Monday, 25 May 2020

Claudio Mutti, Interview with Aurel Cioran


Interview conducted 3 August 1995, Sibiu. Note that Emil Cioran had died on 20 June that year. Italian original, Origini 13 (February 1996). This translation made from the French version in Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes 22 (August–September 1996). Cioran offers interesting reflections on his brother’s relationship with religion, youth, and involvements with Nae Ionescu and the Legionary movement.

French version:



PDF of this translation:



Among the new street-names of Bucharest today we find the name of Mircea Eliade; but in Sibiu, there is still no road bearing the name of Emil Cioran. What does Cioran represent for his fellow citizens of Sibiu at the present moment?

“It falls to the municipal authorities to give names to streets or locations. Normally a little time must pass after a personality’s death before his name enters the toponymy. As far as the inhabitants of Sibiu are concerned, and local intellectuals in particular, they will be unable to give a precise response to your question.”

I’ll put it to you in another way. In a town in which there is a faculty of theology, how is so (at least apparently…) negativist a thinker as your brother welcomed?

“You did well to add ‘apparently.’ In a passage in which he speaks of himself in the third person, and which was published for the first time in the Gallimard Œuvres complètes, my brother spoke very precisely of the ‘paradox of an apparently negative thought.’ He wrote: ‘We are in the presence of a work at once religious and antireligious, in which a mystic sensibility is expressed.’ Indeed, I consider it altogether absurd to put the ‘atheist’ label on my brother’s back, as we have done for many years. My brother speaks of God on every page he has written, in the accents of a truly original mystic. It was upon just this theme that I spoke at a symposium held here in Sibiu. I will cite for you another passage that dates from 1990 and which was published in Romanian in the review Agorà:

Personally I believe that religion runs more deeply than any other form of reflexion emanating from the human spirit, and that the true vision of life is the religious vision. The man who has not passed through the filter of religion, and who has never known the religious temptation, is an empty man. For me, universal history amounts to the unfolding of original sin; and it is on this front that I feel myself closest to religion.

Let’s speak a little about the relations between Emil Cioran and the places of his childhood and of his youth. Did he ever ask you to speak of Rășinari and Sibiu?

“He remembered things that I had completely forgotten. One day he told me by telephone: ‘I see every stone of the streets of Rășinari.’ Throughout his life he preserved in the recesses of his heart the images with which he had left Romania.”

He never showed a desire to return?

“When we were separated in 1937, he said to me, with a choke, on the train: ‘Who knows when we’ll meet again?’ And we only saw one another forty years later, but not in our own country. He had always desired to return. In 1991 he was on the point of departing for Romania. It was then that the illness struck him, for which he had to return to hospital. In these last moments he was required to use a wheelchair. He inevitably feared seeing an entirely new reality if he were to return. And there have in fact been many changes: in Rășinari the social composition has completely changed: almost a majority of the village’s inhabitants work in the town, which inevitably leads to a change of mentality. Everything is very different from the time of our adolescence. In Rășinari we were street-children; we would spend the day rambling through fields, forests and rivers…”

And in Coasta Boacii.

“Yes, indeed: he endlessly evoked, with enormous regret, that paradise that was Coasta Boacii. ‘What good can come, having left Coasta Boacii?’ he said. Then there was that pasture, near Păltiniş, where we would go every summer. We stayed there for a month, in a rather primitive barracks, situated in a clearing where an extraordinary atmosphere reigned.”

You were very close to your brother, not only in the years of infancy, but also during your adolescence and your youth. Tell me of your shared experiences…

“We attended Nae Ionescu’s course at the University. This professor was an extraordinary figure! Many men went to listen, and not only students. My brother even returned after leaving the University, to make a call on the professor. One day, as soon as the lecture was over, Nae Ionescu asked: ‘On what else should I speak?’ And my brother spontaneously responded: ‘On boredom.’ Then Nae Ionescu delivered two lessons on boredom. Afterwards his adversaries, having no more ammunition with which to attack him, because he was the thought-leader of a whole young generation of intellectuals who supported the ‘Legionary Movement,’ they accused him of being…a plagiarist! This kind of attack is an infernal manifestation… The work of a criminal mafia, which began by attacking Heidegger, then by trying to put Eliade on trial…”

And even Dumézil!

“Always on the pretext of anti-Semitism. During that era in Romania there was certainly anti-Semitism, in reaction to the mass arrival of a million Jews coming from Galicia. It was a real problem at that time. But I get the impression that this manoeuvre aiming to criminalise Eliade, Noica and the other intellectuals of the ‘young generation’ produces effects contrary to those desired.”

You were active among the Legionary Movement. Did you know Corneliu Codreanu?

“He was an exceptional man from every point of view. He had charisma. I have often said that he was too great a man for the Romanian people, too serious, too grave. I wanted a radical reform based upon religion. He was a very intensely religious spirit. There is one thing that still deeply impresses me today: the way in which the Legionary Movement approached economic problems. The Movement opened restaurants, refectories at which one would be served a very good meal, with wine in limitless quantity. The idea that seemed extraordinary to me is that the price was not fixed. Each paid according to his own means, or according to his pleasure.”

Where did you know the Captain?

“In Bucharest, because I was studying jurisprudence there. But I encountered him two or three times in a legionary labour camp. He was an exceptional man from every point of view.”

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