Abstract: A paradox governs the image as such in Cioran’s works. The strongly imagistic character of his writing (poetic, not conceptual) seems to contradict the mystic, apophatic pathos of a thinking that aims to demolish all image, expression, whatsoever, to “reveal” or rather to fabricate the Nothingness that it denounces. The notion of a “clairvoyant blindness” is what illustrates best Cioran’s conception of knowledge and knowing as a sort of “ultimate non-knowing”, and lucidity as the consciousness of the Insoluble.
