All Gall Is Divided : The Aphorisms of a Legendary Iconoclast

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 philosopher's existential estrangement, there glows "a certain sweetness for all of what Cioran calls 'amertume.'" Ambrose Bierce produced a small book of mordant paradoxes he called The Devil's Dictionary (1911). This is Cioran's existentialist equivalent. Often aridly clever, it can quickly elicit indigestion, but on occasion its bleak terseness strikes a chord or hints at an autobiography. Cioran (The Trouble with Being Born) was born in Romania, emigrated to France in the 1930s and died in Paris in 1995. "Inside every citizen nowadays," he writes, "lies a future alien." An outspoken non-believer, he opines, "For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa." A passionate pessimist after decades of exile, occupation and war, he insists, "To hope is to contradict the future," and "Had Noah possessed the gift of foreseeing the future, there is not a doubt in the world he would have scuttled the ark." As laconic and intense as his aphorisms appear to be, it seems obvious that his heralded translator, in playing his own word games, has often stretched the irony, sometimes vitiating it. At their sardonic best -- "Shakespeare: the rose and the ax have a rendezvous"--Cioran's lines have a staying power. This is especially so when he expresses his thirst for doubt and his despairing delight in the world's contradictions. Ideas, he believes, are undermined by exhaustive analysis. Pithy cynicism is the antidote he offers. - Publishers Weekly

E. M. Cioran lived on the margins of the modern world. Like his friends Beckett and Ionesco, he stood apart from all the official trappings of his chosen medium of philosophy. Not since Nietzsche has a thinker revealed himself so drastically. All Gall Is Divided is a breviary of estrangement that rejoices in the contradictions and confusions of human fate. As his translator Richard Howard remarks, 'You fraternize with Emil Cioran at your peril, but it is the kind of danger that keeps you alive.'

"All Gall Is Divided, which reads like the writings of Zarathustra's brother and reveals the conflicts, paradoxes, and rejoicings of existence as understood by a man frequently compared to Samuel Beckett."--Jacket **Now in paperback, an "antidote to a world gone mad for bedside affirmation" (__Washington Post__).**__Washington Post____All Gall Is Divided__