La morgue du crépuscule Cioran et Guy Debord

A concern with distinction led numerous French writers, from the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century, to cultivate an ethos recalling the aristocracy of the ancien régime. What does such an attitude signify when it is ultimately perpetuated by disenchanted thinkers like Cioran or Guy Debord? This article interrogates their predilection for classical aesthetic forms as well as a deposed nobility so as to grasp better the paradoxical relationship with the common which emanates from it.