Camus's Curious Humanism or the Intellectual in Exile

Camus's Curious Humanism or the Intellectual in Exile
Author(s): Lawrence D. Kritzman

Source: MLN, Vol. 112, No. 4, French Issue (Sep., 1997), pp. 550-575
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
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Camus's Curious Humanism or the
Intellectual in Exile
Lawrence D. Kritzman
In the Companyof Criticsthe social theorist Michael Walzer character-

ized Albert Camus as "a man of principle, a good man ... in a bad
time."' From his critique of Marxism in L'hommerevolte(1951) to his
multiple anxieties concerning the destiny of Algeria, Camus opted for
an ethic embedded in a humanism distinguished by an generalized
sense of justice and a universal commitment to human value.2At the
core of Camus's critical approach was the politics of love and the
classical ethos of measure that substituted reflective action and
understanding for absolute values. Within that perspective Camus's
moral imperative is the result of a critical observation postulating the
possibility of a world free from evil. Human choices, Camus believed,
have a moral dimension that endowed them with ethical authority. In
effect, the focus of moral concerns for Camus was not rooted in a
legislative operation capable of generating both prescriptive and
proscriptive behavior. Instead it was situated in the exercise of human
judgment culminating in the formation of an "imagined community"
whose sense of togetherness was based on a belief in harmony and
justice with intuition functioning as the oracle of truth.3Accordingly,
Michael Walzer, The Companyof Critics(New York: Basic Books, 1988), 137.
2All references from Camus's critical writings will be drawn from Essais, introduction
par Roger Quillot. Textes 6tablis et annotes par Roger Quillot et Louis Faucon (Paris:
Bibliothique de la Pleiade, 1965). Page references will be indicated in the body of the
text.
I I borrow,
although in a somewhat different way, the idea of "imagined community"
from Benedict Anderson, ImaginedCommunities(London: Verso, 1983).
MLN112 (1997): 550-575 ? 1997 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
M LN 551
as early as Le mythede Sisyphe(1942) Camus suggests that judgment

has consequences and individual political agency has implications
that impact on the world. "Toutes les morales sont fond6es sur l'idee
qu'un acte a des consequences qui le legitiment ou l'obliterent. Un
esprit penetr6 d'absurde juge seulement que ces suites doivent ftre
consid6eres avec serenit6. Il est pret a payer" (MS, 150).
Starting with the presupposition that the scandal of human exist-
ence is the absurdity of death, Camus's L'hommerevoltecondemns
Marxist revolution and with it a critical epistemology based on an
absolutism derived from the notion of totalization. On its publication
in 1951 Camus's essay made a deep impression on the ideological
issues of the day and in a way ignited a debate concerning the value of
what we today call the "metanarrativesof liberation" and the possible
dangers of moral absolutes. "Quand on veut unifier le monde entier
au nom d'une th6orie, il n'est pas d'autres voies que de rendre ce
monde aussi d6charne, aveugle et sourd que la theorie elle-meme"
(HR, 402-3).
Motivating Camus's critical vision is a desire to unequivocally dis-
approve of terrorism while adhering to the Greek ethos of measure
and finitude. "La r6volution du XXe si&cle a s6pare arbitrairement,
pour des fins d6emsurees de conquete, deux notions inseparables. La
liberte absolue rallie lajustice, la justice absolue nie la liberte. Pour
etre f6condes, les deux notions doivent trouver, l'une dans l'autre,
leur limites" (HR, 694). As Camus sees it, the end of freedom and
justice is paradoxically found in a commitment to the Marxist
conception of history and as such justice and freedom have no future
in that name. Yet if justice is an issue for Camus it is to be taken
neither in the sense of right nor of law, but in the context of self-
identification with human value. In criticizing the outcome of mod-
ern social revolutions Camus emphasized humankind's possibility of
engendering evil when rebellion assumes the power of God-like
absolutism and degenerates into the contemporary reenactments of a
Robespierre-like Reign of Terror. Beyond the missionary zeal that he
associated with the legislators of historical materialism, Camus put
forth an ethical stance whose underlying premise was that humans
construct the world as it is and that goodness can only be realized if
we reject the socio-political architects of absolute ideals.
Camus's cognizance of limits renders the legislative power of the
post-enlightenment intellectual's radical critique irrelevant to a cer-
tain extent. As a thinker somewhat before his time Camus attempts to
demystify the philosophical technology of social thought in the name
552 LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN
of a more balanced ethos devoid of specified ideological content. It is

