Abstracts

Kimberly Baltzer-Jaray: ‘Camus and Lovecraftian Horror’

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.   H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraftian horror, also called cosmic horror, is a sub-genre that blends seamlessly science fiction and horror. Named after American author H. P. Lovecraft (1890 – 1937), it is a style and type of storytelling distinct from gothic horror and supernatural fiction that has an emphasis on fears of the unknowable, the foreign other, and the incomprehensible rather than gore or bones, blood and guts. When one looks at the themes of Lovecraftian horror, it becomes clear how most connect with Camus’ concepts of absurdity and alienation. I will argue here that much of the deepest fear reactions we have in response to Lovecraftian horror come from the fact that we carry our experiences of the absurd and alienation into them – it picks them up, plays with them, scares the pants off them, covers them in goo, and leaves them quivering. Lovecraftian horror can be seen as grounded by our everyday experiences of the absurd and alienation that Camus philosophically describes. When your daily life is existing in confrontation with a universe that defies your meanings, attempts at knowledge and is coldly indifferent to your wants, reading a story or seeing a film that speaks of some creature or force ‘out there’ that is all the more unknowable, unfathomable, and also does not respect your life enhances your pre-existing alienation and eats away at any remnants of feeling safe and certain.

I will explore the themes of Lovecraftian horror alongside Camus’ absurdity and alienation. As an illustration, I will be using the film Alien (1979): a modern, culturally significant, and vivid example of Lovecraftian horror. “In space, no one can hear you scream” is a tagline that becomes scary and unsettling when it taps into existing experiences of the absurd and alienation.

Eric B. Berg: ‘Albert Camus on Sport and the Absurd: Towards an Understanding of Sports in His Thought with Special Attention Paid to the Origin of His Understanding of the Absurd’

Albert Camus’s immense popularity speaks to his relevance and importance to many academic fields including philosophy, theater, French Studies, literature, theology and religious studies to list a few. In this paper I would like to add the philosophy of sport to this list. Camus’s popularity has great benefits as it invites many scholars of diverse backgrounds to engage his work and brings waves of new and valuable insights to Camus scholarship and the abovementioned fields in general. However, Camus’s popularity also invites speculation and conjecture and at times wild speculation like the idea he was converting to Christianity before his death at the hands of the KGB. Camus’ connection to sport, specifically football (soccer for American readers) has invited much speculation due to the combining of these two popular subcultures: Camus and football.  His intellectual interest in sport is undeniable, as was his love of the pitch. In this paper I propose that his understanding of the philosophical concept of the absurd has its origin in his tuberculosis diagnosis, specifically having his understanding of himself as an athlete and his projection into his future radically altered at age 17.  The very young Camus understood himself as an athlete and self-identified as such, when that was taken away by a biological fact of the world, he had to radically adjust his own view of himself. I argue that this was one of his first real moments of illumination of the absurd. In this paper I will be using several categories from the emerging field of the philosophy of sport, specifically the idea that in sport we suspend reality, to sharpen our understanding of the origin of Camus’s realization of the absurd. Thus, it is valuable for Camus scholars to understand his connection to sport as more than a side-interest or childhood love he grew out of.

Meaghan Emery: ‘Harun’s Double Vision, or a Tale of Two Camus and the Rebound after The Fall’

In Kamel Daoud’s 2014 novel, The Meursault Investigation, Harun describes the dual personality of his drinking partner, revealed in a New York Times interview to be Albert Camus: “a deaf-mute, apparently stricken with tuberculosis, a skeptical young university student.” This paper will analyze Jean-Baptiste Clamence from The Fall (1956), summed up by Harun as the “old” “deaf-mute.” The other face of the silent character is the twenty-year-old student from “Entre oui et non” (1937) who is received much more warmly. By combining the young student with the corrupt middle-aged advocate, Harun succeeds in defining his conception of glory, building upon Camus’s contrast between honesty and the deflection, omission, and sublimination in his characterization of Clamence. The similarities suggest that this drinking partner is more than a strawman and that ultimately Camus was more than an intellectual who shrank from the challenge posed by the (Algerian) Other. In this house of mirrors, Harun, it seems, is a reflection of the Algerian in Camus who was also at war with himself and his country.

Camus’s unfinished manuscript published as The First Man potentially provided additional fodder for Harun’s characterization of the later Camus. In this text, Camus had created a critical self-portrait as someone who “cheated his mother and his country of Algeria.” However, in the notes for this epic work Camus had also identified as his objective domination “without making a move to possess or have.” Harun picks up on this objective and specifies that it can only be achieved by the rebellious outsider, declaring “A stranger possesses nothing.” Daoud’s novel thereby reveals its inner subterfuge – a disappearing act, in fact. For, for the man in the bar, the fortuitous encounter with the Algerian led to the development of the most important theme in Camus’s unfinished manuscript, the inflection point found in The Fall.

