The Temptation to ExistFirst English edition: Chicago, U.S.A., Quadrangle Books, 1968
Translated from the French by Richard Howard & Introduction by Susan Sontag
Hardcover, 222 pages
ISBN
La tentation d'exister
Première édition: Paris, Gallimard, 1956
240 pages, 118 x 185 mm. Collection Les Essais (No 82)
ISBN 2070214583.
The University of Chicago Press :
Cioran, E. M. The Temptation to Exist. Translated by Richard Howard. With an Introduction by Susan Sontag. 224 p. 5-1/4 x 8 1968
Paper USA $17.50 0-226-10675-6 Spring 1998
This collection of eleven essays originally appeared in France thirty years ago and created a literary whirlwind on the Left Bank. Cioran writes incisively about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, mystics, apostles, and philosophers.
"A sort of final philosopher of the Western world. His statements have the compression of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning."—Washington Post
"An intellectual bombshell that blasts away at all kinds of cant, sham and conventionality. . . . [Cioran's] language is so erotic, his handling of words so seductive, that the act of reading becomes an encounter in the erogenous zone."—Jonah Raskin, L.A. Weekly
E. M. Cioran (1911-1995) was born and educated in Romania and lived in Paris from 1937 until his death. He is the author of numerous works, including On the Heights of Despair, also available from the University of Chicago Press.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction by Susan Sontag
Thinking Against Oneself
On a Winded Civilization
A Little Theory of Destiny
Advantages of Exile
A People of Solitaries
Some Blind Alleys: A Letter
Style as Risk
Beyond the Novel
Dealing with the Mystics
Rages and Resignations
The Temptation to Exist
