Existential Monday ─ Philosophical Essays

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 is the first selection of his philosophical work to appear in English. Here Fondane, until now little-known except to specialists, emerges as one of the great French philosophers of the twentieth century.

Benjamin Fondane (1898–1944), born Benjamin Wechsler, was a French-Romanian intellectual and surrealist poet. Born in Romania, Fondane fled to France in 1923 to escape anti-Semitism. In France, he became part of a vibrant philosophical and intellectual network of both native French and diverse European foreigners that included Marxists, Catholics, Protestants, surrealists, and existentialists. Fondane also spent time in Buenos Aires, where he was invited by Victoria Ocampo to give lectures on avant-garde French cinema and on the existentialist philosopher Lev Shestov. Fondane returned to France where he worked as a writer, philosopher, and poet until his arrest in 1944, when he was sent to Drancy internment camp before being deported to Auschwitz, where he died.

Bruce Baugh is the author of French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism and a professor of philosophy at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, where he specializes in twentieth-century French thought.

Andrew Rubens is currently writing a doctoral thesis on Benjamin Fondane at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He is also translating Fondane’s poetry in collaboration with Henry King; selections appear in the NYRB Poets anthologyCinepoems and Others. His other translation work includes an essay by the philosopher Jean-Luc Marion and a biography of Jean Genet by the writer Dominique Edde. He is a former editor of the postgraduate journaleSharp and occasionally writes for Glasgow Review of Books. He is also a founding member of the Association Benjamin Fondane.