“Channels of Interference”: 
Maurice Blanchot and Emil Cioran
Arleen Ionescu
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, School of Foreign Languages, Yang Yongman Building, Dongchuan 
Road 800, 200240, Shanghai, China
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5764-8612 
anionescu@sjtu.edu.cn
Drawing on the concept of “literary interference” developed by the pioneer of poly-
system theory, Itamar Even-Zohar, and expanded by other scholars, as well as on 
various interpretations of intertextuality, this article compares two twentieth century 
thinkers: the French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist Maurice Blanchot 
and the Romanian-born French essayist and philosopher Emil (E. M.) Cioran. The 
article uses Even-Zohar’s notion of “channel of interference,” and presents three such 
“channels” and their results that shed light on the relationship between Blanchot’s and 
Cioran’s works. The first “channel of interference” that I have termed the “change of 
epoch,” borrowing a phrase from Blanchot, led to their choice of fragmentary writing. 
The second, existentialism, might be able to bring their works together, especially 
through the way they treat the subject of suicide, focussing on Blanchot’s The Space of 
Literature and Cioran’s On the Heights of Despair. Finally, through the third “channel 
of interference,” the two thinkers’ skepticism, the article explores their engagement 
with the concepts of passion/passivity/patience.
Keywords: literary theory / intertextuality / interference / Blanchot, Maurice / Cioran, 
Emil /  fragmentary writing / existentialism / scepticism
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Preamble
Studying the biographies of the French writer, literary theorist and 
philosopher Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) and the Romanian-
born French philosopher and essayist E. M. Cioran (1911–1995), 
comparatists can be immediately struck by their lure of anonymity. 
The original subtitle of Christophe Bident’s biography of Blanchot, 
which the English translation unfortunately did not retain—the “invis-
ible partner”—alludes to Blanchot’s desire to avoid notoriety. Ilinca 
Zarifopol-Johnston’s biography of Cioran suggests the same distance 
from the media and the public: after obtaining a doctoral fellowship in 
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Paris (1937), Cioran decided not to get back to Romania, and, with his 
French debut, A Short History of Decay (1949), pursued the career of a 
“born-translated” writer (Walkowitz; A. Ionescu, “Language”), signing 
his work with “the cryptic” abbreviation E. M. Cioran, with which he 
reinvented his self “as a ‘civilized’ West European author” (Zarifopol-
Johnston 8).
Blanchot’s and Cioran’s desire to keep themselves anonymous 
partly originates from the “scandals”1 of their youth. While scholar-
polemicists such as Jeffrey Mehlman, Steven Ungar, Richard Wolin 
and Philippe Mesnard exaggerated in Blanchot’s case (see also Nancy), 
those who studied Cioran’s case (Nicole Parfait, Marta Petreu, Cristina 
Bejan, among others) were right.
After graduating from the University of Strasbourg, and obtaining 
an MA equivalent at the University of Paris, Blanchot embarked on 
a career as a political journalist, working for the conservative daily 
Le Journal des débats (1932–1940), the anti-Nazi daily Le Rempart 
(1933), the weekly Aux écoutes (1934–1937), but also for the far-
right monthly Combat (1936–1937) and weekly L’Insurgé (1937). 
His contributions to the far-right journals as well as some polem-
ical remarks on Léon Blum, a Jewish politician, led to the inclu-
sion of Blanchot’s works in the investigation on the 1930s French 
intellectuals’ fascist discourse (see Hill, Blanchot 24). Most scholar-
polemicists ignored three important details of Blanchot’s life: first, in 
1935, he described Hitler as “the representative of an unacceptable 
political doctrine” (quoted in Hill, Blanchot 31); second, he was a 
fierce adversary of the pro-Nazi collaborationist, antisemitic novelist 
and journalist Robert Brasillach; third, he helped his life-time friend 
Emmanuel Levinas’s wife and daughter to avoid deportation (Bident 
24–28; Lescourret 64–72).
After specializing in philosophy at the University of Bucharest, 
while on a fellowship in Berlin (1933), Cioran saw in the national-
socialist experiment the promise of a great future for Germany and the 
source of Europe’s regeneration, as his articles published in Vremea, 
Calendarul, and Acţiunea testified. He expressed his strong admira-
tion for Hitler’s “pure vitality” and “fiery passion” (Cioran, “Impresii” 
52).2 In The Transfiguration of Romania, he pleaded for the elimina-
tion of Jews and Hungarians from the country. Later on, he repented 
1 Allusion to Ungar’s title.
2 All translations from Romanian, French, and German are mine if not indicated 
otherwise.
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for his admiration of a “demented sect,” to which he declared himself 
immune (Ornea 198), and excised all antisemitic assertions from the 
Transfiguration’s second edition, where he added an official apologetic 
foreword (Zarifopol-Johnston 117).
