NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 Martin Stanton, “French Intellectuals and the Popular Front,” in Martin S. Alexander and Helen Graham, eds., The French and Spanish Popular Fronts: Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 267.

2 Benjamin Fondane, Le Lundi existentiel et le dimanche de l’histoire (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1990), 43. All translations from the French are mine unless otherwise indicated.

3 Olivier Salazar-Ferrer, Benjamin Fondane et la révolte existentielle (Paris: Éditions de Corlevour, 2008), 86–89.

4 Fondane, Le Lundi existentiel, 11–12.

5 Benjamin Fondane, “Brancusi,” Cahiers de l’Étoile no. 11 (September– October 1929): 717.

6 Benjamin Fondane, Le mal des fantômes, ed. Patrice Beray and Michel Carassou (Paris: Verdier, 2006), 20, 89, and 165.

7 Sasa Pana, ed., Antologia literaturii Române de avant-garda si cîteva deseni din eposa (Bucharest, 1969), 548–50; quoted in Tom Sandqvist, Dada East: The Romanians of the Cabaret Voltaire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 354.

8 Sandqvist, Dada East, 354–59, 366–68.

9 Benjamin Fondane, preface, in Imagini si Carti din Franta (Bucharest: Librariei SOCEC & Co., 1922); in Benjamin Fondane: Poète, essayiste, cinéaste et philosophe, Roumanie, Paris, Auschwitz, 1898–1944, ed. Eric Freedman and Michel Carassou, trans. Vladimir Eli (Paris: Mémorial de la Shoah, 2009), 28.

10 Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto,” Dada 3 (December 1918); cited in Sandqvist, Dada East, 145, 151.

11 Quoted in Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Déjà jadis (Paris: Julliard, 1958), 55; cited in Michael Finkenthal, Benjamin Fondane: A Poet-Philosopher Caught Between the Sunday of History and the Existential Monday (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 69.

12 Sandqvist, Dada East, 18–19, 315.

13 Benjamin Fondane, preface to A. L. Zissu, La Confession d’un candelabra, trans. Benjamin Fondane (Paris: Éditions Picart, 1928); see Salazar-Ferrer, Benjamin Fondane et la révolte existentielle, 176–77.

14 Benjamin Fondane, “Léon Chestov à la recherché du judaïsme perdu,” Revue Juive de Genève 4 (1936): 326–28; in Monique Jutrin, ed., Entre Athènes et Jérusalem: Benjamin Fondane à la recherche du judaïsme (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2009), 195–98.

15 Benjamin Fondane, Trois scenarii. Ciné-poèmes (Brussels: Les Documents internationaux de l’Esprit nouveau, 1928); republished in Écrits pour le cinéma, ed. Michel Carassou, Olivier Salazar-Ferrer, and Ramona Fotiade (Paris: Éditions Verdier, 2007), 15–49.

16 Benjamin Fondane, “Les surréalistes et la révolution,” in Fundoianu/ Fondane et l’avant-garde, ed. Petre Raileanu and Michel Carassou (Paris Bucharest: Éditions Paris-Méditerranée/Fondation Culturelle Roumaine, 1999), 46–52; originally in Integral 3, no. 12 (April 1927): 14–15.

17 Benjamin Fondane, Rimbaud le voyou: Et l’expérience poétique, ed. Michel Carassou (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1990), 204.

18 Benjamin Fondane, Faux traité d’esthétique, ed. Ann Van Sevenant (Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1938), 87.

19 Fondane, letter to Claude Sernet, February 1930, in Carassou and Freedman, eds., Benjamin Fondane: Poète, cinéaste et philosophe, 52.

20 Fondane, Faux traité d’esthétique, 44.

21 Benjamin Fundoianu, Privelisti. Poeme, 1917–1923 (Bucharest: Editura Cultura Nationala, 1930); Paysages, trans. Odile Serre (Paris: Éditions Le Temps qu’il fait, 2014).

22 Quoted in Benjamin Fondane, Rencontres avec Léon Chestov, ed. Nathalie Baranoff and Michel Carassou (Paris: Plasma, 1982), 42–43, 143.

23 Finkenthal, Benjamin Fondane, 215, 220.

24 Cited in Ricardo Nirenberg, “Benjamin Fondane et Victoria Ocampo,” Cahiers Benjamin Fondane 1 (1997): 11.

25 Fondane letter to Freddy Guthmann, March 31, 1939, Cahiers Benjamin Fondane 1 (1997): 25.

26 Silvia Baron Supervielle, “L’Argentine n’oublie pas Benjamin Fondane,” Les Lettres Françaises no. 67 (January 2010): 5.

27 Benjamin Fondane, La Conscience malheureuse, ed. Olivier Salazar-Ferrer (Paris: Éditions Verdier, 2013), xii.

28 Benjamin Fundoianu, “Apelul studentimii,” Viata studenteasca 1 (December 15, 1934): 3–4; in Salazar-Ferrer, Benjamin Fondane et la révolte existentielle, 106.

29 Fondane, Rencontres avec Léon Chestov, 81–82.

30 Benjamin Fondane, L’Écrivain devant la révolution (Paris: Paris-Méditerranée, 1997), 82.

31 Fondane, La Conscience malheureuse, 225, 208–9.

32 Fondane, Faux traité d’esthétique, 58–60.

33 Fondane, La Conscience malheureuse, x–xi.

34 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1139b6–10, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1799.

35 Léon Chestov, Athènes et Jérusalem, trans. Boris de Schloezer (Paris: Librairie Vrin, 1938), 31–35; Athens and Jerusalem, trans. Bernard Martin (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1966).

36 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground and The Gambler, trans. Jane Kentish (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1991), 15, 26–28, 31.

37 Fondane, “Léon Chestov, Soeren Kierkegaard et le serpent,” Cahiers du Sud 11, no. 164 (August 1934): 546.

38 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 63–64.

39 Fondane, “Søren Kierkegaard,” review of Traité du désespoir, Cahiers du Sud 20, no. 134 (January 1933): 42. Traité du désespoir (Treatise on Despair) is published in English as The Sickness Unto Death.

40 Fondane, “Léon Chestov, Soeren Kierkegaard et le serpent,” 543.

41 Fondane, “A propos de Kierkegaard,” Cahiers du Sud no. 155 (October 1933): 625–31.

42 Léon Chestov, “Job ou Hegel? A propos de la philosophie existentielle de Kierkegaard,” La Nouvelle Revue Française 23, no. 260 (May 1, 1935): 756.

43 Benjamin Fondane, “A propos du livre de Léon Chestov: Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle,” Revue de philosophie 37 (1937): 399. See Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 38–39; and Fear and Trembling and Repetition, trans. Edna H. Hong and Howard V. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 212.

44 Fondane, “Léon Chestov, Soeren Kierkegaard et le serpent,” 542.

45 Fondane, Rimbaud le voyou, 207, 211.

46 Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, trans. William Earle (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 37–38, 41, 46–48.

47 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 10–12, 15.

48 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. F. Max Müller (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), xxiv, xlvii.

49 Benjamin Fondane, “Lévy-Bruhl et la métaphysique de la connaissance,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 130, no. 7–8 (July–August 1940): 44–46.

50 Fondane, “Léon Chestov, Soeren Kierkegaard et le serpent,” 541.

51 Ibid., 548–49.

52 Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 37, cited in Fondane, “Søren Kierkegaard,” 47.

53 Fondane, Faux traité d’esthétique, 81.

54 Fondane, La Conscience malheureuse, 9n.

55 Fondane, Rimbaud le voyou, 211.

56 Fondane, “A propos du livre de Léon Chestov,” 413–14.

57 Fondane, Rencontres avec Léon Chestov, 246.

58 Chestov, “Job ou Hegel?,” 759.

59 Fondane, Rencontres avec Léon Chestov, 245–46.

60 Fondane, “Lévy-Bruhl et la métaphysique de la connaissance,” 35.

61 Benjamin Fondane, Baudelaire et l’expérience du gouffre (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1994), 340–42.

62 Fondane, letter to Boris de Schloezer, January 1944; courtesy of Monique Jutrin.

63 Fondane, Le mal des fantômes, 18; Fondane is translating John Gay: “No retreat. No retreat. They must conquer or die who’ve no retreat.”

