Albert Camus, 22: Camus et l'Histoire (review)

The eight articles published here under the title Camus et l'Histoire were initially invited papers at a colloquium at the University of Florida (Gainesville) in 2008, on 'la manière dont Camus a vécu et présenté l'Histoire'. In the absence of an introduction that might have indicated what the organizers (and RLM editors) had in mind with this title, it is left to David Carroll, in a study of the central position of Justice in Camusian ethics and politics, to engage with the key question of Camus 'and History', and to position that question within its inescapable contemporary historiographical problematic (via the work of Francis Fukuyama in particular). Had the volume opened with this article, readers would have benefited from an intellectual framework that facilitated their reading of the other articles on the specific — and more familiar — contemporary issues with which Camus engaged (Resistance, terrorism, colonialism, justice, etc.). The decision to open with Colin Davis's study of 'Camus et la dimension du quotidien', on the other hand, would suggest an inclination to rebut the notion of the historical altogether, in favour of a discontinuous and non-evenemential temporality, a history bereft of causality, as explored by Walter Benjamin for instance. The marked preference for the hermeneutical and disconnected evident in a number of the articles, seemingly only marginally connected to the declared topic, reinforce that impression: Ronald Aronson on Camus and 'un univers sans Dieu' (in line with his defence of a positive world view for secularists); David R. Ellison's overview of Camus and the Mediterranean, despite his reference to Nora's 'lieux de mémoire'; James Tarpley on 'Pieds noirs, masques blancs', which, beyond the reference to Fanon, largely pursues his interest in the 'Algerian island', focused here on L'Homme révolté as a robinsonnade. Three contributions adopt a more conventional stance, grounded in the belief that Camus's world view was shaped by rejection of a determinist acceptance of any grand project (Marxist or otherwise), revealing that History is usually taken as a synonym for politics, and accepting that in Camus's oeuvre it is never divorced from issues of action and ethics in the present: Agnès Spiquel on Le Premier Homme and the engagement with colonial Algeria; Maurice Weyembergh on Camus and terrorism (which veers off into an overview of recent studies on contemporary terrorism); Marie-Thérèse Blondeau's critique génétique of La Peste and the French Resistance. The second part of the issue, 'Études', includes eight studies not linked to the Gainesville colloquium. Several of these articles merely revisit well-established themes such as the death penalty (Hiroshi Mino), darkness/anguish (Hiroki Toura), and violence (Madalina Grigore-Muresan). An analysis of Camus's engagement with Bergson and Nietzsche in Neil Foxlee's article on anti-intellectualism, and intertextual readings by Sophie Bastien and Maki Ando (Beckett, Ibn Battuta, Rousset), stand out, on the other hand, as welcome contributions to the field.