Coming to know something about history, intellectual or otherwise, would seem to be a matter of uncovering and mastering facts and setting them into structures or narratives in which they become comprehensible. But it is also a set of decisions to wave things away, to dismiss or ignore them. --Sartwell
I was just going through the Times Literary Supplement, and was dumbfounded by one thing - the incredible price of books. I'm pulled Crispin's tail recently about the cost of his new book Entanglements which will clock in at about $95.00 according to Amazon. But, that price will probably come down as they generally do, at least a bit, and will be re-published in paper and who knows may even have a Kindle version as well. But, $95 for a book seems to bring out the frugality usually sublimated by the curiosity in my slightly-Scots / mainly Irish soul. I'm having to think again when I think about pre-ordering.
Text books have always been overpriced, as anyone with an Associate's Degree can attest. It would be nice if they had some other value, but except for classics and primary sources, who needs a copy of the 3rd edition of Dewey, Cheatem and Howe's Textbook on Ethics in the Auto Industry when the current edition, number 22, is available?
Anyway, TLS had other interesting reviews but I finally got around to reading Crispin's review of Benjamin Fondane's Existential Monday from October 2016. I've had a copy of Fondane sitting on my to be consumed soon table for a while, prior to Crispin's article. In my defense there's a lot of stuff on the table, and often I just pick up my Kindle Fire and read some Lovecraft mythos or Gothic Noir mystery because I've just watched some political thing and I have a desperate need for context, narrative and declarative sentences. Phillip Marlowe battling Cthulhu in 1950s LA is an marvelous cure for what ails you ("Ailes"you?) after listening to the Orange Orangutan and Kelley Anne What the Fuck for an hour or so...
I've had a subscription to TLS for a while, and meant to read the review so I stumbled on it today and decided that no time like the present. Since the TLS is parsimonious to its non-subscribers as to what they'll let you see, I've attached the file here Download Sartwell TLS Review Existential Monday. Crispin was in excellent form when he wrote it; it's encouraging me to say "Screw email and newspapers, I want to read Fondane's now." It may be Thursday, but it's really Sunday and Monday will never get here if I don't drive on.
Fondane was part of the Existentialist milieu in Paris in the 30s and 40s. Crispin makes a marvelous point in the first paragraph that woke me up; not so much about the book but about history and its various victims and losers. Unlike Sarte, de Beauvoir and the others, Fondane was not a Phenomonologist but more the pure Existentialist. That colored his work and oddly, seems to me to have driven him more toward the experience itself as opposed to worry so much about the thing itself. Crispin's insight was about our understanding of history in general and of philosophy as well, I suspect.
None of us is capable of taking in anything but a tiny fraction of what has happened, or of the people who made it happen or to whom it happened. We need a few figures, a few events, a few ideas, so we can tell the story and move on to something else. We end up leaving out almost everything and everyone.
Fondane was opposed intellectually as well as in real life to autocracies and totalitarianism. He saw Hegel and his followers as totalitarians, echoing Kierkegaard's criticism; he also saw the latent Marxism in Sartre's work and that of his followers as being an authoritarian stain on their work and influence. If you consider Sartre's tendency to cast off those who disagreed with him off into darkness, you can see that he was prescient.
Fondane is one of those left out that Crispin describes. One of Crispin's talents is finding the obscure and unjustly overlooked, and his own anti-totalitarian tendencies make it possible for him to see the value in Fondane's insights as an Existentialist while his own work is more rooted these days in 19th and 20th Century American thought. He is also scholar enough to take issue with the translation and wonder if the pieces chosen were the best. The review makes you want to read the book, but critically and that's a review at it's best.
One other thought. Amazon has the book and in one of the ironies I look to occasionally, the paperback is actually less than the Kindle so if you're an Amazon Prime member, it's about $10, and probably a bit of steal, all things considered. Thanks, Crispy!
