Benjamin Fondane Livres

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.

Benjamin Fondane was that rarest of poets: an experimental formalist with a powerful lyric poetic voice; a renegade surrealist who was also a highly original existential philosopher; a self-consciously Jewish poet of diaspora and loss, whose last manuscripts made it out of Drancy in 1944 just before his deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was murdered, yet whose poetry speaks of an overflowing plenitude. This bilingual selection is the first volume of Fondane’s poetry to appear in English, and it includes a broad sample of his work, from the coruscating and comic cinepoems of his surrealist years, to philosophical meditations, to poems that in their secular and mystical Judaism confront the historical calamity—and imaginative triumph—of European Jewry.

Set against the backdrop of 20th-century Europe, the book explores the life and work of Benjamin Fondane, a Romanian émigré who became a notable figure in Paris's literary scene. His long poem "Ulysses," initially published in 1933, reflects his evolving thoughts during the turmoil of World War II and the Nazi occupation. The revised edition showcases Fondane's unique perspective and artistic resilience as he navigated the challenges of his time, culminating in his tragic deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944.

This book provides a highly original approach to the writings of the twentieth-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin by one of his most distinguished readers.

World-leading philosopher Andrew Benjamin presents a radically new materialist philosophy of art and a rethinking of the history of art in that context.

Considering the impact of Hegel on French philosophy from the 1920s to the beginning of the 21st century, Baugh's narrative makes clear that Hegel's influence on French philosophy has been profound, and can be traced through all the major intellectual movements and thinkers. schovat popis