Cioran on Style (Why Nietzsche is not a German philosopher)

Cioran, interviewed by Jason Weiss in Grand Street 5.3 (Spring, 1986), pp. 105–40:

Well, first I’ll tell you that when I was quite young I myself was affected by this German jargon. I thought that philosophy wasn’t supposed to be accessible to others, that the circle was closed, and that at all costs one had to employ this scholarly, laborious, complicated terminology. It was only little by little that I understood the impostor side of philosophical language.
 [J]argon gives you a sense of superiority over everybody. And philosophical pride is the worst that exists, it’s very contagious. At any rate, the German influence in France was disastrous on that whole level. The French can’t say things simply anymore.

So the frequent and reasonable complaints about French “theory” are really complaints about the German corruption of French style.

[T]he danger of philosophical style is that one loses complete contact with reality. Philosophical language leads to megalomania. One creates an artificial world where one is God. I was very proud and pleased when I was young to know this jargon. But my stay in France totally cured me of that. I’m not a philosopher by profession, I’m not a philosopher at all, but my path was the reverse of Sartre’s. That’s why I turned to the French writers known as the moralists, such as La Rochefoucauld or Chamfort, who wrote for society ladies and whose style was simple, but who said very profound things.

Nietzsche also turned to the aphorists Chamfort and La Rochefoucauld and benefited stylistically. Merely stylistically? But le style est l’homme.