A strong sense of uselessness can be felt throughout Cioran’s literary endeavors. So much so that in one of his last works, grouped under the title Anathemas and Admirations, he confesses that right from his early adulthood existentially the choice for him has always been between being useless or not being at all: “Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.”[1] A consciousness that cannot fall asleep is condemned to a state of crippling alertness, to a futile labor of thinking as it is the only activity it cannot arrest; by definition a sleepless mind is a mind that cannot stop thinking (in other words – a coerced thinking); a consciousness that is in a permanent state of not wanting to be but unable to.  Thoughts that come about in this way (and for Cioran – all of them) are all but useful as they are untranslatable to anything of use to the living because they have no impact, they are all the same, unable – like Cioran’s aphorisms – to connect with each other in any non-accidental manner:

… thoughts are generally the fruit of sleeplessness, consequently of darkness. They cannot adapt to life because they have not been thought with a view to life. The notion of the consequences they might involve doesn’t even occur to the mind. We are beyond all human calculation, beyond any notion of salvation or perdition, of being or non-being, we are in a particular silence, a superior modality of the void.[2]

A useless life is not glamorous at all. Ciorans asks to imagine a dream come true: Sunday afternoons “extended for months” and humanity “liberated from sweat”, but immediately turns this dream into a nightmare by fathoming that “[t]he sensation of time’s immensity would make each second into an intolerable torment, a sublime firing squad.”[3] But this suffering would not be the consequence of living uselessly but rather of not being able to be useful, a result of still living like a worker on borrowed time[4], for whom work is inevitable and leisure only optional. To really free oneself from being useful – as Cioran contends – one must turn “a cold shoulder to time” itself:

The contempt in which servants live— and every man who adheres to time is a servant’— represents a true state of grace, an enchanted obscuration; and this contempt—like a supernatural veil—covers the damnation to which every action engendered by desire is exposed. […] Yesterday today, tomorrow—these are servants’ categories. For the idle man, sumptuously settled in the Inconsolable, and whom every moment torments, past, present, and future are merely variable appearances of one and the same disease, identical in its substance, inexorable in its insinuation, and monotonous in its persistence And this disease is coextensive with Being—it is Being.[5]

Time is irrelevant for the useless because for him there is no time not to do or accomplish anything: he‘s permanently unemployed without any plans not to be. In his idleness he discovers himself to be on the parallel plane with Being as his own unchanging reflection: there is no prospect of a different future to comfort him; everything there is to know about the big and dreadful Being of the philosophers (that Cioran is really mocking in the quote) the idle person sees when he look into the mirror. The idle person does not project himself into the future or the past because time becomes irrelevant to him (time as we understand it when we ask “what time is it?” or say “I’m late”, or “I hope I’ll be there on time”, or “there’s no time”). For the servant of time, on the other hand, there is always a new tomorrow, there is always the possibility to postpone or change, he is in constant and illusory state of not becoming who he is (embodiment of failure); he confuses himself with his own reflection in the categories of time, the three shards of a broken glass.

Nevertheless the servant leads an easier and less tormented life than “the disabused man of leisure” for whom “the pure fact of living, living pure of all praxis, is a task so wearying, that to endure existence as such seems to him an excessive occupation, an exhausting career—and ‘every gesture inordinate, impracticable, and repealed.”[6] Thus the paradox of the life of the individual of leisure is that it has little to do with how we normally imagine leisure. In this respect it would be more accurate to say that a truly useless life is not a life devoted to leisure but to unproductivity. To labor in eternity for no end or practical result – this is the true meaning of uselessness.

