Abstracts

Kimberly Baltzar-Jaray: ‘Absurdism: The Second Truth of Philosophy’

When one surveys the history of early modern/modern philosophy, specifically the ideas and theories that fall within the domain of metaphysics and epistemology, one quickly realizes the presence of the absurd, sitting there like a pink elephant in the room, unacknowledged or at times purposely ignored.  Descartes may have uncovered the indubitable primary truth – ‘I think, therefore I am’ - but Camus called out what I believe is the indubitable secondary truth of philosophy - human attempts to know everything and the purpose of it all are met with a silent, indifferent, impenetrable universe that defeats every attempt.  This is why practically every treatise written during the period inevitably fails or must admit God into the picture as the ultimate explanation and designer (and the inevitable notion of how small our minds are in comparison to God comes about to explain why we are having a hard time figuring the world out).  From Bacon to Berkeley, rationalism to empiricism alike, we see attempts to identify the boundaries of human knowledge for the purposes of accuracy in science and to have truths built on certainty, and we see failure happen over and over.  I believe this was due to the fact that none were daring enough to see the absurd at work, and what they sought was truly impossible.  That is until Kant came along, who I would argue was the first to really sniff out and speak of the absurd, and when he did this he was met with fierce opposition and misinterpretation. Everyone wanted to flee from the absurd and/or deny it existed at all, rather than come to terms with it, accept it, and move on or revolt against it in personal authentic ways. 

In this paper, I will discuss the presence of absurdism in the history of philosophy, demonstrating that it is not simply an existential or literary notion, but rather the key to the problems of metaphysics and epistemology.  In fact, it is core to the philosophical discipline itself and philosophical inquiry.  This will hopefully lead to or in the very least inspire a 'Camus renaissance', where we can start to appreciate the significance of his contribution in a much more accurate light

Eric Berg: ‘Topography in The Stranger’

In this paper, I will outline and explore the topography in Camus’s novel The Stranger. I will argue that Camus uses topography (both natural and human construction) in The Stranger to illuminate important transitions in the novel and, more importantly, to highlight philosophical themes important to the text and his work.   In particular, I will work with the distinction between lucidity and opacity as it relates to absurdity.

Kurt Blankschaen: ‘Breaking through Absurd Walls’

We encounter the Absurd with an emotional backdrop. This backdrop sets the tone for how we are to cope with the Absurd after our first confrontation. Our emotional response is not just a knee-jerk reaction to discovering that the world is devoid of objective meaning, it conditions our future attempts at investing meaning in the world. Responses based on anxiety, for instance, never satisfy: if we are anxious that our choices may not amount to anything enduring in an indifferent world, then our anxiety never goes away. Responses based on petty power relations from the underground make one sick, petty, or unattractive, but never happy. Predicating our actions on a will to power has the potential to shift the primary focus of existence from the present to the future. I will argue that simply accepting the Absurd as a fact about the world, like any other, results in a better understanding of the world and allows individuals more freedom to create meaning in their life.

Typically Camus and Sartre are brought together to talk about an intellectual affinity and a shared history only to suffer from a nasty falling out. I want to argue that a stronger juxtaposition between Sartre’s early literary work, specifically “The Wall,” and Camus’s work in The Myth of Sisyphus can develop the importance of the proper emotional response to discovering Absurdity in the world. For Sartre, Pablo treats the Absurd as a massive hidden joke about the world and laughs so hard he cries. Sisyphus, Camus’s Absurd hero, accepts the Absurd as a fact about the world and continues his existence simply because he finds it meaningful. Sisyphus’s existence proves to be happier; his choice to continue rolling the rock, to continue living a meaningful and happy life is entirely his own.

Peter Francev: ‘A Logotheraputic Interpretation of Meursault’

Often charged with being ambivalent, distanced, indifferent, or callus, by critics who claim to understand his motives and lack of action Meursault is, arguably, Camus’s greatest and most psychologically challenging protagonist. In this paper, I plan to re-visit the first essay I wrote for the Camus Society’s conference five years ago, examining the choices that he makes, from the perspective of the psychotherapy of logotherapist Viktor E. Frankl whose seminal work, Man’s Search For Meaning, will provide insight towards Meursault’s lack of sympathy towards his mother’s death, his relationships, and his general malaise towards life.

