THE HISTORIAN Martin Stanton has called Benjamin Fondane “surely the most underrated intellectual of the 1930s.”[1] He is certainly one of the most difficult to pin down: poet and philosopher, Romanian Jew and French citizen, a thinker for whom every limit, every border served as “a torture and a spur.”[2] During his life, he constantly crossed geographical borders, just as in his work he crossed the borders between genres and disciplines, ranging over poetry, theater, literary criticism, and philosophy. This very versatility may be the major reason that his philosophy remains so underappreciated.
Fondane’s refusal to remain within the confines of any school or doctrine makes him unique, even within the context of the existential philosophy of which he was a leading exponent in the 1930s. A metaphysical anarchist, as the literature scholar Olivier Salazar-Ferrer has called him,[3] he affirmed life and the individual against those great universal abstractions that limit human freedom—the State, History, the Law, the Idea—always refusing the stable identity conferred by any form of “belonging” to some larger group or institution. Like Walt Whitman, he was unafraid of contradiction: His poem “Exodus,” written in solidarity with his fellow Jews who were being persecuted, arrested, and deported from occupied France, was composed at the same time he was writing a critique of what to some constitutes the very essence of Judaism—the Law— declaring that “the Law was made for man, not man for the Law.”[4] Fondane described his compatriot Constantin Brancusi as “fiercely unique, outside of all categories”;[5] so too was Fondane.
In the 1930s and ’40s, Fondane was a major participant in the philosophical debates that were taking place among Marxists, Catholics and Protestants, surrealists and existentialists in a Paris that included a large number of émigré intellectuals. And though his independence of mind and refusal to be limited by any doctrine made him an essentially solitary thinker, he was also an intarissable conversationalist who loved dialogue, argument, and polemic, right up until his final days in Auschwitz.
Fondane was a paradoxical character, and paradox is central to his philosophy: a vision of the solitary individual who through solidarity with other solitary individuals, in virtue of their common uniqueness, reaches towards a new sort of community, constituted through difference and individuality rather than the generalities of ideology, race, nationality, or religion, united by not belonging: “un tas de SEULS” (“so many ALONES”).[6] “Private thinkers”—Søren Kierkegaard, Blaise Pascal, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lev Shestov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, united only in their being “exceptions”—these above all constituted Fondane’s community. His paradoxes and his contradictions, in his thought and in his life, create a barrier to those who seek a rationally coherent and unified body of work, but this very refusal of limits and categories—this revolt—constitutes both Fondane’s singularity and the guiding thread that runs through all his works.
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Benjamin Fondane was born Benjamin Wechsler near Iasi in the Moldavian province of Romania in 1898, the child of a moderately prosperous Jewish Romanian family. At the time, Jews made up nearly forty percent of Iasi’s population of around a hundred thousand; the town was a vibrant cultural center, having been the capital of an independent Moldavia until Moldavia’s incorporation into Romania in 1862. Fondane was fourteen when he published his first poems under the pseudonym I. G. Ofrir, and that year he went through several other pseudonyms before eventually settling on Benjamin Fundoianu (Fundoianu was the name of a country property belonging to his paternal grandfather). He moved to Bucharest to finish high school and then, at the behest of his family, studied law, but he spent most of his time writing articles and poetry for avant-garde Romanian periodicals and writing and directing plays for a short-lived theater company called Insula (“The Island”) that he founded with friends. Their anti-commercial, modernist productions shocked the bourgeoisie. Fundoianu, the poet, critic, essayist, and playwright, soon became a prominent member of the Romanian literary avant-garde; he was, in the words of a contemporary, “the stooping green-eyed youth from Iasi, the standard-bearer of the iconoclasts and the new generation,” around whom “all those euphoric young men believing that they had something to say” circled like moths around a flame.[7] Between 1912 and 1923, Fundoianu published some 550 articles and poems in literary periodicals associated with the various new artistic movements of the time. According to cultural historian Thomas Sandqvist, he was regarded as “perhaps the most vanguard of all modernists of the Romanian avant-garde in regard to both his bohemian lifestyle and his poems.”[8]
But his heart lay elsewhere. Fondane’s great passion was French poetry. In Imagini si Carti din Franta (Images and Books of France), a study of Stéphane Mallarmé, André Gide, Marcel Proust, and other French writers that he published in Bucharest in 1922, he writes: “I have not come to know French literature as I might know German literature: I have lived it.”[9] Romanian literature, indeed, was merely “a colony of French culture.” Why not, then, seek French culture on its native soil? Like his compatriot Tristan Tzara—soon to be his friend—Fondane set his sights westward, in search of the most radical literary and philosophical ideas.
And like Tzara, Fondane arrived in the West in full revolt against rationalism and the reign of logic. Tzara’s famous “Dada Manifesto” of 1918 declared: “I am against action, for continuous contradictions, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense.” Tzara continued: “Logic is always wrong. . . . Its chains kill, it is an enormous centipede stifling independence.”[10] What is at stake is nothing less than a total rejection of “the so-called modern civilization and its very foundations, rational thought and language.”[11] These sentiments resonated with Fondane, who was already in pursuit of a new conception of freedom.
It was a pursuit born as much of tradition as of the avant-garde. In Bucharest, Fondane contributed to a number of Romanian Jewish periodicals, and though his Judaism was anything but orthodox, his writings show that he was steeped in Jewish religious thought, especially the mysticism of the Cabala, and in Jewish literature and folklore. One Romanian play of the day recounts the tale of a rabbi who invites a “philosopher” to dinner and mocks the modern man’s faith in steam engines and air balloons, “marvels” of no interest to the rabbi, who can walk on water and ascend to heaven by his own power in time “to eat the third dinner of the Sabbath.” In the play, “everything is as possible as impossible” and “absurdity itself is the meaning of life.”[12]
Fondane’s is a subversive and rebellious Judaism, “decrystallizing” the Jewish law, and he finds it in the Essenes, in Jesus, in the Cabalists, and in “the pure joy of the Hasidim,” “the search for the living being in the dead person, of temporal movement in stagnation, of a rupture in the automatism.”[13] Fondane would later describe himself as belonging to an “essential Jewishness” situated “outside of time, outside of history, outside the limits of any definite structure—geographical, historical, national,” one that expresses “the density of a revelation which, although entrusted to a single people, concerns the salvation of humanity in general in the highest degree.”[14] For Fondane, this “Jewish thought” includes thinkers such as Pascal, Luther, Tertullian, and Kierkegaard, and excludes ethnically Jewish but essentially secular Jews such as Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud. Its essence is the proclamation of a God unconstrained by logical or moral necessity and for whom “all things are possible.”