precisely human judgment that, in Camus's view, must be tied to a
discourse of value. By exercising judgment the human subject enters
into an "ethical imaginary" capable of enacting a depoliticized and
dehistoricized moral imperative functioning in the name of meta-
physical rebellion which is, as Camus states, "l'affirmation d'une
nature commune a tous les hommes, qui echappe au monde de la
puissance" (HR, 651). For Camus the ethical exists beyond the
exaggerations of polemical discourse as a universal imperative by
which is meant the generalization of spiritual well-being situated
between the extremes of good and evil.
Camus's examination of the history of metaphysical revolt in
L'hommerevoltecan be viewed as the logical outgrowth of the philoso-
phy of the absurd articulated in Le mythede Sisyphe.In that regard it
can be argued that the possible salvation of rational man before the
vicissitudes of an irrational world can only be realized by the
assumption of an ethic that gives meaning to the fragility of life.
Accordingly Camus becomes an intuitive moralist who confronts the
absurdity of the murder and terror associated with political revolu-
tion by engaging in what he terms "thought at the meridian." In
confronting the madness of excess and all forms of political absolut-
ism Camus, in his own way, delegitimizes all grounds of knowledge
and thereby attempts to destroy the illusions propagated by precepts
of rationality in the service of an overdetermined social order. The
recurrent toposof L'hommerevolteis the value of human life as a deter-
mining force in governing our existence; by accepting the absurdity
of existence we must learn to live fully with the imperfections of life
without attempting to control them completely. The golden rule is
therefore "apprendre a vivre et a mourir, et, pour etre homme,
refuser d'ftre dieu" (HR, 708).
Camus's examination of the irrational face of Marxism constitutes
both an ideological and an epistemological critique that opposes the
fraternal bliss associated with the practice of revolt to the totalitarian
imperatives of political revolution.
La revolutionabsolue supposaiten effet l'absolue plasticitede la nature
humaine, sa reductionpossiblea l'etat de force historique.Maisla revolte
est, dans l'homme, le refus d'etre traite en chose et d'etre reduit a la
simple histoire.... La n6gationtotalejustifieseule le projetd'une totalit6
a conquerir. Mais l'affirmation d'une limite ... n'entraine que la necessite
... de marcher vers l'unite.... La revendication de la revolte est l'unite,
la revendication de la r6volution historique la totalite. (HR, 651-53)
MLN 553
By its attempt to conceptualize history on the principle of absolute

purity, Hegelian-Marxist thought names the French Revolution as a
founding moment of a metanarrative which conceives of modernity
as the era of "formal morality."If as under the ancien regimethe king
acted as the mediator of God in history, now in modern times a new
religion has emerged in which humankind lives as the sovereign
source of its own power, a "semblance of God relegated to the heaven
of principles." Like the contemporary political philosopher Claude
Lefort and revisionist historians of the French Revolution such as
Francois Furet, Camus regards Rousseau's Le contratsocial as a text
about the legitimacy of power that theorizes reason as the deity of
modernity and regards the "people" as the catalyzer of the general
will, an indivisible construct substituted for the idea of God itself.4 But
therein lies the poison of this modernist social theory for Camus. It
bases its very raison d'etreon the idea of human empowerment which
secularizes the messianic vision of Christian humanism and replaces
it with a "formal morality" that imposes an imprisoning orthodoxy.
Dieu est du moins desincarne et reduit a l'existence theorique d'un
principe moral. ... Des l'instantou les principeseternels seront mis en
doute en meme temps que la vertu formelle, ouf toute valeur sera
discreditee,la raisonse mettraen mouvement,ne se referantplus a rien
qu'a ses succes.Ellevoudraregnernianttout ce qui a ete, affirmanttout ce
qui sera. Elle deviendraconquerante.(HR, 540)
Like Christianity itself Marxism is regarded as requiring faith; for
Camus it demands that its adherents engage in a teleology of hope
that ironically unleashes inhumanity and violence.
In the name of "reason" and the logic of history Marxism, Camus
suggests, has brought "rational murder" to a level of technological
mastery. Camus accuses the Marxists of engaging in a myth of human
progress that seeks redemption in time. Questioning the very nature
of authority itself, Camus is rather skeptical concerning the claims of
the work of reason in history to achieve either freedom or truth. If,
for Camus, evil becomes associated with historical revolt, it is because
the ends of such action were derived more from the exigencies of the
historical moment than from an overriding sense of moral judgment.
Rather than accepting a universal history that subsumes contradictions
4 See Jeffrey C. Issac, Arendt,Camusand ModemRebellion(New Haven: Yale

University
Press, 1992), 75. "The Rebel offers a sketch of the hubris of modern man. Prefiguring
writers like Francois Furet, Camus locates this arrogance in Rousseau's sacred body
politic and in the French revolutionary Reign of Terror."
554 LAWRENCED. KRITZMAN
into the progress of "humanity,"Camus acknowledges the necessity of

human justice as a timeless and living phenomenon realized as an
ahistorical appeal to human nature in its quest for happiness. "Nous
choisirons Ithaque, la terre fidele, la pens6e audacieuse et frugale,
l'action lucide, la g6n6rosit6 de l'homme qui sait. . . . Nos freres
respirent sous le meme ciel que nous, la justice est vivante. ...
Chacun dit a l'autre qu'il n'est pas Dieu; ici s'acheve le romantisme"
(HR, 708-9). However idealistic these exhortations may be, Camus
invites us to conflate the idea of justice with human solidarity and
challenges us to become captive to its generalized assumptions.
To be sure, Camus's philosophical essay implicitly contains within it
a reconceptualization of the role of the intellectual as one who must
be tied to a moralistic imperative that conceives of revolt as a non-
violent philosophy of moderation. The refusal to deify and totalize
history forces Camus to abandon the possibility of envisaging a
transformed social order on a grand scale and to reject the truth-
telling status of rational thought that pinned its faith on the values of
enlightenment critique. From that perspective L'hommerevoltemust be
regarded as an account of the socio-historical factors that have been
subsumed by the discursive fictions of radical intellectuals in quest of
veridical knowledge. Unlike Sartre, who conceived of the intellectual
as a historical agent whose performative utterances had an impact on
history, Camus, on the other hand, saw his function as the defender
of categories and values such asjustice and metaphysical freedom. Yet
if justice functions as an intellectual standard for Camus it must be
seen as a phenomenon representing a moral relativism independent
of questions of the material factors of class conflict or issues of
diachronic import. By adopting an attitude of skepticism with regard
to all truth-claims, Camus invokes the idea of justice as a descriptive
term for the endless recycling of an ethical standard representing a
political ideal based on fraternity, moderation, and the will to do
good. In a way Camus's sense of justice is one that exists by main-
taining a balance between the excesses of extremism and an adher-
ence to the belief that intellectual discourse which lays claim to a
transformative or ethico-political force can only produce nefarious
results.
By making the idea of justice a universal phenomenon beyond
socio-historical specificity, Camus's essay produced a dramatic contro-
versy in French intellectual life about the nature of history and the
commitment of the intellectual which culminated into one of the
most vitriolic debates of the cold-war period: the Sartre-Camusbreak.
M LN 555
What ultimately triggered the Sartre-Camus controversy in May

