Anathemas and Admirations

The book alternates between two kinds of writing. The 'admirations' are essays and portraits of literary and philosophical figures—Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Valéry, Mircea Eliade, Joseph de Maistre, and others—written with a personal, often confessional tone [citation:1][citation:4]. The 'anathemas' are sections of aphorisms and epigrams on themes such as solitude, flattery, vanity, friendship, insomnia, music, mortality, God, and the lure of disillusion [citation:3]. The two parts are not separate books but interpenetrating modes: the portraits reveal Cioran through his elective affinities, while the aphorisms reveal him through the compressed intensity of his own voice. The book is thus a self-portrait in fragments, held together by the force of a singular personality.

Cioran calls them 'admirations' because they are acts of elective affinity rather than neutral criticism. He writes about figures he admires, often those he knew personally (Beckett, Eliade) or whose temperaments he recognizes as kindred (Fitzgerald's depression, Borges's detachment) [citation:4][citation:10]. The admiration is not uncritical: he praises Beckett for living 'not in time but parallel to it,' and consoles Borges for 'the misfortune of being recognized' [citation:10]. The method is impressionistic and confessional: by describing others, Cioran describes himself. As Kirkus Reviews notes, the result is 'a kind of confession, Pascal-like in its intensity,' in which the author's personality is brought forcibly to bear on every subject [citation:4]. The admirations are thus the most autobiographical part of the book.

The French original was published by Gallimard in 1986, late in Cioran's career. The English translation by Richard Howard appeared in 1991 from Arcade Publishing, with later editions in 1998 and 2012 . Howard, a celebrated poet and translator, was Cioran's standard English translator, and his rendering is praised for transcribing the 'taut correctness' of Cioran's French, which Cioran himself described as 'a restricting but beloved straitjacket' [citation:8]. The 2012 Arcade edition includes an introduction by Eugene Thacker . The translation is significant because it made Cioran's most personal book available to English readers, and it remains the standard version. As with all translations of Cioran, the stylistic extremity of the original is inevitably mediated, but Howard's version captures the compression and bleak humor that define Cioran's voice.

The reception was mixed but generally respectful. Kirkus Reviews praised it as 'brilliant and delightfully opinionated,' though 'a bit verbose,' and noted that it is 'not a book to be read straight through' [citation:4]. The review found the reflections on de Maistre 'tiresome' because Cioran examines 'Utopia' and 'reaction' from too many angles at too great a length, and observed that the aphorisms range from the striking to the banal [citation:4]. Publishers Weekly called Cioran 'one of the century's most fertile, profound minds' and found his pessimism 'paradoxically invigorating' [citation:8]. The Chicago Tribune described the book as 'a good introduction to Cioran because it is his most incidentally autobiographical book' [citation:10]. The main criticism, then and now, is a lack of clear focus: the book is a miscellany, and its unity is temperamental rather than structural.

The book belongs to Cioran's mature French period and shares the aphoristic mode of The Trouble with Being Born (1973) and the bleak political diagnosis of History and Utopia (1960). Kirkus Reviews situates it as 'further speculations and pronouncements from the highly regarded Parisian philosopher (History and Utopia, 1987, etc.)' [citation:4]. The portraits of Beckett and Eliade connect to Cioran's personal history as a Romanian exile in Paris, and the aphorisms on disillusion and insomnia extend themes developed in A Short History of Decay and The Temptation to Exist [citation:1]. The book is not a departure but a distillation: it gathers the preoccupations of a lifetime into a single volume, and its autobiographical dimension makes it uniquely revealing of the man behind the pessimism.

The most common misunderstanding is that it is a collection of literary criticism, a series of essays on other writers. It is not: the 'admirations' are portraits, not critiques, and their primary subject is always Cioran himself. As the Chicago Tribune notes, the book is 'his most incidentally autobiographical book' [citation:10]. A related misunderstanding is that the aphorisms are mere provocation or nihilistic posturing. In fact, they are the compressed expression of a coherent philosophical temperament—one that takes despair as a starting point and finds in it, paradoxically, a reason to continue living and even to have fun [citation:10]. Readers who approach the book as a collection of essays on Beckett or Borges will find something else: a self-portrait in fragments, held together by the force of a singular, corrosive intelligence.