Emil cioran

1947. The year of the most despotic deeds of the communist regime come to power in the shadow of the Soviet tanks. The ordeal of the Romanian intellectual elites (and not only) begins. The Slătineanu family find themselves treated like common criminals. The whole family

When the issue of happiness undermines that of knowledge, philosophy abandons its own domain in order to dedicate itself to a strange activity: it starts dealing with the human being… Nowadays it is interested in answering as thoroughly and as seriously as possible questions

A civilization starts decaying when Life becomes its only obsession. Flourishing ages aim to values per se: life is but a means of attaining them; the individual being is not aware that he lives, he just lives – a happy slave of the shallowness that he breeds, nurses and

We insist on staying alive precisely because life has no foundation, because it lacks even the poorest argument. On the other hand, death is too exact; all arguments are for it. Although our instincts perceive it as a mystery, to our reason it reveals itself in its whole

 - Alexandru Matei, que signifie la France pour toi? - Je suis chez Leo, ou j'ai regardé l'affiche de O-Zone, qui est collée sur la porte de la salle de bain et je pensais que j'étais au moment où même la France pouvait être – hélas! – n'importe

excerpts Chapter II: The Romanian Adamism  Oh God! What have we been doing for a thousand years?! All our life, ever since a century ago, is nothing but the process through which we realized we actually did nothing… the comparison with what was accomplished in other countries

In the last decades, particularly after the collapse of the communist regimes, ardent debates have taken place regarding the political commitment of certain great intellectuals and writers, generating even theoretical and philosophical reflections, concerning the relationship

At the beginning of the '20s, fascism represented the newest and the most catching political phenomenon. Nevertheless, it failed to be a roaring success everywhere and especially at the very beginning. In Romania, the obsession of being permanently synchronized with

excerpt After the year when its first program was launched, namely Mircea Eliade's Spiritual Itinerary, the generation of '27 (or the young generation, the generation of the '30s, the generation that lived life for life's sake, the experiential and Orthodox

In the two decades between the world wars the majority of Romanian intellectuals were engaged in a grand debate about what it meant to be Romanian and how national character determined social and political development. [1] The ideological commitments of the protagonists