64 Supervielle, “L’Argentine n’oublie pas Benjamin Fondane.”

65 Cited in Monique Jutrin, Avec Benjamin Fondane au-delà de l’histoire (Paris: Éditions Parole et Silence, 2011), 66.

66 Geneviève Fondane, letter to Jean Ballard, March 21, 1947, Bulletin de la Société d’études Benjamin Fondane no. 2 (Fall 1994): 10–12.

67 Fondane, letter to Fredi Guthmann, January 28, 1941, Cahiers Benjamin Fondane 1 (1997): 26.

68 Cited in Olivier Salazar-Ferrer, “Fondane et Camus,” in Monique Jutrin, ed., Rencontres autour de Benjamin Fondane, poète et philosophe (Paris: Éditions Parole et Silence, 2002), 29–47.

69 Domaine français: Messages 1943, ed. Jean Lescure (Geneva: Trois Collines, 1943).

70 Stéphane Lupasco, “Benjamin Fondane, le philosophe et l’ami,” Cahiers du Sud 34, no. 282 (1947): 183–87.

71 “Dernière lettre de Benjamin Fondane à Geneviève,” in Carassou and Freedman, eds., Benjamin Fondane: Poète, essayiste, cinéaste et philosophe, 115.

72 Fondane, Rimbaud le voyou, 164.

73 Fondane, Baudelaire et l’expérience du gouffre, 352–53.

74 Fondane, “L’Exercice spirituel,” in Le voyageur n’a pas fini de voyager, ed. Patrice Beray and Michel Carassou (Paris: Éditions Paris-Méditerranée/ L’Ether Vague-Patrice Thierry, 1996), 111–12.

75 Benjamin Fondane, “Préface en prose,” in La mal des fantômes, ed. Patrice Beray and Michel Carassou, with Monique Jutrin (Paris: Éditions Verdier, 2006), 153.

EXISTENTIAL MONDAY AND THE SUNDAY OF HISTORY

1 Jean Grenier, ed., L’Existence (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 25–53.

2 Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, vol. II, 1914–1923, ed. Max Brod, trans. Martin H. Greenberg (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), 200: “ ‘You are reserved for a great Monday.’ Fine, but Sunday will never end.”

3 Fondane is probably referring to Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), a famous rationalist interpretation of religion and the Bible, but his use of the plural (tractati) may be a deliberate reference to all philosophical efforts to confine religious faith to the limits of reason alone.

4 See the New English Bible: New Testament (Oxford and Cambridge: Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, 1961), Matthew 5:20: “I tell you, unless you show yourselves far better than the Pharisees and the doctors of the law, you can never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

5 Fondane erroneously refers to Psalm 86:6. See New King James Bible (New York: Thompson, 1982), Psalm 82:6: “I said, ‘You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.’”

6 G. W. F. Hegel, Morceaux choisis, trans. and ed. Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), 299; see Hegel, “Life of Jesus,” in Three Essays, 1793–1795, trans. Peter Fuss and John Dobbins (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 104–65; the passage cited is on 118.

7 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 2, 48–49 [Fondane’s note]; Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 2: Plato and the Platonists, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 395. Fondane’s reference is in fact to Hegel, Morceaux choisis, 326: “the right to know (subjective freedom) is the fruit of the tree of knowledge, of knowledge of good and evil,—of knowledge, that is, of Reason—the general principle of philosophy for all times to come.”

8 Fondane means that the fundamental lesson of the Bible is that Knowledge, Reason, and good and evil are all products of the Fall, and thus instruments of human enslavement rather then emancipation. This is not what Hegel meant. Hegel sides with the Serpent, who tells Adam and Eve that Knowledge will make them like God; see Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 1: Greek Philosophy to Plato, trans. E. S. Haldane (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 105: “the serpent did not delude man, for God said, ‘Behold, Adam has become one of us, to know good and evil.’”

9 Compare Benjamin Fondane, Baudelaire et l’expérience du gouffre (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1994), 348, 356–57; and Nicolas Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, trans. R. M. French (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1943), 150: “The state exists for man and not man for the state. This is a particular case of the truth that ‘the Sabbath was made for man.’”

10 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1A.9.991a20–22: “To say that they [Plato’s Forms] are patterns of the other things that share in them is to use empty words and poetical metaphors”; The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, trans. W. D. Ross (New York: Random House, 1941), 708.

11 See Plato, Meno, 81a–86c and Phaedo, 72e–77b for the doctrine that “all learning is recollection” of what the soul knew before entering the body.

12 In 1841 and 1842, Kierkegaard went to Berlin to attend the lectures of F. W. J. Schelling, Hegel’s erstwhile collaborator and later a fierce critic of Hegel’s philosophy.

13 One of Shestov’s works is entitled Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle (Vox clamantis in deserto), trans. T. Rageot and Boris de Schloezer (Paris: Vrin, 1936); Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, trans. Bernard Martin (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1969).

14 Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the founder of the phenomenological movement, was a friend of Shestov, but both Shestov and Fondane criticized Husserl’s philosophy for neglecting the existential reality of the individual.

15 Rachel Bespaloff (1895–1949) became a philosopher under Shestov’s influence but later broke with him; see Bespaloff, “Chestov devant Nietzsche,” in Cheminements et carrefours (Paris: Vrin, 1938).

16 Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) developed his own form of “existence philosophy” (Existenzphilosophie), drawing heavily on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; see Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, trans. William Earle (New York: Noonday Press, 1955).

17 Nicolas Berdiaeff, Cinq méditations sur l’existence, trans. Irène Vildé Lot (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1936) [Fondane’s note]. See “Deuxième méditation: Le Sujet et l’Objectivation,” section II, 59: “Whatever kinship there is between Kierkegaard on the one hand and Heidegger and Jaspers on the other, we must make an essential distinction between them. Kierkegaard wants philosophy itself to be existence, instead of merely dealing with existence. But philosophy as practiced by Heidegger and Jaspers is never anything but a philosophy of, about existence.”

18 Bespaloff, Cheminements et carrefours, 81.

19 Karl Jaspers, “La pensée de Descartes et la Philosophie,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 125 (1937): 148 [Fondane’s note]. The full sentence reads: “We must create . . . a philosophy which elucidates that which is unconditioned, historical, and hence not valid for everyone . . . and which at the same time appropriates that which is universally valid and which, for that reason, is not unconditioned but relative.”

20 Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 129, 130. I have followed Fondane’s French.

21 G. W. F. Hegel, Phénoménologie de l’esprit, vol. 1, trans. Jean Hyppolite (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1939), 10 [Fondane’s note]; Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 5, slightly altered. The full phrase reads as follows in Miller’s translation: “The ‘beautiful,’ the ‘holy,’ the ‘eternal,’ ‘religion,’ and ‘love’ are the bait required to arouse the desire to bite.”

22 See Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 2–3: “The severance between knowledge and reality is the fatal result of [a] rationalism which has not been thought out to the end. It denies that the act of knowing is an existential act. . . . At the time when knowledge was a part of being and took place within it, the knower could himself be known. Plato, Plotinus, St. Augustine, Pascal, Jacob Boehme and others were both knowers and the subject-matter of knowledge. But a modern knower who places himself outside reality cannot be known. . . . He refuses to form part of reality and does not want his knowing to be a living, existential, act.”

23 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989), 154: “The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognizing that the finite has no veritable being”; and Hegel, Morceaux choisis, 56.

24 The goal of history is the actualization of Reason as Freedom. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1988), 18, 24–25; Hegel, Morceaux choisis, 249– 50: “Our study [of history] is . . . a Theodicy—a justification of God. . . . Evil in the world must be understood, grasped by the concept; thinking Spirit must be reconciled with the negative. . . .The reconciliation can only be achieved by knowledge of the positive through which the negative is subordinated and surpassed. What is required is consciousness of the true final goal of the world—and on the other hand consciousness of the actualization of this goal and of the fact that evil is not affirmed in the world with an equal validity [as this goal]. . . .The negative is rejected by thinking Reason which seeks an affirmative goal. Reason cannot stop before the fact that particular individuals were mortified. Particular goals are lost in the universal.”

