Collection(s) : European connections
Paru le 18/08/2006 | Broché 294 pages
Public motivé
An influential forerunner of French Existentialism, the Russian-born thinker Lev Shestov (1866-1938) elaborated a radical critique of rationalist knowledge and ethics from the point of view of individual human existence. Best known for his ground-breaking comparative studies of Tolstoy and Nietzsche, and of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, Shestov defined his conception as the «philosophy of tragedy». Shestov's philosophical hermeneutics of the literary work of art was later developed and disseminated through the writings of his disciple, the Romanian-born Benjamin Fondane (1898-1944), who was also a poet, filmmaker and playwright. The two authors provided one of the earliest and most consistent critical accounts of Husserlian phenomenology in France. «The philosophy of tragedy» and its associated notions of «revolt» and existential truth had a lasting impact on a number of prominent writers and philosophers including Georges Bataille, André Gide, André Malraux, Albert Camus and Emmanuel Lévinas.
Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow, Ramona Fotiade is the Director of the Lev Shestov Studies Society and the editor of the Shestov Journal, which brought out the previously unpublished correspondence between Martin Buber and Shestov (issue nr. 4-5/ 2005). Her book, Conceptions of the Absurd (From Surrealism to the Existential Thought of Shestov and Fondane), was published in 2001.
