Shortly after Rachel Bespaloff’s suicide in 1949, her pal Jean Wahl revealed fragments from her last unfinished mission. ‘The Immediate and Freedom’ condensed themes that occupied the Ukrainian-French thinker all through her life: music, rhythm, corporeality, motion and time. One among Bespaloff’s key concepts, ‘the moment’, is much less a fraction of period than a life-changing occasion, a second of embodied metamorphosis. Within the midst of a loud world, torn between transience and eternity, the human being listens to the sound of historical past. Had she accomplished and revealed it, ‘The Immediate and Freedom’ may need grow to be the masterpiece of an vital early existentialist thinker. As a substitute, her title is hardly talked about at this time.
But Bespaloff was a superb and authentic thinker, among the many first wave of existentialists in France. Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Gabriel Marcel all admired her. An expert dancer and choreographer, she had finely tuned ears for the musicality of philosophical writing. For Bespaloff, philosophy is a dynamic, sensual exercise of listening to and interesting with the voices of others, together with these lengthy useless. In dialogue with Homer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, she discovered her personal voice. On the coronary heart of Bespaloff’s world is an authentic conception of time formed by embodiment and music: the moment is a silent pause that suspends historical past’s repetitive rhythm. By means of our our bodies, we expertise that break from historical past as a short second of freedom.
Her extra well-known modern Simone Weil additionally used her physique to precise her philosophy: Weil finally starved herself to loss of life in solidarity with buddies and compatriots in occupied France. Bespaloff shared Weil’s curiosity in consideration, listening and ready as mystical practices of the physique. For each thinkers, philosophy was an existential embodiment of their concepts. Nonetheless, Bespaloff didn’t use her physique as a weapon towards itself; moderately, she was concerned with dance as a inventive alchemy of motion. Bespaloff’s philosophy of the physique is intently linked to the expertise of time: it’s our embodied day-to-day existence that measures and offers rhythm to time. In an essay on Homer’s Iliad written in the course of the Second World Struggle, Bespaloff captured the expertise of dwelling via the horrors of exile and conflict. The human being, ‘sure to her time by dysfunction and misfortune, acquires a brand new notion of the time of her personal existence.’ (All translations right here from the French are my very own.)
Bespaloff’s personal life was certainly one of repeated displacement: she moved from Ukraine to Switzerland, Paris to southern France, to Mount Holyoke by way of New York. Born in 1895 in Nova Zagora in Bulgaria to a Ukrainian-Jewish household, she spent her childhood in Kyiv after which in Geneva the place the household moved in 1897. Her mom Debora Perlmutter was a thinker who taught at college; her father, Daniel Pasmanik, a surgeon, turned a number one theoretician of Zionism within the Russian Empire. A fervent anti-Bolshevik, Pasmanik fought for the White Military within the Russian Civil Struggle. In Switzerland, Bespaloff (then Rachel Pasmanik), studied piano and composition on the conservatory, philosophy on the college, and eurythmics with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. These three areas of research are all entwined in her existential philosophy of embodiment.
Dalcroze eurhythmics is a holistic methodology of musical training; it turns the physique into an instrument. Completely different temporalities are concretised via actions, arm gestures and steps. For Bespaloff, eurythmics turned an intimate apply of listening along with her whole physique. Dalcroze’s favorite pupil, she was despatched to work in Paris in early 1919. She started instructing eurythmics on the Paris Opera whereas additionally publishing brief texts on dance. Bespaloff’s ‘plastic dance’ aimed to revive a misplaced dynamism. Her methodology attracted the eye of Jean Cocteau and Sergei Diaghilev, who launched this new corporeality to his Ballets Russes. If philosophy sharpened her ears, eurythmics sculpted her physique in direction of an embodied expertise of temporality. She believed {that a} extra genuine sense of time, misplaced in modernity, nonetheless lurked beneath our pores and skin.