25 Hegel, Morceaux choisis, 277–78; Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 362–63.

26 G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 27 [Fondane’s note]. I have again translated directly from Fondane’s version. Fondane states that he used both the Lefebvre and Guterman translation of Morceaux choisis, 68, and Hyppolite’s translation of Phénoménologie de l’esprit, vol. 1, 29. However, his version, while reproducing parts of both translations, also departs from both of them in places. Compare Miller’s translation in Phenomenology of Spirit, 19. Fondane follows Hyppolite in using être là (being there) to translate the German Dasein (“existence” both in Miller and in Lefebvre and Guterman) in order to bring out the connection with Heidegger’s use of Dasein in Being and Time as referring to that mode of existence characteristic of human being; être là has become the standard French translation of Dasein. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübinger: Max Niemeyer, 1927); Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); L’Étre et le temps, trans. François Vezin (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).

27 Fondane makes an untranslatable play on words; equipment is outillage and orientation is aiguillage.

28 The French phrase translated as “nothingness”—le néant—may also be rendered as “the Nothing,” and in turn translates the German das Nichts (the Nothing, nothingness). In keeping with the use of néant in the passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology, I have used “nothingness” rather than the more Heideggerian-sounding “the Nothing,” although Fondane intends us to understand it in both the Hegelian and Heideggerian ways. I have translated le Rien as “the Nothing.”

29 This probably refers to Aristotle’s claims that “it is impossible that there should be a demonstration of absolutely everything,” and that one must assume the law of noncontradiction (“it is impossible for anything at the same time to be and not to be”) in order for there to be any demonstration or meaningful argument; Aristotle, Metaphysics, IV.4 and IX.5. See also Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, I.3, and II.19, on the necessity of beginning demonstrations with ultimate principles that cannot be proven.

30 Fondane is parodying a passage from Hegel’s logic concerning “the nonrecognition of the finite as genuine being.”

31 Fondane parodies Hegel’s Phenomenology on Spirit as the magic power that transforms nothingness into being.

32 Martin Heidegger, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique? Suivi d’extraits sur l’être et le temps et d’une conférence sur Hölderlin, trans. Henri Corbin (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), 206 [Fondane’s note]. This work includes a translation of Heidegger’s essay “Was ist Metaphysik?,” as well as key sections from Sein und Zeit, including those on anxiety, “the Nothing,” and historicity. Fondane is referring to Section 76 of Sein und Zeit, on “The existential source of History from Dasein’s historicity,” where Heidegger refers to Nietzsche’s “Untimely Meditation” on “The Use and Abuse of History for Life” (1874) and the “monumental, antiquarian, and critical” modes of History.

33 Ibid., 207 [Fondane’s note]. The monumental, antiquarian, and critical are the three approaches to history or modes of historical inquiry discussed by Nietzsche. Fondane follows Corbin’s translation of “archaeological” instead of “antiquarian,” the standard English translation.

34 Ibid., the entire study devoted to Hölderlin [Fondane’s note]. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung (Munich: Albert Langen and Georg Müller, 1936); in Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique, 231– 52; see particularly 246, 249–50, on poetry as the voice of “the people” (das Volk).

35 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 708 [Fondane’s note]; Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 784, 789.

36 See Fondane, La Conscience malheureuse, 252: “No doubt anxiety discovers this Nothing [Rien], but this Nothing is the nothingness [néant] of ethics, of knowledge, of works, of religions, of Spirit.” See also Fondane’s review of Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?, Cahiers du Sud 18 (1939): 603–6, reprinted in Le Lundi existentiel, 150–55: “According to Heidegger, the state of anxiety places us before the Nothing . . . and Nothingness thus reveals the existent to us . . . [in] its ‘most unique possibility’. . . of freedom for death. . . . It is pointless to point out that Heidegger stops just where the existential thought of his teacher Kierkegaard begins; and that the mission of authenticity is not to build a science on the foundation of nothingness; its mission is to overcome nothingness.” Olivier Salazar-Ferrer argues that for Fondane, “nothingness” is “the coefficient of the unreality of rational representations, whether cognitive, ethical or aesthetic,” that is, an illusion created by reason; Salazar-Ferrer, Benjamin Fondane et la révolte existentielle (Paris: Corlevour, 2008), 103.

37 J. G. Hamann, Tägebucher, I (Innsbruck: Brenner Verlag, 1923), 172 [Fondane’s note].

38 The early Christian philosopher Tertullian (160–c.220) argued that God’s incarnation in Christ is certum est, quia impossibile (it is certain because it is impossible), and declared credo quia absurdum (I believe it because it is absurd.) His sally against philosophy, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?,” is a leitmotif in Shestov’s and Fondane’s work; see in particular Lev Shestov, Athènes et Jérusalem (Paris: Vrin, 1938).

39 Tertullien, De Carne Christi, trans. [Eugène] de Genoude, Oeuvres de Tertullien, vol. I, 2nd ed. (Paris: L. Vivès, 1852), 397 [Fondane’s note]; On the Flesh of Christ, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, vol. III, Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian, ed. and trans. Reverend Alexander Roberts, Sir James Donaldson, and Arthur Cleveland Coxe (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007; originally published in 1885), 521–44.

40 Fondane’s implicit reference is to Spinoza’s doctrine that truth is the sign of itself and of falsehood, index sui et falsi; Baruch Spinoza, Proposition 43, in Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters, ed. Seymour Feldman and trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992), 92: “Indeed, just as light makes manifest both itself and darkness, so truth is the standard [index] both of itself and falsity.”

41 Heidegger, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?, 44 [Fondane’s note].

42 A reference to Kierkegaard’s book Either/Or (1843); in German, Entweder-Oder. For Kierkegaard, existence involves choosing between exclusive alternatives, and he sees Hegel’s dialectic as an attempt to “mediate” oppositions and to find a position between the contrary terms. Fondane’s argument thus takes up Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel.

43 Albert Camus’s L’Étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1942) was an immediate sensation; The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward (New York: Vintage International, 1989).

44 Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe (Paris: Gallimard, 1942); The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955). Shestov had earlier referred to Sisyphus in Le pouvoir des clefs, trans. Boris de Schloezer (Paris: Gallimard, Éditions de la Pléiade, 1928), xxxiii: “We must believe that men, those perpetual Sisyphuses, will once again set themselves . . . to patiently rolling the immense rock of history, and will endeavor, just as they did formerly, to lift it up in torment at the summit of the mountain.” Fondane also invokes Sisyphus on two occasions: in his study of Baudelaire (Baudelaire et l’expérience du gouffre, 61), where he cites Baudelaire’s poem “Le Guignon,” from The Flowers of Evil: “To life up a weight so heavy, Sisyphus, it would take all your courage!”; and again in his own poem Le Mal des fantômes (Paris: Verdier, 2006), 18: “Sisyphus, old Sisyphus, how used up you are! Will you give up? . . . One must not give up. No way out, no way out! They must perish or vanquish, those who have no way out!”

45 Probité intellectuelle. This term is not actually used by Camus, but it is used by Nietzsche in a passage that Fondane cites on more than one occasion, where Nietzsche says it is “intellectual honesty” that prevents us from returning to the comfort of old religious beliefs; Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 60–61. Camus does, however, use the term honnêteté in “Le Mythe de Sisyphe,” in Essais, ed. Roger Quilliot and Louis Faucon (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 113, which O’Brien translates as “decency” in The Myth of Sisyphus, 26.

46 A reference to the passage from Hegel on the “seriousness of history” cited earlier.

47 Camus argues on the contrary that Shestov evades the struggle by denying reason entirely, and thereby suppressing one of the opposed terms from which the absurd arises. For Camus, the absurd is born of the contradiction between, on the one hand, reason and the human need to understand, and, on the other hand, the unreasonable and inexplicable nature of the world. With Shestov, however, says Camus, “Man integrates the absurd, and in that communion conjures away its essential character, which is opposition, dismemberment [déchirement], and divorce. . . . Everything here is sacrificed to the irrational, and the demand for clarity being evaded, the absurd disappears with one of the terms of its comparison”; The Myth of Sisyphus, 37–39 [altered]; Essais, 124–25.

