Abstract:

In this lecture, I propose to look at Romanian-French thinker Emil Cioran (1911-1995) from the standpoint of his complex relationship to failure. I will do so from two angles. 1. Cioran’s philosophizing on failure. He was obsessed with the topic throughout his work: from his first book, which he wrote in Romanian when he was 22, to his latest French texts, failure (be it cosmic, collective or personal) always played a central role in his thinking. 2. Cioran’s record of personal failures: his involvement with a fascist movement in interwar Romania, his failure to keep a full-time job (and his bragging about it), his dream to live a parasite’s life in Paris (and the fullfilment of it). This interdisciplinary approach mixes philosophy and intellectual history, biography and literary studies. The contribution is part of a larger book project, In Praise of Failure (contracted with Harvard University Press).

About the Speaker:

Costica Bradatan is an Associate Professor of Humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, USA, and an Honorary Research Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland, in Australia. He is the author or editor (co-editor) of ten books, most recently Dying for Ideas, The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers (Bloomsbury, 2015). Bradatan serves as the Comparative Studies/Religion editor for The Los Angeles Review of Books.