On the heights of despair

Brief Reviews lectuals, the “liberals,” whom he considers the true exponents of a right-wing, inherently anti-Soviet philosophy. Ligachev states his views with passion and candor. For him, the past, with all its crimes and atrocities, was also a time of grandeur, and, in this, he speaks for the millions of bureaucrats to whom the Soviet Union was a sacred place, For a Western audience, Ligachev also provides the views of a consummate insider who was present at the creation of Gorbachev’s revolution, but who came to dissent from it, and now argues that a different strategy could have rescued Lenin’s legacy. On the He@hts of Despair. By E. M. Cioran, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, l!?J2. 128 pp. $18.95. Cioran made his triumphant debut in Romanian culture with the publication of this volume in 1934.Later, after his exile to France in 1938,he became a celebrated essayist, well-known for his extraordinary stylistic gifts and poignant formulations of the hopeless condition of man in a mass civilization. His book remains important because it allows a Western reader to take the measure of Cioran’s all-consuming youth-fever, very much like Nietzche’s yearning for the superman. Also it provides an introduction to the mental universe of a philosopher who was to be celebrated as a proponent of “radical will” (by Susan Sontag, among others). The truth is that, at the moment Cioran wrote his apocalyptical aphorisms about “the sickness unto death” and the absurdity of existence, he was a supporter of Romania’s extreme Right, glowingly celebrating in newspaper articles both Hitler and the Iron Guard (Romania’s fascist movement>. His political messianism linked to a rejection of rationalism, liberalism, and the whole tradition of the European Enlightenment. As a prophet of the radical Right, Cioran displays in On the Heights of Despair his original philosophical beliefs: a refusal of Cartesian wisdom and the exaltation of unbounded subjectivity. Taking into account the difficulties of Cioran’s paradoxical style, the translation is outstanding. Cioran’s books have been reprinted in post-Ceausescu Romania, where partisans of Orthodox fundamentalism claim his youthful ideas as their source of inspiration (in spite of the philosopher’s warning that they belong to a time of “hysteric exaltation,“) A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia. By Mark Thompson. New York: Pantheon, 1992.350 pp. $23.00. A British journalist with a remarkable historical sense, Thompson has written one of the best analyses of the collapse of the Yugoslav state, one which refuses to take sides but seeks the deep-seated origins of the ethnic strife that shattered Yugoslavia. He holds that an indomitable attraction to power by such men as Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman counts for more than the nationalist passions and the war-mongering demagogery. Both of them entertain a mythological view of the ethnically pure state. Both see the foreigner (frequently equated with any dissenter) as the enemy. Summer 1993 1 483