ABSTRACT
Camus’s figure in The Stranger, known only as Meursault, fills in an anonymous, stripped-down space lacking the sort of intimate contact with others on which mutual human intelligibility is grounded. He lives out a death of God but, as importantly, a death of care for others, and so appears estranged from them (as others are estranged from him) and is a stranger to himself. Along several vectors of a modern life, lost intimacy comes to seem the painful condition that post-Enlightenment individuals and societies struggle to negotiate, by whatever means.