The lack of references to Cioran in Blanchot’s work and Cioran’s 
remarks on Blanchot indicate rather an antagonistic relation between 
the two. Cioran characterized Blanchot with a strange mixture of criti-
cism and admiration, calling him a “confused and verbose,” “deep, yet 
cracked mind” (Cioran, Cahiers 111, 454). He found Blanchot—the 
theorist “the most profound yet the most exasperating critic” (544) and 
Blanchot—the writer, the creator of “elegant hermeticism,” which, yet, 
remained “nothing but words” (622). In “La fin du roman,” Cioran 
praised Blanchot as a novelist but portrayed him as a nihilist, an accu-
sation to which Blanchot implicitly responded, without ever naming 
Cioran, in “At Every Extreme” (February 1995) and “Death of the Last 
Writer” (March 1955), later on included in The Book to Come. Cioran 
reworked his text for The Temptation to Exist, changing its title into 
“Beyond the Novel” and, subsequently, suppressed Blanchot’s name 
but left the definition of “the deliciously unreadable” genre that “hav-
ing squandered its substance, no longer has an object” (140).3 There is 
no wonder that in his “exercises of admiration,” he preferred to men-
tion Blanchot’s contribution only in passing in the section on Caillois: 
“in the analysis of the literary phenomena [he] has brought to the point 
of heroism or asphyxiation the superstition of depth in a rumination 
that combines the advantages of the vague and the abyss.” (Cioran, 
Anathemas 206)
The poverty of comparative studies on Blanchot and Cioran bears 
witness to the two writers’ implicit or explicit dialogue. So far, Camelia 
Elias put in parallel a multitude of fragments at work in literature, 
philosophy, and theology, including Blanchot’s and Cioran’s. Shane 
Weller’s Modernism and Nihilism debunked the various theories about 
Blanchot’s and Cioran’s nihilism, showing how they surmounted it by 
privileging the literary (Blanchot) and the annihilation of belief and 
value (Cioran) (42–73). Gabriel Popescu contrasted Cioran’s “solitude 
in the world” (in A Short History of Decay) with Blanchot’s “essential 
solitude” (in The Space of Literature).
Reading through Blanchot’s silences and braving Cioran’s caveat 
that Blanchot was a “confused” mind, aware that Cioran was often 
3 I reconstructed this neglected, yet highly revealing exchange, starting from Bident 
549, note 11; Cavaillès xlv; Demont 185, note 9. 
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un enfant terrible, whose entire work can be associated with paradox, I 
will examine more closely how their works may illuminate each other 
through Itamar Even-Zohar’s notion of interference, which is more 
appropriate than the vague notions of influence or affinity.
Theoretical Premises: Establishing Interferences
Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman, Even-Zohar coined 
the notion of interference in the context of intercultural relations, 
in the late 1960’s–early 1970’s (Even-Zohar, An Introduction; “The 
Relations”), when Julia Kristeva introduced the concept of intertextu-
ality in her essays from Tel Quel and Critique, followed by her books 
Séméiotiké, Le texte du roman, La révolution du langage poétique.4
Even-Zohar returned to his concept in the special issue “Polysystem 
Studies” of Poetics Today (1990), formulating the following definition: 
“a relation(ship) between literatures, whereby a certain literature A (a 
source literature) may become a source of direct or indirect loans for 
another literature B (a target literature).” (Even-Zohar, “Laws” 54) By 
loans he designated “the totality of the activities involved with the liter-
ary system,” including “the role and function of literature, the rules of 
the game of the literary institution, the nature of literary criticism and 
scholarship, the relations between religious, political, and other activi-
ties within culture” (54).
In 2004, Marijan Dović, who had previously proposed a more 
appropriate theoretical-methodological apparatus in empirical liter-
ary studies (Dović, “Radikalni konstruktivizem”) further nuanced 
the notion of literary interference. He differentiated between “liter-
ary interference” and “interliterary exchange mechanisms” (Dović, 
“Literary Repertoire” 70) and saw borrowings not only “connected … 
to texts, genres or models,” but also as part of “the organization of liter-
ary critique, institutions, publishing system, State funding of art and so 
on,” adding that “[a] weak polysystem cannot operate using exclusively 
4 Although the limited space of this article does not allow me to mention the 
numerous illustrious theorists from Canada, Italy, France, Germany, Britain, the 
States, and Eastern Europe who worked on intertextuality, mention should be made 
of Laurent Milesi’s “Inter-textualités,” Tötösy de Zepetnek’s work on comparative cul-
tural studies (Tötösy de Zepetnek, Comparative; “From Comparative”), Juvan’s work 
on a poetics of intertextuality (Juvan, History) and discussions on “asymmetries of 
the world literary system” (Juvan, Literary 80–85), Franco Moretti’s “world literary 
system” (Moretti, “Conjectures”). 
