Cioran and the Historical Critifiction
This essay is an attempt to trace a few historical and (anti-)modernist themes of Cioran’s philosophical thought, deemed, after Raymond Federman’s theoretical proposal, as historical „crifictions”, that is fictions about what history and culture might have been if it hadn’t been as it actually had. This very fact makes Cioran’s philosophy of history and cultural criticism quite outdated, unless this chapter of his works could be revived as a historical testimony of modernist thought, with attitudes of self-criticism included.
The essay explores the themes of time, history, utopias, liberalism, bourgeoisie, Europe, cultural criticism, modernity in Cioran’s History and Utopia (1960), and corroborates these ideas with the thinker’s similar ideas of youth, so expressed in the Romanian newspapers of the 1930s, and with the notes made during the 1950s-1960s in his private notebooks.
The conclusions plead for Cioran’s consideration solely as a straight modern thinker, despite some post-modern indications contained in his works, and for his remembrance more for the man’s everyday literature than for the ideological one.
Keywords: time and history, critifiction, utopia, cultural criticism, (anti)modernity
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