Book: Anathemas and Admirations

Overview

Anathemas and Admirations is a late work by Emil M. Cioran that crystallizes the tension animating his entire oeuvre: a corrosive skepticism that cannot help paying homage to spiritual and stylistic greatness. Appearing in the mid-1980s, it is conceived as a diptych. One panel gathers tributes to writers, thinkers, and exemplary outsiders whose integrity of spirit Cioran venerates. The other assembles concentrated aphorisms and confessions, his most distilled negations of consolatory ideas, institutions, and hopes. The volume moves between gratitude and refusal, praise and damnation, and finds its equilibrium in the purity of style and the ethics of lucidity.

Structure

The first movement, the “admirations, ” consists of portraits and appreciations rather than conventional criticism. Cioran addresses figures who embody severity, solitude, and fidelity to an inner demand, artists of renunciation and witnesses of the limits. The second movement, the “anathemas, ” proceeds in shards: lightning-struck aphorisms, small meditations, and splinters of confession. Together they form a ledger of assent and dissent: what deserves reverence, what must be revoked.

Themes

Recurring motifs interlace the two halves. History appears as a theater of delusions, with revolutions and systems exposed as spiritual temptations rather than solutions. Exile, biographical and metaphysical, shapes a sensibility that distrusts belonging yet seeks a homeland in language. Aging and lassitude deepen the impulse toward renunciation while sharpening perception. Religion survives as experience without creed; he gravitates to saints and mystics for their extremity, not their dogma. Throughout, Cioran tests the ethical reach of nihilism: if nothing can be justified, what remains worth venerating? His answer is form, style as a moral act, and a hard-won compassion for failure, fragility, and limits.

Admiration

Cioran’s tributes are intimate and exacting. He celebrates severity of tone, the refusal of rhetoric, the courage to carry lucidity to its breaking point. He reads the admired not as careers or influences but as stances toward the void. The portraits emphasize intransigence, sobriety, and the greatness latent in restraint, artists who keep faith with their deficits as with their gifts. Biography is pared to the minimal; what matters are the pressures under which a voice is forged, the pact a writer makes with solitude, and the rigor of a life lived under the sign of necessity. Admiration, for Cioran, is not indulgence but assent to an exemplary exactness.

Anathema

The aphorisms anatomize every available consolation. Hope, progress, and therapy are unmasked as disguises of fear. Philosophy becomes a repertoire of tricks against despair; metaphysics, a transformation of malaise into concepts. He returns to insomnia, exhaustion, and the temptation of suicide as frontiers where thought becomes experience. God is invoked as absence, as wound, as the name for an incomparable loss. Music and silence escape his anathema: they are the forms of transcendence he trusts, because they claim nothing and confer no doctrine. What the aphorisms reject most is any total explanation; what they affirm is the dignity of limits, the truth of failure, and the serenity of desertion.

Style and Significance

The prose is lapidary, elliptic, and charged with paradox. Praise often carries a sting; condemnation, a tremor of pity. The alternation of homage and denunciation reveals a single ethic: to measure everything by intensity and exactness. As a testament of Cioran’s late period, Anathemas and Admirations condenses decades of meditation into an art of saying no without bitterness and yes without illusion. It reads as a self-portrait by indirection, the admired figures serving as mirrors, the anathemas as final confidences.