Albert Camus and the Critique of Violence

202 Pages·2017·1.58 MB·English

by  David Ohana

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Albert Camus’ preoccupation with violence was expressed in
all facets of his work – as a philosopher, as a political thinker,
as an author, as a man of the theatre, as a journalist, as an intel-
lectual, and especially as a man doomed to live in an absurd
world of hangmen and victims, binders and bound, sacrificers
and sacrificed, crucifiers and crucified.
Three main metaphors of western culture can assist in
understanding Camus’ thinking about violence: the bound
Prometheus, a hero of Greek mythology; the sacrifice of Isaac,
one of the chief dramas of Jewish monotheism; and the cruci-
fixion of Jesus, the founding event of Christianity. The bound,
the sacrificed and the crucified represent three perspectives
through which David Ohana examines the place of ideological
violence and its limits in the works of Albert Camus.
Cover illustration: Courtesy of Ronny Someck.
Professor David Ohanateaches European history at the Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev, Israel. He was a visiting fellow at The
Sorbonne, Harvard, and Berkeley as well as the first academic
director of the Forum for Mediterranean Cultures at the Van Leer
Jerusalem Institute. His many books include: The Origins of Israeli
Mythology (Cambridge, 2014), Israel and Its Mediterranean Identity
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Modernism and Zionism (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012), Political Theologies in the Holy Land: Israeli
Messianism and its Critics (Routledge, 2009), and most recently, The
Nihilist Order: The Intellectual Roots of Totalitarianism (Sussex
Academic, 2016).
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For Menachem Brinker,
a Genuine Intellectual
and a Mensch
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Text copyright © David Ohana, 2016; cover illustration
copyright © Ronny Someck.
Published in the Sussex Academic e-Library, 2016.
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ISBN 978-1-78284-314-6 (e-mobi)
ISBN 978-1-78284-315-3 (e-pdf)
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Contents
Abbreviations vi
Introduction 1
The Bound 13
The Sacrificed 59
The Crucified 102
Son of the Mediterranean 158
Notes 175
Bibliography 184
Index 190
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Abbreviations
[Com.] Camus in “Combat”: 1944–1947 (2005)
[N.] Notebooks 1935–1942 (1963)
[Rr.] Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1961)
[Po.] The Possessed (1961)
[C.] Caligula and Three other plays (1960)
[E.] Exile and the Kingdom (1978)
[Fa.] The Fall (1978)
[Sy.] The Myth of Sisyphus and other essays (1955)
[R.] The Rebel (1960)
[P.] The Plague (1948)
[S.] The Stranger (1967)
[Co.] Correspondence, 1932–1960 (2003)
[F.] The First Man (1996)
[Pr.] “Prométhée aux enfers” (1965)
[A.] Algerian Chronicles (2013)
[L.] Lyrical and Critical Essays (1969)
[H.] A Happy Death (1972)
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I am a stranger. I am an outsider to philosophy, and
my questions on philosophy come from
my outsider’s point of view.
JACQUESDERRIDA
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Introduction
The short life, works and intellectual outlook of Albert
Camus were almost all connected with the question of vio-
lence. At the age of one, he lost his father, who was killed as
a soldier of the French army on the outbreak of the First
World War. He passed his childhood and youth in colonial
Algeria, and in his first years in conquered France he was edi-
tor of an underground newspaper that opposed the Nazi
occupation. In the years following the Liberation, he
denounced from afar the Bolshevist tyranny, the Stalinist
gulags and the dominance of the Soviet Union over its satel-
lites in Eastern Europe. He especially condemned the Franco
dictatorship in Spain. In his final years, he witnessed the
“dirty war” between the land of his birth and his country. A
tragic motor-accident cut short his productive, action-filled
life, a life that more or less embraced the blood-soaked first
half of the twentieth century.
A visitor to his grave at Lourmarin, a village in the heart of
Provence, cannot fail to be struck by its simplicity. It just con-
sists of stones placed next to one another, and on its surface
are inscribed the words “Albert Camus, 1913–1960”. Next to
it is the grave of his wife, mother of his twins, equally spar-
ing of words: “Madame Albert Camus, née Francine Faure,
1914–1979”. The graves are surrounded by a lavender bush
and nearby there is a cypress. The little cemetery is situated
at the foot of the hills surrounding Lourmarin. At seven
o’clock in the morning only the birds are awake, apart from a
gardener moving among the graves with a wheelbarrow and
silently clearing away the leaves. The sustained silence of the
gardener recalls the meeting of Camus and Samuel Beckett
every morning in a park in Paris in which they did not say a
word to each other for two hours and then parted, as though