ABSTRACT

This chapter breeds a sense of anxiety through the illusions modernity creates. It argues that Cioran's view of human life is certainly vulgar and cynical. E. M. Cioran was a Rumanian, who spent most of his adult life in France. He was a writer of essays and aphorisms, deliberately anti-systematic and with no regard for finding solutions to the problems he identified. Cioran is a rare mix of the cultured and the cynical, but always a brilliant one and his antimodernism is worth appreciating accordingly. Modernity can be presented as a flight from antimodern condition and the result is an anxiety that comes from the separation of our image of us from our true nature. The chapter contains the measure of Cioran's thought by looking at how he deals with one of his predecessors in the aphoristic style, Friedrich Nietzsche. The ideological battle had been settled decisively in favour of liberal democracy and the market economy.