It is therefore not an overstatement for Cioran to say that futility – “conscious, acquired, deliberate” – “is the most difficult thing in the word.”[7] What make it so grueling is that to be truly futile one must not make futility into an obsession or a profession – in other words, not take it seriously, because, for Cioran, futility is supposed to protect from “the Serious”[8], from turning Man’s ideas into servile realities. Even skepticism – Cioran contends – fails in this respect because it “adapts itself to our character, follows our defects and our passions, even our follies; skepticism personalizes itself”[9], in other words, instead of protecting from our obsessions it serves only to fuel them. It would seem then that futility, as Cioran describes it, is something not entirely achievable: “Each time I catch myself assigning some importance to things, I incriminate my mind, I challenge it and suspect it of some weakness, of some depravity. I try to wrest myself from everything, to raise myself by uprooting myself; in order to become futile, we must sever our roots, must become metaphysically alien.”[10] It would be wrong to construe this in terms of a mind romantically ascending to a higher plane of consciousness or being, but rather in terms of a mind obstructing its own metaphysical impulsion to solidify itself and to turn thoughts into things. Cioran here rightfully is, as Daniel Stern calls him, “the philosopher of ultimate suspicion”[11].

This is furthered even more by his superior uselessness: “No one more useless, and more unusable, than I: a datum I must quite simply accept, without taking any pride in the fact whatever. So long as this is not the case, the consciousness of my uselessness will serve for nothing.”[12] The opacity and importance of this aphorism cannot be underestimated. To begin with it must be noted that Richard Howard’s translation is not entirely accurate as “will serve for nothing” in the original reads “ne me servira à rien”[13], which translates more accurately into “will serve me nothing”. This correction is important because depending on how we read it, the meaning can vary: “serve for nothing” can be read as meaning a relationship between the inner and the outer (world, thing or others), and “serve me nothing” implies only an inner relationship between the consciousness of uselessness and the one whose consciousness it is. “Serve for nothing” also can be read positively as meaning that someone is still serving something or someone but without gaining anything from it (in other words, uselessly for itself but usefully for someone else), which in the current context would not be an entirely ridiculous interpretation. For stylistic reasons he also translates “que moi” into “than I”, which might give us the impression that Cioran is talking about the I or the self and not about himself but in the original this is not the case

What makes the aphorism difficult to interpret is the unclear relationship between the first negative in the second sentence (“not the case”) and the first sentence. It is not obvious what is meant by “the case”: does it include the first sentence in its entirety, and thus “not the case” stands for the negation of the whole fact about no one being more useless than him? Or is it negating only the second part of the first sentence, and thus “not the case” would stand for not accepting the fact about his absolute uselessness without being proud of it? Secondly – supposing that we choose the more probable interpretation which is the former – why is it the case that if it is not the case of him accepting hiss useless without pride – his consciousness of his uselessness will serve him nothing? Shouldn’t the opposite be true? Shouldn’t the fact that he doesn’t take any pride in his total uselessness make his uselessness completely useless to him, because if that would be the case he would not gain anything from it?

The key to making sense of this otherwise futile aphorism is to understand the negative as not negating anything but rather as cancelling or postponing any action whatsoever. It is not case that there is a datum that he “must quite simply accept, without taking any pride” but it also is not the case that the opposite is true, i. e., that as long as he takes pride in it his consciousness of uselessness serves him nothing. His consciousness of uselessness doesn’t only not make him feel proud about the fact of his uselessness but also doesn’t even let him perform the act of accepting it as a fact. If Cioran would accept his consciousness of uselessness without feeling pride it would still serve him as the substance for that very action of acceptance, and therefore would cease to be the consciousness of uselessness. For the consciousness of uselessness to be aware of itself it must do it uselessly.

[1] Cioran, E. Drawn and Quartered. P. 13.

[2] Cioran, E. The Trouble with Being Born. Seaver Books: New York. 2011. P. 57.

[3] Cioran, E. A Short History of Decay. P. 19.

[4] I‘m using this idioms in its established meaning and at the same time more literally as meaning a time that has been borrowed from someone (employer or master) to whom it belongs.

[5] Ibid, p. 35.

[6] Cioran, E. A Short History of Decay. P. 35.

[7] Cioran, E. Temptation to Exist. Arcade Publishing: New York. 2011. P. 60.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Stern D. Ironies of a Cosmic Clown. In Chicago Tribune, September 22, 1968, p. 6.

[12] Cioran, E. The Trouble with Being Born. P. 103.

[13] Cioran, E. De l’inconvénient d’être né. In Oeuvres. Éditions Gallimard: Paris. 1995. P. 1399.