Introduction: To the Symposium By the Special Editor

Abstract

This issue commemorates the 50th anniversary of the death of the French Jewish poet and philosopher Benjamin Fondane, born in Romania at the turn of the century. Well known in Romanian literary and journalistic circles in the 1920's, he emigrated to France in 1923, and became a vital figure in literary criticism and existential philosophy in the inter-war period, the sole disciple of the Russian emigre philosopher Lev Shestov. Fondane was above all a poet, for whom the theater and cinema were also essential dimensions. Although fascinated both by the memories of the shted and the myths of Greece, he moved away from the pure aesthetics of Athens and its holiness of beauty, towards, if not the beauty of holiness, then beyond Good and Evil, away from Reason and its laws and towards Law, away from Justice towards the just, towards the visceral and premonitory cry of Job and the prophets. But this path had a gap, a gulf, an abyss, a void, something missing and indefinable, as we can see in the very titles of his books: the film scenarii for his Cin'podmes were "unmakeable," his plays "unstageable," Ulysses (Ulysse) was forever the wandering Jew, Rimbaud was a "hoodlum" (Rimbaud le voyou), the Titanic did not stay afloat, his aesthetic treatise was "false" (Faux trait6 d'esthetique), his consciousness "unhappy" (La Conscience malheureuse), Baudelaire experienced the "abyss" (Baudelaire et 1'exp&ience du gouffre). The title he wanted given to his poetic work spoke of this trouble or hurt: he called it the pain, unease or sickness of phantoms, ancestors of memories: Le Mal des fant6mes.