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SubStance, Issue 115 (Volume 37, Number 1), 2008, pp. 159-163 (Review)

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DOI: 10.1353/sub.2008.0003

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Carroll, David. Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. 237.
David Carrolls new book on Camus is an important contribution
not only to Camus studies but to contemporary reflections on postcolonial
theory. The book is a model of scholarship and erudition, and it is also
the record of a personal change in point of view. After reading the
attacks on Camuss politics that branded him a colonialist sympathizer
(in their different ways, Albert Memmi, Conor Cruise OBrien, and
Edward Said enact this form of criticism in their respective studies),
Carroll set out to re-read Camus and to discover for himself the degree to
which these attacks and criticisms could be called justified, the degree to
which they were grounded in a serious and nuanced reading of Camuss
writings both the journalistic essays and the fictions that deal primarily
with Algeria. Not the least of the many qualities displayed in Albert
Camus the Algerian is the intellectual honesty of its author. Whereas Carroll
demonstrates, convincingly as far as I am concerned, that OBrien and
Said were off the mark in their attacks (and essentially, that they did not
read Camus), his purpose is not, however, to lionize Camus or to gloss over
the political ineffectiveness of his third way proposals during the very
difficult period of escalation of the Algerian War. Carroll is not saying
that Camuss pleas for dialogue when dialogue had become politically
and practically impossible are in some way politically admirable; what
he is saying is that there is a territory of thought prior to or beyond the
political to which Camus is appealing in his writings both in his essays
and in his fictions. We might call this territory the domain of the ethical
a domain in which the central notions are those of community, dialogue,
responsibility, and the sharing of strong feelings, including that of
anguish. (I shall return to this notion later.) What Carroll has done better
than any critic I know is to demonstrate that Camuss appeals to human
feelings (revolt, for example, begins in a strong personal feeling: je me
rvolte) are not symptoms of political evasion, but rather are attempts to
establish an ethical ground for human action and limits for behavior,
precisely in those situations in which warring factions are tempted to
act in the name of an absolute Truth.
Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2008

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Albert Camus the Algerian is a focused study but not a limited study.
Carroll concerns himself exclusively with those writings by Camus that
have an explicitly Algerian dimension (this means, for example, that
when it comes to LExil et le royaume, neither Jonas nor La Pierre qui
pousse are considered), and in so doing ensures that his forays into
postcolonial theory have the distinctness and specificity of the Algerian
context as their ground. At the same time, however, the fact that Carroll
not only analyzes numerous journalistic pieces such as Rflexions sur
la guillotine, Ni victimes ni bourreaux, and Trve pour les civils, as
well as various politically relevant sections of Lhomme rvolt, but also
addresses LEtranger, La Peste, three short stories from lExil et le royaume,
and Le Premier Homme, leads to his readers gradual and ever increasing
conviction that Carroll is proposing a new reading of Camus one that
bases itself on an intelligent interpretation of Camuss attachment to the
Algerian soil, viewed both in its socio-political reality and also in
mythical terms.
After a short introduction, in which Carroll states succinctly the
essential goal of his book (My purpose here is to challenge the reductive
terms of the polemics over Camus politics, and by doing so come to a
better appreciation of both Camus Algerian fictions and their political
implications [14]), he divides his study into seven chapters, whose
headings read as follows: 1. The Place of the Other; 2. Colonial Borders; 3.
Exile; 4. Justice or Death?; 5. Terror; 6. Anguish; 7. Last Words. The first
chapter includes an interesting reading of LEtranger, notably the second
half of the novel (the incarceration and trial), where Carroll asserts that
Meursault loses his privileged place as a French citizen in colonial society
and [. . .] is increasingly identified with and put in the place of the
colonized Arabs, the anonymous, indigenous Other (31-32). Here as
elsewhere in his study, Carroll emphasizes that Camuss fictions should
not be read as abstract existential allegories, but as stories that are
concretely grounded in the specificities of the colonial situation. In this
case, whereas it may be true that there is a lot of Kafkas The Trial in
Camuss first novel, Carroll argues that to be before the Law for Camus,
time, place, and national identity matter. Indeed, to justify his very
existence before judge and jury, Meursault must prove nothing less
than that he is truly French (32).
In chapter two, Carroll makes intelligent use of Etienne Balibars
concept of altrit intrieure to discuss one of the primary effects of
postcolonialism namely, the end of simple inside-outside binaries, the
increasing complexity of the play between the domestic and the foreign,

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which takes on the appearance of cultural entanglement: Such mutual

