Existential Monday

“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

Benjamin Fondane (1898-1944) was a Romanian Jew who emigrated to France in 1923. He was drawn to French poetry and culture, and while studying law in Bucharest, he dedicated himself to writing for avant-garde literary periodicals.

In Paris, Fondane worked for an insurance company and Paramount Pictures, simultaneously carving out a career as a poet and philosopher writing in French. Under the mentorship of the Russian émigré philosopher Lev Shestov, Fondane emerged as a prominent figure in existential philosophy during the 1930s. He also spent time in Argentina, where he was invited by Victoria Ocampo to lecture on avant-garde film and direct a surrealist comedy. In 1944, Fondane was deported from France and perished at Auschwitz.

New York Review Books publishes Existential Monday and a volume of his selected poetry, Cinepoems and Others.

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

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