SOURCE: Stanton, R. M. “When Logic Turns Lethal.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4044 (3 October 1980): 1109.

In the following review of La conscience malheureuse, Faux traité d'esthétique, and Rimbaud le voyou, Stanton notes that Fondane's philosophy and criticism were highly original, and anticipated later French intellectual debates.

Benjamin Fondane's work contains the aspirations and defeats of a lost generation of refugees. His life took the same course as those of so many hundreds of thousands of others—flight from his native land, Romania; an uncertain interim existence in Paris, expecting the worst; and finally, arrest by the Gestapo, deportation and death in the gas-chambers of Birkenau-Auschwitz in October 1944. The anonymity, though, the banality of the suffering, freed him from old ties to polite formalities, academic manners and artistic “savoir faire”. Once exiled, no holds were barred. Beautiful illusions, neatly constructed thought-systems, were swiftly axed. Awkward emotions—anger, despair and frustration...