Benjamin Fondane – True Meditations from a False Aesthetic Discourse

Abstract

For an author like B. Fundoianu, who thought and wrote on the edge of two centuries, aesthetics was about to change its canon. Morality and metaphysics were already into a stalemate position, and the aesthetician Fundoianu was trying a private deconstruction of the poetic language in his essay A False Treatise on Aesthetics (1938). With the preface of Images and Books from France (1923), the chronicler was emphasizing the fact that creation is subordinated to the grid of differentiation, and not to that of similarity, while attachment for tradition does not mean imitation, but innovation. “The aesthetic man” comes alive, we believe, in the text headed Peter’s Denial (1918), where Fundoianu advocates the case of pure art. The issue that always imposes itself to aesthetic reflection is the crisis of reality generated by the lyrical creator’s autarky in relation to the existential texture and, even more, to the contradictory dialogue between Reason and Faith. The current essay also attempts to offer an assessment of the final Fundoianu, the philosophical testament pertaining to the text entitled Existential Monday and the Sunday of History (1945), a work where history and morality form a strange binomial.