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El aciago demiurgo
Un autor de culto. Una punzante reflexión sobre la existenica del mal y del error.
¿Cómo pudieron conciliar los cristianos la idea de un dios bueno con la presencia del mal en el mundo?
Inspirado por los gnósticos, Cioran dedicó en este libro páginas magistrales a esta cuestión, así como al conflicto entre politeísmo y monoteísmo, cuyas repercusiones filosóficas y políticas siguen vigentes. También nos brinda inolvidables reflexiones sobre el suicidio y aprovecha una visita a un museo paleontológico para meditar sobre la banalidad de la existencia.
Irónicos y precisos, estos textos exponen el talento de Cioran en toda su adictiva complejidad.
Reseñ
«Frente a los discursos felices que nos piden que perseveremos en ser quienes somos, que busquemos la felicidad o que aprendamos de nuestros errores, la vocecilla de Cioran es justo la compañera que buscas en el peor momento de una noche de insomnio».
Sara Barquinero
«Cioran es un escritor literalmente cuando uno se aficiona a su tono, no consiente reemplazarlo por ningún paliativo».
Fernando Savater
«No se consideraba ni filósofo ni escritor, pero logró ser ambas cosas. Su reflexión va inextricablemente unida a un estilo (una literatura) e hizo de su subjetividad su mundo filosófico. Su universo es el de un nostálgico de la mística transformada en un bisturí mortífero».
ABC
«A su discreta manera, Emil Cioran se ha convertido en un clásico de culto [...] Pocos como Cioran son capaces de alentar la reflexión y la duda, algo necesario en esta época de ruido y derivas intrascendentes».
La Voz de Galicia
«Cioran es el filósofo de la segunda mitad del siglo XX más heterodoxo y original y apasionado, más desgarrador y poético e independiente».
La Razón
«Cioran fue un ogro exquisito y adorable».
El Cultural
¿Cómo pudieron conciliar los cristianos la idea de un dios bueno con la presencia del mal en el mundo?
Inspirado por los gnósticos, Cioran dedicó en este libro páginas magistrales a esta cuestión, así como al conflicto entre politeísmo y monoteísmo, cuyas repercusiones filosóficas y políticas siguen vigentes. También nos brinda inolvidables reflexiones sobre el suicidio y aprovecha una visita a un museo paleontológico para meditar sobre la banalidad de la existencia.
Irónicos y precisos, estos textos exponen el talento de Cioran en toda su adictiva complejidad.
Reseñ
«Frente a los discursos felices que nos piden que perseveremos en ser quienes somos, que busquemos la felicidad o que aprendamos de nuestros errores, la vocecilla de Cioran es justo la compañera que buscas en el peor momento de una noche de insomnio».
Sara Barquinero
«Cioran es un escritor literalmente cuando uno se aficiona a su tono, no consiente reemplazarlo por ningún paliativo».
Fernando Savater
«No se consideraba ni filósofo ni escritor, pero logró ser ambas cosas. Su reflexión va inextricablemente unida a un estilo (una literatura) e hizo de su subjetividad su mundo filosófico. Su universo es el de un nostálgico de la mística transformada en un bisturí mortífero».
ABC
«A su discreta manera, Emil Cioran se ha convertido en un clásico de culto [...] Pocos como Cioran son capaces de alentar la reflexión y la duda, algo necesario en esta época de ruido y derivas intrascendentes».
La Voz de Galicia
«Cioran es el filósofo de la segunda mitad del siglo XX más heterodoxo y original y apasionado, más desgarrador y poético e independiente».
La Razón
«Cioran fue un ogro exquisito y adorable».
El Cultural
140 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 25, 2025
3 people are currently reading
21 people want to read
About the author
Emil M. Cioran
179 books4,371 followersBorn in 1911 in Rășinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adolescent years in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy in the “little Paris” of Bucarest.
A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair).
Influenced by the German romantics, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Lebensphilosophie of Schelling and Bergson, by certain Russian writers, including Chestov, Rozanov, and Dostoyevsky, and by the Romanian poet Eminescu, Cioran wrote lyrical and expansive meditations that were often metaphysical in nature and whose recurrent themes were death, despair, solitude, history, music, saintliness and the mystics (cf. Tears and Saints, 1937) – all of which are themes that one finds again in his French writings. In his highly controversial book, The Transfiguration of Romania (1937), Cioran, who was at that time close to the Romanian fascists, violently criticized his country and his compatriots on the basis of a contrast between such “little nations” as Romania, which were contemptible from the perspective of universal history and great nations, such as France or Germany, which took their destiny into their own hands.
