All Gall Is Divided: The Aphorisms of a Legendary Iconoclast

by Emil M. Cioran

Book Overview

"An antidote to a world gone mad for bedside affirmation"--Washington Post.

E. M. Cioran has been called the last worthy disciple of Nietzsche and "a sort of final philosopher of the Western world" who "combines the compassion of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning" (Washington Post).

All Gall Is Divided is the second book Cioran published in French after moving from his native Romania and establishing himself in Paris. It revealed him as an aphorist in a long tradition descending from the ancient Greeks through La Rochefoucault but with a gift for lacerating, subversively off-kilter insights, a twentieth-century nose for the absurdities of the human condition, and what Baudelaire called "spleen."

The aphorisms collected here address themes from the atrophy of utterance and the condition of the West to the abyss, solitude, time, religion, music, the vitality of love, history, and the void. The award-winning poet and translator Richard Howard has characterized them as "manic humor, howls of pain, and a vestige of tears," but, as he notes too, in these expressions of the philosopher's existential estrangement, there glows "a certain sweetness for all of what Cioran calls 'amertume.'"

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1948924234
• ISBN13: 9781948924238
• Release Date: July 2019
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

I'll never forgive Richard Howard for the dumb-pun title

From MY 1980S by Wayne Koestenbaum: "On a train I read ROLAND BARTHES by Roland Barthes (translated by Richard Howard): I looked out dirty windows onto dirty New Jersey fields. I began to take autobiography seriously as a historical practice with intellectual integrity. On an airplane I read Michel Leiris's MANHOOD (translated by Richard Howard) and grooved to Leiris's mention of a 'bitten buttock'; I decided to become, like Leiris, a self-ethnographer. I read Gide's THE IMMORALIST (translated by Richard Howard) in Hollywood, Florida, while lying on a pool deck. I read many books translated by Richard Howard." Good thing, too. I'd be lost without Richard Howard because I don't know French. But he should've given the title a direct translation. Which would be: SYLLOGISMS OF BITTERNESS.

Negativism will only get you so far

1)Even Nihilism should have its limits 2)Bile is only one of the four humors 3) God and the world are with us- Neitzsche and Cioran write no new aphorisms today 4) The bitter should occasionally prepare us for the sweet 5) Cleverness and bad humor provide momentary guilty pleasure 6) The Good is also Real 7) The gall of this Gaul is not always a Gevalt 8) When you look down you invariably go lower 9) As Rona Barrett once said after trashing half of humanity "Cioran, Keep thinking those good thoughts" 10) Thoreau said " Every day is a new day to dawn.The sun is but a morning star" He too was an aphorist.

The most thoroughgoing nihilism

E.M. Cioran, the Romanian decadent writer and anti-philosopher, stands firmly alongside the great aphorists, La Rouchefoucald, Lichtenberg, Nietzsche, with this compilation of stiletto epigrams. Paradoxical and iconoclastic, he treats of subjects as varied as language, death, music, despair, philosophy, religion and love. He represents one of the most unrelenting currents in nihilist thought, as he directs the solvent of his scepticism against everything -- (even scepticism itself) -- all with the most polished prose and a hard, gem-like brilliance. "The history of ideas is the history of the spite of certain solitaries." -- "Leukemia is the garden where God blooms." -- "The Creation was the first act of sabotage." -- "For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa." -- "Events -- tumours of Time." Of such a quality are Cioran's rapier-sharp aphorisms. However, the beauty of his style draws our attention to another, more deep-lying paradox. That in his distrust of humanity, his yearning for extinction and hatred of life, Cioran, with his tremendous stylistic gifts, actually succeeds in finding a route towards affirming life all the more happily and courageously. Even the strength of a certain drive to nothingness, this quanta of the hatred of life, converts itself, in spite of itself, as an ever more potent stimulant to life.

What a cheerful fellow....

Certainly a brilliant exposition of nihilistic thought. Yet, by his skills of expression...and the artful conception of his notions...Mr. Cioran actually, inadvertently, provides strong evidence contradicting his bleak interpetation of life and the human spirit.The wonder is that he never seems to realize it. And so it seems to go with others of this persuasion: aetheists, anarchists, and those who cling purely to the scientific view of things. Their art, their emotion, their intellects, and their passion stand in ironic contrast to their points of view.Go figure.