Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Imagining Cioran On Being Lyrical How Distant Everything Is! On Not Wanting to Live The Passion for the Absurd The World and I Weariness and Agony Despair and the Grotesque The Premonition of Madness On Death Melancholy Nothing Is Important Ecstasy The World in Which Nothing Is Solved The Contradictory and the Inconsequential On Sadness Total Dissatisfaction The Bath of Fire Disintegration On the Reality of the Body I Do Not Know On Individual and Cosmic Loneliness Apocalypse The Monopoly of Suffering Absolute Lyricism The Meaning of Grace The Vanity of Compassion Eternity and Morality Moment and Eternity History and Eternity Not to Be a Man Anymore Magic and Fatality Unimaginable Joy The Ambiguity of Suffering All Is Dust Enthusiasm as a Form of Love Light and Darkness Renunciation The Blessings of Insomnia On the Transubstantiation of Love Man, the Insomniac Animal Truth, What a Word! The Beauty of Flames The Paucity of Wisdom The Return to Chaos Irony and Self-Irony On Poverty The Flight from the Cross The Cult of Infinity Transfiguration of Banality The Burden of Sadness Degradation through Work The Sense of Endings The Satanic Principle of Suffering An Indirect Animal Impossible Truth Subjectivity Homo... Love in Brief Nothing Matters The Sources of Evil Beauty's Magic Tricks Man's Inconsistency Capitulation Facing Silence The Double and His Art Nonsense E. M. Cioran: A Short Chronology