1952 was an unfavorable review of L'hommerevoltein Sartre'sjournal
Les tempsmodernes.As Herbert Lottman suggests in his biography of
Camus, Sartre had essentially hand-picked Francis Jeanson to act as
his willing executioner since as Sartre declared, "he will be the
harshest but at least he'll be polite."5 In "Camus ou l'ame r6volt6e,"
Jeanson, starting with the ironic play on words constituting the title of
the review ("the revolted soul" instead of "the rebel"), accuses Camus
of an antihistorical spirit articulated in idealistic formulas intended to
mystify through a pseudo-philosophy charged with torment.6
L'espoirde Camusserait-ilvraimentde supprimerle "coursdu monde"
par le refus de toute entreprisedans le monde?II reproche aux staliniens
(mais aussi l'existentialisme. . . ) d'etre totalement prisonniers de
l'histoire:mais ils ne le sont pas plus que lui, ils le sont d'une autremaniere.
... Si la revoltede Camusse veut deliberementstatique,elle ne peut plus
que concerner Camuslui-meme. Si peu qu'elle pr6tende, par contre a
influer sur le cours du monde, il lui faut entrer dans lejeu, s'insererdans
le contexte historique,y determinerses objectifs,y choisirses adversaires.
(2089)
What is of interest in Jeanson's assessment is the way in which his
language disinters Camus's rhetoric from the antihistorical critical
space in which he believed Camus has entombed the idea of "revolt"
("la revolte de Camus se veut deliberement statique").Jeanson per-
ceives Camus's intellectual stance as the symptom of an imprisoned
consciousness deployed in relation to the repression of history. If
Camus's position implies an attempted escape from the demands of
Hegelian dialectics asJeanson suggests, it also posits a teleology in its
veiled agonistic encounters. For Jeanson Camus invents an out-of-
time that nevertheless inscribes itself in time; not even in Camus's
world of ethical balancing, claimsJeanson, can the figure of time ever
be erased. "Le cours du monde est a la fois notre prison et notre
oeuvre" (2089). In short, Camus is seen here as assuming a stance
through which he makes history lose its status as a regulative principle
in the narrative of social justice so it may disappear into the void of
righteous non-being.
Just three months later in August 1952 Sartre responded to Camus
personally in an article in Les tempsmoderneswhere he praised Camus
5Herbert R. Lottman, AlbertCamus (New York: Doubleday, 1979), 500.

6 Francis "Albert Camus ou l'ame Les modernes79
Jeanson, revoltee," temps (May
1952), 2070-2090.
for his participation in the Resistance and the exemplarity resulting

from the moral issues he raised in his literary works.7
Vousavezete pour nous ... l'admirableconjunctiond'une action et d'une
oeuvre. C'etaiten 45: on decouvraitCamus,le resistant,comme on avait
decouvertCamus,l'auteurde L'tranger.... Carvous resumiezen vous les
conflitsde l'epoque, et vous les depassiezparvotreardeura les vivre.(345)
Quite clearly Sartre assumes the role of a disappointed lover (he

proclaims "how we loved you then") now perceiving a clear line of
demarcation between the Camus who was and the Camus who might
still yet be through the magic of political salvation. With this
categorical enclosure of the past, Sartre's declaration opens up an
absolute dislocation between past and present. Through the repeti-
tive power of the address ("vous"), Sartre's text situates Camus out of
time by submitting his present image to a rhetorical violence that
reduces the other's place to one of an "illusory mirage." "Votre per-
sonnalite qui fut reelle et vivante tant que l'evenement la nourrissait
devint un mirage; en 44 elle etait l'avenir en 52 elle est le passe et ce
qui vous parait la plus revoltante injustice c'est que tout cela arrive du
dehors sans que vous ayez change" (351). By accusing Camus of
becoming a "mirage" Sartre reduces Camus to an ontological empti-
ness of sorts, a simulation of being that is frozen out-of-time and
bereft of positive meaning. Sartre's call for a definite course of action
within the present reflects a desire for freedom to supersede knowl-
edge whereby the drive to give history a sense of direction will
ultimately facilitate the possibility of making sense of it. "L'Histoire,
en dehors de l'homme qui la fait, n'est qu'un concept abstrait et
immobile, dont on ne peut dire ni qu'il a une fin ou qu'il n'en a pas.
Et le probleme n'est pas de connaitresa fin mais de lui en donnerune"
(352). In response to his perception of Camus, Sartre strategically
takes what appears to be a more moderate approach to history by
rejecting the premise that Marx believed it had an objective and
opting instead for participation in concrete political action.
Yet even more troubling from Sartre's point of view is what he
describes as Camus's refusal to understand the world in which he
presently lives. Victim of a self-imposed blindness Camus is described
as having abandoned the heroic plot of his earlier critical production
and in so doing establishes an axiological divide between a particular-
7Jean-Paul Sartre, "Reponse a Albert Camus," Les tempsmodernes82 (August 1952),