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193
its own repertoire, which is why it takes up foreign models and reper-
toremes” (69–70).5
Even-Zohar’s and Dović’s definitions of interference are otherwise 
consonant with Marko Juvan’s interpretation of intertextuality as
essentially a cross-cultural phenomenon linking together not only one national 
literature with other—including marginal, peripheral—literatures and cul-
tures, but also, within a given semiosphere, mainstream literary production 
with its past, forgotten forms, and marginal, subaltern, or emergent subsys-
tems; finally, intertextuality structures the text’s affiliation and response to its 
cultural contexts—of other arts, social discourses (from politics to science), 
sociolects, ideologies, ways of living, and media. (Juvan, History 7)
Like Dović, Juvan emphasized the role of “understanding and employ-
ing foreign elements in a new cultural horizon,” because in this way 
comparative criticism can move “into global theory of dialogism and 
intercultural exchange” (66).
Even-Zohar’s pre-literary comparatist situation, which, otherwise, 
did not make a great impact in comparative studies, with the notable 
exceptions of Belgium, China, and Eastern Europe where it was further 
improved and expanded (Salvador 2; Lambert 11), can represent an 
appropriate tool to put in parallel Blanchot’s critical works and Cioran’s 
philosophical essays. I share Janez Strutz’s conjecture that interference 
can be “a unique setting for comparative literary studies, a laboratory 
of literary and cultural scholarship” (Strutz 244). In my view, the two 
thinkers’ works can be connected through what Even-Zohar called 
“channels of interference” (Even-Zohar, “Laws” 57), without offering 
us a definition of his term. I therefore endeavor to reconstruct this 
concept from his illustrations and define it as: the networks via which 
one source literature is assimilated by a target source literature, either 
directly (without the mediation of translation) or indirectly (through 
translation). The next sections of this article will delve into three 
main channels of interference (“the change of epoch,” existentialism 
and skepticism) resulting in three similar modes of writing or literary 
themes: fragmentary writing, also connected to the concept of disaster, 
engaging with experience through recurrent themes such as the suicidal 
act, and dealing with the notions of passion/passivity/patience.
5 His examples of interferences from Slovenian literature canonical figures (Matija 
Čop and France Prešeren) were “cultivating a poetic language,” finding a new “versifi-
cation system”, and “opening new spaces” through which many models were success-
fully incorporated in the target literature (71–73). 
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In order to establish whether these channels of interference were 
direct or not, I propose to return to the two writers’ biographies. 
Both Blanchot and Cioran were à-la-page readers and commenta-
tors of Romanticism, existentialism and skepticism. Before moving 
to France, Cioran’s exposure to French culture was massive. He did 
not need the mediation of translation, being proficient in French, 
which became his first language after 1937. Nevertheless, the “chan-
nels of interference” I propose do not refer exclusively to French but 
also to German and Greek models. While both Blanchot and Cioran 
spoke German, in which case the channels of interference were direct, 
they may also have resorted to translations from Greek philosophy, in 
which case they were indirect.
The First Channel of Interference: “The Change of Epoch”—
Fragmentary Writing and the Experience of the Disaster
The first channel of interference that can be placed in Dović’s larger 
interpretation of the polysystem (Dović, “Literary Repertoire” 69) 
refers to what Blanchot named a “change of epoch” (Blanchot, The 
Infinite 328–329; The Writing 102)6 in the aftermath of the Second 
World War.7 The Holocaust revealed the weak foundations of Western 
thought, whose inability to conceive difference legitimated the Nazis’ 
radical antisemitism. The immediate response to this change was frag-
mentary writing, which became a new genre and a new “organization of 
literary critique” (Dović, “Literary Repertoire” 69) in the 1950’s, a pe-
riod of “anxiety and uncertainty,” “upheaval and stagnation, discovery 
and obfuscation, readjustment and resistance” (Hill, Maurice Blanchot 
37). Blanchot’s and Cioran’s return to the fragment corresponds to 
what Juvan called “the text’s affiliation and response to its cultural con-
texts” (Juvan, History 7). Fragmentary writing makes the two thinkers’ 
texts resonate, since both were attracted by the fragment’s intermina-
bility/incompletion and its possibility “of ‘recasting’ its form,’” offering 
“a perspective which combines both the philosophical and theoretical 
6 Blanchot used “the change of epoch” without defining it, also after the May 1968 
Paris events, when he referred to the way in which numerous other contemporary 
cultural phenomena such as literary theory and the avant-garde novel were affected 
(Hill, Maurice Blanchot 49).
7 For a discussion on the failure of the Enlightenment project and the dramatic 
changes that occurred in the aftermath of the Second World War, see also A. Ionescu, 
“The Essay” 345.