cultural entanglement does not eliminate borders (or differences) within,
between, or among nations and cultures, however, but rather transforms
the issue of borders and differences from being predominantly a question
of the separation of the foreign from the indigenous or the outside from
the inside into one of understanding the function and effects of hybridity
or difference internal to (postcolonial) culture in general (42). Following
upon these theoretical considerations, Carroll then proceeds to develop
his own reading of La Peste while critiquing that of OBrien (who had
made the highly problematical assertion that colonialism, not World
War II, could be taken as the referent of this second novel). Carrolls
conclusion reads as follows: What The Plague reveals about Camus
perspective on Algeria, therefore, is not a colonialist indifference toward
the Arab population of Oran or any other Algerian city. His is rather a
critical perspective that stresses at the same time the necessity for and
limitations of all acts of political resistance to oppression, the obligation
to put peoples health first, before religion and before politics (57).
What Carroll says in the above passage about the necessary
limitations that need to be placed on acts of political resistance as well as
the importance of putting peoples health first will emerge in the
subsequent chapters as a leitmotiv. Whether writing in the direct and
sometimes polemical journalistic mode or in the guises and disguises of
fiction, Camus continually and consistently insists upon what he will
call mesure in Lhomme rvolt a sense of ethical balance and measure that
in and of itself precludes the placing of any goal (including that of
independence from a despotic colonial power) above that of life itself. As
Carroll states it unequivocally in the fourth chapter: I would consider
[Camuss] refusal to legitimize murder whether in the form of capital
punishment, political assassination, terrorism, or counterterrorism as
the founding principle of Camuss critical perspective on politics, both
his increasingly militant anticommunism and his refusal to defend the
use of terrorism in the cause of national liberation in Algeria or torture
and murder in Frances counterterrorist strategy (102). As Carroll
continues, both in chapter five and in his conclusion, to consider the
question of terror per se, it is clear that Camuss position on the matter
will not vary. Because the enacting of terror (by the FLN, for example) as
a means to the end of liberation entails the killing of innocent people,
Camus cannot, under any circumstances, support terror. The reason
Camus could not be in favor of dialogue with the FLN at a time when
dialogue with the FLN might have had positive political results (i.e.,

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perhaps at least some bloodshed might have been averted had the FLN
been recognized as the representative body of a large number of
disenfranchised Algerian people and accorded a voice in early
negotiations for independence) is disarmingly (excuse the play on words)
simple: life as the ultimate value must be respected and can never be
compromised, however justifiable or noble the final goal. As he
illuminates Camuss perspective on this question, Carroll also discusses
the metaphysics of rebirth and salvation and the concept of total
violence (114-17) as propounded (chillingly) by Fanon and Sartre.
Camus, who for Sartre as well as Jeanson was a nave me rvolte,
had a coherent ethical position; but this position, given the intractable
problems of the Algerian conflict as of the mid-1950s, could not be
translated into a coherent or workable political plan.
Although each of the seven chapters of Albert Camus the Algerian is
well written and persuasive in its intellectual arguments, I suspect that
many readers will be particularly impressed with the chapters that
deal in the most detail with Camuss fictional texts. Chapter four, which
focuses on Camuss resistance to all messianic or redemptive politics
(193), is essentially intelligent paraphrase of articles (Rflexions sur la
guillotine, Ni victimes ni bourreaux) whose arguments and
conclusions are fairly straightforward; whereas chapters three and five
contain brilliant readings of three of the stories from LExil et le royaume.
What Carroll has to say about the absolute freedom of the nomads in
La femme adultre; what he writes about the complexity of the concept
of hospitality in Lhte (in discussing what Freud would have called the
antithetical sense of the primal word hte, which can mean both host
and guest in French, Carroll makes excellent use of Jacques Derridas
De lhospitalit); what he demonstrates in his subtle reading of the enigmatic
and difficult tale entitled Le rengat (including an apt comparison of
its use of narrative voice to Becketts experimentations in The Unnamable)
all constitute a considerable contribution to our understanding of
Camus as a writer of fiction. What emerges from these readings, as well
as from Carrolls thorough analysis, in chapter seven, of Le Premier Homme,
is Camuss impressive range as writer of imaginative prose his ability
to move from the transparently autobiographical to the allegorical to
the ironical mode. Although one might have assumed, from its thematic
emphasis, that Carrolls book would be heavy on theory and on political
ideas, the overall effect of his study is to foreground both the aesthetic
and ethical dimensions of Camuss work, while showing the inadequacy
of any reading of Camus that would attempt to reduce either of these
dimensions to a clearly identifiable political signifi.
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All good books are good in themselves and also point beyond their
self-imposed frames toward questions that they have raised but not
exhausted or resolved. The one section of Albert Camus the Algerian that is
both particularly impressive in its analytical rigor and suggestive of
further development is the second half of chapter six, which centers on
the notion of anguish. Carroll notes that, in the dialogue de sourds opposing
entrenched French colonial interests to the escalating demands of the
FLN, what was lacking was any common ground i.e., any shared
territory. Carroll causes his reader to re-examine what Camus has to
say, in Trve pour les civils, about anguish (angoisse) as this shared
domain, which becomes, for the writer, the very locus of his voice. In
Carrolls precise formulation:
The only way to address the anguish of others, to speak of and to
their anguish, is with the voice of anguish itself, that is, in a conditional,
I am tempted to say, literary voice that is not entirely ones own, since
no one can pretend to actually speak directly for or as the anguish of
another. . . . The voice of anguish cuts through the clash of ideologies and
political, religious, and cultural differences. . . . To evoke such a shared
voice, one that links Algerians together in terms of what separates them
from and opposes them to each other, is in itself, if not the beginning of a
particular form of dialogue, at least the sign of its possibility (150-51).
One sees here ways in which Camuss late writings, in a more
extended study, could be linked not only to the late, ethically centered
writings of Derrida, but also to certain recurring themes in Blanchot and
to the entirety of Levinass preoccupations. Camus may not have been
an academically trained philosopher, but the questions he raises, both in
his essays and in his fictions, point to the complexity of the relatedness of
self to other viewed in ethical terms, and suggest a positioning of his
work alongside the most challenging of modern and contemporary
writers those we tend to group today under the category of theorists.
Far from being an emotionally driven me rvolte, Camus was a
writer who found, in the ethical imperatives that reside within the
altruistically directed emotions especially revolt and anguish the
only possibility of dialogue worth pursuing in a violent and divided
world.
David R. Ellison
University of Miami

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