335-53.
M LN 557
ized standard of equity and one of critical abstraction. "Ou est

Meursaut, Camus? Oi est Sisyphe? Ou sont aujourd'hui ces trotzkystes
du coeur, qui prechaient la Revolution permanente? Assassin6s, sans
doute, ou en exil. Une dictature violente et ceremonieuse s'est
installee en vous, qui s'appuie sur une bureaucratie abstraite et
pr6tend regner la loi morale" (334). Through a curious critical cross-
dressing it is Sartre who paradoxically appropriates the language of
anti-Marxist thought and uses it here as an insurrectional tool to
attack what he perceives as Camus's imposition of subjugated knowl-
edge ("une dictateur violente et c6ermonieuse"), as a finite province
of meaning. Not only does Sartre accuse Camus of failing to evolve
with the spirit of the times, but he interprets his blindness, through
the uncritical submission of knowledge to an abstract moral law, as
what Shoshana Felman has termed "a crisis in witnessing."8 At the
core of this preoccupation is the idea of salvation which Sartre
elevates from a personal concern to one of universal proportions.
"On pense que les circonstances meme les plus douloureuses, de
votre vie vous ont elu pour temoigner que le salut personnel 6tait
accessible a tous" (350). The idealization of salvation for Sartre
permits him to allow for the possibility of a more positive prognosis by
suggesting that Camus might eventually assume, in the name of
historical justice and universal truth, a more ethical posture.
What Sartre's argument amounts to is an ethical discourse which
defines salvation as a recuperative activity that can potentially repair
what has been damaged. Menacing Camus with the threat of being
labeled "immoral"with the passage of time, Sartre's text legitimates
Jeanson's review as a discursive event. It allows Sartre to suggest that
Camus's critical fictions may one day be recast as a sentence embody-
ing nefariousjudgments. In this light, for Sartre, salvation can be only
realized in and through history ("to give history the meaning that
seems best to us"), and Marxist ideology functions as a therapeutic
procedure constituting the fundamental context of human action.
Sartre's reading of Camus becomes all the more dramatic in light
of the latter's reaction to Jeanson's critique of his book which takes
the form of a letter addressed to the director of Les tempsmodernesand
8 Shoshana Felman,
Testimony.Crises of Witnessingin Literature,Psychoanalysis,and
History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 172-78. I have benefited from Felman's reading
of the Camus/Sartre controversy. Whereas she is more focused on issues of testimony
I am more interested in the ways in which the rhetoric describing historical and
political issues problematizes the question of intellectual engagement and the commit-
ment to justice.
not to the author of the negative review per se.9 Camus's formulation
concerning the dangers and benefits of history describes a logic that
places historicism against antihistoricism and in so doing he articu-
lates a wished-for-ideal (balance and moderation) whose desired
ethic, articulated through a rhetorical negativity, appears as lacking
the specificity of a fully substantiated concept.
L'hommerevolte,en effet, se propose ... de d6montrer que l'antihistorisme
pur, au moins dans le monde d'aujourd'hui, est aussi facheux que le pur
historisme. I1y est 6crit, a l'usage de ceux qui veulent lire, que celui qui ne
croit qu'a l'histoire marche a la terreur et celui qui se croit a rien d'elle
autorise la terreur. I1 y est dit qu'il existe "deux sortes d'inefficacit6, celle
de l'abstention et celle de la destruction," "deux sortes d'impuissance,
celle du bien et celle du mal." (323)
Making history the object of either a positive or negative absolute

choice is for Camus a totalizing gesture that renders the intellectual
impotent and victim of the so-called tyranny of intellectual wisdom.
Camus's rhetoric submits the idea of history to a description con-
strained by a syntax that limits through negation and defines the
positive function of history by that which it is not.
La v6rit6 qu'il faut r6crire et r6affirmer en face de votre article est que mon
livre ne nie pas l'histoire (negation qui serait d6nuee de sens) mais
critique seulement l'attitude qui vise a faire de l'histoire un absolu. Ce
n'est pas l'histoire qui est donc rejet6e mais une vue de l'esprit quant a
l'histoire ... non pas la r6alit6 ... on peut se conduire dans l'histoire sans
faire appel a aucune valeur. (324)
As a result of its rhetorical acrobatics, Camus's text is unable to name
in detail the beneficial capacity of history to forge the goal of
collective well-being. The idealist foundation of Camus's rhetoric now
stands revealed by authorizing itself as a phenomenon founded on
openness and self-incurred limitations.
In a way Camus's letter criticizes the a prioriresponsiveness of the
existentialist intellectual's affirmativity as it is embodied in political
practices that paradoxically foreclose on the constitution of autono-
mous social beings.
Lib6rer l'homme de toute entrave pour ensuite l'encager pratiquement
dans une n6cessit6 historique revient en effet a lui enlever d'abord ses
raisons de lutter pour enfin le jeter a n'importe quel parti pourvu que
celui-ci n'ait d'autre regle que l'efficacite. C'est alors passer, selon la loi du
9Albert Camus, "Lettre au directeur des 'Temps modernes,"' Les tempsmodernes82
(August 1952): 317-33.
M LN 559
nihilisrne,de l'extremeliberte a l'extremenecessite;ce n'est rien d'autre,