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aspects of literature and the more affective experience of the text” (Watt 
13). In their demand for discontinuity, they resorted, albeit indepen-
dently, to similar trimming, segmenting, styling en abyme.
This type of channel of interference illustrates the midway where 
Blanchot, trained as a philosopher, yet professing literary criticism, 
meets Cioran, trained as a philosopher, yet adopting an essayistic 
writing style whose “secret formula” is often “consonant with poetry” 
(Oprescu 186).
Their fragments share “foreign models and repertoremes” (Dović, 
“Literary Repertoire” 70), mainly Heidegger’s works on language, the 
Jena romantics’ best-known texts, and Nietzsche’s “eternal return” 
which they imported directly. The fragment was theorized in the short-
lived literary magazine Athenaeum (1798–1800) initiated by August 
Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel.8 Blanchot expressed his con-
viction that through the Schlegel brothers’ manifesto, literature was to 
“bear in itself this question of discontinuity or difference as a question 
of form … before consigning them to Nietzsche and, beyond Nietzsche, 
to the future” (Blanchot, The Infinite 359) and engaged with Hölderlin’s 
“sacred” speech (Blanchot, The Work 111–131).9 Cioran who also had 
an interest in the aphoristic school of Schopenhauer and Lichtenberg 
memorized and commented on several passages from Novalis and 
Schlegel (Cioran, Cahiers 418, 563, 685; cf. Zarifopol-Johnston 53), 
alluding to “falling into fragments” (Cioran, The Temptation 192). 
Blanchot’s indebtedness and references to Nietzsche are so frequent 
that the task of footnoting them becomes impossible (see, for instance, 
Blanchot, The Infinite 137–170; The Work 287–299), while Cioran’s 
first volumes (especially On the Heights and Tears and Saints) are highly 
reminiscent of Nietzsche, whom he admired for having questioned the 
discourse of any philosophical system.10 Cioran agreed with Nietzsche 
who had stated that treatises “are for jackasses and magazine readers” 
(Nietzsche 579) and asserted: “The mediocrity of philosophy can be 
explained by the fact that one cannot think but at a low temperature. 
When you master your fever, you arrange your thoughts like puppets; 
you pull ideas by the string and the public does not deny itself illusion.” 
(Cioran, Amurgul 19)11
8 For a discussion on the theoretical romanticism’s originality and its “radical 
modernity,” see Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 39–40.
9 On Blanchot and Romanticism see Allen; McKeane and Opelz.
10 For Nietzsche’s influence on Cioran see Bolea, Jung 24; Regier, “Cioran’s 
Nietzsche.” For Cioran’s distancing from Nietzsche see Liiceanu, Itinéraires 27–29.
11 The quotation is also an allusion to Lev Shestov’s existential principles: “But 
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Blanchot’s “fragmentary turn” differentiated between the fragment, 
“the task of rendering all the others indeterminate” (Holland 260), 
thus “only the dialectical moment in a greater ensemble” (Blanchot, 
Political Writings 63), which was in relation to “the patience of pure 
impatience” (Blanchot, The Writing 34), and “fragmentary writing” 
that “does not know self-sufficiency,” “does not speak in view of itself, 
does not have its content as meaning” (Blanchot, The Infinite 152). This 
difference shows that Blanchot’s conception of writing was “‘unwork-
ing’ and (self-)effacement, the fragmentary—rather than the fragment” 
(Milesi, “B Effects”).
Cioran took pride in writing his books as discontinuous aphoristic 
fragments: “[w]orks die: fragments, not having lived, cannot die either” 
(Cioran, The Trouble 168). He declared to Laurence Tâcu: “I’m an 
author of fragments” (Cioran, “Je suis un auteur à fragments” 345).
Exploring further the channel of interference which I identified as 
“the change of epoch,” and its result, the fragment, I return to one of 
Blanchot’s accounts on the fragment as the inner experience of the 
disaster:
Why does writing—when we understand this movement as the change from 
one era to a different one, and when we think of it as the experience (the inex-
perience) of the disaster—always imply the words inscribed at the beginning 
of this “fragment,” which, however, it revokes? (Blanchot, The Writing 102)
Through this channel of interference, which is in close relation to the 
next one, existentialism, we can equate the total light that Blanchot sees 
when the falling of the star (aster) occurs (The Writing of the Disaster) 
with the demonic light that Cioran invokes in On the Heights of Despair. 
