Cioran et Swift: Anamorphose du désenchantement

In this article, I will compare Cioran’s criticism of utopian thought with Jonathan Swift’s parody of utopian fictions. According to Cioran, Gulliver’s Travels symbolizes the vision of an «utopia without hope»; a definition that can be applied also to his own skepticism, conceived as an «exercise of anti-utopia». The central focus of the paper is to compare the utopias of Renaissance to literary anamorphosis. From this point of view, Cioran’s interpretation of Swift’s misanthropy is comparable to a philosophical anamorphosis which uses the deformations of human reason as a mirror; a mirror capable to reflect the real proportions of the “animale rationale”.