On reaching Paris in 1923, Fundoianu became Fondane. He kept company with fellow Romanians—among them Tzara and Brancusi—and members of the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde: Antonin Artaud, Marc Chagall, and others. He got to know the surrealists; Man Ray took a photograph of him to illustrate Fondane’s book of “unfilmable” screenplays, Ciné-poèmes.[15]
André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto had contained the ringing declaration that “the imagination is at the point of demanding its rights.” Fondane was attracted to the playfulness and rebelliousness of surrealism, though he was soon put off by Breton’s increasing dogmatism, the sectarianism and factionalism of the movement, and Breton’s attempt to ally it, beginning in 1927, with the “scientific socialism” of the French Communist Party. Fondane found it incomprehensible that surrealism, born of a spiritual anarchism that opposed the rational constraints and determinism of “Euclidian reality,”[16] should abandon the arbitrary and the miraculous and subscribe, in the name of “service to the revolution,” to “a historical materialism which resolved the antinomy ‘individual-society’ by suppressing the individual.”[17] Fondane would eventually maintain that for all his enthusiasm for dreams and madness, Breton only ventured into such domains with “Freud’s Baedeker guide in hand.”[18] Breton’s surrealism was not nearly mad enough.
In 1930, Fondane’s vexed relations with the surrealists came to a farcical apogee in a Montparnasse bar, the Maldoror (named after the Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, a bible for surrealists). Breton, Louis Aragon, René Char, and Paul Éluard breezed in, Breton announcing, “I am a guest of the Comte de Lautréamont and this establishment belongs to us.” A melee ensued in which Fondane says he “fought against Breton personally.”[19] Nonetheless, he remained on good terms with the “dissident” surrealists, such as Artaud, René Daumal, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Robert Desnos, and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, who Fondane saw as having remained true to “the irrational, affective, imaginative, real self.”[20]
During all this time, Fondane was trying, with considerable difficulty, to make a life for himself in Paris. He had arrived with a reading knowledge of French but little more, and between 1923 and 1928, his principal literary output remained in Romanian. He was a Paris correspondent for Integral and other Romanian avant-garde periodicals; he also published a collection of poems, Privelisti (Landscapes).[21] Romanian friends provided encouragement and financial help, as did Gide and the philosopher Jules de Gaultier. When Fondane’s sister, Line, and her husband, Armand Pascal, joined him in 1924, the three shared an apartment. His friend Ilarie Voronca arrived the same year, and in 1926, he and Fondane obtained positions at an insurance company, where Fondane also met his future wife, Geneviève Tissier, whom he married in 1931. Yet life remained hard, and in 1927, Fondane was admitted to Arcachon, a spa on the Atlantic coast, for medical treatment and rest.
Fondane was also struggling to become a French author and to find his way, intellectually and spiritually, as a poet and a philosopher. His meeting in 1924 with the Russian émigré existential philosopher Lev Shestov would prove decisive, even though it was not until 1926 that Fondane became one of Shestov’s familiars. Shestov was well known in Paris as an exponent of existential thought; his salon was frequented by leading European intellectuals. Fondane had read Shestov’s Revelations of Death while still in Romania and was astounded to learn that Shestov was alive. It was Shestov’s example that led Fondane to engage with philosophy seriously, and it was Shestov who gave Fondane the tools to develop an irrationalist philosophy of “the impossible” which went beyond the largely destructive character of dadaism.
Fondane’s philosophical work proper begins in 1929 with his essays on Shestov and on Shestov’s friend and philosophical adversary, the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl; soon he would be grappling with Plato, Aristotle, Stoicism, Plotinus, Spinoza, and the new philosophies of Bergson, Freud, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and—above all—Kierkegaard, whose work was enjoying a renaissance in the 1920s. Fondane was always modest about his philosophical gifts. In 1936, Shestov would even chide him: “But you are not ignorant of philosophy! You must not, out of modesty, let your critics think: if you only knew. . . .You did not come to philosophy by the usual route, true, but fortunately, that allows you to ask more daring questions. . . .You must not let them treat you as a poet, a mystic. You are a philosopher.” It was with both admiration and exasperation that Shestov admitted to Fondane that Shestov’s French translator, Boris de Schloezer, had told him that Fondane’s major philosophical work La Conscience malheureuse (The Unhappy Consciousness) was in fact more widely read than Shestov’s Kierkegaard and Existential Philosophy. De Schloezer added: “I think that your philosophy has a better chance of making its mark on the world through Fondane than through you.”[22]
Fondane’s first philosophical work was Rimbaud le voyou (1933), and Shestov was not alone in admiring it; Gaultier spoke of Fondane’s “philosophical mastery” and Miguel de Unamuno wrote an appreciative letter. Fondane’s reputation as a leading exponent of “existential philosophy” began to grow, perhaps most tellingly even among its adversaries, such as the Marxist Henri Lefebvre, the neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain, and the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard. He was soon better known as a philosopher than as a poet; to other poets he complained that ever since his first essay on Rimbaud, more attention was being paid to his philosophical work than to his poetry. In 1943, he lamented, “I publish more prose than poetry; one of my activities harms the other.”[23] He was certainly prolific. Between 1928 and 1944, more than 115 of his articles appeared in scholarly reviews, literary journals, and other periodicals.
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In 1929, Fondane’s time in Paris was interrupted by a three-month stay in Buenos Aires. It would have a profound effect on his life and work. Earlier in the year, his brother-in-law and old companion from the Romanian theater days had succumbed to tuberculosis, a death that left Fondane severely depressed. Not long before this tragic event, he had met Victoria Ocampo, the Argentine author and editor of the important modernist journal Sur, at Shestov’s. Ocampo made it her business to know everybody who was anybody in the literary world, from José Ortega y Gasset to Albert Camus, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Jorge Louis Borges, and Rabindranath Tagore, and in her first meeting with Fondane, she was much taken by him, not to mention his dark beret and green scarf with matching gloves. She soon invited him to her apartment, where he got into a furious dispute with Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, one of Ocampo’s lovers and a gifted novelist whose anti-Semitism would later lead him to collaborate with the Nazis. Ocampo and Fondane became friends and probably lovers. When she invited him to come to Buenos Aires, he leapt at the opportunity, setting sail from Marseilles in July in full hope that the trip would restore his flagging spirits.