For Blanchot,
[l]ight breaks forth: the burst of light, the dispersion that resonates or vibrates 
dazzlingly—and in clarity clamors but does not clarify. The breaking forth of 
light, the shattering reverberation of a language to which no hearing can be 
given. (Blanchot, The Writing 39)
For Cioran, “the passion for the absurd” could throw “a demonic light 
on chaos” (Cioran, On the Heights 10) in connection with ecstatic states 
that lure the one who looks at it and pushes him into disaster which 
Cioran names apocalypse or “eternal silence”:
the temperate zones of human and cosmic life are not in the least like the poles or the 
equator.” (Shestov, Speculation 280)
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Let wildfires spread rapidly and a terrifying noise drown out everything 
so that even the smallest animal would know that the end is near. Let all 
form become formless, and chaos swallow the structure of the world in a 
gigantic maelstrom. Let there be tremendous commotion and noise, terror, 
and explosion, and then let there be eternal silence and total forgetfulness. 
And in those final moments, let all that humanity has felt until now, hope, 
regret, love, despair, and hatred, explode with such force that nothing is left 
behind. (52–53)
Both Blanchot’s falling of the star and Cioran’s demonic light imply 
the necessity to go beyond phenomenology. Mention should be made 
that phenomenology ultimately comes from phos (light), which is thus 
the science of what appears in the light.
The Second Channel of Interference: Existentialism—The 
Theme of the Suicidal Act and the Notion of Disaster
Deriving its insights from phenomenology, whose roots can be found 
in Edmund Husserl, existentialism is concerned with human existence. 
I equate the second channel of interference between Blanchot’s and 
Cioran’s works with existentialism, which in its first phase (1840’s) was 
represented by Kierkegaard, the second (1880–1940) by Nietzsche, 
Husserl, Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, the third (1930–1970) 
by Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice 
Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose doctrine was that “exis-
tence precedes essence; or … that subjectivity must be our point of 
departure” (Sartre 20).12 Blanchot and Cioran were in the midst of 
the existentialist wave that followed the Second World War and they 
engaged with some of the major predecessors of existentialism, espe-
cially, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (see Cioran, The Temptation 12; cf. 
Bident 187, 193; Regier, “Cioran’s Nietzsche”; Sontag in Cioran, The 
Temptation), but also Heidegger. However, as this section will show, 
very few scholars spoke about Blanchot’s and Cioran’s existentialism. 
From this point of view, this section endeavors to follow the urge that 
Lauren du Graf, Julia Elsky and Clémentine Fauré invoked in the latest 
issue on existentialism of Yale French Studies: “it is time to reanimate 
the statue, to de-essentialize existentialism, as it were” or to go “beyond 
the existentialist myths” (Graf, Elsky and Fauré 5).
12 See also Huisman; Bolea, “What Is Existentialism?”; Existenţialismul astăzi; 
Dreyfus. 
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According to Bident, “[f]or Blanchot …, the success of existen-
tialism (even in its theoretical bases) had an element of mythmaking 
about it, and betrayed true existence…” (Bident 195). Bident records 
Emmanuel Levinas’s interpretation, similar to Georges Bataille’s,13 of 
Thomas the Obscure as a “demand of experience” and his analysis of 
Blanchot’s there is, a concept to which Levinas returned in Existence 
and Existents (506, note 12).14
The young Cioran belonged to a group of intellectuals who “ostenta-
tiously styled themselves the ‘Young Generation”’ (Hitchins 10), many 
of them also members of the Criterion Association (1932–1934): the 
historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), the avantgarde play-
wright Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994), philosophers Mircea Vulcănescu 
(1904–1952) and Nae Ionescu (1890–1940), the mentor of the whole 
group, who taught them to experience life. Ionescu’s Romanian version 
of existentialism was trăirism (from a trăi: to live). For him, “philoso-
phizing is an act of life, an act of experience [trăire]” (N. Ionescu, 14; 
for the origins of Nae Ionescu’s trăirism see Cernica). Nevertheless, 
Ionescu’s method combined existentialist doctrines with ideas ranging 
from xenophobic nationalism (Bejan 25–57). Criterion organized con-
ferences, symposia and arts exhibitions in Bucharest, and had their own 
eponymous publication, where they defined their “quintessential con-
cepts ‘Experienţa’ [experience], ‘Spirituality’ and ‘Generation’” (Bejan 
154). As Eliade confessed, the association audaciously considered itself 
“a precursor to the French cultural circle surrounding existentialism” 
(Bejan 271).
I would like to go back to Juvan’s theory, since trăirism/existential-
ism is what he called “essentially a cross-cultural phenomenon” (Juvan, 
History 7); Cioran’s trăirism, a local, marginal form of existentialism,15 
is that “forgotten form” of the past (7) which is reiterated in his French 
texts in consonance with the existentialist ideas that were circulating 
in France in those times. Moreover, Juvan mentioned that “[a]ny text 
13 Blanchot’s friend, Bataille wrote a letter addressed to Gaston Gallimard (Decem-
ber 1948), which mentioned a book that he intended to write, yet never finalized, 
whose provisional title was Maurice Blanchot et l’existentialisme (Bataille 391–392). 
