The Temptation to Exist

E. M. Cioran

University of Chicago Press, Jul 20, 1998 - Literary Collections - 224 pages

This collection of eleven essays originally appeared in France thirty years ago and created a literary whirlwind on the Left Bank. Cioran writes incisively about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, mystics, apostles, and philosophers.

"A sort of final philosopher of the Western world. His statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning."—Washington Post

"An intellectual bombshell that blasts away at all kinds of cant, sham and conventionality. . . . [Cioran's] language is so erotic, his handling of words so seductive, that the act of reading becomes an encounter in the erogenous zone."—Jonah Raskin, L.A. Weekly

Contents

• Thinking Against Oneself: 13
• On a Winded Civilization: 48
• A Little Theory of Destiny: 65
• Advantages of Exile: 74
• A Letter: 108
• Style as Risk: 126
• Beyond the Novel: 136
• Dealing with the Mystics: 151
• Rages and Resignations: 165
• The Temptation to Exist: 206

About the author

Richard Joseph Howard was born in Cleveland, Ohio on October 13, 1929. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1951 and a master's degree in 1952. He studied at the Sorbonne as a Fellow of the French Government in 1952-1953. He briefly worked as a lexicographer, but soon turned his attention to poetry and poetic criticism. His works include Trappings: New Poems; Like Most Revelations: New Poems; Selected Poems; No Traveler; Findings; Alone with America; and Quantities. He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1969 for Untitled Subjects. He is also a translator and published more than 150 translations from the French. He received the PEN Translation Prize in 1976 for his translation of E. M. Cioran's A Short History of Decay and the American Book Award for his 1983 translation of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. In 1982, he was named a Chevalier of L'Ordre National du Mérite by the government of France. He taught in the Writing Division of the School of the Arts, Columbia University. He died on March 31, 2022, in Manhattan, at the age of 92.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Temptation to Exist
• Author: E. M. Cioran
• Translated by: Richard Howard
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1998
• ISBN: 0226106756, 9780226106755
• Length: 224 pages
• Subjects: Literary Collections / Essays; Literary Criticism / General; Philosophy / General; Philosophy / History & Surveys / Modern; Philosophy / Religious