Albert Camus au quotidien ed. by André Benhaïm and Aymeric Glacet (review)

Edited volumes are frequently marred by a lack of thematic focus and/or unevenness in the quality of the individual contributions. The present collection suffers from neither of these shortcomings. The volume’s ten essays examine the centrality of le quotidien in Camus’s life, thought, and work. Topics discussed include the role of the concierge in Camus’s fiction; alimentary economy, especially in La Peste and Le Premier Homme; ecological (as a function of le quotidien) as opposed to historical appartenance in Camus’s writings on Algeria; the misery of daily life in Kabylie during the famine in 1939, described by Camus in Alger républicain; and Camus’s use of the anecdote in evoking the tragic in everyday life. These essays bring to bear a formidable range of critical and philosophical approaches to analyse Camus’s conception of le quotidien. Heidegger’s ontology figures prominently in Nicolas L’Hermitte’s ‘Entre rhétorique et ontologie’; Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of heccéité is discussed in Debarati Sanyal’s outstanding contribution ‘Écologies de l’appartenance chez Camus’; and Blanchot’s reflections on the paradoxical nature of le quotidien inform Edward J. Hughes’s ‘Expérience et connaissance du quotidien’. The essays also assess or reassess familiar issues and debates associated with Camus’s life and politics, specifically his feud and break with Sartre and his vexed position on Algeria. In a polemical and decidedly pro-Camus essay dealing with the confrontation with Sartre, Michel Onfray discusses the efforts of the latter and his colleagues to belittle Camus’s intellect and writings; he then argues that Camus, in joining the Communist Party in 1935, opposed colonial rule long before Sartre had given a thought to colonialism. In a more nuanced and subtle defence of Camus in relation to his position on colonialism and Algeria, Ève Morisi rejects Albert Memmi’s famous claim in his Portrait du colonisé; précédé de Portrait du colonisateur (1985) that Camus was a ‘colonisateur de bonne volonté’ (quoted on p. 108), through a close reading of Camus’s Kabylie articles for Alger républicain. Most of the essays focus on le quotidien in less political and historical contexts, however. In their ‘Avant-propos’ André Benhaïm and Aymeric Glacet note Camus’s status as an ‘aventurier du quotidien’ (p. 12) and show that the writer’s quest for the ephemeral experience of the everyday is linked to his search for happiness, authenticity, and freedom. Le quotidien is also linked, perhaps paradoxically, with the experiences of solitude, alienation, and silence. Hughes notes that in L’Exil et le royaume ‘le quotidien est souvent vécu comme l’expérience de la solitude’ (p. 168), but he stresses too that ‘vivre au jour le jour dans l’anonymat constitue une expérience d’apprentissage et d’authenticité’ (p. 163). In La Chute, according to Nicolas L’Hermitte, Clamence’s experience of le quotidien embraces both ‘la banalité désespérante de la vie de tous les jours’ and ‘le mode d’être spontané de l’individu’ (p. 156). All in all, this is a fine and original collection and, as such, a tribute to Camus the writer and intellectual.