Existential Mondays and the Humour of the Absurd, an essay by Daniel Barbiero

In February 1944, Benjamin Fondane, the Jewish-Romanian poet and philosopher who’d become a naturalized French citizen in 1938, wrote “Le Lundi existentiel et la Dimanche de l’Histoire.” The essay, eventually appearing in English as “Existential Monday and the Sunday of History,” was for a symposium on existentialism that would be published by Gallimard in 1945 in the volume L’Existence, under the editorship of Jean Grenier. Fondane was residing in Paris, which was under German occupation; with the publication of Albert Camus’ Mythe de Sisyphe in 1942 and Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Être et le néant the following year, existentialism was in the air. It was a strange time indeed.

In “Existential Monday” Fondane largely addressed himself to two questions: what is true existentialism, and what is the meaning of the Absurd? Both questions were directed toward the intellectual currents of the time. The first was prompted by the ascendancy of “existentialist” philosophies whose roots could be traced to Husserl’s phenomenology as well as to Kierkegaard’s earlier, proto-existentialism, and which more recently had been shaped by the influential hybrid of Heidegger and Hegel presented by Alexandre Kojève in his seminars of 1933-1939. (I put “existentialist” in quotation marks here because it was, at the time, a kind of catch-all term for a number of contemporary philosophers and other writers, some of whom did not themselves accept that label for describing their own work.) The second question was posed in response to the theme of the Absurd, which Camus’ essay had made fashionable.

In addressing these questions, Fondane characteristically does not set out a systematic argument. Indeed, to have done so would seemingly have been to perform a rejection of his own position. We might say that instead of providing a properly philosophical argument he provided a form of witness – an expression of affective commitment to a given position. Nevertheless, certain arguments do emerge from his criticism of his contemporaries’ philosophizing.

 

“Existentialism” vs “Philosophy of Existence”

Fondane’s primary concern in “Existential Monday” is to separate his own existentialism, which he calls by that name, from what he calls the “philosophy of existence” – “to distinguish what is and what is not existential philosophy” (p. 28). He claims that this latter, which he associates with Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, and Camus, is a later development that was built up over the foundation of the original, more authentic existential philosophy expressed in the work not only of Kierkegaard, but of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Fondane’s own philosophical mentor, Lev Shestov. These later philosophies, Fondane claims, stand at a remove from actual existence itself; following Berdyaev, Fondane claims they are “philosophies of existence, about existence” (p. 6). For Fondane, they represent a kind of Procrustean bed of rationalism that the irrational reality of the concrete individual, or existent, must be cut to fit. But such fitting can only be a mis-fitting in which what is true to the existent – the concrete reality of his or her existence in a world that refuses to be reduced to a logical order – necessarily is lost in favor of an abstraction. Hence Fondane is moved to ask

whether the existential philosophy of our time at least prolongs the guiding thought of its initiators, or whether it has merely retained the name “existential” for a form of thought that – no matter what name one gives it – in essence intends to submit its teachings to universal reason. (p. 6)