After spending two years in Germany, Cioran arrived in Paris in 1936. He continued to write in Romanian until the early 1940s (he wrote his last article in Romanian in 1943, which is also the year in which he began writing in French). The break with Romanian became definitive in 1946, when, in the course of translating Mallarmé, he suddenly decided to give up his native tongue since no one spoke it in Paris. He then began writing in French a book that, thanks to numerous intensive revisions, would eventually become the impressive 'A Short History of Decay' (1949) -- the first of a series of ten books in which Cioran would continue to explore his perennial obsessions, with a growing detachment that allies him equally with the Greek sophists, the French moralists, and the oriental sages. He wrote existential vituperations and other destructive reflections in a classical French style that he felt was diametrically opposed to the looseness of his native Romanian; he described it as being like a “straight-jacket” that required him to control his temperamental excesses and his lyrical flights. The books in which he expressed his radical disillusionment appeared, with decreasing frequency, over a period of more than three decades, during which time he shared his solitude with his companion Simone Boué in a miniscule garret in the center of Paris, where he lived as a spectator more and more turned in on himself and maintaining an ever greater distance from a world that he rejected as much on the historical level (History and Utopia, 1960) as on the ontological (The Fall into Time, 1964), raising his misanthropy to heights of subtlety (The Trouble with being Born, 1973), while also allowing to appear from time to time a humanism composed of irony, bitterness, and preciosity (Exercices d’admiration, 1986, and the posthumously published Notebooks).
Denied the right to return to Romania during the years of the communist regime, and attracting international attention only late in his career, Cioran died in Paris in 1995.
Nicolas Cavaillès
Translated by Thomas Cousineau
A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair).
Influenced by the German romantics, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Lebensphilosophie of Schelling and Bergson, by certain Russian writers, including Chestov, Rozanov, and Dostoyevsky, and by the Romanian poet Eminescu, Cioran wrote lyrical and expansive meditations that were often metaphysical in nature and whose recurrent themes were death, despair, solitude, history, music, saintliness and the mystics (cf. Tears and Saints, 1937) – all of which are themes that one finds again in his French writings. In his highly controversial book, The Transfiguration of Romania (1937), Cioran, who was at that time close to the Romanian fascists, violently criticized his country and his compatriots on the basis of a contrast between such “little nations” as Romania, which were contemptible from the perspective of universal history and great nations, such as France or Germany, which took their destiny into their own hands.
After spending two years in Germany, Cioran arrived in Paris in 1936. He continued to write in Romanian until the early 1940s (he wrote his last article in Romanian in 1943, which is also the year in which he began writing in French). The break with Romanian became definitive in 1946, when, in the course of translating Mallarmé, he suddenly decided to give up his native tongue since no one spoke it in Paris. He then began writing in French a book that, thanks to numerous intensive revisions, would eventually become the impressive 'A Short History of Decay' (1949) -- the first of a series of ten books in which Cioran would continue to explore his perennial obsessions, with a growing detachment that allies him equally with the Greek sophists, the French moralists, and the oriental sages. He wrote existential vituperations and other destructive reflections in a classical French style that he felt was diametrically opposed to the looseness of his native Romanian; he described it as being like a “straight-jacket” that required him to control his temperamental excesses and his lyrical flights. The books in which he expressed his radical disillusionment appeared, with decreasing frequency, over a period of more than three decades, during which time he shared his solitude with his companion Simone Boué in a miniscule garret in the center of Paris, where he lived as a spectator more and more turned in on himself and maintaining an ever greater distance from a world that he rejected as much on the historical level (History and Utopia, 1960) as on the ontological (The Fall into Time, 1964), raising his misanthropy to heights of subtlety (The Trouble with being Born, 1973), while also allowing to appear from time to time a humanism composed of irony, bitterness, and preciosity (Exercices d’admiration, 1986, and the posthumously published Notebooks).