48 See Fondane’s letter to Boris de Schoezer of January 1944: “[Camus] has understood nothing of the existential: not Shestov, not Kierkegaard. We must imagine Sisyphus happy, he says at the end of the book. I would like nothing better, but I don’t have enough imagination!”; cited in Monique Jutrin, Avec Benjamin Fondane au-delà de l’histoire (Paris: Éditions Parole et Silence, 2011), 138.

49 “Mind” or “intellect” in Greek.

50 A misologue or misologist is one who hates or despises reason and argument; in Plato’s Phaedo, 89d, Socrates warns his followers of the danger of misology, or hatred or contempt for rational argument.

51 Heidegger, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?, 42 [Fondane’s note]. Compare Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” trans. David Farrell Krell, in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 111: “Only because the nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangeness of beings overwhelm us. Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder—the revelation of the nothing—does the ‘why’ loom before us.”

52 A term affixed to legal documents.

53 Heidegger, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?, 42 [Fondane’s note]. Compare Krell’s translation, 111: “The question of the nothing puts us, the questioners, in question.”

54 Søren Kierkegaard, Journal, 210 [Fondane’s note]; Fragments du Journal, trans. Knud Ferlov and Jean J. Gateau (Paris: Gallimard, 1927).

55 “Wretchedness” and “poverty” both translate misère. Fondane alludes to Marx’s Misère de la philosophie or The Poverty of Philosophy (1846).

56 “Doubt everything”: the slogan of the philosophy of René Descartes (1596–1650), who in his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences (1637) takes it as his first rule of method “never to accept anything as true” that did not “present itself to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I had no occasion to doubt it”; see Descartes, Philosophical Works, vol. I, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 120.

57 “First philosophy” refers to “metaphysics,” as for example in Descartes’s Meditationes de Prima Philosophiae (1641) or “Meditations on First Philosophy,” a title frequently rendered as simply Metaphysical Meditations.

58 See Benjamin Fondane, Faux traité d’esthétique, ed. Ann Van Sevenant (Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1938), 25–26: Reason displays “an undisguised horror for empirical reality: for the arbitrary, contingent, and fleeting; a frankly admitted contempt for everything that is personal, affective, subjective, sentimental, or imaginative; a barely contained penchant for viewing existence . . . as an irrational hallucination of the senses.” Reason discounts the testimony of the senses and so reduces reality to what is rationally intelligible alone (34), thereby impoverishing reality (47) and neglecting its full complexity; see also Fondane, Rimbaud le voyou: Et l’expérience poétique, ed. Michel Carassou (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1990), 294.

59 Søren Kierkegaard, Riens philosophiques, trans. Knud Ferlov and Jean Jacques Gateau (Paris: Gallimard, 1937), 110–11 [Fondane’s note]. See Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 44.

60 Kierkegaard, Fragments du Journal, 65 [Fondane’s note].

61 Fondane admired Henri Bergson’s theory of time or duration (la durée) and of a life-force (élan vital) that underlies both material and mental existence. However, in “Bergson, Freud et les dieux,” in La Conscience malheureuse, ed. Olivier Salazar-Ferrer (Paris: Éditions Verdier, 2013), 119–167, and in his Faux traité d’esthétique, Fondane strenuously objects to the theory advanced in Bergson’s Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion, 58th ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), that religion is the product of the human mind’s “fabulating” faculty and is “systematically false” (111–14); see Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudsley Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977).

62 Fondane is referring to Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906) and his Philosophy of the Unconscious (Berlin, 1869).

63 Fondane had a voluminous correspondence with the Romanian philosopher Stéphane Lupasco (1900–1988), and they held many ideas in common. Lupasco, in particular, developed a “philosophy of contradiction” in opposition to traditional logic’s exclusion of contradiction. See Lupasco, Logique et contradiction (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947) and the notes to “Boredom” in this volume.

64 Kierkegaard, Fragments du Journal, 154 [Fondane’s note].

65 Søren Kierkegaard, Traité du désespoir, trans. Knud Ferlov and Jean Jacques Gateau (Paris: Gallimard, 1932), 103; The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 38. Fondane reviews this work in Cahiers du Sud X, no. 147 (January 1933): 42–51. This review in turn forms part of the material for “Søren Kierkegaard and the Category of the Secret,” in Fondane, La Conscience malheureuse, 199–227.

66 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 38. See Shestov’s All Things Are Possible, trans. S. S. Kotelianski (London, 1920); the original Russian title, in English, would be The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (St. Petersburg, 1903); see Sur les confins de la vie; l’Apothéose du dépaysment, trans. Boris de Schloezer (Paris: Éditions de la Pléiade, 1927).

67 Neo-Thomist philosopher Étienne Gilson (1884–1978). Fondane refers to Gilson’s L’Esprit de la philosophie médiévale (Paris: Vrin, 1932) in La Conscience malheureuse, 266; Gilson’s essay “Limites existentielles de la philosophie” appeared in the same volume as Fondane’s “Existential Monday,” L’Existence.

68 This seems more like Plato than Aristotle, although Aristotle does cite what he calls a proverb, “Poets tell many lies,” in Metaphysics I.2.983a. In Plato’s Republic, 377b–398b, Socrates condemns poets as liars, and argues that they should be excluded from the ideal community.

69 G. W. Leibniz (1646–1716) is noted for this Theodicy (1710), an attempt to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering in the world with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and infinitely just God, in which Leibniz notoriously claims that “this is the best of all possible worlds.”

70 Apaiser can also be translated as “to pacify,” “to soothe,” or “to satisfy.” However, given the post-Munich context in which Fondane writes, I have chosen to translate it as “appease,” and “appeasement” for apaisement.

71 Hegel, Morceaux choisis, 291 [Fondane’s note; the emphasis is Fondane’s]. The passage comes from Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik, Book III, 550–54, from the first edition of his complete works, Werke, vol. X, ed. Heinrich Gustav Hotho (Berlin and Leipzig, 1837–1842). Fondane also cites this passage in Baudelaire et l’expérience du gouffre, 352–53: The death of Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial is “like the end of any individual sacrificed by Hegel to what he calls Spirit. . . . But it is clear that ‘Spirit’ has not triumphed; because what Spirit wanted was not the death, the sacrifice, of the individual, what it wanted was his consent to the sacrifice . . . in order to realize ‘absolute rationality.’ For ‘the ultimate element of tragedy is not just unhappiness and suffering, but the satisfaction of the mind (l’esprit): the necessity of what befalls individuals can appear as absolute rationality and the soul is morally calmed. It is upset by the hero’s fate, but in fact is appeased.’ It is only according to this interpretation that tragedy is intelligible.”

72 Louis Lavelle, L’Erreur de Narcisse (Paris: Grasset, 1939), 102–3 [Fondane’s note].

73 Guterman and Lefebvre, preface to Hegel, Morceaux choisis, 17 [Fondane’s note]. It is perhaps worth quoting this passage in full, as it is aimed squarely at the existential philosophy of Fondane and Shestov: “But if Kierkegaard cures us of Hegel, Hegel cures us of Kierkegaard. Impatience wants the impossible, and is not concerned with the steps, Hegel says someplace. Here is the warning sign of Reason, of Necessity, of the Necessity which, known and dominated, founds Freedom. Is not religiosity precisely the impatience, the greedy haste of the slave in his prison or recently released?”

74 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, introduction, first edition (1781), A1 [Fondane’s note]. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. F. Max Müller (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), xlvii: “Reason is roused [by experience] rather than satisfied.” Note that the German Befriedigung, like the French apaisement, contains the word for “peace”—Frieden, paix—a nuance not captured by “satisfaction.”

75 Paul Langevin, “L’Orientation actuelle de la physique,” in L’Orientation actuelle des sciences, ed. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: Alcan, 1930) [Fondane’s note].

76 This is a parody of the passage from Hegel on ancient tragedy, cited above.

77 Ivan Turgenev, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, trans. Richard Freeborn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).