In Buenos Aires, Fondane presented his favorite films to the Amigos del Arte—Man Ray’s L’Étoile de mer, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou, René Clair’s Entr’acte, and Germaine Dulac and Artaud’s La coquille et le clergyman—and lectured on Shestov at the university. Fondane regarded film as a radically new art that escaped the logic of rational discourse. Writing to his sister, Fondane assured her that Ocampo was “a great friend and nothing more—I swear.” Back in Paris in October, Fondane wrote to Ocampo: “Victoria of pure and sleek beings. Victoria of will-o’-the-wisps of wit. . . . Victoria of cool parks like an angel’s thighs. . . .”[24] Ocampo published his poetry and his articles on Heidegger, Nietzsche, and film in Sur. Their friendship would prove lasting and important.
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Back in France, Fondane found a new job. In 1930, Paramount’s French division hired him as a script editor, adapting Hollywood scripts for French audiences, and as an occasional assistant director and a general “gofer.” In 1933, his potential “big break” came when he began working with Stefan Markus on a screen adaptation of the novel La Séparation des races, by the Swiss writer C.F. Ramuz. The result was Rapt (in the United States, The Kidnapping), directed by the well-known silent-film director Dimitri Kirsanoff (the pseudonym of Marc David Kaplan, an Estonian Jew), with music by the avant-garde composers Arthur Honegger and Arthur Hoérée. Fondane wrote the screenplay, for which he would receive a credit, and was heavily involved in the film: He helped to cast the actors, directed some scenes, and gave interviews to the press. The film makes an especially striking use of sound: Dominated by Honegger and Hoérée’s score, the soundtrack also includes sounds that were written directly onto the film in a manner later made famous by Norman McLaren. But the film flopped. At a time when talkies were all the rage, Rapt was a sound film with hardly any talk.
It was to make another film that Fondane returned to Argentina in 1936. Ocampo had invited him to direct an adaptation of Ricardo Güiraldes’s celebrated novel of the pampas, Don Segundo Sombra, but the author’s widow opposed the project and it came to nothing. Instead, Fondane turned to a movie of his own: a surrealist musical farce called Tararira, which in Spanish means variously an exclamation of joy or amusement, the murmur produced by a crowd, or an interjection signifying incredulity or disdain. The film starred the Aguilar Brothers, a team of four comedians and lute players who had fled the Spanish Civil War, and was meant to be a social satire in the spirit of the Marx Brothers. While making it, Fondane ran into technical problems and financial difficulties. He had to rush the editing process and complained that the film had been left “mutilated, destroyed, headless” by postproduction;[25] the producer refused to distribute it and no copies of the film or screenplay appear to have survived. Yet the Argentine writer Gloria Alcorta, who attended a private screening, considered it a “masterpiece.”[26] The final scene took place in a salon de thé filled with ladies decked out in jewels and feathers. The lute players, exasperated by constant interruptions of their concert, smash up everything to the strains of Ravel’s Bolero “played without instruments.” Fondane retained the old dadaist subversive humor.
Fondane’s second Argentine adventure was hardly a total failure. It paid his bills for a year and even allowed him to clear off some debts. During the course of his first voyage to Argentina, he had written his first major poem in French, Ulysse (1933), and his second major poem, Titanic (1937), likewise used the sea voyage to Argentina as a metaphor for the metaphysical wanderings of the individual who feels a stranger to the world, without a home port to return to. On the trip back to France, he met and became close friends with philosopher Jacques Maritain and his wife, Raïssa. And back in France, he was delighted to find that his newly published La Conscience malheureuse was receiving excellent reviews.
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By 1936, the political and economic situation in Europe was worsening. Unemployment had surged after the Wall Street crash of 1929 and persisted into the 1930s, opening the way to extremes on the right and left. The victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia’s 1917 revolution led to the formation of the Communist parties throughout Europe. On the right, Mussolini’s Fascists had won parliamentary elections in 1922 and established a dictatorship in 1925. The Nazi takeover in Germany in 1933 emboldened the extreme right. In February 1934, the streets of Paris were convulsed by riots as far-right groups such as Action Française and the Croix de Feu sought to overthrow the left-leaning government. Italy made war on Ethiopia in 1935, despite sanctions imposed by the League of Nations and international condemnation. In March 1936, Nazi Germany occupied the Rhineland in defiance of international law. The left-wing Spanish Republic was teetering into the civil war that would be brought on by Francisco Franco’s Falangists in July 1936. Fascism, in particular, was in the ascendant, and the prospect of war loomed over Europe. Fondane was deeply disturbed by these developments, and they were a focus of his work from 1934 on.
Fondane’s vexed relations with Marxism are expressed in “Preface for the Present Moment” (included here) and in his introduction to La Conscience malheureuse, as well as in his unpublished 1935 essay “The Writer Before the Revolution.” On the one hand, Fondane concedes that the issues of economic injustice and poverty addressed by Marxism are real and must be dealt with; on the other hand, the resolution of economic and social injustice will not solve the metaphysical problems facing the human condition: necessity, physical determinism, and death, “the Fatum that alienates us from ourselves.”[27] Fondane’s chief complaint against Marxism is that in the name of some future, more equitable society, it sacrifices the individual—in theory and in practice.
With respect to Fascism, however, Fondane’s attitude was unequivocal. In an “Appeal to Students” published in Paris in May 1934 by expatriate Romanian students, Fondane writes: “The Fascist offensive, which is imminent, must be stopped. . . .Tomorrow in the concentration camps, it will be too late to repent. The struggle must begin now, while there is still time, before the final destruction.”[28] Faced with a choice between Soviet Marxism and Nazism, Fondane echoed Shestov, who in 1935 declared: “I don’t like war. But if we had to make war against Hitler, I’d grab my rifle, even at my age. You know my esteem for Bolshevism? Well, if Hitler attacked the Soviets, we would have to defend the Soviets in order to stop Hitler from becoming master of Europe. Between the two evils, I choose the lesser.”[29] Likewise, Fondane wrote that although the writer, as a writer, might be indifferent as to whether society turns to Communism or Fascism so long as the freedom to write is unimpaired, as a human individual, “unless he is a lackey or a fool, he can only fight against Fascism and wish for the advent of a Socialist society which, by resolving economic contradictions, would offer both a bit more justice and a bit longer life.”[30]
For Fondane the antirationalist, it was awkward that most opponents of Fascism accused it of irrationalism. Fondane’s essay “Man Before History, or, The Sound and the Fury” (1939), included in this volume, argues on the contrary that the threat of Nazism stems from an excess of rationalism, at last honest and consistent in its negation of the individual human existent in favor of some grand, abstract Idea—in this case, the Idea of race. As Fondane argued in the preface to his Faux traité d’esthétique (False Treatise of Aesthetics, 1938), the Nazis used irrational elements such as myth as a means to rational ends.
