The poetics of Emil Cioran: from scream to silence

This article analyzes the internal dynamics of Emil Cioran’s poetics, interpreted as a tense journey from an expressive cry to ascetic silence. The aim of the study is to reconstruct the logic of this movement and identify how stylistic strategies become a means of demonstrating the fundamental antinomy between the impossibility of utterance and the unwillingness to completely fall silent. The scientific novelty of the work lies in its systematic examination of the cry not only as a theme, but also as a structural principle of “cry-writing”, organizing the syntax, rhythm, and punctuation of Cioran’s texts, as well as in a detailed comparison of its evolution with the archetype of the biblical Job. The results obtained showed that the trajectory from early, ecstatic Romanian texts to a later, “neutral” manner of writing is a consistent exhaustion and interiorization of speech. The cry, realized through abrupt syntax and expressive punctuation, marks the self-destruction of language; silence, however, is presented not as a passive absence of speech, but as an active, ascetic ideal and the highest form of testimony, following the exhaustion of verbal possibilities. Thus, the study reveals Cioran’s poetics as a unique laboratory of style, where writing becomes an ascetic practice, balancing on the brink of the inability to speak and the impossibility of remaining silent, and his creative path as a radical experiment in the deconstruction of the authorial self through language.