Peter Francev: ‘Jean-Baptiste Clamence and the Fall of Empathy’

Arguably Camus’s most complex character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence has been an enigma of sorts since his creation by Camus in The Fall. He is, as he puts it, a man who lives two lives, a real-life Janus that comes to represent both the sincere and the diabolical underhandedness of having a life full of lies. Whilst this presentation will not explore or necessarily engage with the argument of Clamence’s ethics (or lack thereof), it will seek to better understand who he is through the major interactions with other individuals and test whether or not he is or even can be a truly empathetic character. 

Sumin Jang: ‘The Figure of Christ in The Betwixt and the Between: From Idol to Icon’

Albert Camus frequently criticized Christianity and the Western cultural-intellectual tradition based on it. He did not share the belief in an afterlife and sought to remain faithful to life on this earth. This moral inclination, often categorized as Mediterranean or Greek philosophy by previous studies, was expressed by Camus himself as a form of attachment. However, at the same time, he showed special admiration and respect for Jesus Christ, who is central to Christianity, and for His teachings. This admiration was not only expressed directly in his articles, essays, and interviews but also indirectly in his literary works.

As many Camus scholars have noted, the figure of Christ is almost omnipresent in his work. A classic example can be found in the preface to “The Stranger” published in America in 1955, where Camus stated, “Meursault is the only Christ we deserve.” Even before he conceived his three cycles, beginning with the "absurd," the figure of Christ persistently appears in his early texts, reflecting his interest in religious sensibility. Particularly, his academic paper completed in 1936, “The Metaphysics of Christianity and Neoplatonism”, defines the figure of Christ as an image and symbol that reveals the shared sensibilities of humanity at the crossroads of Greek and Christian cultures. This suggests that the figure of Christ served as a major image influencing his thought and philosophy even before he became a professional author.

Building on this foundation, we could examine the figure of Christ in his early work, “The Betwixt and the Between”, from the perspective of the phenomenology of Idol and Icon. If the figure of Christ as Idol cannot transcend the category of an object before our eyes, the figure of Christ as Icon, on the contrary, surpasses the subject's gaze and the object's presence, encompassing both the past and the future beyond what the subject can perceive. The mother as character in “The Betwixt and the Between”, embodying Christ and representing the Icon, opens the possibility of religious experience through literature.

Maciej Kaluza: ‘La Chute and Camus’s Idea of Judgment in the Context of Understanding Nihilism’

The presentation will start with the core idea about nihilism, as envisaged by Nietzsche, prognosing the existence of passive and active nihilism. In second part, I will show, how and why Camus rejected the idea of nihilism in such understanding, trying to unify: its meaning and influence. Thirdly, I will show how La Chute is a response to such, totalized experience oh nihilism and the importance of the category of judgement in Camus’s understanding of it. Judgement becomes a tool not against, but, paradoxically, in favor of nihilist stance. In conclusion I will try to show how Camus’s reply resonates with modern thought, being a reply consistent with Simon Critchley’s proposal. 

Dominik Kulscár: ‘The Bakunianism of Camus’s Révolté – Revolt as as Aspect of Human Nature’

The aim of this presentation is to critically examine revolt as an element of human nature. In correspondence with the French anarchist Gaston Leval, after the publication of L’Homme révolté, Camus acknowledged his indebtedness to Bakunin, claiming that he has been ‘nurtured’ by the philosophies discussed in his essay, including the revolutionary’s. What I find to be of particular interest is that in 1947, Camus makes a note in his Carnets about Bakunin’s three principles of human development, and specifically puts the word revolt in italics. One year later, in the play L’État de siège, when Diego confronts the Secretary, he passionately declares that “in human beings there’s a strength you can’t diminish, a burning madness swirled with fear and courage, deeply ingrained and forever victorious.” Therefore, what I will focus on in my presentation are the existential dimensions of revolt in Bakunin, who understands revolt as the driving force behind humanity’s development of freedom. Of particular note, in this regard, is Bakunin’s Confession, where he frames his own life as one marked by continuous rebellion against societal constraints, which are the reflections of his own internal struggles. Such portrayal of rebellion is further expanded upon in Dieu et l’État, where Bakunin describes revolt as an indomitable strength that animates the human being’s perpetual and unyielding quest for autonomy and self-renewal, a struggle that is both internal and external, and one that can never be fulfilled, since we are bound to time and history. Drawing on the insights from Bakunin, I will then examine how this account of revolt is echoed in the figure of the Camusian révolté.

Simon Lea: ‘Can Awareness of the Absurd Help Us Solve Moral Dilemmas?’

In this paper, I am interested in how awareness of the absurd can (or cannot) help us overcome moral dilemmas. Through a comparison of Meursault from The Stranger, and Daru from Camus’s short story ‘The Guest’, I will attempt to tease out the limitations of ‘absurd awareness’ in assisting our decision-making when moral dilemmas present themselves.