78 Kierkegaard, Traité du désespoir, 103; The Sickness Unto Death, 38.

79 Aristotle’s idea of a “self-sufficient” or “self-reliant” being, such as the intellect (noûs).

80 Léon Chestov, Le Pouvoir des clefs, trans. Boris de Schloezer (Paris: J. Schiffrin, 1928); Lev Shestov, Potestas Clavium, trans. Bernard Martin (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1968).

81 Compare Martin’s translation: “But intelligere does not mean ‘understanding’ but working out within oneself such a relationship to the world and to life that it is possible to attain the acquiescentia animi or the summum bonum of which all philosophers have always dreamed”; available at http://shestov.by.ru/pc/pc33_3.html, accessed July 4, 2006.

82 F. W. Nietzsche, Par-delà le bien et le mal, prélude d’une philosophie de l’avenir, trans. Henri Albert (Paris: Société du Mercure de France, 1920), 202 [Fondane’s note]; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), aphorism 211, 123: “Actual philosophers, however, are commanders and law-givers: they say ‘thus it shall be!’”

83 See Fondane, Baudelaire et l’expérience du gouffre, 307: Jonathan Swift’s reminder that “mind and knowledge came out of excremental organs” is an insurrection against Academic “good taste” and of the body against the mind: “It is what Nietzsche might have called: ‘the revolt of the enslaved Masters against the slaves in power!’ But here it is no longer a matter, as with Nietzsche, of morality, but of the truth of Masters. This is no longer the search for a ‘way out,’ but the search for freedom.”

84 My rendering follows Fondane’s French. See Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 230–31.

85 Par-delà le bien et le mal [Fondane’s emphasis]; some words from this passage are omitted. See Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 55, 63: “Did one not finally have to sacrifice everything comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in a concealed harmony, in a future bliss and justice? Did one not have to sacrifice God himself and out of cruelty against oneself worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness—this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate act of cruelty was reserved for the generation which is even now arising: we all know something of it already.”

86 F. W. Nietzsche, “The Madman,” in The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181–82: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. . . .This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”

87 G. W. Leibniz, “The Principles of Philosophy, or, the Monadology (1714),” in Discourse on Metaphysics and Other Essays, trans. Daniel Garber and Roger Ariew (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991), 68: “The monads have no windows or doors through which something can enter or leave. Accidents cannot be detached, nor can they go about outside of their substances, as the sensible species of the Scholastics once did. Thus, neither substance nor accident can enter a monad from without.”

88 See Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. Alastair Hannay (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 122: “I am not dreaming, I am awake. I do not turn her [viz., Regina Olsen, Kierkegaard’s former fiancée] into poetry. . . I think I am able to turn anything into poetry, but when it comes to duty, obligation, responsibility, guilt, etc., I cannot and will not turn these into poetic subjects.” As a poet, Fondane is likewise concerned that his philosophy not “evaporate” into poetry.

89 In English in the original.

90 During his mental breakdown and descent into madness in Turin in 1889, Nietzsche sent postcards to Cosima Wagner, Richard Wagner’s wife, addressing her as Ariadne, the character in Greek mythology who provided Theseus with the thread that enabled him to escape the labyrinth, and signed himself “Dionysus,” the Greek god of wine and drama.

91 A reference to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyitch (1886).

92 A reference to Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864).

93 See Charles Baudelaire, “The Gulf,” in The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 342–45: “Pascal has his abyss, moving where he moved.” Translation altered. The theme of the abyss (le gouffre) is central to Fondane’s book on Baudelaire; on Pascal and the abyss, see Baudelaire et l’expérience du gouffre, 246–53. See also Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 52, 67: on the “infinite abyss” within human nature and on human nature being “suspended” between two abysses (gouffres) of the infinite and the void.

PREFACE FOR THE PRESENT MOMENT

1 Published in 1936 in Paris by Denoël et Steele, contents: “Preface for the Present Moment,” “Introduction,” “Nietzsche and the Supreme Cruelty,” “Gide ‘Following Montaigne,’” “Bergson, Freud, and the Gods,” “Husserl and ‘Reality Made Easy,’” “Heidegger Before Dostoyevsky,” “Kierkegaard and the Category of the Secret,” and “Léon Shestov, Witness for the Prosecution.”

2 Fondane’s argument anticipates Albert Camus’s L’Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951); The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956). Both Fondane and Camus were influenced by Shestov’s philosophy of the absurd.

3 See G. W. F. Hegel, “Freedom of Self-consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness,” in The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), IV.B. For an analysis of the significance of Hegel’s “unhappy consciousness” in twentieth-century French philosophy, see Bruce Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (New York and London: Routledge, 2003). The French malheureuse, like the German unglückliche, can mean “unfortunate” or even “cursed,” as well as “unhappy.” As a noun, a malheur is a misfortune, an ordeal, a calamity, or an accident; a malheureux is a poor wretch or an unfortunate or unhappy person.

4 Primum vivere deinde philosophari: Live first, then philosophize.

5 Fondane probably has in mind Marxist philosophers such as Henri Lefebvre and Norbert Guterman, who had attacked existentialism, and Fondane and Shestov’s version in particular.

6 Fondane, like Shestov, identifies Fate with necessity, or ananké in Greek.

7 Fondane is referring to the dialectical progress from thesis (position), to antithesis (negation) and synthesis (the surpassing and reconciliation of the opposition between thesis and antithesis in a higher term). The “surpassing”—dépassement, Aufhebung—both negates and conserves the terms it negates. This is the common understanding of Hegel’s dialectic, which was also taken up by Marx, who famously “turned it on its head” by making it materialist instead of idealist; see Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 102–3.

8 On this subject, see Karl Marx, Misère de la philosophie [The Poverty of Philosophy], in Morceaux choisis, ed. and trans. Norbert Guterman and Henri Lefebvre (Paris: Gallimard, 1934), 106: “In England, strikes regularly led to the invention and application of new machines. One could say that the machines were the weapon which the capitalists used to put down the rebellions of specialized labor. The self-acting mule, the greatest invention of modern industry, took the rebellious weavers out of the struggle. Though the coalitions and the strikes could have no effect other than to turn all the efforts of mechanical genius against them, they still had a tremendous influence on the development of industry.” It is clear that in this instance, the dialectic willingly and without the least regret sacrifices the “rebel weavers” to mechanical genius—it being expected that mechanical genius is necessary to the ideal development of the dialectic. But as for the weavers who are put down themselves, the dialectic does not give a toss. It neither can nor wants to respond to their fate. Just like Nietzsche—although in a completely different way—it places itself above Pity! [Fondane’s note.]

9 The search for a “philosophy of the concrete” was a major preoccupation shared by existential and Marxist philosophers between the wars. On the existentialist side, see Jean Wahl, Vers le concret (Paris: F. Alcan, 1932). Here, Fondane is referring to Marxism as a supposed “philosophy of the concrete.”

10 Marx, in the eleventh of his “Theses on Feuerbach,” famously declared: “Philosophers have merely attempted to interpret the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”; see Karl Marx, The Portable Karl Marx, ed. Eugene Kamenka (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 158.

11 Marx, Morceaux choisis, 51 [Fondane’s note]. See Marx, “ ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’” in The Portable Karl Marx, 157: “But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each separate individual. In its reality it is the ensemble (aggregate) of social relations.”

12 An “absolute fusion” of subject and object, self and other, dream and reality, and of all oppositions was one of the main goals of surrealism; see André Breton, “Seconde manifeste du surréalisme,” in Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 76–77. The “long, immense, and systematic [raisonné] derangement [dérèglement] of all the senses” was proposed by Arthur Rimbaud in his letter of May 15, 1871, the so-called “Letter of the Seer” (Lettre du voyant).

13 “Irrésignation” is a neologism coined by Fondane. It has a stronger sense than “non-resignation,” just as “irresponsible” has a different and stronger sense than “not responsible.” It is a revolt against resignation. See Monique Jutrin, “Poésie et philosophie: l’irrésignation de Benjamin Fondane,” Cahiers Benjamin Fondane 2 (Autumn 1998): 27–32.