Fondane, then, was not “beyond politics,” as Fondane scholars Michael Finkenthal and Olivier Salazar-Ferrer argue. His political positions are all grounded, with remarkable consistency, in his metaphysics, which seeks to preserve and restore the concrete reality of the bodily, sensuous, passionate, and living individual in the face of Reason’s abstract universal categories. Neither a libertarian nor a conventional Socialist, his metaphysical anarchism owes more to Nietzsche than to Marx, and is more interested in unleashing the potential and “becoming” of individuals than in economics. Although Fondane drew fire from Lefebvre, the chief Marxist intellectual of the 1930s, for his “irrationalism,” Lefebvre respected his anti-Fascist bona fides and concern for individual existence.
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Fondane shaped his philosophy at a time when existential philosophies of all kinds proliferated in Europe: Heidegger, Jaspers, and Nikolai Berdyaev were much talked about, as were their precursors, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and the French existential philosophers they inspired: Gabriel Marcel, Jean Wahl, Denis de Rougemont, Emmanuel Levinas, and Georges Bataille.
The diversity of existential thought in the 1930s has been largely eclipsed by the phenomenal success of the humanist phenomenological existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty after 1945, for whom “the three H’s”— Heidegger, Husserl, and Hegel—became the touchstone. In 1930s France, a much more extensive movement existed: Religious existentialists (Catholic, Protestant, Jewish) argued among themselves and with secular existentialists; proponents of the old existentialism (Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard) clashed with advocates of the more academically oriented philosophies of Jaspers and Heidegger; Marxists and surrealists joined the debate as sympathizers or antagonists. All of them were united by a concern for what Wahl called “the concrete”: the lived reality of individual experience—including socioeconomic alienation—rather than the abstract categories of traditional philosophy.
Fondane’s chief contribution to the movement was his uncompromising insistence that existential thought express the experience of the living, feeling, sensing, and passionate individual. Kierkegaard is the exemplary figure for Fondane, Kierkegaard who restores to the individual “his absolute right to place his ‘drama’ at the center of the philosophical problem” and “who does not oppose Hegel’s [reason] by contradiction, despair, the paradox, and sin, but by his contradiction, his despair, his paradox, his sin.”[31] The truths of the irrational, affective, imaginative, and passionate self are not the timeless intellectual truths of the philosophers but the existential, tragic truths of the great poets: “that life, death, suffering and wretchedness, love, anger, boredom, cowardice, sacrifice, solitude, the unknown, mystery, fatality, luck, freedom—exist.”[32] Existential thought, then, can only be the personal, interested act of an individual, not a disinterested search for universal truths; it is “the very act whereby the existent posits his own existence, the very act of the living being, searching within himself and outside himself, with or against the self-evident, for the very possibilities of living.”[33]
To get a sense of how Fondane arrived at this position, we can look at what he says about three predicaments outlined by the thinkers central to his thought: Shestov, Dostoyevsky, and Kierkegaard.
Shestov says: Consider these two propositions, “a rabid dog was poisoned” and “Socrates was poisoned.” From the standpoint of reason and logic, these two propositions are equivalent. Both of them deal with an event that took place in the past and only once. Anything that comes into existence in time will also pass out of existence, and so the only eternal truths are those which are outside of time altogether and which do not depend on experience: the a priori truths of logic and mathematics. Only the “truths of reason” that do not depend on experience are necessary and cannot be otherwise; all empirical truths are “truths of fact”: contingent truths that could be otherwise. By that reasoning, since it became true in 399 BCE that Socrates was poisoned, then this is a contingent and changeable truth rather than a necessary and eternal one. It will die one day, just as it was born one day.
But strangely enough, reason won’t have that. For reason, a contingent past occurrence becomes an eternal and necessary truth because, as Aristotle says, “For one thing is impossible even for God: to make what has been not to have been.”[34] Even though empirical facts could have been otherwise, once they have been, then it is no longer possible for them to have been otherwise. Before the battle of Waterloo, it was possible that Napoleon could have won it, but after the battle, Napoleon’s victory became impossible because in fact he lost. This conversion of contingency into necessity is at least a paradox, but if a contingent truth becomes necessary after the fact, then one has no choice but to admit that “Socrates was poisoned” is also an eternal truth, like the a priori truths of mathematics. Shestov objects: “This truth has already lived too long in this world, almost 2,500 years. But to promise it immortality, an existence outside of time, which no forgetfulness could destroy: who has taken it upon himself the right to make such promises?”[35] The answer is: Reason. But does reason have this right? Undoing the past would require violating reason, but why must reason have the last word?
We are faced with two alternatives. On the one hand, we can side with reason, and say that everything that has happened no longer has any possibility of not having happened and has become an eternal truth. In that case, the most consistent attitude would be the love of fate (amor fati) recommended by the Stoics and Nietzsche: the acceptance that everything that has happened was necessary. On the other hand, we can revolt against reason and necessity. This becomes all the more urgent when what “has been” is repugnant (the murder of Socrates) and what looms on the horizon—war, extermination camps—is terrifying. It is in the name of “all the victims of history” past and future that Fondane and Shestov invoke a God unconstrained by reason’s laws, for whom “all things are possible,” including undoing the past. The eternal truth of a dog’s death may be trivial; the sufferings of countless human beings are anything but.
This brings me to Dostoyevsky. In Notes from the Underground, the narrator, “the underground man,” says that most people “faced with an impossibility. . . immediately capitulate” before “the laws of nature, the conclusions of the natural sciences and mathematics. . . . Reason is a fine thing, there’s no question about it, but reason is only reason, and satisfies only man’s rational faculties, whereas desire is a manifestation of the whole of human life. . . . If you say that reason will prevail in any case—well, in that case, a man would deliberately go mad in order to escape his reason and assert himself.”[36]
Desperate words and desperate measures. And yet, Fondane argues, human existence “is not situated entirely and without remainder on the level of rational thought.”[37] To satisfy the demands of reason at the expense of the living being as a whole amounts not just to acquiescence to slavery but to a kind of amputation. The whole human being cries out for wild freedom, freedom from the constraint of rational necessity, the laws of reason. Fondane insists that we must choose: either rational philosophy, which explains, justifies, and proves that whatever is, is necessary and so counsels obedience and resignation, or existence, which counsels rebellion and insubordination and lays claim to the absurd promise of the impossible. As a way out of reason’s chains, madness might yet be right against reason. This is what Fondane calls “poetry”: the attempt to bring madness, dreams, and the unbridled imagination into real life in the manner of Rimbaud’s “systematic derangement of the senses.”
