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As Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei observes, the last few years have seen a significant resurgence of interest in existentialism, both in and beyond the academy. Authors and texts who were dismissed during the time when postmodernism was the rallying-cry of the progressive academy are being rediscovered and re-applied in a wide variety of ways. It almost goes without saying, however, that if a renewed existentialism is to become a significant contributor to the ongoing conversation that is philosophy, it will not and cannot be exactly the same as the old existentialism. Indeed, the flyleaf refers to the book as offering “a new vision of existentialism,” a claim that is, I think, fully justified by the contents. Gosetti-Ferencei’s version of existentialism shows a deep and extensive immersion in the relevant classic texts, but it also brings these into dialogue with our contemporary concerns while interpreting and applying them with a generosity and kindness that was notably absent from at least some of its original representatives, though not all (there’s not much kindness in Sartre, for example).
An opening chapter establishes what will become a theme throughout the study: that whilst the “existentialist café” of 1940s Paris rightly plays a crucial part in the formation of existentialism, there is much more to existentialism than the cigarettes, roll-neck jumpers, and sexually adventurous lifestyles of the Left Bank intelligentsia. We are warned that existentialism is a diverse and difficult philosophy and that it would be a mistake to reduce it to one or other catchphrase. Indeed, in Part II, Gosetti-Ferencei takes us through the intellectual genealogy of existentialism, from ancient philosophy, through romanticism, and on into the twentieth century, a story that strongly supports the claim that existentialism was not just a momentary philosophical fad. Startling as its rhetoric and style were to many post-war Anglophone readers, its fundamental questions and concerns were deeply and extensively rooted in the history of Western philosophy, all the way back through Descartes’ “turn to the subject” and the Stoics’ culture of self-formation to Parmenides’ meditations on being.
Due attention is given to existentialism’s immediate nineteenth-century predecessors (Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche) and to the complex interrelationship between existentialist philosophy in the narrow sense and cultural forms such as literature and jazz that became closely...