Politics & Power Quote by Emile M. Cioran

To claim "no nationality" is to stage a small act of philosophical desertion: not from a country so much as from the emotional contract that nations demand. Cioran, a Romanian-born writer who remade himself in French exile, turns statelessness into a badge of cognitive hygiene. The line is deliberately abrasive because it flips a default assumption - that belonging grants depth, legitimacy, a "place" - into its opposite: belonging is the intellect's contamination.

The intent is less cosmopolitan celebration than refusal. "The best possible status" is a provocation aimed at the way nationalism recruits thinkers as decorators of the state: poets as mascots, philosophers as justifiers, critics as loyal opposition. Cioran implies that the intellectual's job is to stay unbeholden, to keep language from becoming a flag. The subtext carries his broader pessimism: if nations are vehicles for collective myth, then intelligence is what punctures myth - and puncturing myth makes you unfit for the warm narcotic of identity.

Context matters because Cioran isn't offering an abstract principle from a safe distance. His early flirtations with fascist currents in interwar Romania haunt his later work, making this line read like both confession and self-quarantine. Exile becomes a moral technology: by stepping outside the national story, he tries to deny himself the intoxication that once seduced him.

There's wit in the absolutism, too. "No nationality" is impossible in bureaucratic life, yet rhetorically potent: it names an aspiration to be unclaimable, to keep thought from being deputized. The sting is that it also courts sterility - purity purchased with loneliness.