Denied the right to return to Romania during the years of the communist regime, and attracting international attention only late in his career, Cioran died in Paris in 1995.
Nicolas Cavaillès
Translated by Thomas Cousineau
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 19, 2026
Diversos ensayos y aforismos componen El aciago demiurgo, libro escrito por el filósofo Emil Cioran y publicado en 1969, el que persigue con profundo pesimismo temas que cruzan su obra tales como la muerte, la angustia, el dolor y la existencia.
Desde reflexiones en un museo en un día de lluvia, casualidad que otorga la posibilidad de meditar sobre los huesos mediante la filosofía de la desesperación del autor, discusiones con el cristianismo, Platón y los gnósticos al respecto del mal en la existencia humana a causa del Demiurgo, o las tensiones entre el monoteísmo y el politeísmo, debate en el que se acusa al cristianismo de crímenes asociados al encadenamiento del espíritu, este bajo la continua presión de un dogma que frena las sensibilidades dispersas en los rostros de las diferentes divinidades, los escritos del filósofo acusan transversalmente una voluntad que se esfuerza por desencajar las ilusiones terrenales y metafísicas con el objetivo de desnudar los sentidos de la existencia otorgados por la humanidad y sus creaciones.
Cioran irrevocablemente nos dirige al territorio del cinismo para comentarnos sin tapujos que la creación es un error y la muerte es lo único que nos ofrece cierto consuelo y relajo, alternativa por propia mano que supone no necesariamente una realidad, sino más bien cierto grado de libertad al convocarlo en nuestra mente. Pese aún, la existencia y la muerte carecen de sentido tal como se han entendido tales conceptos en Occidente. Cioran probablemente sea uno de los pensadores menos condescendientes al que uno pueda leer, más en los tiempos que corren.
Leerlo siempre supone construir un espejo que nos permita recordarnos el sinsentido al que pertenecemos, idea irrevocable si uno ausculta los ídolos o si se escucha el silencio del universo a las peticiones fragantes de humanidad que alguna vez en la vida hemos levantado.
Desde reflexiones en un museo en un día de lluvia, casualidad que otorga la posibilidad de meditar sobre los huesos mediante la filosofía de la desesperación del autor, discusiones con el cristianismo, Platón y los gnósticos al respecto del mal en la existencia humana a causa del Demiurgo, o las tensiones entre el monoteísmo y el politeísmo, debate en el que se acusa al cristianismo de crímenes asociados al encadenamiento del espíritu, este bajo la continua presión de un dogma que frena las sensibilidades dispersas en los rostros de las diferentes divinidades, los escritos del filósofo acusan transversalmente una voluntad que se esfuerza por desencajar las ilusiones terrenales y metafísicas con el objetivo de desnudar los sentidos de la existencia otorgados por la humanidad y sus creaciones.
Cioran irrevocablemente nos dirige al territorio del cinismo para comentarnos sin tapujos que la creación es un error y la muerte es lo único que nos ofrece cierto consuelo y relajo, alternativa por propia mano que supone no necesariamente una realidad, sino más bien cierto grado de libertad al convocarlo en nuestra mente. Pese aún, la existencia y la muerte carecen de sentido tal como se han entendido tales conceptos en Occidente. Cioran probablemente sea uno de los pensadores menos condescendientes al que uno pueda leer, más en los tiempos que corren.
Leerlo siempre supone construir un espejo que nos permita recordarnos el sinsentido al que pertenecemos, idea irrevocable si uno ausculta los ídolos o si se escucha el silencio del universo a las peticiones fragantes de humanidad que alguna vez en la vida hemos levantado.
November 8, 2025
Será porque vengo de "En las cimas de la desesperación" pero esta obra no me ha parecido tan buena como la que menciono. Sigue siendo un muy buen libro y una mirada al abismo que es el pesimismo.
November 16, 2025
Cioranista hasta la médula.
«Sufrir es producir conocimiento».
«En el plano espiritual, todo dolor es una suerte; pero solo en el plano espiritual».
«Sufrir es producir conocimiento».
«En el plano espiritual, todo dolor es una suerte; pero solo en el plano espiritual».
October 29, 2025
Soy un descubridor de Cioran desde este verano y tengo que decir que me he hecho "cioranista".
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews