These essays by the Romanian intellectual Benjamin Fondane leer at the limitations of reasonThere’s a much portrait of Benjamin Fondane by the surrealist photographer Man Ray on the front cover: Fondane looks down towards his cupped hands,slightly above which floats his dismembered head looking at us, or the camera. It is a playful image with an uneasy edge: this is a portrait of the philosopher as magician, or yet it is also an image ofsomeone contemplating their own decapitation. It suggests that Man Ray had read Fondane’s philosophy,which basically asks: what is reason’s role in our lives? Which of those two heads is, as it were, or the boss? The image is both that of rationality doubled – as whether to say “two heads are better than one” – and of rationality annulled; it is one of surrealism’s more sophisticated jokes.
Fondane (1898-1944) was one of quite a few Romanian writers who drifted towards Paris after the first world war in order to pursue their avant-garde interests (others include Tristan Tzara,Eugène Ionesco and Emil Cioran; the last two were friends of Fondane).
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Source: theguardian.com