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PARTISAN REVIEW
enough, most of us turn out to be unfit for or averse to ferreting
out, to observe in ourselves or in others....Those-rare, it is
true-who have been indiscreet or unfortunate enough
to
plunge
all the way to the bottom of their beings, they know how
to
judge
man: they can no longer love him, for they can no longer love
themselves.
Cioran's vision of history is an exercise in self-demonization, an attempt
to personalize the cliches of satanic rebellion. The cliches
qua
cliches
remain as banal as ever.
What is interesting, as always in Cioran, arc the details of the spec–
tacle he offers, the local flashes of insight, the tone and verbal power of
the playwright-actor (sincere in the very insincerity of playacting), the
magnificent style. Even though the dire prophecies contained in
History
and Utopia
(according to which the Soviet Union would conquer or
dominate a decadent, exhausted, disintegrating democratic West before
succumbing itself to the effete charms of liberty and suffering the same
fate) have failed, many formulations have preserved their mordant sug–
gestiveness, their haunting memorability. The eerie image of the Balkans
as a "brothel on fire" is one of many possible examples. The Balkan
countries, Cioran advances, are in possession of "a biological capital it
would be futile to seek in the West" and may still take revenge for hav–
ing been "mistreated, disinherited, cast into an anonymous martyrdom,
pinioned between sloth and sedition." He is aware that this "assertion
will seem ludicrous" but goes on to show how the last "primitives" of
Europe might give her a new, dangerous, perhaps destructive energy:
But the Balkans?-l don't want to defend them, nor do I want to
pass over their virtues in silence. That taste for devastation, for
internal clutter, for a universe like a brothel on fire, that sardonic
outlook on ancient or imminent cataclysms, that pungency, that
far
niente
of the insomniac or the assassin-is it nothing, then, an
inheritance so rich and so burdensome, one that will thus empower
those who come into it?
Well said, and true within the "theatrical" frame of Cioran's discourse
of self-canceling hyperboles and ironic ambiguities; but exportable to
other, more common frames only under penalty of gross misunder–
standing and inexcusable lack of taste.
All Gall Is Divided
is both a distilled summary of Cioran's previous
work and an ironic essay in thematic "self-indexation," in that it spells out,
