The Fascination of Artifice. Valéry and Cioran

Borrowing a number of favorite themes from Valéry's thought, Cioran sets for himself the goal of systematically contradicting Valéry's solutions; he does that by relying on the force of the irrational, the unpredictable and the ephemeral, in an attempt to demonstrate the error made by the partisans of integral rationalism. Simulation, a central element in Valéry's vision of art, indispensable to the development of personality and to the confinement of the anarchy of the accidental, appears to Cioran as a consequence of the corrupt nature of humanity and as a result of the proliferation of its carnivalesque instinct. Subsequently, he puts forward the suggestion that, in order to overcome it, oriental teachings about the unreality of the world and universal vacuity should be used.