Giovanni Gaetani: ‘The Critique of Contemporary Philosophy in the Unpublished Work “L'impromptu des philosophes”‘

Among all the unpublished works of Albert Camus’s L'impromptu des philosophes is surely one of the most important and, at the same time, one of the most ignored and underestimated. Even among Camus's scholars this little piéce theatrale remains a great unknown. The aim of our paper is then to re-evaluate the importance of this text, which can be considered with no doubt Camus's most explicit critique of contemporary philosophy.

George Heffernan: ‘Absurdity, Creativity, and Constitutionality: Critical Observations on Camus’s Critique of Husserl’s Phenomenology in The Myth of Sisyphus’

The founding phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and the “existentialist” (sit venia verbo) Albert Camus were two of the leading thinkers of the 20th century. Despite Husserl’s critique of what later came to be regarded as existentialism but was not usually referred to as such in his time, there is no evidence that he ever said or wrote anything about Camus’s philosophy. Yet, despite his relatively underdeveloped level of interest in academic philosophy, Camus singled out Husserl’s phenomenology for what was by his standards a sustained critique in The Myth of Sisyphus. Given that Husserl argues that phenomenology owes its position as rigorous science to its eidetic character (as distinguished from the empirical approach of psychology as a natural science and from the approach of philosophy of existence as a human science), that Camus focuses on Husserl’s essentialism, and that his critique articulates the problems that philosophers of existence, namely, existentialists, had with phenomenology, it is remarkable that there is virtually no philosophical literature examining and evaluating Camus’s critique of Husserl. The present paper seeks to fill this void.

Simon Lea: ‘Camus and the Idea of Humiliation’

Camus experienced humiliation both as a personal experience and a shared experience. In this article, with continual reference to Camus's life and work, I first examine humiliation as a violation of human dignity before examining the relationship between humiliation and degradation. Degradation is then contrasted with pride and ambition. Finally, I explore the differences between ambition and aspiration to show that, for Camus, seeking the former will necessarily result in your humiliation whereas if you seek the latter you will probably only find yourself degraded.

Benedict O’Donohoe: ‘L’Exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom): Giving Voice to Voicelessness’

It is well-known that his quarrel with Sartre and the coterie of Les Temps Modernes over the critical reception of L’Homme révolté (The Rebel, 1951) left Camus depressed and despondent about his potential to complete his projected “triptych” of works on the theme of revolt. Indeed, he lost confidence in himself as a thinker and writer and entered a period of virtual sterility for five years, publishing only two collections of (mostly) pre-1951 essays – Actuelles II and L’Été – before the appearance of the masterly but self-accusatory La Chute in 1956.  That short novel had initially been intended for inclusion in the collection of short stories, Exile and the Kingdom, which Camus envisaged as a way of restoring his confidence and credibility as a writer. These would be what the French call exercices de style, “exercises in style”, treating the theme of exile “in six different ways […] ranging from the internal monologue to the realistic narrative”, as Camus himself put it.  These would re-establish him as a literary figure of the first rank, a writer of range and sensibility: neither a “one-hit-wonder” (with the extraordinarily successful L’Étranger), nor a pale imitator of Sartre (and his critical punch-bag). In short, Exile and the Kingdom is above all an exercise in Camus re-finding his voice as a writer.

