Précis de décomposition

Précis de décomposition (A Short History of Decay), Emil Cioran's 1949 essay collection and his first book written in French, gathers aphoristic philosophical reflections organized into sections such as "Directions for Decomposition," "The Second-Hand Thinker," "Faces of Decadence" and "The Decor of Knowledge." Nihilistic in tone, the book returns throughout to the theme of decay — in individuals as disease or despair, in societies as decline into decadence — alongside death, resignation, failure and a corrosive skepticism toward knowledge and civilization. It polarized readers on publication, dismissed by some as unrelentingly bleak against the postwar culture's official optimism.