« Mais qui ose en affronter les suites ? » : Emil Cioran et les rapports entre la vanité, le suicide et l’écriture
“But who dares to face the consequences ?”: Emil Cioran and the Relations Among Vanity, Suicide, and Writing

Summary/Abstract: According to Emil Cioran, every human being is “full of the conviction that all is vain.” But Cioran wonder immediately after indicating that universal recognition of vanity: “But who dares to face the consequences?” How does the writing voice in Cioran associate with and distinguish himself from this generalized humanity? And what should our reaction to the vanity of all things be? We could be tempted to say that destruction, and self-destruction above all, seems to be the most reasonable reaction. Although Cioran writes in a near-obsessional way about suicide, he does not ultimately recommend it as a solution to vanity precisely because vanity resists all solutions. The writer is thus in a contradictory position: what would be the use of declaring the vanity of all things if that declaration only participates in that same vanity? The act of publishing books is not, according to Cioran, more effective than suicide as far as the attenuation of vanity is concerned, but reading and writing as simultaneous creation and destruction allow us to forget vanity at least enough to continue living.

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