David Platten: ‘There is no justice, there is just us’: Saying and (not) doing in Camus’s The Fall (1956)’

Camus’s The Fall was described by Sartre as a ‘black diamond’, of Camus’s outputs, ‘the finest and least well understood’. It is a complex work of literature that welcomes readings from diverse academic constituencies. Is it a comment on existentialism, on the trauma of genocide, on freedom of speech, or on literature itself? The scaffold over which multiple readings have been slung is a narrative whereby a man attempts to evaluate his life. Camus’s biographers discern an authorial presence more tangible in The Fall than in any other of his works, yet Clamence is a slippery narrator, and he talks a lot. In this paper I will take an angular approach to this internal monologue, drawing on the concept of the personnage-délégué – an imperfect projection of the self - deployed by Pierre Bayard in Aurais-je été résistant ou bourreau? (2013) [Would I have been a Resistance fighter or an Executioner?], and also borrowing ideas from the field of neuroscience, notably Michael Gazzaniga’s notion of ‘the interpreter of experience’ (Caruso and Flanagan eds., Neuroexistentialism, 2018, 223-234). The paper will conclude with some reflections on how The Fall enriches our understanding of Camus’s moral philosophy.

Denise Schaeffer: ‘Time, Language, and Rebellion Against Abstraction in The Plague’

This paper explores the idea of rebellion in connection with the themes of temporality and abstraction that pervade the narrative of The Plague. While the novel’s characters are typically interpreted as representing different ethical perspectives as they respond to the epidemic and its effects, they also have different relationships to time and to language. From the tendency of the bourgeois citizen of Oran to simply “mark time,” to Rieux’s sense of urgency regarding the need for public health measures, to Tarrou’s concern about not wasting his time, to the hermit’s insistence on counting peas—the human relationship to time and the way time alters human experience (both deepening and diffusing it) is a motif throughout the novel.  Similarly, as the characters struggle to put their deepest feelings into words, they exhibit different relationships to language. These two issues are interconnected and provide two avenues for exploring the human tendency toward abstraction, which Camus suggests is an essential human need even though abstraction also pulls one away from what is essentially human.

In The Rebel, Camus states, “Art is an impossible demand given expression and form.” Time and language are two elements that give form to human experience, and Camus’ artistic exploration of time and language in The Plague sheds light on what is truly “impossible” about the demand that human experience makes, and on why our efforts to give it form are necessarily paradoxical, especially when it comes to “giving form” to the irreducible particularity and hence dignity of the individual. Finally, the difference between friendship and solidarity will be examined in light of these questions.

Matt Waldschlagel: ‘Albert Camus and Error Theory’

As a rough approximation, it may be said that in The Myth of Sisyphus Camus holds The Absurd to be the conflict between our impulse to ask after questions of meaning (“What is the meaning of my life?” or “How can I live meaningfully and deeply?”) and the impossibility of achieving any answer from an indifferent universe. Camus is seen by some as a kind of skeptic about what we can call existential meaning. It seems that the position we occupy in response to The Absurd that Camus recommends we take has strong parallels with the error theory in metaethics. In his taxonomy, Russ Shafer-Landau identifies the error theory as kind of moral nihilism. He explains that moral nihilism is itself a “form of moral skepticism that says that the world contains no moral features, and so there is nothing for moral claims to be true of.” (Shafer-Landau, 2010) According to Shafer-Landau, the error theory of morality is defined by three essential claims: 1. There are no moral features in this world; 2. No moral judgments are true; 3. Our sincere moral judgments try, and always fail, to describe the moral features of things. It follows that: 4. There is no moral knowledge. (Shafer-Landau, 2010).

While error theorists are preoccupied with the status of moral claims, Camus is preoccupied with the status of claims about existential meaning. But both moral claims and claims about existential meaning are normative claims; they concern what weought to do or how we should be. As I read him, Camus is willing to grant that the universe provides answers to factual and scientific questions but fails to offer us any answers to normative questions about the meaning of life and how (or whether) to live. We might recast the third essential claim of the error theory to be more acceptable to Camus: Our sincere existentialjudgments try, and always fail, to describe the existential meaning of things.

So, Camus, like the error theorist, has a skeptical view about normativity. This paper will explore whether Camus’ view about normativity agrees with the position occupied by the error theorist. That is, can or should Camus be construed as an error theorist with respect to existential meaning? And regardless of the answer, how might this answer advance Camus studies?

Also, do error theorists implicitly hold a view about The Absurd? Put differently, if we suppose that The Absurd is understood relative to the domain that pertains to the error theory (i.e., the status of ethical claims, not the status of claims about existential meaning), do error theorists as moral nihilists tacitly assume The Absurd?

Lastly, while the error theory in metaethics may be motivated by scientism, Camus’ position on what I call existential meaning clearly is not. Instead, Camus’ motivations appear to come from his views about religion and politics. To what extent, if any, do these different motivations matter in assessing whether Camus can charitably be identified as holding an error theory?