‘She listened along with her complete particular person: along with her palms, along with her lips, along with her eyes’
In 1921, Bespaloff was the choreographer of the ‘Royal Hunt’ scene in Hector Berlioz’s opera The Trojans – a theme she would return to in her Iliad essay. In ‘Dance and Eurythmics’ (1924), Bespaloff wrote that dance is a universe with ‘its vocabulary, a hard and fast language, its personal logic, its wants.’ Eurythmics is the system of this universe, turning motion into existential experiences. By means of the plasticity of our our bodies, we are able to attain new types of being. Within the fragment ‘The Dialectic of the Immediate’, Bespaloff describes time consciousness as ‘nothing aside from a sure manner of greedy the connection between finitude and infinity within the on the spot.’ The moment’s brevity factors us in direction of a misplaced continuity that may be restored. By means of music and dance, Bespaloff found what she calls the expertise of ‘magic interiority’. By externalising motion, the topic of eurythmics plunges herself into an interior expertise.
Bespaloff met her second vital instructor in 1925, the Jewish existentialist thinker Lev Shestov (born in Kyiv as Yehuda Leib Shvartsman). The encounter with Shestov modified her life: Bespaloff the choreographer determined to grow to be a thinker. This was a radical transfer however, by then, she was already married to a Ukrainian businessman, which allowed her to stop her job on the Opera and shortly after have a daughter. Shestov was a central determine within the philosophical émigré circles of interwar Paris. French existentialism gained fame a lot later via the works of Sartre and Camus. Nonetheless, Sartre was deeply indebted to Shestov’s authentic synthesis of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Jewish theology.
Shestov’s charisma and unsystematic thought magnetised younger philosophers, amongst them Georges Bataille. In some ways, the Shestov circle was the hotbed of French existentialism. Together with the Romanian poet Benjamin Fondane, Bespaloff was on the centre of Shestov’s salon. Her pal Daniel Halévy described her sitting on Shestov’s couch, utterly immobile, whereas ‘she listened along with her complete particular person: along with her palms, along with her lips, along with her eyes.’ One of many few girls within the circle, she quickly turned buddies with the Christian existentialist author Gabriel Marcel and the Jesuit theologian Gaston Fessard who each admired her work. A feminine thinker within the 1930s was, as Olivier Salazar-Ferrer put it, ‘a bit like a lady within the 19th century carrying males’s garments.’ Nonetheless, Bespaloff would quickly put on her personal garments. In 1929, she had dinner with Edmund Husserl whose phenomenology she confidently attacked with Shestovian arguments.
Bespaloff brought on one other stir with the publication of her ‘On Heidegger (Letter to Daniel Halévy)’ in La Revue philosophique in 1933. It was among the many very first discussions of Martin Heidegger’s thought in France. Fluent in German, Bespaloff had learn Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) in the summertime of 1932. Heidegger’s greatness, she wrote, was that ‘he situates himself within the inextricable; he doesn’t need to detach himself.’ Much like the expertise of eurythmics, Heidegger’s philosophy proposes our hopeless entanglement with the world. It’s not tough to think about a 28-year-old Sartre being drawn to Bespaloff’s letter, the place she wrote excitedly: ‘Existence initiatives itself into the potential: selection is its future.’ For Bespaloff, deciphering Heidegger, this selection will not be a matter of free will however of irrevocable dedication. By actively selecting, we sprint past ourselves into an unsure future.
As a musician, Bespaloff ‘listened’ to Heidegger’s textual content as if to a efficiency of Bach, a ‘monumental Artwork of Fugue’. She recognised that, as in a Baroque fugue, all of the motifs ‘deliver us again to the central theme of Being taken up in all its potential facets, with growing infinite variation, however at all times equivalent to itself.’ Bespaloff’s enthusiasm for Heidegger’s musical metaphysics was quickly tempered by the invention of one other existentialist: Søren Kierkegaard. In 1934, she revealed notes on Kierkegaard’s Repetition (1843), a piece that emphasised the musicality of repetition as steady transformation.
She declares conflict on her instructor’s complete denial of any risk of reality
Repetition doesn’t add something, it solely accentuates what’s irreducible to human existence. Repetition in Kierkegaard is ‘the desire to dwell once more and the refusal to outlive’. Solely by repeating can we grow to be genuine topics. In Kierkegaard’s ‘stunning second’, Bespaloff discovered what she known as ‘the moment’: an expertise of absolute, everlasting silence. The absence of a path, she wrote on Kierkegaard, is the one path his philosophy desires to observe. This Zen-like picture additionally completely captures the meandering trajectories of her personal thought, which Laura Sanò has known as ‘nomadic’. A wandering cosmopolitan, Bespaloff was pressured to traverse the boundaries of varied international locations, languages and cultures. Her philosophy mirrored that nomadism, with delicate consideration to the embodied expertise of motion, melody and metamorphosis.
