Existential Monday

Benjamin Fondane-who was born and educated in Romania, moved as an adult to Paris, lived for a time in Buenos Aires, where he was close to Victoria Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges's friend and publisher, and died in Auschwitz-was an artist and thinker who found in every limit, in every border, "a torture and a spur." Poet, critic, man of the theater, movie director, Fondane was the most daring of the existentialists, a metaphysical anarchist, affirming individual against those great abstractions that limit human freedom-the State, History, the Law, the Idea.

Existential Monday is the first selection of his philosophical work to appear in English. Here Fondane, until now little-known except to specialists, emerges as one of the great French philosophers of the twentieth century.