Fallen to the Rank of Adjective: On Benjamin Fondane
“We are in a world in which each one of us comes along with his fixed idea, irreducible to that of his neighbour.” The problem, for Fondane, is universalism. “We don’t want a unanimity of agreement, but a defensive unanimity.” At the gut of Fondane’s argument — whether we want to pin him as a writer, thinker, philosopher or poet — is the claustrophobia innate to our verbal categories when it comes to the industrialisation of original thought.
Dominic Jaeckle reviews Existential Monday and “Cinepoems” & Others by Benjamin Fondane.