himself a former Surrealist, Queneau suggested that Fondane was relying on blind faith, having a distorted perspective on science, literature and the human intellect. Furthermore, he noted that, under the influence of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Fondane described reality exclusively in primitivist terms, as the realm of savagery and superstition. Fondane's objection to the communist flirtations of the main Surrealist wing had roots in his earlier discourse: before leaving Romania, Fondane had criticized socialism as a modern myth, symptomatic of a generalized desecration, suggesting that Leninist and Labor Zionist projects were economically unsound. Much admired by Emil Cioran for his rejection of all modern ideology, the poet argued that a critical distance imposed itself between artists and social structures, and, although he too reacted against "bourgeois" culture, concluded that communism carried a greater risk for the independent mind. In particular, he objected to the Marxist theory on base and superstructure: although his planned address for the Writers' Congress spoke of Marxian economics as being justified by reality, it also argued that economic relationships could not be used to explain all historical developments. His critique of the Soviet Union as an equally "bourgeois" society also came with the argument that Futurism, not Surrealism, could transform into art the communist version of voluntarism. Fondane found himself opposed to the general trend of intellectual partisanship, and took pride in defining himself as a politically independent skeptic. Around 1936, he reacted strongly against Julien Benda's rationalist political essays, with their overall critique of intellectual passions, describing them as revived and "excruciatingly boring" versions of positivism, but ignoring their primary, anti-totalitarian, agenda. However, La Conscience malheureuse (with essays on Shestov, Edmund Husserl, Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard) was noted as Fondane's own contribution to the debate surrounding Popular Front activities and the rise of fascism: titled after a concept in Hegelian philosophy, which originally referred to the thinking process generating its own divisions, it referred to the possibility of thinkers to interact with the larger world, beyond subjectivity. Rallying himself with the main trends of Jewish existentialism, the poet remained critical of other existentialist schools, such as those of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, believing them to be overly reliant on dialectics, and therefore on rational thought; likewise, citing Kierkegaard as his reference point, Fondane criticized Jean Wahl for not discussing existential philosophy as an act of faith. His dislike for secular existentialism was also outlined in