Cioran și tragedia greacă: coordonatele unei creativități hermeneutice

This study examines two major interpretive approaches that have shaped the understanding of Emil Cioran’s work, both of which focus primarily on the writer’s early years: the biographical approach, centered on the author’s psychological condition, and the intellectual approach, which investigates the formative influence of earlier philosophers. Among the latter, the connection between Cioran and Nietzsche has received the greatest scholarly attention. Building on this tradition, the present article explores a topic that has not previously been examined in a comprehensive and exclusive manner: Cioran’s interpretation of ancient Greek tragedy. Although the theme of tragedy appears throughout both his Romanian- and French-language writings, it occupies a particularly important place in two unpublished early manuscripts later recovered in the Romanian edition of his complete works. The study demonstrates that tragedy is present across four major forms of Cioran’s writing—the essay, the sketch, the notebook entry, and the aphorism—and analyzes the key concepts of his hermeneutics of tragedy, including the dialectic of individuality and collectivity, the theory of civilizations, ancient thanatology, predestination, and the (im)possibility of salvation, as well as their place within his broader philosophical thought.