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An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania
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About An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran And The Rise Of
Product Description A writer who does stupid things in his youth is like a woman with a shameful past―never forgiven, never forgotten. E. M. Cioran, the renowned Romanian-French nihilist philosopher and literary figure, knew this better than anyone. Alongside Heidegger, Sartre, Paul de Mann, and others, Cioran was one of the great scholars of the twentieth century to be seduced by totalitarianism: he experienced a most disturbing intellectual and moral drama. 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. In an incendiary book published in the mid-thirties, Cioran openly praised Hitler and Lenin and compared the leader of the fanatical Romanian Iron Guard to Jesus himself. This book, The Transfiguration of Romania, is the focal element of Ms. Petreu's analysis, which she carries on to Cioran's posthumously published Notebooks, characterized by the regret and remorse of his twilight years. In straightforward and lucid prose, grounded in a wealth of documentary evidence, she provides the entire history of a painful individual and collective drama. For many of Cioran's yearnings would later be realized in Ceausescu's dictatorship of Romania―to the regret of the Romanian people. Norman Manea's Foreword reminds us of Cioran's stature in Western intellectual circles and explains the critical importance of An Infamous Past. From Publishers Weekly Romanian poet, philosopher and editor Petreu shows in this dense but fresh work that many Romanian intellectuals were seduced by fascist ideology during the interwar years—and that philosopher Cioran, an "aphorist of humorous despair," was haunted by this legacy for the rest of his life. Petreu details the ultranationalist, pro-Christian ideology of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, a movement of intellectuals that gained prominence in Romania after WWI. As with many ideologies of the era, Petreu writes, anti-Semitism lay at the movement's core. Cioran's own ideology, rooted in the wish to turn Romania's "depressing present into a grandiose future," included a more complex view of Jews, outlined in his 1936 The Transfiguration of Romania. He envied what he saw as Jewish productivity in government, business and the arts. But Petreu shows how his outlook, adapted from Spengler, also necessitated hostility toward Jews and other non-Romanians. Cioran left Romania after WWII and became ashamed of his earlier fascism, but Petreu mines his life for lessons to be learned today about how good intentions can lead to extremism. (Nov. 4) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review An enormous contribution to our understanding not only of Romania's tormented past, but also of European intellectual history. -- Marci Shore, Indiana University, Slavic and East European Journal Represents the most thorough analysis of Cioran's inter-war fascination with fascism and nationalism…thought-provoking read., Patterns Of Prejudice A thorough and vivid portrait of a Romanian gifted fascist thinker, who dreamed about ‘a Romania with the population of China and the destiny of France.' Like his legionary colleagues, Emil Cioran admired Hitler, justified his crimes and believed that capitalism was ‘immoral, Judaic and anti-Christian.' Unlike other Iron Guard ideologists, Cioran praised Lenin and envisioned a modern Romania driven by industrialization and urban values. Like his comrades, Cioran advocated a fascist dictatorship and cultivated Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the criminal führer of the Iron Guard. But unlike his friend and fellow Iron Guard ideologist, Mircea Eliade, who did not show any willingness to part with his totalitarian past, Cioran had the decency, in his
