Should we be disturbed at all that the young Cioran exhibited pro-fascist tendencies in his homeland of Romania? Or should we consider this differently and write off that part of his life as youthful folly?

We should certainly condemn the fascistic political outlook that Cioran championed briefly in his youth and which he expressed in a text written in Romanian, The Transfiguration of Romania. (A recent book by a Romanian writer, An Infamous Past, discusses Cioran’s political orientation at that time.) At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that Cioran subsequently repudiated and deplored the views expressed in this book. Incidentally, I’ve always thought it odd, to say the least, that we are so much more troubled by the fact that a writer like Cioran flirted with ultra-right wing positions in the 1930s than by the fact that there are still writers and intellectuals in the United States today who, say, defend the Vietnam War, an utterly indefensible enterprise.

At any rate, I think the more important question is a different one, namely: are the works for which we admire Cioran and for which he’s rightly famous — or even the œuvre as a whole, leaving aside The Transfiguration of Romania — colored or tainted by fascist sentiments?

It’s quite clear to my mind that they are not. In fact, I think most of his writings address non-political, or “pre-political” questions, and are compatible, so to speak, with both left-wing and right-wing political positions. Indeed, from a political perspective, I think Nietzsche’s work —to take an example of a thinker who bears some obvious affinities with Cioran — is much more problematic.

One of the oldest literary forms, and yet seldomly used by contemporary writers… isn’t this quite ironic? In that the television commercial is itself a kind of aphorism too…

It’s certainly true that as a “genre” the aphorism seems to be as marginal and neglected as ever. This is surprising for a couple of reasons. There seems to be an audience both for books that offer worldly wisdom and for those that promise spiritual enlightenment. Just think of the apparently inexhaustible interest in self-help books and the enormous market for “New Age” literature. What’s more, we live in a time in which all sorts of marginal or peripheral genres and “discourses” have been rediscovered and celebrated. The aphorism would seem to be an especially appropriate genre for an era in which people appear to have a shorter attention span and are accustomed to a certain amount of compression and fragmentation in literature and the media.

… perhaps there are times in which aphorisms flourish, and times in which they don’t, and that our age happens to belong, unfortunately, to the latter.

One reason why few contemporary writers produce aphorisms is perhaps that this form of writing is poorly understood, and for this reason alone tends to be avoided. I once submitted a series of political aphorisms to a fairly well-known, somewhat alternative political journal, which rejected them. What surprised me was not the fact that they were rejected — maybe the journal was right to reject them — but the reviewer’s comments. It was clear from these comments that the reviewer had no grasp whatsoever of the aphorism as a literary form. He/she thought that the aphorisms were deficient because they did not include sufficiently elaborate arguments and theoretical justification. Long arguments and theoretical justification in an aphorism! Anyone who demands this from an aphorism plainly has no sense of what this genre of writing intends to achieve.

Another reason is that aphorists are almost invariably moralists, in one sense or another, and there is a good deal of skepticism or distrust today toward writers who present themselves as moralists.

Lastly, it might be the case that our age is actually less congenial to the aphorism, for whatever reason. Aphorisms have certainly flourished more in some literatures than in others. There is a much richer tradition in French literature (e.g. Chamfort, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, and Vauvenargues), and German literature (e.g. Lichtenberg, Goethe, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) than in English literature. By the same token, perhaps there are times in which aphorisms flourish, and times in which they don’t, and that our age happens to belong, unfortunately, to the latter.