from Jean-Pierre Baudet

To Floriana Lebovici
Paris, 29 October 1987
Dear Floriana:

[...][1]

I take advantage of this occasion to transmit to you another manuscript, of which I am less embarrassed to speak. It is a matter of a German book, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, by Guenther Anders, the first volume of which I read several months ago, and of which I spoke to you at the time. This book was published in 1956 and presented analyses of market everydayness [la quotidiennete marchande] that were remarkable for the time and are ever truer today. A student of Husserl who was exiled under Nazism, but did not share the comfortable situation in the USA of the Frankfurt School, the author allied in an original manner the residues of phenomenological analysis and an extremely virulent critique of market standardization. I believe that the first volume (I still have not found the second one) is a very good book, despite its faults, which in my opinion reside in a certain awkwardness or clumsiness in the expression, faults that can be greatly ameliorated by a translator who was conscious of them. The attached translation, made by a French person living in Berlin and, it seems, a translator of Schopenhauer, came to me through interposed contacts, and I transmit it to you without commentary, adding simply an attempt at translating the first two pages in another style, so as to allow you to dissociate the text from the translation, if needed, so as to judge the former better.

Cordially,
Jean-Pierre

[1] We don't know what has been removed from the text of this letter, or who removed it.


(Translated from the French by NOT BORED! November 2008. Footnote by the translator.)




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