14 Edmund Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes, trans. Emmanuel Levinas and Gabrielle Peiffer (Paris: Armand Colin, 1931), 12; my translation. Compare Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 14: philosophy seeks “those cognitions that are first in themselves [i.e., self-evident] and can support the whole storied edifice of universal knowledge.”

15 “Criticisms” refer to philosophies that follow the methods of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

16 Husserl took on Descartes’s task of philosophically reconstructing the edifice of science based on absolutely indubitable and “apodictic” premises. See René Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), especially pages 114–18, 126–27.

17 See Léon Chestov, “Athènes et Jérusalem,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 60, no. 11–12 (November–December 1935): 316, regarding Meyerson: “It is no longer even Montaigne’s ‘unreasonable reason’ but reason that has in a way gone mad.” [Fondane’s note.]

18 Henri Bergson, La Pensée et le mouvant (Paris: F. Alcan, 1934), 62; The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: The Citadel Press, 1992). Cited by Jean Baruzi in Problèmes d’Histoire des Religions (Paris: F. Alcan, 1935) [Fondane’s note].

19 Henri Bergson, Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1932); The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudsley Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977).

20 It is not clear which doctrine of Aristotle’s Fondane has in mind, but Aristotle everywhere argues against arguments that go on to infinity, as in the form of an infinite regress. So, for example, “it is impossible that there should be a demonstration of absolutely everything,” and one must assume the law of noncontradiction (“it is impossible for anything at the same time to be and not to be”) in order for there to be any demonstration or meaningful argument; Metaphysics, IV.4. It is this assumption without proof of the law of noncontradiction that Fondane and Shestov strenuously reject.

21 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. F. Max Müller (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), I. Elements of Transcendentalism, Second Part: Transcendental Logic, Section IV: Of the Division of Transcendental Logic into Transcendental Analytic and Dialectic, A: 57–60; B: 81–85, 48.

22 For Husserl, “apodicity” is something so self-evident that it is impossible to doubt. See Husserl, Méditations cartésiennes, 3: “The philosopher is forbidden from accepting as existing anything that is not completely free of any possibility of being placed in doubt . . . . He seeks to gain—if possible—by the exclusion of anything that could present the possibility of doubt, a set of absolutely self-evident givens”; my translation from the French. See Cartesian Meditations, 3.

23 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), aphorism 109, 60–61: “How one would like to exchange the false assertions of the priests that there is a God who desires that we do good, is the guardian and witness of every action, every moment, every thought, who loves us and in every misfortune wants only what is best for us—how one would like to exchange these for truths that would be as salutary, pacifying and beneficial as those errors are! Yet such truths do not exist. . . . One can no longer have any association with [Christianity] without incurably dirtying one’s intellectual conscience.”

24 F. W. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), aphorism 55, 63: “Did one not finally have to sacrifice everything comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in a concealed harmony, in some future bliss and justice? Did one not have to sacrifice God himself and out of cruelty to oneself worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness?”

25 See Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927), in Freud, Civilization, Society and Religion: Group Psychology, Civilization and Its Discontents and Other Works, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. W.D. Robson-Scott, revised by James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 183–241, especially 214–15 and 233: Irreligious people “will find themselves in a difficult situation. They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness [in the face of nature] and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the center of the creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence. They will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children forever; they must in the end go out into ‘hostile life.’ We may call this ‘education to reality’. . . . And as for the great necessities of Fate, against which there is no help, they will learn to endure them with resignation.”

26 See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1962), 44: “It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts”; see also 59, 65, 74–76, and 81, and Freud, The Future of an Illusion, 184–85.

27 See Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, trans. Terrence Malick (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 113–21; in French, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?, trans. Henry Corbin (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), 102–5. Fondane’s source, however, is Rachel Bespaloff, “Lettre sur Heidegger à Monsieur Daniel Halévey,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 116, no. 11–12 (November–December 1933): 321– 39; Bespaloff refers to “the third form of transcendental activity, legitimation, justification, explanation (Begründen),” a paraphrase of Heidegger rather than a direct quotation (335–36). Fondane’s interpretation of Heidegger in La Conscience malheureuse (303) was guided by Bespaloff’s article.

28 Rimbaud, Lettre du voyant [Fondane’s note]; “Letter of the Seer.”

29 A reference to Plotinus, Enneads, trans. Stephen Mackenna (London: Penguin Books, 1991), I.3.5, 27: “Philosophy is the supremely precious.”

30 By “participation,” Fondane means the “mystic participation” that Lucien Lévy-Bruhl says “primitive” people achieve with nature and the supernatural. It is a form of what Lévy-Bruhl calls “prelogical thought” that does not obey the “law of noncontradiction.” See Fondane, Faux traité d’esthétique (Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1938) and “Lévy-Bruhl et la métaphysique de la connaissance,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 129, no. 5–6 (May–June 1940): 289–316 and 130, no. 7–8 (July–August 1940): 29–54.

31 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (1781), A xi; Critique of Pure Reason, xxiv (altered in accordance with Fondane’s rendering).

32 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, xxiv: reason must “institute a court of appeal which should protect the just rights of reason, but dismiss all groundless claims.”

33 Lev Shestov (Léon Chestov).

MAN BEFORE HISTORY, OR, THE SOUND AND THE FURY

1 Cahiers du Sud XVIII, no. 216 (May 1939): 441–54.

2 Ibid., Bénet, “Avec des Cartes truquées,” 400–13.

3 See Benjamin Fondane et les Cahiers du Sud: Correspondance, ed. Monique Jutrin, Gheorghe Has, and Ion Pop (Bucharest: Éditions de la Fondation Culturelle Roumaine, 1998), 150–53.

4 Or “cited” by Gide, as Bénet did not indicate the source [Fondane’s note]. Bénet uses the phrase as an epigraph for his article “Avec des Cartes truquées,” which inaugurated the “survey” by arguing for a return to medieval charity and the self-sacrifice of the Crusades as a countermeasure to Nazism.

5 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground and The Gambler, trans. Jane Kentish (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1991), 18, 30.

6 Shakespeare, Macbeth, 5.5: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” [Fondane’s note cites Shakespeare in English.]

7 Fondane refers to the Stephanus pages common to all translations of Plato. See The Sophist, trans. F.M. Cornford, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 994.

8 In “Avec des Cartes truquées,” Bénet accuses the Nazis of being illogical for proclaiming that “might is right” and yet seeking a camouflage of legality and justice through measures such as plebiscites: “At least be logical!” He calls Nazis and Fascists “the new barbarians” (400).

9 Spinoza, Ethics, Proposition 67, in Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters, ed. Seymour Feldman and trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992), 192.

10 Fondane’s brackets.

11 Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, abridged by John Dillon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), Ennead II.9.XIII, 124–25, states that “those who censure the constitution of the Cosmos” make the absurd demand that everything be absolutely perfect and so are “obliged to admit evil in the Supreme also,” that is, in God.

12 Rather than Seneca, the more likely source of the story of the Stoic in the storm is Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, 19.1, discussed by Augustine in The City of God, 9.4. Augustine argues that someone who trembles in fear for his life actually cares about his life a great deal, even if his reason tells him that he shouldn’t.

13 Cf. Matthew 5:43–45: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”

14 In English in the original.

15 Amor fati, the “love of fate,” is one of the leitmotifs of Nietzsche’s later philosophy. For Fondane, such an attitude involves a submission to necessity, the opposite of the spirit of revolt and freedom that he champions.

16 Aristotle, On the Soul, trans. J. A. Smith, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), I.4, 408b, 548: “The case of the mind (noûs) is different; it seems to be an independent substance implanted within the soul and to be incapable of being destroyed.”

17 Ibid., III.4, 429b, 590: “While the faculty of sensation is dependent on the body, the mind [noûs] is separable from it.”

18 Fondane is implicitly referring to Marx’s famous eleventh of his “Theses on Feuerbach”: “Up until now, philosophers have only sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it”; Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Portable Karl Marx, ed. Eugene Kamenka (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 158.

19 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 20: “what is actual is rational and what is rational is actual.”

