History and Utopia

[xylokopos]

PART A

In this astonishing book, a compilation of a letter and five essays, Cioran creates a strange hybrid that is part deconstruction of leadership and civic principles and part rumination on the necessity and folly of utopian thinking.

Man, for Cioran, is political without choice; the political, he assures us, is the teleology of the biological. We are bound by our deepest nature to enter into conversation with other men and consequently, with history. But the way we relate to our history is by reducing reality to ideas and ideas to ideology; thus, we see no paradox in trying to save our societies by murdering half our fellow citizens. Acting in a political manner, within the context of history, we give in to evil. Our mere existence, says Cioran, involves a minimum of villainy. Political action is always to the detriment of the other. Society is an arena where a zero sum game is played out between the individual and the collective, as well as between the ruler and his subjects.

Cioran opens his letter to his political prisoner friend, the philosopher Noica, by recounting in a heartfelt manner the pains he suffered to master the French language in order to exile himself within it. He continues with his thoughts on Hungary as an enemy of the Romanian people and using his sentiments that have shifted from enmity to indifference as a springboard, he expands on two ideas that dominate this book and reveal, at least in part, his indebtedness to Nietzsche: a) the importance of having enemies, both for men and for nations and b) moderation as a result of depleted vitality. Of course, Cioran’s admiration for the virility of totalitarianism and the aesthetics of cruelty can be offensive and of little comfort to Noica, imprisoned at the time by the communist regime in Romania. Thus, Cioran hastens to assure his friend that his own present condition in France is not to be envied. Societies and individuals yearn for freedom and it is this pursuance that constitutes liberty’s virtue; for once attained, liberty can hardly be maintained or defended. A society that has arrived at a stagnated moderation and a comfortable mediocrity is a society that aspires to nothing, one that no longer engages with history, one that cannot become anything else. Suspended in an untenable present, refusing to accept a sense of mission or destiny, it voids itself.

The opposite of such a society is modern Russia and Cioran devotes the next essay in explaining how Russia emerged from sitting out most of history to dominating it. In a counter-intuitive way, centuries of unimportance, of domination by the Khanate, of ignorance and political impotence, prepared Russia as a nation and as an empire. By not engaging, by slipping by unnoticed, squeezed between the Tartar and Byzantium, Russia safeguarded her vital reserves so that she emerged, full of strength, to further expand and subjugate others. Since it is obsession and not ideology that characterizes national physiognomy, Russia did not gain prominence because of communism, but through it. Russia slavified communism, adapted it to her deepest strengths and vices. And here Cioran falters: being an average prognosticator at best, carried away by the mental image of a massive landmass that aspires to more power and more territory precisely because of her gigantism, he sees potential for Russia to dominate Europe entirely and to even destroy the Church. Russia, the ascendant barbarian, comes as a savior to the civilized, one time barbarians, who gape in awe at a frenzy of becoming that once was theirs.

Still, tyranny and absolutism are highly instructive affairs as Cioran aptly demonstrates in his next essay, “Learning from Tyrants”. The tyrant is the colophon of the politician, the perfect manifestation of the man of action. By virtue of his extreme individuality and through the exploitation not of his virtues, but of his vices, the tyrant is exemplary of what man must become if he is to be anyone, to do anything. This short treatment of political power appears to be a photographic negative to most treatises on government. For instance, and according to Cioran, cruelty almost never leads to the fall of tyranny, unless it is mistimed. A ruler needs to fear his friends more than his enemies. Those subjected to the whim of absolute power mostly accept it willingly and derive pleasure from this very subjugation, their own abnegation, not just out of cowardice, but in full recognition of their own depletion, their own desire for moderation and their incapacity to propel history forward. In the tyrant they see themselves as they have been or as they should have been if they had made that first step into becoming individuals, if they had undertaken that first evil and violent act of segregation and affirmation of the ego. The citizen, here, appears abulic and compliant, secretly harboring no other desire than to sidestep history, to avoid engagement at all costs. The philosopher, disabused of any notion of useful action and justified doctrine, admires the positively healthy attitude of the tyrant, yet also desires to drop out of history, to stop participating in this absurd carnival that is politics. Politics, after all, revolves entirely around man and the uselessness of man in the existential sense is magnified tenfold in man as political creature. Cioran sees himself as a ghost, hovering between the beast and the corpse.