An Infamous Past

Marta Petreu

"A writer who does stupid things in his youth is like a woman with a shameful past, writes Marta Petreu - never forgiven, never forgotten. E.M. Cioran, the renowned Romanian-French nihilist philosopher and literary figure, knew this as well as anyone. Alongside Heidegger, Sartre, Paul de Mann, and others, Cioran was one of the important thinkers of the twentieth century to be seduced by totalitarianism: he experienced a most disturbing intellectual and moral drama." "More than any earlier study of Cioran, Marta Petreu's intensive investigation of his life and work confronts the central problem of his biography: his relationship with political extremism. The scene of Cioran's excesses is Romania and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, a time of xenophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, Nazism, and Stalinism. In an incendiary book published in the mid-1930s, Cioran openly praised Hitler and Lenin...

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