Consider a third predicament, one that Fondane takes from Kierkegaard, that of “a cultured man, married, paterfamilias, a bureaucrat of the future, a respectable father, easy to do business with, very tender with his wife, he even cares about his children.”[38] And Fondane continues: “Suddenly, in broad daylight, this man who was lunching peaceably in the midst of his family forgets the social niceties . . . and, unbuttoning his shirt collar, rushes to the window and cries out: Help! Help! What to think of that? It would be best not to think of it, but the fact is, we must think of it. Ah! If only someone could have called the police, the firemen—who knows! If at least there were a danger, an enemy to be avoided or eliminated. Nothing! . . . Yet time is running out. . . . A doctor! Quick, a doctor! Oh, not to cure the patient! . . .The most important thing . . . is to find out what is wrong with him. A doctor comes. ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘What are you feeling?’ ‘Anxiety.’ ‘Have you felt this way for a long time?’ ‘No, it came over me suddenly.’ ‘A passing phase, without importance. You need to come to your senses, regain your reason.’ ‘I was going to tell you doctor, I’ve had enough of Reason.’ ‘What will you replace it with?’ ‘Nothing . . . no, with a thought which seeks something it cannot think.’ ‘You’re tired, my friend; you need to rest.’ ‘No, I need the possible, doctor; if not, I’ll suffocate.’”[39]
What is this “possible” that can revive the patient? Faith, says Kierkegaard, which “struggles like a madwoman for the possible,” for belief in a God “for whom all things are possible,” including the logically impossible. The stories from the Bible that are dearest to Kierkegaard, Shestov, and Fondane involve logical impossibilities. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard argues that when, following God’s commandment, Abraham goes to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham believes both that Isaac will die (because he will sacrifice him) and that Isaac will live (because God promised that through Isaac he will be the father of nations): He will kill Isaac but believes that God will give him back in virtue of the absurd. Abraham’s faith requires him to believe a logical contradiction, not to mention an ethical monstrosity. Likewise, Kierkegaard’s Repetition points out that Job loses everything: his wealth, his cattle, his wife, his children. Job’s “comforters” tell him to accept his lot; it’s God’s will, who are you to argue? But Job demands to speak to God directly, does so, and gets back everything double. Fondane comments that God does for Job precisely what Aristotle said was impossible: He undoes the past, makes what has been not to have been.[40] He adds that instead of consoling himself for what has been lost forever, “Kierkegaard demands the repetition of what has been and is no longer,” that the dead—Isaac, Job’s family, Socrates—“be given back to us alive,” something that is “absolutely unthinkable” from a rational standpoint.[41] Job and Abraham need the possible, says Shestov, when “according to the testimony of reason, all possibilities have been exhausted,”[42] when “every humanly thinkable certainty and probability has proven its impossibility.”[43]
The possible that Kierkegaard needs in order to breathe is, in Fondane’s words, “the impossible, repetition, the miracle.”[44] Having faith in the absurd, in the possible that is reason’s impossible, allows one to think—at last—in the categories of life instead of living in the categories of rational thought. And yet this is something we do only in extreme circumstances, when there is no rational solution, no other way out of the impasse. “When reason pushes us into the abyss, it is the absurd that saves us in every instance”; “absurd reality is the only one that has an emergency exit.”[45]
Fondane admits that the cases of Job and Abraham do not constitute any kind of proof or anything that Reason would recognize as an “argument.” Abraham and Job are “exceptions,” of interest only to believers. What use can we make of something so personal, so individual? As the German existentialist Jaspers said of those other exceptions, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, they are not like us; they leave us empty-handed; “their answers are not ours.”[46] Unless—unless we ourselves become exceptions, become individuals. But that is risky. The only way to become an exception is to leave behind common sense and rational consensus, but when we do so, we find ourselves on a dark path, without the signposts of ready-made criteria, afraid of losing our footing. Few do so voluntarily; most exceptions have that role thrust upon them when thrown into a predicament in which common sense and reason are of no avail. It is then that they cry out for “the possible!” and dare to break with logic and reason.
Yet rejecting reason and logic runs contrary to the whole thrust of modern philosophy. Since Descartes, philosophy has been based on “clear and distinct” ideas that are supposedly impossible to doubt: They are self-evident. Descartes affirms that I cannot doubt that I think or that I exist while I am thinking—I think, therefore I am—and this, says Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology, is the basis of modern science: a form of knowledge grounded on an absolute foundation and absolutely justified, based on an intuition or “mental seeing” in which the object of thought is grasped perfectly and completely, and so absolutely indubitably. Those intuitions modeled on “I think, therefore I am”—intuitions that Husserl calls Evidenz, les évidences—form the basis of “truths that are valid, and remain so, once and for all for everyone.”[47] Even though Husserl, unlike Descartes, wants to embody the cogito, he leaves the primacy of intellectual self-evidence unchallenged.
Fondane disagrees with the entire rationalist approach. He argues, on the contrary, that rationally self-evident truths are not valid for everyone at all times and in all respects. In fact, the attempt to make them so is guilty of the sort of circular reasoning that reason itself condemns. “I think, therefore I am” is taken to be indubitable on the basis of such rational presuppositions as that for every act of thought, there must be a thinker, a presupposition that itself appears indubitable and self-evident from the standpoint of intellectual intuition. But it is entirely possible to doubt this presupposition: Nietzsche did, Fondane does, as many others have done since. The problem is that intellectual intuitions, clear ideas, doubt, logical reasoning, and rational self-evidence, far from establishing Reason’s right to determine “all truths past and future,” in fact, presuppose it. Reason starts off with certain rationally self-evident truths that it cannot doubt or suspend, such as the law of contradiction, and then uses its own criteria to prove the validity of its criteria: a circular procedure contrary to reason’s own rules. Immanuel Kant, for example, calls Reason the final “court of appeal which should protect the just rights of reason but dismiss all groundless claims . . . according to the eternal and unalterable laws of reason”—and dismisses as invalid any evidence originating elsewhere that does not conform to its standards. The evidence of individual experience—not being valid for everyone, necessary and universal—is, says Kant, more “irritating” than “satisfying” to reason.[48] But rejecting that which Reason finds “irritating” because it does not conform to its standards is a mere prejudice of Reason.
Reason’s arguments have held sway for such a long time that we find it hard to question them. Even when a crisis calls our “rational equipment” into question, says Fondane, “we use our reason to examine reason,” and dismiss experience “simply because experience only says what is; it does not say that what is, is necessarily such as it is and cannot be otherwise. . . . Each time that an exceptional experience finds itself promoting a reality that transcends the laws supplied by our knowledge . . .we immediately think not of verifying the validity of the laws of our knowledge but of verifying this experience by means of those self-same laws. . . .We think that our knowledge exhausts reality, is identical to reality.” [49] In fact, although the laws of reason and logic obtain within their own proper domain— an ideal world of pure thought (logic, mathematics) and its applications in natural science—they do not exhaust the rich and sometimes contradictory domain of human psychology.
