Albert Camus and the Political Philosophy of the Absurd: Ambivalence, Resistance, and Creativity by Matthew H. Bowker (review)

Faced with the ‘Absurd Confusion’ (p. 11) that commentators have generated around the subject, Matthew H. Bowker holds that ‘understanding absurdity as the ambivalence between selfhood and merger is enough’ (p. 13). The crux of his thesis, set out in Chapter 4, ‘Absurdity and Ambivalence’, enlists Eugen Bleuler, Freud, and Melanie Klein, plus theories of the borderline personality, to reframe the contradictory set of emotional premises contained within the sentiment of absurdity: on the one hand, the impulse towards unity and merger with the world; on the other, an attachment to separateness and a revulsion for intellectual totalities and leaps of faith. The subsequent chapter, on ‘Absurdity and Ambivalence in The Stranger’, appraises the various ‘diagnostic’ readings of Meursault’s character and suggests that the reader’s response, like that of the authorities depicted in the novel, is driven by the ambivalence surrounding a taboo individual who eschews Kantian moral freedom. Chapter 6, ‘Revolt, Resistance, or Rebellion?’, considers the ‘is and ought of the absurd’, making the important point that revolt, as Camus defines it, is characterized by the ability to ‘endure the ambivalence of the absurd’ (p. 125); this helps us better appreciate the complex activity at the heart of absurd rebellion. The experience of ambivalence thus becomes, in the words of the title of Chapter 7, ‘a grounding for an absurd political morality’, where true revolt is seen as a mature, integrative, and creative response to the ambivalent desires for unity and separateness that motivate it. The familiar concepts of mesure and moderation as responses to the split between ‘all’ or ‘nothing’ emerge re-energized from this discussion, as forces that ‘permit moral values to exist’ and make it possible to think of ‘moral action as creative action, and not as action that follows rules or fits into predetermined categories’ (p. 170). Such a reading of Camus’s thought enables us to appreciate better what is meant by his insistence on ‘creation’ and his attachment to it as an ethical principle. Bowker’s approach also opens the way, he suggests, to advances in contemporary psychosocial understandings of moral and creative action and interaction, notions that in the final chapter, ‘Political Theoretical Conclusions’, he advances via rigorous and not always indulgent analyses of Les Justes and Camus’s stance on Algeria. This book is a cogent and thought-provoking reappraisal of Camus and key aspects of political philosophy.