que se vouer a fabriquerdes esclaves.(330)
Here Camus foregrounds the paradoxical nature of Sartrean free-
dom and acts as the interlocutor of the metanarrative of historical
materialism with its tropes of time and class. The advocates of
historical necessity are regarded as condemned to a theoretical death
through the imposition of an intellectual slavery predicated on the
"death sentences" of Marxist discourse. By maintaining a position of
cognitive skepticism in regard to theory, Camus paradoxically be-
comes a man of vision, an ethical pragmatist whose observation of the
"real"replaces prefabricated narratives of a revolutionary universal.
Ironically, Camus situates himself as a moral witness of the present
who adheres to an even higher principle of justice, one based on an
equilibrium devoid of any conceptual or theoretical excess. To bear
witness for Camus is thus to assume the solitude associated with the
responsibility of speaking for others and to others in a measured
perspective. Whereas Camus envisages Sartre and the Marxists as
engaged in ideological misrecognition, the Camusian intellectual
attests to the failures derived from a so-called redemptive social order.
He functions as a vehicule to invoke an imperative for a human
community tied to a reality beyond itself: the universal dictum to give
life value.
Algerian Angst
Many of the issues, both epistemological and political, concerning
Camus's critique of Marxism in L'hommerevolteand the controversy
surrounding it are played out in his reaction to the Algerian question
and France's colonial past. Camus found himself trapped in a kind of
a "no-exit situation," cornered between an allegiance to preserve the
legitimacy of people of French origin in Algeria and a sincere desire
for reform against the plague of misery experienced by the mass of
Arabs. For Camus each side in the Algerian conflict, committed to the
justness of its cause, defined the enemy as the incarnation of absolute
evil in all its inflexibility and therefore found it responsible for the
breakdown of community.
In essence, Camus sought the creation of an equilibrium that
isolated both revolutionary nationalists and those who wanted to
maintain the status quo in terms of a colonial presence in Algeria. As
late as 1955 Camus still asked for "la place du dialogue" in the
agonistic relationship between the French and the Algerians. He
invoked a humanitarian idealism that could be implemented by the

magical formulation of common objectives proposed by competing
opponents. Capable of engendering a utopic space, this magical
thinking was founded on the paradoxical consensus associated with
the meaning of utopia itself as a place that doesn't exist. "I1etait mon
devoir," claims Camus, "de venir repercuter aupres de vous un appel
de simple humanite, susceptible, sur un point au moins, de faire taire
les fureurs et de rassembler la plupart des Alg6riens, francais ou
arabes, sans qu'ils aient a rien abandonner de leurs convictions"
("Appel pour une treve civile en Algerie," 992). The way the Algerians
can come into their own, Camus suggests, the measure of their
humanistic and democratic commitment, is through the birth of a
consciousness that imposes upon itself an imaginary coherence
through the silencing of excess .
For a nation to exist, as Renan suggested a century earlier in
"Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?," it must forget violence and participate in
a social contract modeled on the image of a harmonious equilib-
rium.10By focusing on forgetting as the road to collective existence,
Camus proposes a future upon which a solidarity emanates from the
implementation of a homogenized ethic. '"e veux croire, a toute
force, que la paix se levera sur nos champs, sur nos montagnes, nos
rivages et qu'alors enfin Arabes et Fran;ais, r6concilies dans la libert6
et lajustice, feront l'effort d'oublier le sang qui les s6pare aujourd'hui.
Ce jour-la, nous qui sommes ensemble exilds dans la haine et le
desepoir, retrouverons ensemble une patrie" ("Lettre a un militant
algerien," 965-66). Unity, as he sees it, is a point of identification and
an effacement of sorts ("de faire taire leurs convictions"), a position
that offers no other catharsis than the desire to bond against the
absolute of absolutes, the absurdity of death. "Aucune cause ne
justifie la mort de l'innocent" ("Appel pour une treve civile," 993).
The call for a political truce between enemies thus represents a
commitment to the willful censorship of rage and to the transforma-
tion of a potentially virtuous populace into agents of moral good.
As in the case of his encounter with extremist ideologies, Camus
saw justice and moderation, grounded in the construction of a
community attuned to the limitations of human existence, as the only
efficacious response to the Algerian conflict. "Ma conviction est que
nous ne pouvons plus avoir raisonnablement l'espoir de tout sauver,
o1See Ernest Renan, "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation," in Oeuvrescompletesde ErnestRenan,