Contrary to the rationalist program of Descartes, Kant, and Husserl, existential philosophy shows that the horrors of existence, the paradoxes and contradictions of human life cannot be grasped through “clear and distinct ideas” but are only given through extreme emotional states such as anxiety and despair—through passion. Pascal had said, against Descartes, that “the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of,” and, Fondane adds, “today, Kierkegaard and Shestov come to Pascal’s aid; they emphasize the impossibility of knowledge by ‘clear and distinct ideas.’”[50] Clear and distinct ideas belong to Heidegger’s das Man, the “anyone” of everyday averageness, not the extremes of human existence that drive us beyond the limits of the rationally comprehensible and into the desperate search for the impossible. For the individual who confronts human finitude, abandonment, mortality, and misfortune through anxiety, despair, and passion, reason’s universal truths, valid for everyone and clear and distinct, are no longer of any use; such an individual needs a personal solution, valid for herself alone: a philosophy by and for “exceptions,” not by and for “anyone.” It would be a philosophy based on experiences that are self-evident and indubitable for the person who has them, in the moment in which they are experienced: passions, emotions, sensory perceptions, and imaginative experiences which hold the experiencing subject entirely in their thrall. Such experiences are necessarily dark and distressing; it is only the humanly insoluble problems that throw us back on ourselves as a solus ipse, lacking the footholds provided by reason and common sense, forced to seek a way out through the absurd. Wordsworthian epiphanies, states of happiness and wonder—however intense—do not individualize us in this way, and can be recollected in tranquillity and communicated to others.
It is passion, anxiety, and despair, in their very individuality— rather than universally clear and distinct ideas—that reveal the depths of human existence. Since these experiences are neither clear nor distinct and often express conflicts within the self, Fondane argues, citing Rimbaud against Descartes, “It is uncertain whether ‘I think, therefore I am’; perhaps . . .‘I is another.’”[51] The “I am” or existence of the individual is not reducible to the rationality, unity, and identity of the “I think.” Rather than truth being found in the intellect or reason, which is the same for everybody, Fondane argues for a truth that, like Kierkegaard’s, is “strictly personal,” valid only for him, incommunicable and unjustifiable to others, but lived in the intensity of passionate inwardness. Kierkegaard himself says “Paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker who avoids paradox is like the lover who wants to distance himself from passion: a mediocre individual.”[52] The truth of individual existence lies in what Kierkegaard calls “passionate inwardness,” not in intellectual contemplation.
Indeed, the so-called “higher Reality” of Reason, promoted by philosophers from Plato to Husserl, is in fact something Ideal, like mathematics. Its strict laws of noncontradiction, identity, and the excluded middle constitute a bed of Procrustes into which are forced the complex and sometimes contradictory elements of existence revealed in intense emotional states, dreams, and sensory experience. For reason, such nonrational experiences are grasped only as failing to meet reason’s ideal standards: as the unreasonable, the irrational, the illogical, and consequently as devoid of sense, insignificant, and false, as “not-being” rather than “being.” Reason subordinates lived difference to logico-mathematical identity; it privileges the necessary over the contingent and a constant causal order over chance. Plato goes so far as to say that “real life” is absent so long as the soul is trapped in the body and that the sensory-physical world is an illusion. For Fondane, by contrast, the real reality, what Rimbaud calls “real life,” is found “everywhere and often more profoundly in the unusual, the accidental, the catastrophic, and the aberrant than in frequent, uniform, and regular events.”[53] Experience in all its nonrational dimensions—sensory, affective, imaginative—has its own kind of self-evidence and brings us in contact with an enchanting and wild reality far richer than the one grasped by reason. The ideal “higher Reality” of the philosophers is more imaginary than any poem; poems are at least rooted in sensory, affective, and imaginative experience, whereas the ideal constructions of pure reason—to paraphrase Nietzsche—have not a single point of contact with the vicissitudes of lived experience.
Even so, it is not a question of doing away with reason but only of imposing limits on its excessive claims: “When existential thought opposes rational thought . . . it is in no way attacking its essence or the results defined by the objectives that it pursues in its proper domain, but only its inappropriate interference in a domain of concrete existence which is beyond its means of investigation.”[54] The particular individual is not a universal, and so is not the object of any science, that is, of any thought based on the rules of reason—of indubitability, universality, and validity for everyone, at all times. “The principle of noncontradiction or of identity is indispensable to mathematics, to logic, to purposeful action: but in psychology, it makes no sense. This domain is off-limits to it. . . . Human psychology is the domain of pure caprice, the domain of the ‘sudden,’ by which I mean of the effect without a cause, the domain of the arbitrary, that is, of the absurd.”[55] Here reason’s “I think” is not fundamental; it is built on the ruins of the crushed, anxious, passionately willing, and suffering “I” who is driven to seek a solution to a personal problem that is valid for that individual alone. What that individual needs is not rational thought but “a concrete, tensed, passionate, assiduous thought, thought to the nth power,”[56] which alone can grasp individual existence in its irreducible singularity. A thought, mind you, but existential thought, “which begins where rational thought ends—that thought which is born . . . from the awareness of our powerlessness in the face of necessity.”[57]
True philosophy, then, is tragic philosophy, “the second dimension of thought.” The person who “takes life as it is, as everyone accepts it,” says Shestov, “who turns away from the horrors of life . . . has given up on philosophy and thought.”[58] Admittedly, this is philosophy in extremis. Most people, says Dostoyevsky, when faced with an impossibility, give up, are persuaded that there is nothing to be done, and can live with this quite equably. But, says Fondane, if someone, like Job, “should be struck down, anxious unto death, should have lost everything, had everything taken from him—affection, honor, health, and even hope—then he can no longer accept that his unhappiness is reasonable, necessary, holy, and under the protection of eternal truth”; it is then that he cries out for a “possible” beyond rational necessity that would allow his unhappiness to be something merely contingent that could be undone and overcome.[59]
In short, Fondane questions whether rational necessity is truly necessary. Relying on the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s investigations of the “prelogical mentality” of preindustrial societies to support his antirationalism, Fondane suggests it could be that what we have taken for a long time to be human thought itself—namely rational thought as it has come down to us from the Greeks—is just one species of human thought, a set of “mental habits” and an orientation of the mind, rather than the mind being everywhere one and the same. Although Lévy-Bruhl’s theories have been largely discredited, Fondane’s argument does not depend on him and indeed finds an echo in the philosophies of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Logical thinking might be only “an acquired habit, set down in society, replicated by society, and maintained by education, surveillance, and violence.”[60] But a habit, however ingrained and however long-standing, can be unlearned and replaced by a new form of thought.
