All Gall Is Divided

“An antidote to a world gone mad for bedside affirmation"—Washington Post.

E. M. Cioran has been called the last worthy disciple of Nietzsche and "a sort of final philosopher of the Western world" who "combines the compassion of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning" (Washington Post).

All Gall Is Divided is the second book Cioran published in French after moving from his native Romania and establishing himself in Paris. It revealed him as an aphorist in a long tradition descending from the ancient Greeks through La Rochefoucault but with a gift for lacerating, subversively off-kilter insights, a twentieth-century nose for the absurdities of the human condition, and what Baudelaire called "spleen."

The aphorisms collected here address themes from the atrophy of utterance and the condition of the West to the abyss, solitude, time, religion, music, the vitality of love, history, and the void. The award-winning poet and translator Richard Howard has characterized them as "manic humor, howls of pain, and a vestige of tears," but, as he notes too, in these expressions of the philosopher's existential estrangement, there glows "a certain sweetness for all of what Cioran calls 'amertume.'"

E. M. Cioran was the son of an Orthodox priest. In the late 1930s, he left his native Romania for Paris, where he lived and wrote until his death in 1995. His many books include A Short History of Decay, Drawn and Quartered, The Temptation to Exist, The Trouble with Being Born, History and Utopia, and Anathemas and Admirations, all in translations by Richard Howard and published by Arcade.

Richard Howard is the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, award-winning translator, essayist, teacher, and literary critic. He won the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of A Short History of Decay. He lives in New York City.

Eugene Thacker is the author of several books, including Infinite Resignation and In The Dust of This Planet. He teaches at the New School in New York City.