Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt (review)

While received opinion tends to see Camus moving away from the Absurd when he turns to Revolt in La Peste and subsequent works, John Foley identifies instead a dynamic continuum between these pivotal concepts, and presents revolt as a 'plausible consequence' (p. 29) of the Absurd, seeking 'to illustrate the centrality of this coherence to an accurate understanding of Camus's political and philosophical commitments' (p. 4). To achieve this, he subjects Camus's texts to close reading focussed on a number of key issues such as capital punishment, Algerian independence and, in particular, political violence. In developing the argument, some analyses rehearse well-established discussions (the instrumentalisation of the killing of the Arab in L'Etranger, the ambiguities surrounding the symbol of the plague in La Peste, for instance). On the other hand, an extended reassessment of works like the Lettres à un ami allemand (as seeking to deal with the ethical and political consequences of the Absurd), and 'Ni victimes ni bourreaux' (as the first attempt to define a moral politics consistent with the Absurd), and an examination of the polemics between Camus and the Sartrian Left on issues such as rebellion, Marxism or state terrorism provide a reappraisal of the period's political realism-morality debates. The chapter on L'Homme révolté demonstrates with great clarity that revolt and solidarity, seen as 'two mutually generating values' (p. 57) – linked later to the notion of limits – provide the key to the legitimation of ethical political action. The decision to devote separate chapters to L'Homme révolté, political violence and the Camus-Sartre polemic produces some repetition, inevitably; but also provides space to establish clear contrasts between key issues such as Marxist messianism and historicism, and Camus's defence of the right to doubt. The thoughtful dialogue with other critical voices developed throughout falters only in the final chapter, on Camus and Algeria, where Foley launches a challenge to the 'retrospectivism' of postcolonial criticism. As Foley rightly argues, the central issues for Camus at that time were indiscriminate violence used to achieve political ends, Algerian nationalism and independence – the latter two seen in the context of pan-Arabism primarily as threats to the European minority in Algeria. In arguing against critics who reduced these issues to one of support for, or failure to support, Algerian independence (and the FLN), his study is actually in line with much current critical discourse. The latter, however, has also largely laid to rest the question of the rights and wrongs of the past polemics on which he bases his critique (O'Brien, 1970; Said, 1993). In revisiting these, rather than pursuing the analysis of the relevant texts in the light of the positions and principles established in the chapter on Camus and political violence, Foley leaves it up to the reader to return to Camus's post-1954 texts and reassess the stresses and limitations imposed on the coherence of the moral politics that the earlier chapters elucidated so convincingly. A Socratic ploy, perhaps, to encourage the reader to engage in the close reading and argumentation at which Foley himself is so adept?