Existential Monday
  • Published: 15 June 2016
  • ISBN: 9781590178980
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $34.00
Categories:

Existential Monday

Philosophical Essays

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Benjamin Fondane was a French-Romanian intellectual and poet whose thought and writing transcended the boundaries of genre and discipline, spanning poetry, theater, literary criticism, and philosophy. Existential Monday brings the essays of this complex, brilliant, and until now under-appreciated thinker to a new audience of readers.

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.
  • Published: 15 June 2016
  • ISBN: 9781590178980
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $34.00
Categories:

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Praise for Existential Monday

Praise for Benjamin Fondane

"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

"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

"I am proud to have known Fondane, learnt the elements of philosophy from particularly Chestov's and his own, special kind of existential philosophy, and to have been, at a crucial moment in my youth, greatly influenced by him." --David Gascoyne

"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