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Benjamin Fondane�who was born and educated in Romania, moved as an adult to Paris, lived for a time in Buenos Aires, where he was close to Victoria Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges�s friend and publisher, and died in Auschwitz�was an artist and thinker who found in every limit, in every border, �a torture and a spur.� Poet, critic, man of the theater, movie director, Fondane was the most daring of the existentialists, a metaphysical anarchist, affirming individual against those great abstractions that limit human freedom�the State, History, the Law, the Idea. Existential Monday, the first selection of his philosophical work to appear in English, includes four of Fondane's most thought-provoking and important texts, "Existential Monday and the Sunday of History," "Preface for the Present Moment," "Man Before History" (co-translated by Andrew Rubens), and "Boredom." Here Fondane, until now little-known except to specialists, emerges as one of the enduring French philosophers of the twentieth century.