Existential Monday by Benjamin Fondane

Author:Benjamin Fondane
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-899-7
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

MAN BEFORE HISTORY

Or, The Sound and the Fury

“Man Before History,” the closing contribution to a symposium about the European political crisis, published in the spring of 1939, stands as Fondane’s most sustained effort to bring his existential philosophy to bear on politics.[1] In September 1938, Britain and France had acceded to the German annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia; by March 1939, Germany had occupied the western part of Czechoslovakia and installed a puppet regime in Slovakia. Germany had previously reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936 and annexed Austria in 1938, and in 1939, it was assisting with Francisco Franco’s attempt to bring down the Spanish Republic. All the contributors to the symposium— ranging across the intellectual spectrum from conservative Catholics to surrealists and Marxists—address the mounting threat of war posed by Fascism in general and Nazism in particular. They were broadly divided, however, between those like Jacques Bénet, the author of the first essay,[2] who argue that the proper response to the danger of Fascism is a return to Christian self-sacrifice and charity, and those (notably Marxists) who see Nazism as an irrationalism that must be combated with reason. Fondane rejects both positions. Hitler is the arrogance of reason personified, but freed of hypocrisy; like liberal humanists, Hitler wants to realize the Idea on earth—at any price. Christian self-sacrifice likewise asks individuals to sacrifice themselves for an ideal. Instead of self-sacrifice, Fondane argues for an approach based on the model of the defeated and crucified Christ: a model of human powerlessness and the need for faith in a God for whom “all things are possible.”

Fondane invested himself very heavily in the composition of this article. It was his first important article since the death of his mentor, Lev Shestov, in 1938; Fondane was now flying on his own. In his correspondence with Jean Ballard, Fondane writes: “I have never had so much difficulty producing something. . . .There is enough material here for a big book. Everything I attempted suffered from delirious overexpansion; I had to tear it up and start over. This has been going on for weeks; I thought that I was going to have to fold my hand.” In a subsequent letter, he urges Ballard to publish the collection of articles as soon as possible in view of their relevance to the worsening political situation: “No, events have not weakened it; on the contrary, it is all too relevant. I am convinced that it will have quite an impact.”[3] This article expresses the urgency Fondane felt with respect both to the political situation and to his own philosophical development.

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