Having established this biographical and literary context, I will explore the paradox that Camus’s six short stories in Exile and the Kingdom are obsessed with loss of voice and the impossibility of communication. “La Femme adultère” (The Adulterous Woman) presents a protagonist “surrounded by a language she does not understand” and trapped in a loveless marriage to a dull man with whom she cannot begin to communicate. “Le Renégat” (The Apostate) consists entirely of the rambling inner monologue of a man whose tongue has been torn out and whose written communication makes little more sense than the guttural grunts he persistently interjects. “Les Muets” (The Silent Men) announces by its very title – literally, “the mutes” – that loss of voice, or failure to communicate, lies at the heart of the tragic misunderstanding that inexorably unfolds between the employer and his men. “L’Hôte” (The Host, or The Guest) exploits the ambiguity of its French title to destabilise meaning from the outset, plunging the reader along with its three characters into a confusion of miscommunication. “Jonas, ou l’artiste au travail” (Jonas, or the Artist at Work) ironically and comically dramatizes the situation of Camus himself, that of a famous artist who is running out, simultaneously, of living space and creative ideas, until his “inspirational star” is snuffed out altogether. Finally, “La Pierre qui pousse” (The Growing Stone) follows an exiled protagonist caught up in an esoteric rite, acted out in a foreign language in a strange country, an “outsider” isolated by the ineffable. In the light of this analysis, I will argue that the gradual composition of these “nouvelles” over a period of four years acted as a kind of homeopathic therapy for Camus: writing about loss of voice enabled him to re-discover his own voice as a writer, to publish the masterly La Chute in 1956 (a by-product of Exile and the Kingdom) and to resume the project of Le Premier Homme which, alas, would never be brought to fruition.

Luke Richardson: ‘ “A Stranger on the African Shore”: Camus and the Dynamics of Identity Creation’

Pierre Bourdieu argued that identity is fundamentally ‘a performative discourse’.  This was particularly true for French writers of colonial Algeria whose literature articulated a new sense of national and cultural identity, but did so in engagement with metropolitan imaginings.  Writers like Louis Bertrand, Jean Pomier and Robert Randau pushed back against the literature of Gautier and Frometin whose travelogues portrayed Algeria as an encounter with the Oriental “other”. For Bertrand and his followers in the school of Algérianisme, French Algeria should be seen outside of the prism of France’s perception of it and was rather a separate entity with its own youthful and vital identity. While writers like Gabriel Audisio and Emmanuel Roblés rejected the racial prejudices of the Algerianistes, they equally sought to create a cultural space, in the form of the Mediterranean, which would provide a sense of French Algerian identity. Ultimately, the pieds noirs were neither French, nor Algerian, but rather in a kind of nationalist hinterland. The projection of this new identity as a performative discourse, through the medium of literature, aimed to negotiate this problematic. However French Algeria was a political entity founded on a history of colonial violence, based on racial prejudice and inequality, and was proving less and less historically sustainable in the post-war period. Therefore, equally this new sense of identity was becoming increasingly precarious.

Camus was highly influenced by Audisio and highly critical of Bertrand. Both play a critical role in the formation of his earliest literature and arguably through his career. More than either of them though, as they were both French born, the problem of Algerian identity was an immediate, personal and unyielding one for Camus. This paper will study the way Camus existed in critical discourse with the attempts to form a ‘moi algerienne’ in his earliest literature, how the anxiety of French Algerian identity can be read in his later works and ultimately how thinking about Camus and his sense of self-identification provides potential answers to his ideological difficulties during the last years of his life.

Ron Srigley: ‘It Was There that It All Started: Meursault’s Ascent in Albert Camus’s The Stranger’

Camus used imagery from ancient texts intentionally as templates for his essays and stories. One image in particular became for him an important resource for depicting the character of the modern world – the image of the cave in book 7 of Plato’s Republic. The image is apparent in Camus’s earliest works as well as in later book-length essays like The Rebel. In this paper I argue that Camus used the image of the cave to illuminate the nature of Meursault’s nihilism in The Stranger, his effort to free himself from that nihilism, and the barriers to that effort he encounters along the way. Exploring Meursault’s drama in relation to Camus’s source text sheds new light on the old problem of Camus’s alleged existentialism and his assessment of modernity more generally. 

Bill Wahl: ‘Absurd Images’

Albert Camus, particularly in The Myth of Sisyphus, gave us descriptions of the absurd which are variously poetic, rational, and compelling. Others, such as Sartre and Kierkegaard, have also offered depictions of the absurd which help us understand this “first of all truths”. As beautiful and persuasive as these descriptions are, they nevertheless rely entirely of the medium of language and the images which language may stir up in the reader. The absurd may also be evoked and understood through direct exposure to visual imagery. The author of this presentation has spent many hours surveying imagery via internet searches with a view to discovering visual depictions of the absurd. Numerous images are presented, as well as a verbal presentation of the meaning of the absurd, with time for discussion amongst attendees.