Cioran et le gouffre temporel

RETRACTION NOTICE. This article has been retracted. For more information, please read the Editorial in Revue Romane 50:1 (2015).

In the Cioranian universe, language and time, both inextricably bound, both chillingly perverse, constitute icons of what is, contextually, an inexorable vision of the human condition. The pairing progenerates specters, phantasms of the void, pernicious and vacuous. It is at the perilous, indeed, the perfidious nexus of enunciation and endlessness — each dreaded, yet each ineluctable — that the dyad adopts an onerous cast. To the extent that discourse configures a cipher of perpetuity, and in that, conversely, any trace of eternity conjures a ceaseless extension of the word, of that very word which begets and embodies postmodern aporia, there lurks in consequence of discourse emitted a palpable trepidation, a confrontation with the ultimate precipice, the unconscionable, inscrutable continuity of nothingness. The deconstructive imperative overtakes the text, from which there is neither scriptural nor metaphysical exit. A curious dynamic, a tangled skein of haunting refrain.