ABSTRACT
This chapter treats Albert Camus as the thinker who gave the modern sense of absurdity its clearest and most compelling – indeed, its classical – formulation. Camus placed the absurd at the heart of his work, making it a foremost literary and intellectual concept, and drawing sharp-edged political consequences from it. I begin with the sometimes striking kinship between the earliest works of Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and indicate how their most celebrated philosophical writings build, however differently, on understandings of absurdity. While Sartre takes absurdity as a comprehensible ontological property of existence itself. Camus sees absurdity as a fundamentally frustrating but inescapable feature of our experience of the world. Facing this limitation fully, as Sisyphus does but Caligula does not – and as Meursault does at the end of The Stranger – is the only authentic way for an individual to live. Thus, in the grim situation depicted in The Plague, the path Camus recommends is to face absurdity and live our limits collectively and in solidarity with others. Of course, he endorses rebellion and rejects quiescence – “I revolt, therefore we are.” But he rejects the effort to overcome our basic human condition, life’s fundamental absurdity. In The Rebel, he depicts those who refuse to do this in great detail.
Writing above all against revolution, Camus sought to clarify the fundamental spirit of revolt, to distinguish it from its fatal deformations, especially “Caesarean socialism” – Stalinism – and to recall the rebellious impulse to more modest and collective origins. But the ultimate message of Camus’s sense of the absurdity built into human life is not political abstention or any form of quiescence, but the opposite – a brief for an activist politics, very much of the left, committed to a democratic vision of progressive social change.
