Existential Monday: Philosophical Essays

by Benjamin Fondane, Bruce Baugh (Translator), Bruce Baugh (Editor), Bruce Baugh (Introduction)

Overview

Benjamin Fondane—who was born and educated in Romania, moved as an adult to Paris, lived for a time in Buenos Aires, where he was close to Victoria Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges’s friend and publisher, and died in Auschwitz—was an artist and thinker who found in every limit, in every border, “a torture and a spur.” Poet, critic, man of the theater, movie director, Fondane was the most daring of the existentialists, a metaphysical anarchist, affirming individual against those great abstractions that limit human freedom—the State, History, the Law, the Idea.
 
Existential Monday, the first selection of his philosophical work to appear in English, includes four of Fondane's most thought-provoking and important texts, "Existential Monday and the Sunday of History," "Preface for the Present Moment," "Man Before History" (co-translated by Andrew Rubens), and "Boredom." Here Fondane, until now little-known except to specialists, emerges as one of the enduring French philosophers of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590178997
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	05/17/2016
Series:	NYRB Classics Series
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	928 KB

About the Author

Benjamin Fondane (1898–1944) was a Romanian Jew who emigrated to France in 1923 to pursue his love of French poetry and culture. While at law school in Bucharest, he spent most of his time writing for avant-garde literary periodicals. In Paris, Fondane worked at an insurance company and for Paramount Pictures while establishing himself as a poet and philosopher writing in French. Under the guidance of the Russian émigré philosopher Lev Shestov, Fondane became a leading exponent of existential philosophy in the 1930s. He also spent time in Argentina, at the invitation of Victoria Ocampo, lecturing on avant-garde film and directing a surrealist comedic film. In 1944, he was deported from France and killed at Auschwitz. In addition to Existential Monday, New York Review Books publishes a volume of his selected poetry, Cinepoems and Others.

Bruce Baugh is the author of French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernismand numerous articles on Benjamin Fondane, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other thinkers. An executive editor of Sartre Studies International from 2005 to 2015, he is currently a professor of philosophy at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, where he specializes in twentieth-century French thought.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

A Note on the Text xxxvi

Acknowledgments xxxviii

Existential Monday and the Sunday of History 1

Preface for the Present Moment 33

Man Before History, or, The Sound and the Fury 47

Boredom 63

Selected Bibliography 81

Notes 85

Editorial Reviews

Fondane’s polemical approach confronts the reader with some explosive turns of thought which may lead us to reconsider everything we took for granted about life and art.” —Andrew Rubens, Glasgow Review of Books 

“Fondane . . . deserves to be celebrated outside France . . . as his far-ranging gifts and accomplishments are at the heart of 20th-century Jewish artistic and philosophical modernism.” —Benjamin Ivry, The Jewish Daily Forward

“I was seized by the force of his images anchored in carnality, and I had the feeling of listening to a voice that was both unique and powerful, the voice of a man who, unworried by literary effect, shouted out his human condition.” —Michel Carassou

From the Publisher