Fondane traces this philosophical error back to the concept of intuition put forward by Husserl, whose 1929 lectures at the Sorbonne Fondane attended. For Husserl, intuition consists in an intellectual act that yields knowledge of an Ideal object. To intuit, in other words, is to know the thing in its essence, as an essence – as an abstract entity transcending its sensual presentations. By contrast for Fondane, intuition consists instead in a more immediate, affective confrontation of the existent with his or her own existence. We might say that for Fondane, intuition constitutes the existential truth of the existent as a concrete individual. What is true of the concrete individual is something that can’t be captured within the idealizing confines of a concept – something of existence must necessarily escape it. What that something is, Fondane suggests, is the anxiety of being that comes to one as one confronts a world in which, to quote the title of one of Shestov’s books, “all things are possible.” “All things” encompasses not only what reason tells us is possible but much else that it would prohibit. When all things are possible, the irrational, the unforeseen, the downright perverse – none of this will consent to being reduced to what reason can make of it. What reason does make of it, Fondane claims, is a misleadingly lulling picture – the “Sunday” of his essay’s title, which is his metaphor for what he calls “the peace” promulgated by philosophers like Kant, Spinoza, and Parmenides. It is, Fondane claims, the peace that follows from an illusion, a falsely reassuring picture of a predictable world ruled by reason. Fondane contrasts this picture of a metaphysically domesticated world with the world picture of a more authentic existentialism, which comes across in the kind of “incessant uneasiness” depicted in the writings of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, as well as Shestov and Kafka (p. 7). Uneasiness is the basic and primordial intuition of an anxiety “that reveals to us the nothingness that universal reason conceals from us” (p. 12). This concealment is an unearned bit of seduction; as Frank Bowman put it in an early article on Fondane, that kind of “comfortable optimism will no longer do” (Bowman, p. 111). Fondane summarizes his position thus: “If anxiety does precede logic, then the existent precedes Existence and the singular precedes the general” (p. 10). (There does seem to be an irony in Fondane’s using a syllogism with which to refute reason. But perhaps there is no other way. And one cannot fault an exception in a philosopher for whom the exception is the rule.)

A caveat: although he rejects what he claims is the universalizing Idealism and logical reductionism inherent in reason, Fondane does not reject knowledge altogether. Rather, he asserts that the more authentic existential philosophy he advocates begins at the “moment when Knowledge no longer answers our questions” (p. 29); it “does not amount to the abandonment of knowledge...but rather is the search at long last for a genuine knowledge which will not turn its back on anything” (p. 24). In what does that genuine knowledge consist? His answer can be found in the rhetorical question he offers up: “Could the role of the philosopher be to maintain unrest in the existent?” (p. 29).

 

The Absurd

One of the things – perhaps the most important thing -- Fondane’s genuine existential knowledge would not turn its back on is what Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” popularized as the problem of the Absurd. Fondane in effect neatly captures the essence of the Absurd when he cites those times when “nature refuses to bend to the demands of our universal reason” (p. 22). At exceptional times like those the real, the world as it unfolds according to its own logic, overflows the capacity we have to understand and describe it; it evades intelligibility. The Absurd is accordingly a phenomenon that is beyond reason and resists reduction to the concepts that would capture it – both in the sense of “containing” and “entrapping” it – in the ultimately invalid terms of generalization; in resisting generalization it validates the “claims, demands, and complaints” of the concrete individual (p. 15). It is, in other words, the experience of an individual event by an individual existent, both of which are irreducible in their individuality. For Fondane, the concrete nature of the experience of the Absurd is inextricably linked to the immediacy of its affective force, which he locates in the existent’s sense of anxiety in the face of nothingness. To apply reason to the anxiety-laden intuition of the Absurd would simply reduce it to “empty chatter,” which is what Fondane accuses rational philosophies of attempting to do (p. 15). How then to respond to it? For Fondane, the authentic response consists in the immediate “search for a way out, the discovery of our impotence, and...the relation of our impotence to something which can.” (p. 16).

It is for this reason that Fondane rejects Camus’ response to the Absurd in his parable of Sisyphus, when he asks us to imagine Sisyphus happy at his futile task of rolling a rock uphill. Fondane cannot imagine this, and I must admit that I’ve never been able to imagine it either. Fondane sees Camus’ idea of Sisyphus happy as a dodge, as a way of denying the reality of the Absurd. Camus, for Fondane, is exemplary of the tendency of the “philosophers of existence” to substitute the idyll of a peaceful Sunday for the visceral anxiety of an existential Monday. In effect,

[t]hat Sisyphus imagine himself happy is all that Platonic, Stoic, or Hegelian thought could ask for; that he consent to ‘imagine himself’ happy is all that noûs, Spirit, or universal reason – or whatever – asks of him. Sisyphus thereby...renounces the absurd. (p. 15)

By contrast, a Sisyphus who refuses the inauthentic escape of imagining himself to be happy would, presumably, maintain himself in “incessant uneasiness” and hence keep faith with the Absurd and the unsettling truth it conveys about the world: that the world is one in which, if all things are possible, the logically impossible is in fact actually possible. It is beyond our capacity to understand and control it.

