Existential Monday: Philosophical Essays

By Benjamin Fondane

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 159017898X
• ISBN13: 9781590178980
• Release Date: May 2016
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.1" x 8.0"