vol. 1 (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1947).
M LN 561
mais que nous pouvons nous proposer au moins de sauver les corps,
pour que l'avenir demeure possible" (335). To be sure, the future is
contingent on a limited form of salvation which, as he describes it,
reproduces a narrative of progress and development. With this in
mind Camus conceptualizes his function as a mediator of extremes,
as one who depends on the phenomenological language of balancing
for the disintoxication of the poison of political fanaticism. "Le r6le
de l'intellectual est de discerner, selon ses moyens, dans chaque
camp, les limites respectives de la force et de la justice. II est donc
necessaire d'eclairer les definitions pour d6sintoxiquer les esprits et
apaiser les fanatismes, m&mea contre-courant" (898-99). For Camus,
then, the intellectual must become a moral agent and a force of
justice within the public sphere so that those who are alienated (such
as the indigenous Algerian Arab population) may be subsumed by the
imperatives of a social community authenticated on reason and
peace. The obligation in the face of violence, as Camus sees it, is a
paradoxically "pacifistactivism,"one that is opposed to all constituen-
cies of meaning marked by domination and essentialism. "Un
intellectuel, me semble-t-il, n'a que faire, a moins de prendre les
armes lui-meme. Lorsque la violence repond a la violence dans un
delire qui s'exaspere et rend impossible le simple langage de raison,
le role des intellectuels ne peut-etre, comme on le lit tous les jours,
d'excuser de loin l'une des violences et de condamner l'autre ... leur
r6le doit etre de travailler dans le sens de l'apaisement pour que la
raison retrouve ses chances" (895). Appeasement, as it is described
here, is the universal a prioriof community which is founded on the
evacuation of ideological plenitude. Accordingly, Camus's goal of
constructing a social imaginary, derived from the consensus values of
regulative notions such as justice, happiness, and peace, enables him
to lay claim to the possession of an ethico-political force invoking
moral presence through the absence of absolutes.
As early as 1939 Camus wrote a series of journalist articles in the
Socialist Algerrepublicainabout the suffering of the Berber inhabitants
of the Kabyle mountains who were victimized by French colonial rule.
From the beginning of his discussion of the inequities of colonialism
Camus puts forth a notion of justice that moderately revises the
colonial context by imparting wisdom to the "conquerants inquiets."
He suggests the possibility that the colonized can overcome the
alienation resulting from injustice and poverty through the imposi-
tion of a dividing line that segregates the absolutism of colonial rule
from the humanist imperatives of a more enlightened albeit more
moderate colonial presence. In this regard, inspired by the 1936

Blum-Violette project proposing a policy of assimilation based on civil
rights and electoral status, Camus puts forth the suggestion of
"administrative emancipation" for the indigenous population of
Algeria as a way to seek positive change and assuage the intense
pressures of more radical Algerian nationalists. The righting of an
injustice, through legalistic reform, can generate a solution capable
of dissipating dissension; it enables those in a politically minoritarian
position to align themselves with a political reformism advocating
assimilation and yet allowing the victims of famine to "remain faithful
to themselves."
At this historical juncture to be a good Frenchman, for Camus,
means to engage in a quest for justice activating a posteriorithe
potential humanism of the French nation. In adhering to this
imperative justice is derived from a sense of purposiveness that takes
self-reference (the demands of being a good Frenchman) as its
defining act of virtue.
Je dois dire qu'il est difficileaujourd'hui,comment etre un bon Francais.
Tant de gens, et des plus diff6rents,se targuentde ce titre.... Mais,du
moins, on peut savoirce que c'est qu'un homme juste. Et mon prejuge,
c'est que la Francene sauraitetre mieux representeeet defendue que par
des actes de justice. ("Miserede la Kabylie,"936)
At issue in Camus's pre-world war two commentary is how best to
represent French interests. Camus's moral reasoning clearly opposes
the "abstract negation" of Hegelian philosophy and opts instead for
one of relativity (what may be termed "the relatively good") promot-
ing universal responsibility in relation to the nation as a whole ("la
France").
What is most striking in this context is the manner in which Camus
becomes the spokesman of French national self-interest through a
rhetoric that limits the parameters of extreme nationalist positions
and opens up the possibility for change at the same time. By basing
human happiness on the myth of social integrity derived from the
principles of 1789, Camus proposes a human community in which a
unified ideal is invented through the convergence of loosely con-
nected subjectivities that maintain differences within a whole. It is
therefore not surprising that in Camus's 1958 preface to Chroniques
algerienneshe suggests that "truejustice" can only be realized in the
context of a generalized ethic that allows for difference, a curiously
homogenized cultural hybridity grounded in an communalism free
of distorting influences.
M LN 563
Mais peut-on survivre comme peuple sans rendre justice, dans une mesure
raisonnable, a d'autres peuples? La France meurt de ne pas resoudre ce
dilemme. Les premiers veulent l'universel au d6triment du particulier. Les
autres le particulier au detriment de l'universel. Les deux vont ensemble.
Pour trouver la societe nationale il faut passer par la societe nationale.
Pour preserver la societe nationale, il faut l'ouvrir sur une perspective
universelle. (896)
According to Camus's logic the universal and the particular are