At this point we must acknowledge the theological dimension to Fondane’s thinking. It is a dimension that isn’t overly emphasized in “Existential Monday” but is there, like an operating system running in the background. The exceptional circumstance in which the Absurd makes itself known is, for Fondane, evidence of a God who can bring about what would otherwise be impossible – a God who can break the bonds of natural necessity. That Fondane envisioned natural necessity in terms of a rational order is in effect an accident of history. For as Ricardo Nirenberg has pointed out, Fondane’s conception of the world was formed by 19th century ideas of determinism and in addition in physics and mathematics hadn’t taken into account non-Euclidean geometries; only an omnipotent God could make possible what determinism forbade. Hence with enough faith in God’s omnipotence we could leap through the intuition of the Absurd to a “realm of unfettered freedom” (Nirenberg). Here, then, is Fondane’s way out.

 

The Absurd, the Marvelous, and Homo Interpretans

If Sisyphus’ imagined happiness isn’t the way out of the Absurd, and we find ourselves unable to put our faith in Fondane’s theological way out, then what is? Elsewhere, I’ve argued that the kind of state of affairs we might be disposed to interpret as Absurd could instead be seen as an opening to what André Breton and his fellow Surrealists welcomed as the marvelous, in the guise of what they called “objective chance,” or the significant coincidence. Briefly, if we think of the Absurd as consisting in the misfit between human expectations, ideas, designs, and concerns on the one hand, and the resistance of the real on the other, then we can understand it as the inevitable confrontation between what we might think of as the natural necessity that arises in a world that is at bottom an atopia – a place that is atopos, or strange, and in which we are to some degree strangers – and human necessity, or the needs that define us and through which we project ourselves into this atopia that often refuses to cooperate with us. The Absurd thus arises in the gap between the human need to impose an intelligible order on the world, and the world itself. When we confront this gap we experience it as an “eruption of contradiction within the real.” The words are Louis Aragon’s, in describing the experience of the marvelous in Paris Peasant; he could just as well be describing the Absurd manifesting itself in front of us. How can such a frustrating, potentially anxiety-producing experience equate to something marvelous? If we take it as a hermeneutic provocation, as a goad to confront it as something carrying a significance for us – if only we can find the interpretive key to unlock that significance. This interpretive moment differs from Sisyphus’ imagined happiness in that the significance we find may not be reassuring or provide us with an escape from our unsettledness. It may in fact pull us in deeper, if the solution it promises to whatever problem we are confronting is a difficult one, or one that requires facing an unpleasant truth. This isn’t a matter of a pre-existing, occult truth being discovered in disruptive circumstances, but rather the application of an interpretive process in order to derive a meaning whose relevance is specific only to the unique individual – the existent that we are and that has been provoked into taking a hermeneutic stance relative to the unexpected and (perhaps) unwelcome event disrupting us as we make our (formerly) complacent way through the world.

Interpreting the Absurd in terms of objective chance, or the marvelous more generally, would appear to be akin to adopting an attitude of wonder in the face of the Absurd, which Fondane rejected. Fondane rejected it because he saw wonder as a secondary, after-the-fact response to the Absurd rather than an immediate reaction and thus less authentic. This, presumably, would make it the product of reflection, and hence of reason – an evasion of the Absurd fit for a Sunday and not for an existential Monday. I don’t quite see how this criticism holds up, though. Wonder – astonishment, awe, amazed incomprehension, or what-have-you – may very well constitute the initial and immediate response to a given state of affairs, particularly one in which the usual order of things appears to have been upended or in which something that absolutely cannot go wrong somehow does – when even the impossible becomes possible. And wonder, as well as its closely allied psychological responses – including the sense of the marvelous -- carries an affective force that can be no less powerful or authentic than that of anxiety. Or perhaps even more powerful. It may shade over into the terror and exaltation of the sublime, which carries within it the suggestion of an ultimate nothingness. Whatever the nuances involved, the main point is that to be struck by an anomalous or uncanny situation as something that is marvelous is to respond to it in a manner that is no less immediate and emotionally forceful than it is to respond to it with anxiety.

