miedo a navegar todo lo lejos posible, y con el mismo afán dominador de sus antecedentes piráticos y navegantes, fueron aquellos escolásticos de la cultura fáustica quienes sentaron las bases de la ciencia moderna, mucho tiempo antes de Galileo, Copérnico, Descartes o Newton. Un Mundo y un Dios entendidos en términos de fuerza, energía, y una naturaleza entendida como botín y campo para la conquista. Los vikingos del espíritu, los escolásticos medievales, impulsaron el verdadero Renacimiento y la primera fase científico-técnica de la cultura fáustica. Ellos prepararon el terreno para la segunda oleada de descubrimientos, y con los descubrimientos, las conquistas. Los conquistadores españoles fueron, a ojos de Spengler, los nuevos vikingos, los herederos de la "sangre nórdica", destinados a revolucionar el mundo, como hicieran, unos siglos antes, sus antepasados.
En 1889, Fidus reprend les cours réguliers qu’il s’était promis de suivre à Munich. Il y fait la connaissance de Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, originaire, lui aussi, d’Allemagne du Nord, converti à la théosophie de l’occultiste Madame Blavatsky et partisan d’une politique coloniale allemande. Ce nati de Hambourg était un ami intime de Madame Blavatsky et de son adepte américain Henry Steel Olcott, qui avait fondé aux Etats-Unis une secte théosophique. La religiosité théosophique de Steel Olcott était un mélange obscur de bribes hétéroclites tirées des religions d’Asie et de trucs de prestigiditateur, qui avait pourtant acquis une notoriété internationale. Il faut aussi rappeler que ce cher Henry travaillait accessoirement pour le gouvernement américain. Pour rassembler leurs adeptes allemands, Hübbe-Schleiden édita une revue mensuelle, intitulée Sphinx, dont le graphiste principal fut évidemment le jeune Fidus. Cette collaboration dura trois ans. Influencé par les idées glanées dans la revue, Fidus fit siennes celles d’un « cercle de vie » et d’une « thérapie par la lumière ».
Fidus, lui, quitta Munich pour Berlin, où il travailla pour des revues telles Jugend, Pan et Simplicissimus. Plus tard, il collabora à Kraft und Schönheit et à Die Schönheit. Le regard de Fidus sur la beauté naturelle du corps humain et son style « Art Nouveau », quelque peu édulcoré, firent de lui le graphiste le plus connu d’Allemagne au tournant du siècle.