interdependent. But if a human community is to be established it
must be constituted through a national society that maintains a
"universal perspective." The theory and practice of nationhood, as it
is articulated here by Camus, depends on an assimilation that is
ironically in opposition to the etymological meaning of "nation" as
a"natural" phenomenon. Ultimately Camus, like Renan in his re-
marks concerning unity as a condition of nationhood, demands the
creation of a national culture where particular human subjects can
only establish community by immersing themselves in an anonymity
of sorts. Camus's "consensual" nationalism is predicated on the
construction of an "imagined community" whose survival depends on
an a somewhat unexamined ethical consciousness that gives rise to
unity through the evacuation of definitional constraints.
The 1945 Setif massacres in Algeria motivated Camus to write a
series of journalistic pieces for Combat in which he urged the French
government not to engage in an inhumane and violent reprisal for
the rebellious uprising. In these essays Camus describes the S6tif riots
of Algerian nationalists as the result of the violence inflicted on the
Arab population by an unjust French economic policy. Long before it
became fashionable for French left-wing intellectuals to be critical of
colonialism, Camus dramatically asserted that the suffering under
French rule would only get worse in years to come and eventually
would produce more intolerance and bloodshed. However, although
Camus recognized in the polemical discourse of nationalists such as
Ferhat Abbas and Aziz Kessouz that the Arab inhabitants of Algeria
no longer wished to be assimilated, he attempted, nevertheless, to
frame a solution to that political problem in the context of French
democratic traditions. "Persuadons-nous bien qu'en Afrique du Nord
comme ailleurs on ne sauvera rien de francais sans sauver lajustice.
... Tout ce que nous pouvons faire pour la verite, francaise et
humaine, nous avons a le faire contre la haine . . . tachons de ne rien
ajouter aux rancoeurs alg6riennes. C'est la force infinie de lajustice,
et elle seule, qui doit nous aider a reconquerir l'Alg6rie et ses
habitants" ("Crise en Algerie," 959). In effect Camus starts with the
presupposition that justice is a French phenomenon; he conflates

French "truth" with human "truth" so that political contradictions
and conflicts between colonizer and colonized are effaced in the
name of universal good. By appropriating the discourse of French
nationalism as a humanistic phenomenon, the Camusian subject
reinscribes a colonial presence as something that already exists in
culture. The "reconquering of Algeria" alluded to here paradoxically
becomes an act of benevolence framed by the assumption that that
which is democratic is quintessentially French and is therefore
universally just. Camus's perception of a "crisis in Algeria" is ulti-
mately positioned and subjected to a French representation ofjustice.
It is fixed by a position which offers no absolute description of truth
other than being something aspiring to an ideal which can only
become inevitable in its independence from the cultural specificity of
the historical process.
The revolt for independence in Algeria began in 1954 when the
FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale) demanded the creation of a
sovereign Islamic state without a French presence and a civil war took
place. What became clear at this moment and what would eventually
entrap Camus in a state of perpetual anguish was the FLN's desire to
reject the possibility of reform and its goal of engaging in acts of
violence at any cost to achieve liberation. Recognizing that the
politics of assimilation was no longer operative given what he termed
"the individuality of the Arab people," Camus still maintained the
hope of keeping a French presence in Algeria that would practice a
politics of justice. "Je crois en Algerie a une politique de reparation,
non a une politique d'expiation.... Et il n'y aura pas d'avenir qui ne
rende justice en meme temps aux deux communaut6s d'Algerie"
("Chroniques Algeriennes," 898). Quite clearly what Camus describes
as "cet esprit d'equite" (898) is a solution based on the peaceful co-
existence of French and Arab populations within the boundaries of a
French constitutional framework. What Camus is proposing is not a
simple reification of a French colonial presence which Edward Said
unjustly characterizes as the interventions of "a moral man in an
immoral situation" (174).11 Instead Camus struggles with and sin-
cerely opts for an idealized version of reform that would include all
those committed to non-violence and divorced from the totalizing
impulses of nefarious ideological imperatives. By deterritorializing
the dominating force of fanaticism in its diverse incarnations, Camus
" Edward W. Said, Cultureand Imperalism(New York: Knopf, 1993).
M LN 565
seeks to legitimate a kinder and gentler society predicated on the

founding of a community where cultures cohabit in mutual respect
for one another rather than in contentious coexistence. For Camus
salvation can only exist in the present through the affirmation of the
multiple cultural identities that make up the land known as Algeria.
Ironically the idea of self-determination and the founding of an
Algerian nation limited to a Muslim population devoted to the
eradication of Frenchmen created intense anxiety for Camus. By
rejecting that possibility as a solution to the inequities of colonization,
and by multiplying the recognition of diverse indigenous groups (by
making every possible other the same in regard to the idea of the
"homeland"), Camus appropriates the power to imagine a commu-
nity whose hybrid nature forestalls the very existence of national
demarcation determined by ethnic and political purity. In his last
published essay on the Algerian conflict (1958) Camus, wounded by
attacks of betrayal that made him an exile in his native land, assumes
a somewhat defensive posture by juxtaposing the unfeasibility of an
economically independent Arab Algeria while at the same time
demystifying the idea of ever establishing any Algerian nation.
Il n'y a jamais eu encore de nation algerienne. Les Juifs, les Turcs,les
Grecs, les Italiens,Les Berberes,auraientautant de droit a reclamer la
direction de cette nation virtuelle.Actuellement,les Arabesne forment
pas a eux seulstoute 1'Algerie.L'importanceet 1'anciennetedu peuplement
francais en particulier,suffisent a creer un probleme qui ne peut se
comparera rien dans l'histoire.Les Francaisd'Alg6riesont, eux aussi,au
sens fort du terme,des indigenes.IIfaut ajouterqu'uneAlgeriepurement
arabe ne pourrait acceder a 1'independanceeconomique sans laquelle
1'independancepolitique n'est qu'un leurre. ("Algerie1958,"1012-13)
Challenging the idea of a single unity nation as he does here, Camus
sets things up in such a way that allows him to reject the creation of an
authorizing identity capable of imposing totalizing parameters in the
name of national freedom.
In this light, it would be incorrect to describe Camus as an en-
lightened paternalist who simply wanted to reaffirm, albeit discretely,
the prerogatives of an unrestrained French colonial rule. Quite
clearly, Camus proclaimed in 1958 that the FLN's reign of terror in
the name of national liberation was "illegitimate" based as it was on
irrationalism and terror. Camus regards the dangers inherent to the
self-determination propagated through the terrorism of the FLN not
as a simple threat to keeping Algeria French, but as a challenge to the
moral values and natural rights of Algerians as a whole.
What is at stake in this polemic is the issue ofjustice which can only
be realized through participation in a community that forecloses on
the possibility of reasoning away crime and allows for the "reality"of
heterogeneous cultural elements.
On a le droit, et le devoir, de dire que la lutte armee et la repression ont
pris ... des aspects inacceptables. Les represailles contre les populations
civiles et les pratiques de torture sont des crimes dont nous sommes tous
solidaires ... nous devons refuser toutejustification ... a ces methodes....
Des l'instant ... ou ... on les justifie, il n'y a plus de regle ni de valeur,
toutes les causes se valent et la guerre sans buts ni lois consacre le triomphe
du nihilisme. (Avant-propos, "Chroniques algeriennes," 893)
For Camus the authorization of violence cannot be stipulated by any

