A false Treaty on Aesthetics

he questions that Benjamin Fondane ask himself about the avant-garde phenomenon are expressed under their most complex form in the ample essay, Faux traité d’esthétique, with a subtitle Essai sur la crise de la réalité, published by the prestigious Danoël et Steele publishing house and dedicated, mostly, to aspects regarding the surrealism.An event which marked a turning point in the in the intellectual biography of Benjamin Fondane: we’re referring to his meeting with Lev Şestov, the existentialist philosopher whose disciple he will remain for the rest of his life.What came out of the spiritual Şestov – Fondane meeting, in a literary and philosophical field, was the transformation of a poet into a philosopher who engaged in ample disputes with important names from the philosophy of the thirties, taking upon himself a difficult task, that of arguing against certain points of ample philosophical systems, built by Husserl, Heidegger or Freud.In the contact’s conjuncture with the way of thinking of the Russian philosopher, Fondane conceived the application of these concepts in the case of poetry as well, creating an “existential poetics”, a sort of anti – aesthetics in the tradition of the şestovian anti – philosophy.Fondane’s philosopher statute requires a special kind of discussion, given the fact that, although his aesthetics is, in the French period of his creation, dominated by philosophy, he does not create a philosophical system, the essence of his thought being of a poetical nature, “naturally lyrical