Other than Constantin Noica, it is difficult to imagine a Romanian cultural figure so central to national cultural politics yet so baffling in his own political choices. An award-winning philosopher, trained in Germany and France, once married to the daughter of English émigrés living in Romania, Noica seemed to many well suited to lead dissent against the insularity and thuggishness of the Communist system. Even his biography endowed him with dissident bona fi des. Because of his association with the fascist Legionnaire movement in the 1930s and 1940s, Noica was placed under house arrest in 1949 and imprisoned from 1959 to 1964, when his friends in the Parisian Romanian diaspora, working through the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, obtained his release and that of many Romanian political prisoners. To the immense disappointment of the Parisian expatriate community, Noica immediately rejected their calls for political action and wrote two articles for Glasul patriei (Voice of the homeland), a state journal published abroad. In these, he suggested that the “reservations regarding a simple regime” shared by his prewar generation were “a mistake with regard to our own country.” His essays are Soviet-style political ablutions, exhibiting the mandatory “self-criticism” that demonstrates the subject's change of allegiance. To account for this choice we should weigh two factors: first, Noica's intense guilt for the suffering of those arrested along with him, half of whom were part of a reading circle that discussed philosophical texts; second, Noica's vision of Romania as minor and his corresponding cultural politics. Noica's aim in his articles was not to express allegiance to the new regime, nor resistance, but a version of Călinescu's “philosophy of aloofness”: displays of indifference to power and pity toward those who hold it. Noica's version of the minor involved a detachment from questions of political power and identification with translation—as a textual practice as well as a metaphorical one—in his editing projects, memoir, and essays, culminating in his 1973 essay on “Romania's inherited fate, to be Europe's translator.” Understanding Noica's version of a minor Romania will enable us to rationalize his cultural-political choices as the valuation of nation over freedom.