Abstract

A master of the art of thinking against oneself, Emil Cioran explores in his works, particularly in The Temptation to Exist, the idea that the condition of being a creature satisfies no one and that the best situation is unattainable: to have never been born. Man must recover his primitive absence, become a metaphysical stranger, withdraw from everything, and retreat, like the hermits, into that negation of history which is the desert.