Christian Limousin records some elements of this aborted project, such as the explora-
tion of Blanchot’s connection with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, which are 
also further developed by Bruno Chaouat (Limousin 253–254). 
14 Blanchot’s “there is” is linked to the Outside (le dehors), a space corresponding 
to Levinas’s formulaic il y a (see A. Ionescu, Large and Marin 6).
15 For analyzing, via Sloterdijk, the four types of existentialism of Cioran’s work see 
Bolea, Existenţialismul 17; “Death without Death” 74.
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comes into being, exists, and is comprehensible solely through content 
and formal ties with other utterances, existing texts, and also sign sys-
tems …” (45). Blanchot’s and Cioran’s works abound in such utter-
ances and existentialist themes such as authenticity, human alienation, 
freedom and responsibility, absurdity and death prevail.
Perhaps the most frequent themes invocated by both are despair 
and suicide as a response to the absurdity of life (especially developed 
by Camus). Both Blanchot and Cioran associated the lure of the sui-
cidal act with passion. For Blanchot suicide remained “secret, myste-
rious, and indecipherable” (Blanchot, The Space 102), for Cioran it 
meant “wealth” and “self-overcoming” reminding both of Nietzsche’s 
Selbstüberwindung and Philipp Mainländer’s argument that “at a certain 
level, in which the suicidal removes not only the phenomenal being, 
but also the noumenal being, every suicide is, in fact, a deicide” (Bolea, 
“Toward the ‘Never-Born”’ 151): “what greater wealth than the suicide 
each of us bears within himself?” (Cioran, A Short History 37)16
Bident records Blanchot’s shock when hearing about Paul Celan’s 
suicide, and the reflections on it in The Step not Beyond as well as his 
further thoughts from The Space of Literature (400–401). The latter 
also contains analyses of Dostoyevsky’s The Devils, and Nerval’s biog-
raphy where Blanchot regards the suicidal act as passive, because the 
person who commits his final act “supremely and absolutely” affirms 
life when negating it: Kirilov’s “feverishness,” his steps that led him 
nowhere and Nerval’s wandering before taking his life which schol-
ars wrongly assumed to belong to “life’s agitation or a still vital force” 
(102) demonstrate that “[w]hoever kills himself could, then, go on liv-
ing: whoever kills himself is linked to hope, the hope of finishing it all, 
and hope reveals his desire to begin, to find the beginning again in the 
end…” (103).
The comparison between art and suicide is meant to state, beyond 
appearances, that both art and suicide are “testing a singular form of 
possibility” (Blanchot, The Space 106). As suicide is oriented towards 
its reversal to itself, “the work seeks this reversal in its origin” (106). 
Committing suicide is rather the death that one “refuses,” that one 
“neglected,” the negligence being itself “perpetual flight and inertia” 
and in this type of negligence that the work “wants to dwell” (107). For 
Cioran, philosophy was a way to bear with endless anguish, despair, 
16 Also see Bolea’s analysis of Cioran’s theme of suicide as “election” from A Short 
History, and its correspondence to a reflection from his still untranslated Romanian 
Amurgul (Bolea, “Toward the ‘Never-Born’” 150–151).
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and suicide. “A book,” he asserted, is “a postponed suicide” (Cioran, 
The Trouble 77).
Nevertheless, exploring further this channel of interference, we can 
see also how this existentialist theme permeates the two thinkers’ works 
with a major difference. Blanchot never toyed with the idea of suicide, 
and adopted rather the cool reserve of Camus which was much more 
from the realm of the neuter, a concept that Blanchot’s work perma-
nently responds to,17 while Cioran’s approach was much more per-
sonal. Young Cioran suffered from insomnia and the torturing white 
nights made him produce his first text On the Heights of Despair “as 
a sort of generic rationale for all suicides” (Johnston 77). Inspired by 
“notices of suicides in Romanian newspapers of the period,” invariably 
opening “with the same formula: ‘On the heights of despair, young 
so-and-so took his life…’” (Johnston 77) and mirroring Camus’s state-
ment that “[t]here is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and 
that is suicide” (Camus 3), Cioran transformed this theme in the pro-
grammatic idea of his works. He felt that suicide meant tragedy and 
the idea of suicide meant freedom, a belief that he borrowed from the 
Schopenhauerian equation of life with pain: “Without the idea of sui-
cide, I would certainly have killed myself.” (Entretiens 175)
The Third Channel of Interference: Skepticism—Passion/
Passivity/Patience
Throughout the history of European philosophy, from Aristotle to 
Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Sartre and Hartmann, activ-
ity (generally related to thumos) and passivity (linked to pathos) were 
viewed as related to affectivity, finally settling on a formula that Robert 
Zaborowski put forward in a thought-provoking article: “from thu-
mos to pathos and affectus, then from passion to emotion and feeling.” 