But even if we do respond to the Absurd with a sense of wonder, does that mean that the response represents, as Fondane asserts, “no longer a question” but rather an answer in itself, and hence is somehow inauthentic? (p. 16). I don’t believe so. To see the eruption of the Absurd into one’s life as an opening to an experience of the marvelous is to raise the question of the meaning of the event that presents itself as Absurd. That meaning, which the attitude of wonder raises in its questioning, concerns the possible significance of the unforeseen contradiction or of the surprising coincidence of natural necessity and human necessity. Affect, in other words, leads to the question of interpretation. I don’t think that anxiety exempts itself from this structured response. It too raises a question about the meaning of the event that gave rise to it. In either case, the situation solicits an immediate affective reaction that raises a question which in turn opens up to a moment of interpretation. From affect, to questioning, to interpretation: this is simply how human being, as homo interpretans – “one who interprets” -- negotiates a way through the world, whether that world presents itself as orderly or as Absurd. The drive to interpret just is a part of the ontological makeup of the being that is human being. To be sure, interpretive activity appears to be present to some extent in other sentient beings as well. But it pervades our lives and manifests itself with a sophistication and precision thanks largely to our capacity for language. It is something quasi-instinctive in us. Thus we even if we attempt to maintain ourselves in a state of incessant uneasiness, the question of the meaning of that uneasiness cannot be held off forever.

In sum, the sense of wonder, the experience of a marvelous contradiction within the real – these, no less than anxiety, are initial, intuitive openings within experience that lead naturally to subsequent interpretation. In the end, it seems to me that to rule out the one response to the Absurd (wonder, or the intuition of the marvelous) and not the other (anxiety) may simply represent a precommitment to a sense of what counts as authentic, made on the basis of temperament. In this regard Fondane’s essentially tragic outlook might explain much.

 

From the Absurd to Humour

I realize, though, that seeing the Absurd as a manifestation of the marvelous, whether in the guise of objective chance or otherwise, does not always show us the way out of the Absurd. At times the seemingly perverse resistance of the real really is perverse, and not at all marvelous or a sign indicating the solution to a personal dilemma. Here Fondane’s intuition that anxiety represents the most authentic response to the Absurd makes much sense. But I want to suggest an alternative that is in its own way allied to anxiety, or better yet, is one of the ways in which existential anxiety may manifest itself. That alternative can be found in Breton’s notion of humour.

Prior to naming it “humour noir” (“black humor”)  in 1940’s Anthologie de l’humour noir (“anthology of black humor”), Breton dubbed his notion of humor “humour objectif” (“objective humor”). I will simply call it “humour.” Humour in its fully developed form represents Breton’s borrowing from two sources, Hegel and Freud. To be sure, the prehistory of Breton’s humour can be traced to his wartime friend Jacques Vaché’s “umour,” which Vaché described as the “theatrical (and joyless) pointlessness of everything.” But Breton’s mature concept of humour goes far beyond Vaché’s late adolescent nihilism.

From Hegel, Breton appropriated the idea that if the outside world was deemed unable to provide the material forms needed to express subjective states adequately, then certain external events or situations nevertheless could bring home to the observing subject “the object and its real form.” (The quoted phrase is from Hegel’s Aesthetics.) The subjective realization of the real form of the object is humor, in its objective form. More pointedly and more directly recognizable as what we ordinarily would think of as humor, from Freud Breton incorporated ideas put forward in the 1928 paper “Humour,” specifically the claim that

the essence of humour is that one spares oneself the affects to which the situation would naturally give rise...humour has in it a liberating element...[it signals] the ego’s victorious assertion of its own invulnerability. It refuses to be hurt by the arrows of reality or to be compelled to suffer. It insists that it is impervious to wounds dealt by the outside world, in fact, that these are merely occasions for affording it pleasure. (Freud, p. 2)

We can see the influence of Freud’s claim in Breton’s own definition of humour as the “paradoxical triumph of the pleasure principle over real conditions at the moment when they are considered the most unfavorable” (Breton, p. 11). The Hegelian influence is embedded in Breton’s notion that humour resolves the dialectical contradiction between subject and object by allowing the former to externalize, or objectify, itself by projecting itself onto the contingent circumstances of the outside world and by doing so, reciprocally to subjectivize them by revealing them in the light of the pleasure principle.