20 Hegel refers to the modern state as “the divine Idea as it exists on earth”; G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Books, 1988), 42. In German, this introduction was published separately under the title Die Vernunft in der Geschichte (Reason in History). Hegel’s thesis is that history progresses toward the goal of free citizens living under rational (rather than arbitrary) laws; history is thus a manifestation and embodiment of reason. For that reason, the sufferings of countless individuals are justified as the price necessary for achieving the goal of history (which is also the goal of reason). In that sense, “history is the true theodicy,” as Hegel says: the true justification of evil and suffering as being necessary to God’s plan; see Introduction to the Philosophy of History, 12–13, 18, 24, 39, and passim.

21 Ibid., 19, 21, 75: “It is Spirit, and the process of its development, that is the substance of history. . . .We can say of world history that it is the exhibition of the Spirit, the working out of the explicit knowledge of what it is potentially. . . .World history in general is thus the unfolding of Spirit in time.”

22 Kant argues that reason is a “universal legislator” in that reason requires one to act in such a way that the maxim of one’s action could serve as a universal law. See Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), 30.

23 Fondane probably has in mind Maritain’s Humanisme intégral: problèmes temporels et spirituels d’une nouvelle chrétienté (Paris: Aubier, 1936); Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom, trans. Joseph W. Evans (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968). Fondane reviews this work in Le Rouge et le noir 8, no. 28 (July 24–25, 1937), where he praises Maritain for taking philosophy out of the study and into the street, into the midst of the “political, economic, and religious crisis of today,” and for his courageous anti-Fascist stand at a time when many Catholics were rallying to Franco.

24 Otto Planetta was a member of the SS who was executed in 1934 for his role in the assassination of Chancellor Engelburt Dollfuss of Austria.

25 Bénet cited this same piece of Nazi propaganda in a slightly different form, which he found in the French newspaper Le Petit Dauphinois, in July 1938: “How did Christ die? Sniveling on the cross. How did Planetta die? Shouting: Long live Hitler, long live Germany!” This, says Bénet, is the new Nazi Gospel; Bénet, “Avec des Cartes truquées,” 407.

26 Fondane is contrasting the philosophical and Stoic ideal of facing death with equanimity to the anguish of Christ on the cross. Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedo 61c–69e, states that death is the liberation of the soul from the body’s prison.

27 See Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”; Luke 23:46, “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!”; John 19:30, “It is finished.” The verse from John cited by Fondane as “Tout est accompli,” which is the standard French translation, carries the connotation of everything having been accomplished, completed, or fulfilled, something not conveyed in the English Revised Standard Version or King James Version.

28 Fondane has Bénet in mind, who preaches a return to the spirit of the Crusaders who did everything for faith and honor; Bénet, “Avec des Cartes truquées,” 408–9.

29 See Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), IX.4, 189: “During that [time] you let me suffer the agony of a toothache, and when the pain became so great that I could not speak, my heart prompted me to ask all my friends who were with me to pray to you for me, since you are the God who gives health to the body as well as to the soul. I wrote down the message and gave it to them to read, and as soon as we knelt down to offer you this humble prayer, the pain vanished.”

30 Spinoza, Ethics, Propositions 15, 20, and 32–37: 40–43, 46–47, and 53–87. Spinoza’s intellectual love of God amounts to loving the divine necessity of the laws of nature, whereas for Fondane, God has the power to overcome necessity and do the logically impossible.

31 Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

32 Matthew 8:22: “Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.”

BOREDOM

1 This selection is chapter XXIX of Fondane’s Baudelaire et l’expérience du gouffre (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1994; 1st ed., Paris: Pierre Seghers, 1947). For Heidegger’s treatment of boredom, see Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen Verlag, 1929); “What Is Metaphysics?,” trans. David Farrell Krell, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Heidegger distinguishes “genuine boredom” from just being bored with a book, a show, work, or some distraction; genuine boredom “swarms like a silent fog in the abysses of human reality, brings men and things, you and everyone, together in an astonishing indifference.” Fondane, like Heidegger, also draws on Pascal’s Pensées: “Man’s condition. Inconstancy, boredom, anxiety. . . . Nothing is so intolerable for man as to be in a state of complete tranquillity, without passions, without business, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nothingness, his abandonment, his inadequacy, his dependence, his helplessness, his emptiness”; Pensées, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1999), 14, 123.

2 Fondane’s phrase calls to mind Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 82, where Strachey uses “malaise” to translate “Unbehagen”; originally Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930), which in its first French translation is La Malaise dans la civilization (Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1934), “the malaise in civilization.” Fondane refers to this work in “Bergson, Freud et les dieux,” in La Conscience malheureuse (Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1936), 119–67, as well as in his introduction to that work (2–3, 17), where he considers Freud’s thesis that civilization is built on the repression of human instincts.

3 Like many of his contemporaries, Fondane uses the term l’existant to refer both to a particular existing individual and to the totality of what exists. See Rachel Bespaloff, “Lettre sur Heidegger à M. Daniel Halévy,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 57 (November–December 1933), which influenced Fondane. Since Fondane slides from one sense to the other, I have left the term in its original and ambiguous form.

4 Fondane is referring to Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–1985), whose L’Alternative (Paris: Alcan, 1938) Fondane reviewed for Cahiers du Sud 18, no. 216 (May 1939): 249–51; reprinted in Fondane, Le Lundi existentiel (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1990), 117–22.

5 “Criticism” is used in the sense of Kant’s “critical philosophy,” which investigates the a priori conditions of the objects of knowledge, as in the Critique of Pure Reason.

6 See Jankélévitch, L’Alternative, 190: “Society should accompany us back home, make itself at home in our intimacy, leave us alone as little as possible in order to stand in the way of this inexplicable tête-à-tête; because when Society is there, that strange visitor that is ourselves, which is the double of our consciousness, does not ordinarily dare to show its face. . . . Fortunately, sociability is as natural to us as existence itself: for it is true that existence was given to us so that we can exist, and not so that we can watch ourselves breathe.” See also 209: “Which is why the best thing would be perhaps to not force things . . . to be ‘divinely superficial’. . . because nothing good for us can come from there.”

7 Either Fondane or his editors are guilty of an error of transcription. Jankélévitch actually writes (L’Alternative, 171), that original sin is a metaphor that does not contain anything thinkable in it. Fondane correctly cites this formulation in his review, and indeed mocks it (Cahiers du Sud, 251; Le Lundi existentiel, 122).

8 Charles Baudelaire, “To the Reader,” in Les Fleurs du mal, trans. Richard Howard (Boston: David R. Godine, 1983), 5–6; original French, 183–84. All citations of The Flowers of Evil are from this translation; the first set of page numbers refers to the translation, the second to the original French.

9 See Ecclesiastes 1:18: “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.”

10 “Acosmism” is usually the view that the world and particular objects have no independent reality but exist only through being grounded in God. For example, see G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Peter Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart, with the assistance of H. S. Harris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 180: For Spinoza, “there is only God, there is no world at all . . . the finite has no genuine actuality.” For Émile Meyerson (1859–1933), however, acosmism refers to the scientist’s need to restrict phenomena to what can be rationally explained. See Fondane’s review of Gaston Bachelard, “Le nouveaux esprit scientifique,” Cahiers du Sud 13 (1935): 867–70: “By dint of maneuvering reality in order to make it ‘suitable’ for thought, science has caused it to disappear little by little. ‘The phenomenon is dead,’ the German philosopher Heinemann already exclaimed. And Meyerson will tell us that the scientist’s ideal is acosmism: just a little more fitting of the world to thought and there will no longer be a world.”

11 Baudelaire, “Craving for Oblivion,” Les Fleurs du mal, 77–78; 255.

12 Ibid.

13 Baudelaire, “To the Reader,” Les Fleurs du mal, 5–6; 183–84. The “cunning chemist” is Satan.

14 Baudelaire, “Spleen” (IV), Les Fleurs du mal, 76–77; 253–54.

15 Baudelaire, “Obsession,” Les Fleurs du mal, 77; 254.

16 Baudelaire, “Destruction,” Les Fleurs du mal, 121; 299.

17 The Theologia Deutsch or Theologia Germanica is thought to have been written in the middle of the fourteenth century in Germany. The position of this anonymous treatise is that “self-will,” or disobedience to God’s will, is the source of sin.

