Emil M. Cioran (1911-1995) is one of the most unusal thinkers of the 20th century. A transgressor of every frontier and guided by a pessimism which at times seemed to point towards suicide, the Romanian author is, nevertheless, spine-chillingly lucid and appealing. His books constitute a reflection on nothingness, life's lack of meaning and despair, and aim to be, first and foremost, 'a genuine danger to the reader'. An iconoclast and demystifier through and through, Cioran strives with scandalous obstinacy to remove the masks from every elements constructed by ever-delirious human thought. His radical pessimism is accompanied by irony and is expressed by means of an inimitable style. Cioran can be seens as a Lucifer (the lucid being par excellence) who set to thinking and writing with unbearable severity/harshness.