What we have in Breton’s humour is a way of confronting circumstances at their most unfavorable – at their most Absurd – and engaging them in a way that, in essence, gives us the last laugh, at their expense. If there is a distinction between recognizing the Absurd and surrendering to it, humour is one way of keeping us from passing from the former to the latter. Humour doesn’t deny the reality or the seriousness of the Absurd or try to soften it, but rather puts it in its place at the same time that it denies us the false prospect of an easy escape. I can’t help but think here of Kierkegaard’s statement in Either/Or that “the comic consists in subjectivity’s wanting to assert itself as pure form” (Kierkegaard, p. 142). This it seems to me is precisely what humour attempts: to assert the individual’s sensibility over against the natural necessity of the determinants that impinge on him or her without regard for that individual’s needs or desires. To recognize the Absurd in the comic spirit of humour is to transcend the ego’s vulnerability through the assertion of our claim to pure subjectivity. In effect, humour is an attitudinal projection of the ego into its world and hence is an experientially singular event that, in its spontaneous response to a contingent set of circumstances, evades universalization or reduction to the reflective effects of reason. As such, humour is an existential attitude to the extent that it manifests an engagement with what concerns us even as it thumbs its nose at the circumstances that frustrate or otherwise defenestrate that concern. In the end humour's attempt to assert our subjectivity in the face of adversity may fail, and the ego’s claim to invulnerability may turn out to be nothing more than a joke – literally – but it is a joke that nevertheless frees us to face the Absurd and to make our way through a world in which all things, including the least desirable, are possible.

Going somewhat beyond Breton, I want to suggest that humour is a kind of knowledge – not a knowledge based on, say, the correct inference of a universally valid conclusion from given empirical circumstances, but rather an interpretive, existential knowledge that reveals to us how things are for us, how they are of concern to us as concrete individuals. In that regard humour is comparable to anxiety or for that matter to any other affect, in that it engages us in the world in a way that imparts knowledge of that world in a non-rational, immediate way. The general point is that through affect we are attuned to the world, and that attunement conveys an understanding through which we orient ourselves. Given Fondane’s rejection of philosophies that would claim to make the world intelligible, the irony here is that, as a type of knowledge – even one that is arational – anxiety is one way of imposing intelligibility on the world. For we make the world intelligible not only through reason or our developed ideas about it, but through the moods, passions, and other affects which provide us our primary sense of how things are. Imposing intelligibility on the world of whatever kind, rational or otherwise, is an interpretive act and hence an inevitable part of being human, for in the end, human being is homo interpretans. Simply to exist as a human being is to interpret.

It may seem strange to read Fondane’s existential engagement with the Absurd through an idea taken from Breton. (And not only from Breton, but from Breton’s appropriation of an idea he claimed to find in Hegel, whom Fondane presents as a major philosophical antagonist throughout “Existential Monday.”) Although Fondane had been attracted to Surrealism he was antipathetic to Breton and even claimed to have come to blows with him when Breton and a group of Surrealists staged a hostile visit to the Bar Maldoror in February 1930. And yet perhaps the relevance of Breton’s humour to Fondane’s existentialism is just more evidence of the Absurd, in which anything’s possible, at work again.

 

Sisyphus Laughs

Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus” gives us Sisyphus in the underworld, but it doesn’t give us the backstory of how he got there. In myth, Sisyphus was a serial trickster who cheated death through subterfuge not once, but twice. It was in punishment for this that he was made to roll the rock uphill. While we may not be able to imagine Sisyphus happy, it’s possible to imagine him seeing the ironic humor in his situation: the consummate trickster himself being tricked, the man who boasted of his quick wit being outwitted. We can imagine him appreciating the humour of it all, and taking a perverse pleasure in laughing at it. But contra Camus, it wouldn’t be a happy laugh.