Bespaloff’s essay assortment Paths and Crossroads (Cheminements et Carrefours) appeared in 1938. Devoted to Shestov, the ebook contains texts on Julien Inexperienced, André Malraux, Marcel and two essays on Kierkegaard. The chapter ‘Shestov earlier than Nietzsche’ declares conflict on her instructor’s complete denial of any risk of reality. By refusing to suppose, she writes, Shestov had returned to a different dogma – a radical relativism that in the end changed into nihilism. In opposition to Shestov’s rejection of purpose, Bespaloff poses Nietzsche’s try to succeed in reality via and inside one’s life. Nietzsche’s idea of the Will to Fact, she thought, might reconcile us to the tragedy of existence. The place Shestov noticed an unbridgeable hole, Bespaloff made a leap: within the on the spot, happiness is in our attain. Bespaloff’s ‘joyful consciousness’ made a deep impression on Camus who learn the ebook intently in the summertime of 1939.
Bespaloff’s writings on Kierkegaard coincided with the publication of Wahl’s Kierkegaardian Research (1938) – a sworn statement to their friendship and lifelong collaboration. Bespaloff and Wahl had been trendsetters in Paris. Introducing Kierkegaard’s anti-Hegelian philosophy into France, they ready the bottom for the existentialism that flourished in wartime Paris. Their ventures into Christian existentialism straight reacted to Hegel’s revival in France instigated by Alexandre Kojève’s lectures, held between 1933 and 1939. One other émigré from the Russian empire, Kojève was as pivotal as Shestov to the formation of French modernism. It was these refugees from japanese Europe, amongst them Bespaloff, who formed the course of French tradition by importing new currents to Paris, together with Surrealism, Marxism, phenomenology and existentialist philosophy.
In the spring of 1938, Bespaloff started rereading the Iliad along with her daughter Naomi. Her intensive notes changed into a superb essay on Homer’s epic poem. Shestov’s loss of life that yr deeply upset her. In a letter to Wahl, she calls Shestov one of many few actually noble males she knew. The household moved to her husband’s property in southern France in 1939. Simply earlier than the Nazis occupied Paris, she wrote a letter to Marcel: ‘However the worse it will get, the extra I realise you could’t love life, the extra I uncover the pressing want to search out new causes to find it irresistible. And I’m afraid that this time I received’t have the ability to, which might be worse than loss of life…’
Her work on the Iliad essay turned an existential ‘methodology of dealing with the conflict’. She quickly turned conscious of the same textual content, written coincidentally, that appeared in Cahiers du Sud in 1940: Weil’s ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Pressure’. Bespaloff started to revise her essay; she critically responded to Weil’s condemnation of any use of pressure. Residing as a Jew in Vichy France, Bespaloff turned more and more determined, and with good purpose. In November 1941, she wrote to Marcel: ‘I really feel as if I’m caught in a tragic, stressed, absurd dream. And I’m very afraid of waking up.’ Her pal Wahl, additionally Jewish, had been imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo, and worse was to return for a lot of Jews in Paris.
In 1942, Bespaloff managed to flee, boarding certainly one of final ships to go away Nazi-occupied France, along with her mom and daughter, her library and grand piano. Having narrowly fled a focus camp outdoors of Paris, Wahl joined them. Along with his encouragement, Bespaloff started to transform her essay on the Iliad. She finally completed her notes in yet one more exile, this one in New York. Revealed in English translation in 1943, On the Iliad framed conflict as an absolute ‘query of dropping all of it to achieve all of it’. Within the phrases of Fondane’s letter to his spouse, conflict turned ‘the second to dwell our existential philosophy’. In keeping with Bespaloff, Homer felt each intense love and intense horror of conflict. The place Weil claimed that pressure transforms topics into objects, Bespaloff, emphasises temporary moments of magnificence that happen within the midst of violence. With conflict being waged throughout, there are flashing instants of generosity and beauty.