(Zaborowski 11)
I call the third channel of interference skepticism. Blanchot’s and 
Cioran’s skepticism led to opening “new spaces” (Dović, “Literary 
Repertoire” 73) in their engagements with matters of passivity/passion/
patience. By skepticism I understand, similarly to Shane Weller, “an 
undoing of values that never arrives at their complete annihilation” 
(Weller 72), thus disagreeing with those who followed the facile path 
of classifying all Blanchot’s and Cioran’s works as nihilist.
17 For Blanchot’s “neutrality of space” see Marin; Toma.
Arleen Ionescu:     “Channels of Interference”: Maurice Blanchot and Emil Cioran
201
Taking a last glance at Blanchot’s and Cioran’s biographies, we may 
see that Blanchot was attracted by skepticism earlier than Cioran. 
Although Cioran’s early works and a part of A Short History can be 
considered nihilistic, he moved from an explosive active nihilism to 
a start of “weary” Stoicism in his French period of creation, which is 
more categorically that of a skeptic.
Blanchot’s thesis for a Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures at the 
Sorbonne (1929), La conception du dogmatisme chez les sceptiques (Hart 
5), affirmed a “skepticism against hope” (Bruns xxi). Cioran, whose 
skepticism made his writing voice undecidable in any particular 
position, rejected the lure of nihilism from his youth, reminding of 
Schopenhauer’s turn from The World  as Will and Representation to 
Parerga and Paralipomena:
I have imagined miracles of annihilation, pulverized my hours, tested the 
gangrenes of the intellect. Initially an instrument or a method, skepticism 
ultimately took up residence inside me, became my physiology, the fate of my 
body, my visceral principle, the disease I can neither cure nor die of. (Cioran, 
The Temptation 115)
Thus, there is no wonder why Cioran’s French debut, A Short History 
of Decay opens “as a retreat into classical skepticism, with nods to 
Diogenes and Pyrrho” (Regier, “Cioran’s Insomnia” 998).
Blanchot’s work anchors the paradoxical affirmation of passion/pas-
sivity, which characterizes the experience of literature and death alike, 
often in the form of the neuter, that singular place of a passion beyond 
the opposition of passive/active, escaping both affirmation and nega-
tion, remaining what Blanchot calls “an unidentifiable surplus,” situat-
ing itself “always elsewhere than where one would situate it” (Blanchot, 
The Infinite 305). The radicality of this experience leads the writer to 
the de-individualizing ordeal of désœuvrement (theorized in The Space 
and The Book), then the conception of the disaster (The Writing) as 
the passion in/through writing of a future death that is already past—
and whose “autobiographical” origin was belatedly fictionalized in The 
Instant of My Death. This is the story of a young man brought before a 
firing squad during the Second World War, who, while waiting for the 
German soldier’s bullet, suddenly found himself released from his near 
death by a Russian officer who told him to save himself. The paradox 
of a death that “has already taken place,” yet “has never been present” 
marks the birth of a new tense, called by Jacques Derrida “the unbeliev-
able” (Blanchot and Derrida 49–50) and connects skepticism to the 
aspiration to a passive, neuter language.
PKn, letnik 45, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2022
202
Not unlike Blanchot, in his Romanian texts, Cioran conceived 
death both the affirmation of salvation and the negation of nothing-
ness, a paradox related to ruin: “The terrifying experience of death, 
when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about 
death, you save part of your self. But at the same time, something of 
your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they 
have in consciousness.” (Cioran, On the Heights 4) Cioran’s French 
texts long for an affirmation of the neuter as well, although this is 
never explicitly advocated but as a transition: “Affirmation and nega-
tion being no different qualitatively, the transition from one to the 
other is natural and easy.” (Cioran, The Fall 97) The Trouble with Being 
Born, a summum of aphorisms can be regarded as Cioran’s version of 
the neuter: everything he passionately affirms, he later on denies with 
the same fervidness, as if “in him coexisted permanently and about all 
subjects the affirmer and the negator … the pleader and the judge, in 
an eternal contradictory soliloquy, an infinite dialogue with his self…” 
(Bollon 150).
For Blanchot, natural death was immensely passive. Unlike 
Heidegger, for whom death was the human being’s ultimate goal and 
his only authentic experience, Blanchot conceived death as a “given” 
rather than something “to be achieved” and reread Being and Time 
as the desire to turn the fear of death into passion (see Alweiss). 
Furthermore, in Blanchot’s Awaiting Oblivion, which started from a 
text he prepared for Heidegger’s Festschrift, waiting meant “prolonging 
death unto eternity” (A. Ionescu, “Waiting for Blanchot” 80).
