A Short History of Decay by E.M. Cioran

Author:E.M. Cioran
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Modern, Reference, 20th Century, Philosophy, French, Literary Criticism, Social, History & Surveys, Quotations, Essays, European
ISBN: 9781628724943
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2012-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

Conditions of Tragedy

If Jesus had ended his career upon the Cross, if he had not been committed to resuscitation—-what a splendid tragic hero! His divine aspect has cost literature an admirable subject. Thereby he shares the fate, aesthetically mediocre, of all just men. Like everything which perpetuates itself in men’s hearts, like everything which is exposed to worship and does not irremediably die, he does not lend himself to that vision of a total end which marks out a tragic destiny. For that it would have been necessary that Jesus have no followers and that the transfiguration did not come to raise him to an illicit halo. Nothing more alien to tragedy than the notion of redemption, of salvation and immortality! The hero succumbs under the weight of his own actions, without its being granted him to evade his death by some supernatural grace; he continues—as an existence—in no way whatever, he remains distinct in men’s memory as a spectacle of suffering; having no disciples, his sterile destiny proves fruitful to nothing but other people’s imagination. Macbeth collapses without the hope of a redemption: there is no extreme unction in tragedy. . . .

The nature of a faith, even if it must fail, is to elude the Irreparable. (What could Shakespeare have done with a martyr?) The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief. His existence eliminates any notion of an escape; the paths which do not lead him to death are dead ends to him; he works at his “biography"; he tends to his denouement and instinctively manages everything to bring about events fatal to himself Fatality being his vital juice, every way out can be no more than a disloyalty to his destruction. Thus the man of destiny is never converted to any belief whatever: he would thereby spoil his end. And, if he were immobilized on the cross, it is not he who would raise his eyes to heaven: his own history is his sole absolute, as his will to tragedy is his sole desire. . . .

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