Existential Monday (Paperback)

Benjamin Fondane

ISBN 10: 159017898X / ISBN 13: 9781590178980

Published by New York Review Books, New York, 2016

About this Item

Paperback. 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. Poet, critic, man of the theater, movie director, Benjamin Fondane took a philosophical turn in 1930s, which made him a major interlocutor. This book deals with his life and work. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781590178980

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Existential Monday (Paperback)
• Publisher: New York Review Books, New York
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 159017898X
• ISBN 13: 9781590178980
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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.

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 Postmodernism and 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.