18 Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670); Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998). Contrary to what Fondane implies, Spinoza says that the deaths of Adam and Eve that followed eating the fruit of knowledge were natural consequences of a kind of poisoning rather than an arbitrarily imposed divine punishment; see Spinoza, Letter 19, in Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters, ed. Seymour Feldman and trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992), 271–75; and Theological-Political Treatise, 54. Nevertheless, Fondane is right to place Spinoza in the line of philosophers and theologians who tried to make original sin into something that is rationally intelligible.

19 Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who was influenced by Hindu and Buddhist texts, preached the renunciation of the will, as the will ensnares humans in empirical existence in the material world and leads to suffering. Earlier in Baudelaire et l’expérience du gouffre (27), Fondane quotes Schopenhauer as saying that it is necessary to overcome the finite ego, or the suffering self (le triste moi, das leidige Selbst), for example, through the aesthetic and disinterested contemplation of beauty: “we are no longer an individual, which is forgotten, but only a pure subject of cognition. . . .Then rid of the suffering self, we become utterly one with those objects as pure subject of cognition”: see Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. I, 3.38; The World as Will and Presentation, trans. Richard E. Aquila in collaboration with David Carus (New York: Longman, 2008), 242–43. Schopenhauer regards sexual desire as a form of craving that leads to suffering.

20 In English in the original. See Lord Byron, Manfred, 1, 1: Sorrow is Knowledge: they who know the most Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.

21 Stéphane Lupasco (1900–1988), Du Devenir Logique et de l’Affectivité (Paris: Vrin, 1935), 2 volumes. Fondane took a lively interest in this other Romanian philosopher living in France. He published a review of Lupasco’s L’Expérience micro-physique et la pensée humaine (Paris: Alcan, 1935) in Cahiers du Sud 19, no. 259 (August–September 1943): 71–76; reprinted in Le Lundi existentiel, 168–84, and was working on a study of Lupasco’s philosophy just before he was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. The unfinished notes for this study have been published as L’Être et la connaissance: Essai sur Lupasco (Paris: Paris-Méditerranée, 1998). For Lupasco’s appreciative memoir of Fondane, see “Benjamin Fondane, le philosophe et l’ami,” Cahiers du Sud 34, no. 282 (1947): 183–87. Lupasco says that Fondane read Lupasco’s two “large and difficult books” in their entirety, “making notes on every page, filling the margins with countless objections and meditations” (185).

22 Fondane’s parenthetical note.

23 Fondane’s emphasis. Lupasco’s general theory of “becoming” posits that any actual state of affairs (physical, affective) is the result of a process of actualization of virtual tendencies that can develop in opposite directions, from greater heterogeneity to greater homogeneity or the reverse. Whatever state actually results from the dynamic of forces carries with it, as its ghostly double, its opposite state, that is, the state which would have resulted from a becoming that moved in the opposite direction from the one that took place. This opposite or contrary state is thus “virtually” present in the actually existing state.

24 Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, chapter 1, para. 4; Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 35: “I have taken great care not to deride, bewail, or execrate human actions, but to understand them.” Fondane and Shestov cite this passage frequently, out of context and misleadingly. Spinoza wants to understand actions as natural effects of natural causes, governed by laws of nature and so pertaining to human nature “in the same way as heat, cold, storm, thunder, and such pertain to the nature of the atmosphere.” He contrasts this with a moralistic approach that would condemn human emotions as “vices.” Fondane and Shestov, however, take Spinoza to mean that we should never bewail the human condition, and that intellectual understanding should be our sole means of inquiry.

25 Baudelaire, “To the Reader,” Les Fleurs du mal, 6; 184.

26 “Les paradis artificiels” (1860) is the title of an essay by Baudelaire containing his observations of the effects of hashish and opium on himself and his friends.

27 Acedia is a state of listlessness or torpor first recorded among monks who lived in isolation. It results in a withdrawal from the world and an inability to act.

28 Jankélévitch, L’Alternative, 209: “Who would seriously recommend frivolity to us?” Cited in Fondane, Le Lundi existentiel, 121. Fondane’s omission of “seriously” attenuates the irony of the original.

29 Fondane, “Nietzsche et les problèmes ‘répugnants,’” Le Rouge et le Noir 8 (November 24, 1937).

30 Nietzsche, Humain, trop humain, trans. Henri Albert (Paris: Mercure de France, 1894), 138 [Fondane’s note]. See Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 60–61. I have departed from Hollingdale’s translation slightly in order to stay closer to the version used by Fondane.

31 “First science” or “first philosophy” is a title sometimes given to metaphysics.

32 Lupasco, Du Devenir Logique et le l’Affectivité, vol. 2, 290–91.

33 “Destruction,” Les Fleurs du mal, 121; 299.

34 This thought comes from De Quincey, in whose Confessions it is twice repeated, and which Baudelaire “borrows” for his Petits poèmes en prose. In order to economize? From boredom? “Because man cannot help but appropriate that which seems to him to have been so exactly made for him that he regards it, despite himself, as having been made by him?” That may be! [Fondane’s note.] See Baudelaire, “Une heure du matin,” Petits poèmes en prose; Baudelaire, “One O’clock in the Morning,” in Selected Poems, trans. Carol Clark (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 199: “At last! The tyranny of the human face has disappeared and I will no longer suffer except from myself.”

35 As in Pascal, “diversion” has the double sense of “entertainment” and of being “diverted from” something. See Pascal, “Diversion,” in Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 66–72: “Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things. . . .The only good thing for men therefore is to be diverted from thinking of what they are, either by some occupation which keeps their mind off it, or by some novel and agreeable passion, like gambling, hunting, some absorbing spectacle. . . .What people want is not the easy, peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the burdens of office, but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us. That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture.”

36 Baudelaire, “The Irreparable,” Les Fleurs du mal, 59–61; 236–38.

37 See Baudelaire, “Heauton Timoroumenos,” Les Fleurs du mal, 79–80; 256: I am the knife and the wound it deals, I am the slap and the cheek, I am the wheel and the broken limbs, hangman and victim both!

38 Baudelaire, “The Irreparable,” Les Fleurs du mal, 59–61; 236–38.

39 Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), 274: “I promise a tragic age: the highest art in saying Yes to life, tragedy, will be reborn when humanity has weathered the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars without suffering from it.”

40 See Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 111: “It is the task of history. . . to inspire and lend the strength for the production of the great man. No, the goal of humanity cannot lie in its end, but only in its highest specimens” (slightly altered); compare Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 149. On sacrifice of the highest things, see Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), aphorism 55, 63: “Did one not finally have to sacrifice everything comforting, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in a concealed harmony, in a future bliss and justice? Did one not have to sacrifice God himself and out of cruelty against oneself worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness—this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate act of cruelty was reserved for the generation which is even now arising: we all know something of it already.” Fondane cites both of these passages in several of his essays.

41 Rimbaud, Lettre du voyant: “la vraie vie est absente”; “Letter of the Seer”; “real life is absent.”

42 Rimbaud, “Qu’est-ce pour nous, mon Coeur?,” in OEuvres complètes, ed. Rolland de Renéville and J. Mouquet (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 124.

43 Baudelaire, “To the Reader,” Les Fleurs du mal, 5–6 ; 183–84.

44 Fondane develops this point at length in the title essay of Le Lundi existentiel, especially on 25–32.

45 Understanding. Fondane is again referring to Spinoza’s dictum that we should not laugh, bemoan, or despise, but rather “understand” man.

46 Schopenhauer’s leidige Selbst.

47 Jonathan Swift, letter to Lord Bolingbroke: “It is time for me to have done with the world; and so I would if I could get into a better, before I was called into the best, and not to die here in a rage, like a rat poisoned in a hole!” Cited by Fondane, Baudelaire, 302.

48 This line from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov becomes a leitmotif in the existential thought of Camus and Sartre; see, respectively, Camus, “L’Homme révolté,” in Essais, ed. Rober Quilliot (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 465-71; Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme, ed. Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 39.

49 “Man is a wolf to man.” From Plautus, Asinaria, II.iv.88.

50 “Apocalypse” should be understood here in its original sense as “revelation” as well as in the sense of cataclysmic destruction.