Benjamin Fondane's 'La Conscience malheureuse' Reissued by Verdier

Verdier has reissued Benjamin Fondane's 'La Conscience malheureuse', a collection of studies on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Freud, and Léon Chestov. Fondane, a Romanian-born Jewish poet who arrived in Paris in the early 1920s, was associated with the Surrealists and wrote the provocative essay 'Rimbaud le voyou'. He and his sister were arrested by the Gestapo and killed in a concentration camp shortly before the Allied victory. The reissue has prompted renewed interest in Fondane's work, including his poetry collection 'Le Mal des fantômes', 'Écrits pour le cinéma', his essay on Rimbaud, and Monique Jutrin's 1989 biography 'Benjamin Fondane ou le périple d'Ulysse'. Fondane's writings challenge Western civilization's foundations—philosophy, metaphysics, aesthetics, logic, reason, and morality—by opposing Hegel's knowledge with Job's ignorance, Kant's freedom with Abraham's slavery, and Aristotle's science with St. John of the Cross's non-knowledge. He critiques the Surrealists for their idealism and inability to live the revolt they praised. His poem 'Ulysse' protests against solitude and the 'white fatherlands'. Fondane, a Jewish Ulysses, found his port not in Ithaca but in Auschwitz-Birkenau.