VLADIMIR TlSMANEANU
607
The truly odd thing is that instead of the usual copyright notice,
Humanitas (certainly with Cioran's blessing) printed the following: "The
first two editions appeared in 1936 and 1941. The current edition is the
only authorized version." To make things more explicit, the octogenarian
Cioran composed the following caution: "I wrote these divagations in
1935-36, at the age of twenty-four, with passion and
orgueuil.
Of all I
have published in Romanian and French, this text is perhaps the most
passionate. It also is the most alien to me. I do not rediscover myself in it,
although the presence of my then hysteria strikes me as obvious. I saw it
as my duty to suppress some pretentious and stupid pages. This is the
definitive edition. Nobody has the right to change it." Cioran may have
changed his mind (it was C laudel who once wrote that
ce sont seulement les
imbeciles qui rle changent pas d'avis),
but his early Romanian writings exist
and should be freely examined. With its lionization of the hysterical
crowds, his book belongs to the impetus that helped establish the Fascist
dictatorship in Romania, the bloody prelude to the next, no less ruthless
Communist tyranny. Although subdued and cryptic, Cioran's short
warning at least does imply that he repents for his juvenile aberrations. In
contrast, Eliade, as Norman Manea rightly pointed out in his essay "Felix
Culpa," never explicitly abjured his Guardist commitment.
The reissue of Cioran's first book shows it still to be the cri
de coeur
of
a metaphysical dandy, a collection of spasmodic aphorisms and reflections
written by a young epigone of Nietzsche during insomniac crises of mis–
anthropy and narcissism. The translator's introduction is a perceptive
piece of literary history, showing that, from title to conclusions, Cioran's
book has a deep ironical dimension, but there is no information about
Cioran's fatefu l political wager. Thus, in the new edition, Cioran's meta–
physical lyricism has been artificially distilled and purified from his no less
significant political radicalism. One can, of course, accept Cioran's repu–
diation of his early political blunders, but intellectual history requires
some reflection on the relationship between Romania's spiritual elite and
the pseudo-Christian, ethnic fundamentalism of the Iron Guard.
The espousal by Cioran and other members of the Young Generation
of the Guardist tenets was linked
to
their entrenched anti-intellectualist
and anti-liberal beliefs. Part of their allegiance to the Guard was linked to
their cultural inferiority complex: as Cioran once put it, the "vanity of a
man born within a small culture is forever wounded." Anti-Semitism was
adopted as part of the creation of a much-needed "national myth" which
could not be conceived in the absence of an enemy figure. For them the
Jews became the symbol of the plutocratic-commercial values they had so
much decried in their earlier but not manifestly anti-Semitic writings. In
