Cioran ou le mal de foi : les vestiges du sacré dans l'écriture
The secularization process characteristic of 20th century Western thought has wrought profound change in our modern view of the sacred. Indeed, The disintegration of traditional representations of the sacred has left a mainly existential and spiritual void where, previously, certain contents of these representations allowed one to find a personal space in relation to, and within, the Universal – in other words, to find one’s place in the world and its organizing institutions – and to invest such a space with shared, accepted and understood meaning. However, this decaying process is not without producing a residual which literature can gather: vestiges of a sacred in transformation – a sacred which also remains the object of a search. Cioran’s writing is exemplary in this respect. Not only is it a depository for the remains of the sacred, it is also the tool or the medium, the striving path of its pursuit. His torn writing, ridden with existential angst and profound doubt, bears witness to a refusal – presented as an inability – to subscribe to outdated traditional representations of the sacred. Neither completely philosophical nor literary, thereby generally considered unclassifiable by scholars, Cioran’s oeuvre brings attention to the importance of literature as a modality of the mind. Cioran’s oeuvre brings to light literature’s role within thought as a space where a search for a sacred that lies beyond its traditional framework might manifest itself, but also as a means of undertaking a freer, more personal, search for the sacred. Literature thus becomes as much a receptacle as a means of a wholly existential quest that is neither represented nor confessed, but acted out. The “I” found throughout Cioran’s works is not the “I” of a confession, but the “I” of a narrative, which is not to say it is the “I” of the author. It is precisely in the gap created by dramatization that arises the paradox inherent to the particular knowledge literature conveys: the personal, incarnate, particular character of this knowledge becomes the vehicle for a universal experience which has the power or potential of harboring the reader’s personal experience as he performs – or acts out, #! as it were – the text for himself. In this sense, reading and writing are intertwined – are two sides of a single reality – in this quest for a sacred that comes forth, in Cioran’s thought, in this space of exception, outside of institutions. Taking as its starting point the exemplarity of Cioran’s oeuvre in these respects, this thesis proposes a reflection on literature as a mode of inscription of what remains of the sacred, as well as a manifestation and a means of a yearning or a quest for the sacred unhindered by institutional boundaries. It aims thereby to shed light on the type of knowledge peculiar to literature by taking into account the literary dramatization that takes place in the context of this search.
Cioran sacred Cioran literature writing dramatization knowledge reading