Drawn and Quartered by Emil M. Cioran
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The End of the End

Drawn and Quartered begins with an account of the Gnostic myth of the origin of mankind. Originally part of the heavenly host, human beings were unable to make up their minds whether to join the battle of the angels for or against God. For this indecision, we were banished to earth. The essential feature of our existence here is its lack of meaning, an appropriate punishment indeed, which we constantly attempt to escape by inventing stories like the Gnostic myth.

This “truth of no truth” is the ultimate truth, as it were. “Our only choice is between irrespirable truths and salutary frauds.” We must hide from the truth in order to exist at all. This is “an inhuman truth,” one that is both inhumane and beyond the ability of our species to comprehend it. So we do our best to avoid it. The principal tool of our self-delusion is history. Without history we are already in what theologians call the eschaton , the end times. “History is the obstacle to ultimate revelation.”

Francis Fukuyama was right therefore when he declared the End of History (in 1992), but not in the sense he imagined. Cioran anticipated his point, and radicalized it, long before Fukuyama had made it: “Henceforth there will be no more events!” they will exclaim” (in 1979). Fukuyama was referring to the inevitability of democratic capitalism as the future of the political world. Given subsequent events, Fukuyama was merely guilty of wishful thinking. Cioran got it right: it is when a political system looks most permanent that it is most vulnerable to being swept away. This is the truth hiding in Fukuyama’s error.

This is what the eschaton looks like. We inhabit it. We have always lived in it but have taught ourselves not to notice. This is an error whose truth we cannot conceive. In the midst of the end we are unable to appreciate it for what it is: the absence of any meaning we have been trying incessantly to impose upon the world. There is nothing more beyond this. Even the end has no meaning. “The truth is, history does not quite lack essence, since it is the essence of deception, key to all that blinds us, all that helps us live in time.” For Cioran , history is “the rush toward a future where nothing ever becomes again?” His suggestion is that we stop rushing; we have arrived.

View all my reviews