All Gall Is Divided: Aphorisms by Emil M. Cioran
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Wonderfully Venomous Text

Cioran pokes and prods the bubble of language mercilessly. He knows he cannot harm it but he can mock it and taunt it. Like a Prophet of the Old Testament, he can demand a reaction from the beastial being which is everywhere and nowhere. Like a prisoner of war, he can engage in trivial sabotage to make language exert its power and cruelty openly.

In order to really hate language, one must first love it above all else, to realise that language is all we have even as it holds us in its fatal grip: “To cleanse literature of its greasepaint, to see its real countenance, is as dangerous as to dispossess philosophy of its jargon. Do the mind’s creations come down to the transfiguration of trifles? Is there some sort of substance only beyond words — in catalepsy or the skull’s grin?”

The only option is to use language without restraint, to beat it, to make it reveal itself for what it is: a means of manipulation masquerading as rapportage. “What makes a work last, what keeps it from dating, is its ferocity. A gratuitous assertion? Consider the prestige of the Gospels, that aggressive book, a venomous text if ever there was one.”

Only then can language be seen for what it is: a façade, the purpose of which is to maintain the momentum of the species. “That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope.” Yet we are propelled by just that hope.

We are dominated by “the cancer of the word.” We deceive ourselves into believing our own press. “If we believe, so ingenuously, in ideas, it is because we forget that they were conceived by mammals.” We literally consume ourselves through thought. “Mind is the great profiteer of the body’s defeats. It grows rich at the expense of the flesh it pillages,” Perhaps we are not the crown of evolution but its lowest rung, verging on the temptation to “take refuge in the equilibrium of the mineral kingdom.”

Indeed “In this provisional universe, our axioms have only the value of fait-divers.” But the situation is even worse than it appears, because, “With every idea born in us, something in us rots.” Language kills from the inside. Those of us who manage to survive temporarily, “are doomed to plagiarism or reviewing.”

View all my reviews