Interestingly, Breton’s own attitude toward Camus’ Sisyphus and the Absurd is on record. Asked by interviewer Jean Duché in 1946 about Camus’ “pessimism of the absurd,” Breton replied:

The Rock of Sisyphus? The Surrealists differ from Camus in that they believe that one day or another it’s going to crumble, abolishing as if by magic both mountain and torture: they tend to think that there might be a propitious way of rolling it...They don’t consider the “fracture” observed by Camus between the world and the human mind to be irrevocable. They in no way accept that nature is hostile to man, but suppose that man, who originally possessed certain keys that kept him in strict communion with nature, has lost these keys, and that since then he persists more and more feverishly in trying out others that don’t fit. (Autobiography, pp. 205-206)

Breton’s “keys that don’t fit” are the keys of scientific determinism, of the view of a world run according to the rules of reason. In this regard, he is close to Fondane. The proper keys for Breton were to be found in a particular relationship to nature. As he told Duché,

Scientific knowledge of nature can be worthwhile only on condition that contact with nature via poetic and, dare I say, mythic routes be reestablished. (Autobiography, p. 206)

 Here humour goes unmentioned.

Breton’s response to Duché reflects the reorientation that the former’s thought underwent during the 1940s, as he found his bearings increasingly in myth and the hermetic tradition. We can see evidence of this turn in 1944’s Arcane 17, his late major work on the power of nature as interpreted through the myth of Melusine and the iconography of the Star card of the tarot deck. At this point in his thinking humour may not have suggested itself to him as a possible response to the Absurd. But that doesn’t prevent us from continuing to see in it a viable way of dealing with the absurdity of things going against us.

There remains the possibility that in extremis we may find ourselves running up against the limit of the pleasure principle’s capacity to assert itself in the face of adversity. To be sure, humour can be dark, often has a cruel edge, and frequently is unfunny because the situation that provokes it can be dark, cruel, and unfunny. Is there a point at which the darkness, cruelty, and unfunniness of the situation dissolve the pleasure principle in their acid bath? Or can we resist them, whether through conscious choice, unconscious temperament, or some combination of the two? It’s a question we can only answer when and if the time comes.

As for Fondane, he never saw the publication of “Existential Monday.” A month after he drafted the article he, along with his sister, was arrested by the collaborationist French authorities and eventually deported to Auschwitz, where he was gassed in October. His wife Geneviève, a Catholic, successfully argued that he should be freed because he was married to a Gentile, but he refused to leave his sister. Because of that choice, he went to a fate he could have avoided. It is an absurd irony that this anti-rationalist was killed by an irrational ideology that used rational methods to destroy its victims. Did he go to his death with an unshaken faith in the existential omnipotence of a God for whom all things are possible? Only he knew. What we know is that for him, in the end Sisyphus’ rock did not crumble.

 

References:

Frank Bowman, “Irredentist Existentialism: Fondane and Shestov,” Yale French Studies No. 16, Foray Through Existentialism, 1955. Accessed at https://www.jstor.org/stable/2929156. Internal cite to Bowman.

André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, translated by Mark Polizzotti (New York: Paragon House, 1993). Internal cite to Autobiography.

André Breton, “Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism” in Free Rein, tr. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline D’Amboise (Lincoln: U NE Press, 1995). Internal cite to Breton.

Benjamin Fondane, “Existential Monday and the Sunday of History,” in Existential Monday: Philosophical Essays, edited and translated by Bruce Baugh (New York: New York Review of Books, 2016). Internal cites consisting of page numbers only are references to this source.

Sigmund Freud, “Humour,” in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. IX Pt. 1, January 1928. Accessed at Archive.org. Internal cite to Freud.

Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or Part I, translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Internal cite to Kierkegaard.

Ricardo Nirenberg, “Everything Is Possible: The Philosophy of Lev Shestov and Benjamin Fondane” in OffCourse issue 36, January 2009. Internal cite to Nirenberg.