What existential thought seeks is not so much a rationally demonstrable solution as a way out by and for the existing individual: a way out from within History that at the same time would be a way out of historical necessity. In Fondane’s view, this need for a “way out” is found “in the most significant works of our time: first, in Baudelaire, then in Dostoyevsky, in Nietzsche, in Kierkegaard, in Kafka,” where this need is expressed for the first time in its purest form.[61] It is just this “WAY OUT in case of fire” that Fondane complains is lacking in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.[62] We may well doubt whether such a way out exists. Even Fondane, in his poetry, succumbs to pessimism: “No way out, no way out! They must conquer or die, those who have no way out!”[63]
Fondane wrote this in 1942, when his need for a “way out” was very real: He was living in Paris under the German occupation, at his apartment at 6, rue Rollin. He had become a naturalized French citizen in 1938, after Jean Ballard, the editor of Cahiers du Sud, had organized a subscription to raise the necessary 2,024 francs; among the contributors were Brancusi, Lévy-Bruhl, and Camus. In February 1939, Fondane had been declared fit for military service, and by June, he was growing increasingly worried about the approach of war. In that month he also saw Ocampo. As they were parting at the door of Fondane’s building, he asked her to wait. He went inside and came back with a large envelope with a wax seal, on which he had written: “Shestov. Unfinished manuscript containing Shestov’s letters to me and my conversations with him. I place in the care of Victoria Ocampo the manuscript on which I am working. In case of war, she may use it as she sees fit. In that case, she is authorized to open the envelope.” Ocampo recalls: “It was out of character for Fondane to speak to me so seriously and I could think of nothing to say in reply. But the Nazis were persecuting Jews in Germany and Fondane was Jewish.” A note accompanying the manuscript, later published as Meetings with Lev Shestov, described it as “the most precious thing I possess.”[64] It was the last time they would meet.
When the war broke out, Fondane was mobilized as a private second class, stationed at Ponthierry, about fifty kilometers southwest of Paris. A fellow soldier recalls Fondane returning from patrol and plunging into a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics annotated by Shestov, “harder than the straw pallet I slept on,” and during those months, Fondane had sufficient free time to write poetry and a large article on “Lévy-Bruhl and the Metaphysics of Knowledge.” At the start of the German offensive in May 1940, Fondane wrote to his wife, Geneviève, and his sister, Line: “Better to die than to live in an absurd world. Better to perish if the universe knows no gods but Hitler. We have to prepare for either destruction or a miracle. . . . But let us take heart. This is the moment to live our existential philosophy. When the empirical has been lost, when might has conquered, when the impossible arrives, it is then that faith begins. Let me, let us, have that faith.”[65]
On June 17, Fondane was taken prisoner by the Germans and held captive in a church. He soon escaped and made his way back to the French lines. Two days later, France surrendered and he was captured again. Suffering from acute appendicitis, he was immediately sent to the Val-de-Grâce hospital in Paris for an emergency operation; he remained there until February 1941. When he returned home, his papers and books were still there, but his clothing, money, and linen had gone missing during the Paris exodus of June 1940. In March 1941, the prefecture of police challenged “the naturalization of Monsieur Vecsler, called Fundoianu, Benjamin,” but decided in February 1942 that in view of his military service and his marriage to “one of our compatriots” (Geneviève was Catholic) that “Vecsler is not a Jew” based on the anti-Jewish French law of 1941. It was a temporary reprieve; in July 1943, new laws stripped all Jews who had become French citizens after 1927 of their citizenship.
Unable to leave Paris, without employment—which was forbidden to Jews—and living on the small sums smuggled to him by friends, heating his apartment with a brazier and coal donated by the publisher Jean Lescure, Fondane nevertheless refused to play by the rules. He attended the philosophy lectures of Bachelard at the Sorbonne, though as discreetly as possible—not for his own sake but for Bachelard’s. He refused to wear the yellow Star of David mandated by the occupation authorities. Even after the notorious roundup (rafles) of Jews in 1942, Fondane continued to frequent bookstores in the Latin Quarter, and in particular that of the publisher José Corti, whom Fondane would press for news of the outside world. As Fondane told his wife, he was exactly the sort of Jew that Hitler most wanted to get rid of: “an authentic Jew,” rebellious, disobedient, and nonconformist.[66]
Meanwhile Fondane’s friends had been plotting to get him out of France. In July 1941, Maritain tried to enlist Ocampo in a scheme to send Fondane to New York, where Maritain was teaching at the New School for Social Research, but cross-Atlantic communication was difficult, and there were countless misunderstandings and delays. Fondane received his mail from abroad via Cahiers du Sud in Marseilles, in the free zone, and the same method was used to send mail abroad. In the end, nothing came of the plan, and a new scheme was hatched, involving Ocampo, the Aguilar Brothers, and another Argentine friend, Fredi Guthmann—this time to send Fondane to Argentina. Near the end of 1941, Fondane wrote Guthmann: “I am at present about to make some serious decisions—to leave my family and home and hit the road.”[67] At the end of September 1942, two months after the infamous roundup of Jews in Paris, Guthmann sent Ballard a telegram saying that the Aguilar Brothers would like to “hire” Fondane—that is, bring him to Argentina. On October 6, Fondane replied (via Ballard), accepting the offer “without conditions.” But French authorities in the occupied zone refused Fondane permission to travel to the free zone and Marseille.
His troubles did not put a stop to his intellectual interests and work. He read the new generation of existentialists—Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus was published in 1942, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in 1943, and in 1944, he responded to both of them in his philosophical essay “Existential Monday and the Sunday of History” (which is included in this volume). Here Fondane settled accounts with existential philosophy, ranging the original existential thinkers (Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Shestov) against the “second wave” (Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Camus), in light of “the hussars with sabers drawn” who had descended upon France. In 1943, Camus had visited Fondane—at some risk to them both (a Jew in hiding, a member of the Resistance)—and Fondane was clearly taken with both the man and his ideas, writing to Camus in September 1943: “I took such a lot of notes while reading [The Myth of Sisyphus]! . . . How can I raise questions in a letter which would require a book?”[68] Both Fondane and Camus were fascinated by Shestov’s philosophy, although they took nearly diametrically opposed positions regarding it. Fondane’s letter to Camus indicates that he wanted to continue the dialogue, but there is no evidence of further correspondence or meetings.
