Cioran şi analiza cafard-ului
Cioran and the analysis of cafard

Summary/Abstract: Settled in Paris, the Romanian philosopher Cioran discovered the cafard, “psychological or visceral boredom” that the entire French people seemed to him to suffer of. He distinguished this state from the proper boredom (ennui) and excluded its equivalence with melancholy, nostalgia or the German Sehnsucht. Recording in his Notebooks the crisis of cafard, he tried to detect all its levels (from tango to the Apocalypse), the physiological sources and the metaphysical dimensions. He was convinced of its universality, sought remedies and investigated its products, including the cruelty and its own writing. In this presentation I emphasize that this concept is a fundamental one in Cioran’s life and work (he even set out to dedicate it an essay – Essai sur le Cafard – but came to the conclusion that it is useless to analyse it any further). I also point out that in many translations (including those in Romanian) cafard has been replaced by other terms (sometimes inappropriate) and thus his presence, although essential, is no longer pointed out.

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