Although Cioran neither theorized passion, nor did he traverse such 
experiences as those recounted in The Instant of My Death, he also con-
ceived death as human beings’ vocation: “The assent to death is the 
greatest one of all.” (Cioran, The Temptation 207) He made “of death an 
affirmation of life,” converting “its abyss into a salutary fiction” (222).
Skepticism as “an event” returns to Blanchot in the form of “the 
affirmation outside negation” (Bruns 231): “the return of the refuted, 
that which erupts anarchically, capriciously, and irregularly each 
time … that authority and the sovereignty of reason, indeed of unrea-
son, impose their order upon us or organize themselves definitively into 
a system.” (Blanchot, The Writing 76) For the writer of the disaster, 
passion is in relation to passivity, pas (in French both the negation 
“no” and “step”), past and patience: “[w]e are passive with respect to 
the disaster, but the disaster is perhaps passivity, and thus past, always 
past, even in the past, out of date.” (3; see also Derrida’s comments on 
the myriad of “pas” in “Pace Not(s)”) Furthermore, patience gives the 
Arleen Ionescu:     “Channels of Interference”: Maurice Blanchot and Emil Cioran
203
writer the possibility to think of the relation between writing and pas-
sivity and past in relation to the immemorial (Blanchot, The Writing 
14; see also A. Ionescu, Memorial 43–44).
Cioran’s preoccupation with passion/passivity/patience was more in 
the realm of theology, especially in Tears and Saints, whose title alludes 
to the Catholic tradition of the “gift of tears.” For Cioran, writing 
was rather connected to impatience, unlike faith which was linked to 
patience: “Artists can’t be religious. To have faith one must remain pas-
sive vis-à-vis the world. The believer must not do anything. The artist 
can’t believe because he has no time.” (Cioran, Tears 73) However, fic-
tion which reveals “the passion for the absurd” (Cioran, On the Heights 
10) gave the writer the possibility to “transcend death by the pursuit 
of the indestructible in speech, in the very symbol of nullity” (Cioran, 
The Trouble 34).
Concluding Remarks
There is no one Blanchot, since he asserted that his own work was 
written “not by a single person, but by several” (Blanchot, The Infinite 
435). In a similar way, we can say that “there is no one Cioran,” but 
a “scattered” one, as Kluback and Finkenthal remarked (Kluback and 
Finkenthal 2, 4).
This article has attempted to make light on the apparent non-
relation between Blanchot and Cioran, by establishing three possible 
“channels of interference.” As we stepped in the third decade of the 
third millennium, Even-Zohar’s concept of interference, enriched by 
Dović, and Juvan’s broader definition of intertextuality may seem tra-
ditional nowadays and perhaps, as Juvan self-critically characterized 
his method, “old-fashioned” (Juvan, History 184). Yet, as this article 
hopefully demonstrated, they can remain extremely useful tools for the 
exploration of the labyrinthine connections between Blanchot’s and 
Cioran’s fragmentary writing, the disaster, the theme of suicide, and 
the notions of passivity/passion/patience.18
18 Acknowledgment: this research was supported by The Program for Professor of 
Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning.
PKn, letnik 45, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2022
204
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»Kanali interference«: Maurice Blanchot in Emil 
Cioran
Ključne besede: literarna teorija / medbesedilnost / interferenca / Blanchot, Maurice / 
Cioran, Emil / fragmentarnost / eksistencializem / skepticizem
Iz koncepta »literarne interference«, ki ga je zasnoval pionir teorije polisistemov 
Itamar Even-Zohar, razširili pa so ga drugi teoretiki, ter iz različnih interpreta-
cij medbesedilnosti izhajajoči članek primerja dva misleca dvajsetega stoletja: 
francoskega pisatelja, filozofa in literarnega teoretika Mauricea Blanchota ter 
v Romuniji rojenega francoskega esejista in filozofa Emila (E. M.) Ciorana. V 
članku uporabljamo Even-Zoharjev pojem »kanal interference« in predlagamo 
tri takšne »kanale«, vsakega od njih z rezultati, ki osvetljujejo razmerje med Blan-
chotovimi in Cioranovimi deli. Prvi »kanal interference«, ki smo ga po Blanchotu 
poimenovali »sprememba epohe«, vodi v njuno izbiro fragmentarnega pisanja. 
Drugi, eksistencializem, bi lahko potencialno povezal njuna dela predvsem v tem, 
kako vzpostavljata temo samomora, s poudarkom na Blanchotovem Prostoru lite-
rature in Cioranovem Na višavah obupa. Nazadnje še prek tretjega »kanala inter-
ference«, skepticizma obeh mislecev, raziskujemo njuno ukvarjanje s pojmi strast/
pasivnost/potrpežljivost.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 82.0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v45.i1.11