Among his regular visitors in those years were the Romanian philosophers Stéphane Lupasco and E. M. Cioran. Both were charmed by Fondane’s passionate and voluble philosophical conversation.
Fondane was not a member of the Resistance, although he did meet the Resistance leaders Robert Monod and Robert Lacoste in February 1944. And he contributed to Resistance literary journals that were published in the free zone or Algeria and corresponded clandestinely with their editors. Éluard included Fondane’s poem about the fall of France, “Journées de Juin” (June Days), in L’Honneur des poètes under the pseudonym “Isaac Lacquedem,” a French name for “the Wandering Jew,” while “The Importance of Baudelaire,” the first chapter of the book Fondane was writing on Baudelaire, appeared in a Swiss collection of pro-Resistance writings alongside contributions by Sartre and Camus.[69] The Baudelaire book was Fondane’s last major undertaking; it would be published posthumously as Baudelaire and the Experience of the Abyss in 1947 (a chapter from it, “Boredom,” is included here). It deals with acute psychological penetration, with how cruelty, murder, and persecution can arise out of sheer boredom as “stimulants” in a world in which nothing any longer matters. War and torture, by inflicting pain on others and on oneself, rouse the mind from the torpor of indifference.
On March 7, 1944, Fondane and his sister were arrested by the collaborationist French police. He had been betrayed by his concierge, with whom he’d had a falling out. Arrests and deportations had multiplied since January, when the French government had put French Jews under German jurisdiction. Fondane left a note for his wife on his work table: “Viève. Am at the police station. See Paulhan.” That was Jean Paulhan, the director of La Nouvelle Revue Française until the occupation, who had successfully intervened on behalf of various detainees: Jews, resistants, foreigners. Fondane and his sister were held at the prefecture of police in Paris, and Geneviève worked to have him released on the grounds that he was married to an Aryan. Fondane was given a free pass, but he refused to go without Line, who was not. Cioran and Lupasco rushed to the German Kommandatur. The Germans denied responsibility; Fondane had been arrested by the French.
Fondane and Line were sent to Drancy, a way station to the death camps. Geneviève, Lupasco, and Cioran vigorously petitioned the Romanian legation—the cultural attaché was none other than Eugène Ionesco—to intervene on their behalf, and on April 16, Paulhan wrote to Shestov’s translator, de Schloezer: “Great news about B.F. his wife has displayed extraordinary energy. The Romanian legation did well; at last, it seems certain that F. will not be sent to Germany.” A party was planned for Fondane’s return home. But again, it was impossible to obtain Line’s release and Fondane would not abandon his sister. On March 30, 1944, both were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on the second-to-last convoy to leave France.
Lupasco describes seeing Fondane for the last time: “In March 1944, in a little room at the end of a long hallway of the prefecture of police in Paris,” he was comforting a weeping girl who had been picked up by the Gardes Mobiles outside her high-school.[70] From Drancy, Fondane secretly wrote to Geneviève: “My little one. . . . Be brave. You know, and I’ve told you, that our fate is such that there are some things we cannot change. I once wrote that ‘the traveler has not finished traveling.’ Well, I was right, I’m moving on. . . . Be strong, my little one, I’m sure that all this will be over in a little while and that we will see each other again. . . . Au revoir, mon petit petit.”[71] Along with the letter smuggled to Geneviève was Fondane’s “literary testament”: precise instructions about what was to be done with the many unfinished writings he had been working on, including the Baudelaire book and a projected volume, Being and Knowledge, about Shestov, Lévy-Bruhl, and Lupasco, not to mention his poem L’Exode: Super flumina babylonis, his harrowing account of the fall of France and the new and more horrifying “Babylonian captivity” of the Jews under the German occupation.
In Auschwitz, Fondane was put on a work detail, quickly lost weight, and was hospitalized. Lazar Moscovi, a doctor, kept him there for as long as possible. Fondane recited poetry, told literary anecdotes, and discussed international politics with other prisoners, just as if he were in Paris in the company of friends. André Montagne, a fellow inmate, describes his last sight of Fondane: He left the “block” in the cold and rain, did up the collar of his jacket, and got into the truck taking him to the gas chamber. He was gassed on October 2 or 3, two weeks before the Soviets liberated the camp.
•
Fondane once wrote: “One might be compelled to die, no doubt, but nothing in the world can compel you to accept this death.”[72] He died unresigned to his fate, even though he knew it was inescapable; in his own words, “[Hegelian] Spirit has not triumphed, for what it desired was not the death, the sacrifice of the individual; it wanted the individual’s consent to the sacrifice.”[73] In 1946, certain that Fondane had perished, Geneviève wrote to Ballard: “Right up to the end he remained himself, wanting to live his philosophy, never abandoning his struggle against the rationally self-evident.” In an earlier letter she had said: “These murderers cannot stop his death from being part of his message, from being the success of his message.”
The philosopher Emil Fackenheim has written that we must not grant Hitler posthumous victories. Hitler’s victory over Fondane at Auschwitz would be definitive if we allowed Fondane’s thought—the tensed, passionate thought to the nth power of the living individual struggling, with or against the rationally self-evident, to find the very possibilities of living—to perish. It was indeed true that Fondane went, as Lefebvre wrote, to the utter limits of himself and his philosophy. Fondane always preferred those philosophers whose lives were their work (Socrates, Pascal, Saint John of the Cross) to those who spent the best part of their lives seated before a writing desk (Kant, Hegel, Descartes): “What are the works of Pascal, of Saint John of the Cross, set beside their life? These authors would remain living even if nothing of their works remained.”[74] So, too, for Fondane.
And so, too, his work, which seems to leapfrog over the postwar era to join with ours. Bypassing the preoccupations of the postwar, phenomenological existentialists (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir), it links up with the critique of reason and of the unified “I” found in such postmodern thinkers as Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. Fondane’s search for the impossible—for the possible beyond all logical possibility—anticipates Foucault and Alain Badiou. His distrust of ideologies and abstractions, his passion for individual and concrete existence, his ceaseless questioning and searching all speak to our post-utopian, disenchanted world. We recognize Fondane’s problems as our own: the importance of the affective and imaginative facets of existence ignored or suppressed by a hyper-technological world; the constraints of personal identity and universal norms for those who cannot be reduced to any category; the conflicts between our aspirations and the hard reality of the world, between reason and passion. Even if, as Jaspers might say, Fondane’s answers are not ours, he does not leave us empty-handed.
I will give Fondane the last word:
Remember only that I was innocent
and that, like all of you, mortals of that day,
I too had a face marked by rage,
by pity and joy,
quite simply, a human face![75]
—BRUCE BAUGH