Within the Iliad, pressure is each a supreme actuality and an phantasm. It’s the superabundance of life itself, ‘a murderous lightning stroke, by which calculation, likelihood, and energy appear to fuse in a single component to defy man’s destiny.’ This doesn’t imply that Bespaloff glorified violence. Removed from it. However the expertise of the Second World Struggle made her realise the inescapability of pressure and its energy to remodel a person’s understanding of the human predicament. On the coronary heart of her essay is Hector, the ‘resistance-hero’ who embodies justice and braveness. Like each human within the Iliad, Hector can not flee his destiny – and he is aware of it. Hector’s flight from pressure is brief however has ‘the eternity of a nightmare’. That’s the horrifying temporality of conflict that Bespaloff skilled first-hand.
Hannah Arendt’s studying of Kafka echoed Bespaloff’s existentialist despair
Probably the most crushing elements of Bespaloff’s Iliad essay are devoted to Helen, a lady with whom she clearly identifies. Clothed in lengthy white veils, she is probably the most austere character of Homer’s poem. Each unbearably stunning and unlucky, Helen awoke in exile and felt ‘nothing however a uninteresting disgust for the shrivelled ecstasy that has outlived their hope.’ She is the prisoner of her personal passivity, pressured to dwell in horror of herself. Finally, Helen’s promise of freedom, like Bespaloff’s personal, stays unfulfilled. Helplessly, Helen watches the boys who went to conflict for her, observing ‘the altering rhythm of the battle’. The breaks that interrupt the preventing are uncommon instants of silence:
The battlefield is quiet; just a few steps away from one another, the 2 armies stand head to head awaiting the one fight that can resolve the result of the conflict. Right here, on the very peak of the Iliad, is a type of pauses, these moments of contemplation, when the spell of Changing into is damaged, and the world of motion, with all its fury, dips into peace.
Whereas in New York, Bespaloff preserved her ties to Parisian mental life from her exile by exchanging letters with Fessard and Marcel. She received a job with the Voice of America’s French broadcast earlier than transferring to Mount Holyoke Faculty in Massachusetts, the place she taught French literature. Mount Holyoke turned an vital outpost for French tradition within the US in the course of the conflict. At gatherings of exiled students organised by Wahl, Bespaloff met Jacques Maritain, André Masson, Marc Chagall and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
This ‘small, darkish woman who wore white gloves’, as her translator Mary McCarthy described her, additionally made an impression on Hannah Arendt who visited in August 1944 to ship a lecture on Franz Kafka. Arendt’s studying of Kafka, later revealed in Partisan Evaluate, echoed Bespaloff’s existentialist despair. Beneath the darkish shadow of conflict, Arendt describes humanity as inescapably trapped in historical past’s meshes. Kafka’s ‘nightmare of a world’ had grow to be actuality. In an essay on Camus, her final revealed work, Bespaloff describes how historical past pressured her era ‘to dwell in a local weather of violent loss of life’.
After the conflict, regardless of beforehand having been fêted by them, Bespaloff turned a vocal critic of the brand new era of French existentialists, particularly Sartre. In a 1946 letter to the musicologist Boris de Schloezer, Bespaloff wrote that ‘the hollowness of subjectivity that Sartre opposes to what I name “magical interiority” is way much less the inspiration of a brand new humanism than the harbinger of a brand new conformity.’ She argued that, as an alternative of liberating the person, Sartre’s existentialism destroyed the magical interiority via which people can authentically join with each other. For Bespaloff, Sartre degraded the topic into an object beneath the gaze of the Different. This objectified ‘subjectivity curiously aligns with American “individualism”, which unleashes itself in motion to masks the absence of the person.’ Like Helen’s Troy, the US felt each uninteresting and hostile to Bespaloff.
Bespaloff’s journey to Mount Holyoke was her last exile. Throughout time period break, in April 1949, for causes not completely clear, she sealed her kitchen doorways and turned on the fuel oven. Her personal complicated fugue ended with a tragic cadence. She had written earlier of the happiness that may be discovered straight away. In her last word, alluding to Camus’s declare, she wrote: ‘One can think about Sisyphus joyful, however pleasure is eternally out of his attain.’