law; equity, regarded as a relativized albeit universal phenomenon,
admits rights to all groups without any coercion. To be sure, if free-
dom is the cornerstone of Camus's imagined community its modus
operandi is in its opposition to injustice and repression in any context.
Whether it be the terrorist tactics practiced by the FLN or the torture
inflicted by the French army on the Arab population of Algeria,
Camus argues against the "casuistry of blood" that undermines
community. The recourse to justice as ethical imperative has uncov-
ered an antinomy between the universal claim to justice and Camus's
demand that each case of justice be treated as an individual one. Yet
the Algeria which emanates from the Camusian imaginary has its
subjects positioned in a geographical space representing a diverse
people with a diverse history in a singular conception of justice: a
universalized sense of mutual recognition and the commitment to
human dignity that it entails.
In the end, Camus adhered to the creation of a multicultural
federation based on the principles of association and cultural au-
tonomy, what he termed "a French Commonwealth" of different
ethnic groups committed to "l'union des diff6rences, ce ne sont plus
des territoires mais des communautes aux personnalit6s differentes"
("L'Algerie nouvelle," 1016). Camus had come a long way: he
condemned colonial oppression outright and he rejected his earlier
solution of assimilation. But he could never tolerate violence or the
possibility of a unicultural Moslem nation in Algeria that would not
include the rights of what he termed "indigenous Frenchmen."
Neither at home amongst Arab nationalists in his native Algeria nor
at ease amongst pied-noir traditionalists, he ultimately became an
outsider, caught in a state of instability, whose commitment to justice
left him isolated. Depressed by the inability to resolve the Algerian
M LN 567
conflict, Camus was forced to choose in the last years of his life to
disengage himself from it and he opted instead for the sterility of
exile and silence. "C'est pourquoi, dans l'impossibilit6 de mejoindre
a aucun des camps extremes, devant la disparition progressive de ce
troisi&me camp oiu l'on pouvait encore garder la tete froide ... j'ai
decide de ne plus participer aux incessantes pol6miques qui n'ont eu
d'autre effet que de durcir en Alg6rie les intransigeances" ("Chro-
niques alg6riennes," 891). "Ce troisieme camp," was Camus's middle
ground representing a proper distance between absolutes, one that
idealized the sovereignty of universal justice and the sanctity of
human life, but one which could never just simply be.
Critical Fictions
I wish now to turn briefly to Camus's last works of fiction, the
collection of short stories, L'exil et le royaume,published in 1957.12
Several of the stories in the collection take place in Algeria or in other
colonial settings. In his chapter "Camus and the French Imperial
Experience," Edward Said takes a rather negative attitude toward
Camus. In a somewhat cursory reading of his narrative production he
declares that Camus was so tied to a Eurocentric tradition that he
reified French priority in Algeria and blinded himself to the fate of
Algerian Muslims. Accordingly, he regards the discourse on Algeria
embedded in Camus's fictional texts as emblematic of France's desire
for colonial hegemony. "The novels and short stories," claims Said,
"narrate the result of a victory won over a pacified, decimated Muslim
population whose rights to land have been severely curtailed" (181).
To be sure, the stories in L'exil et le royaumeexamined here, "La
femme adultere" and "L'hote," each possess a colonial setting and
function as critical allegories entrapping the reader in the unde-
cidability of Camus's ethical posturing. What is striking about these
narratives is that in portraying the trials and tribulations of pied-noir
characters (Janine and Daru) attempting to transcend the solitude of
their existence and the imprisonment of their past, they translate,
nevertheless, a symptomology characterized by tension and irresolu-
tion. Camus's texts enact narrative strategies revealing a process of
12All
quotes from Lexil et le royaumewill be drawn from Albert Camus, Thteatre, recits,
nouvelles,preface parJean Grenier. Textes etablis et annotes par Roger Quillot (Paris:
Gallimard, Biblioth&que de la Pleiade, 1962). Pages references will be indicated in the
body of the text.
self-conscious struggle concerning the desire for community and the

impossibility of ever establishing an absolute standard for its founda-
tion. The relation of Algeria to the pied-noirconsciousness of Janine
and Daru in these fictions produces a "remoteness" and instability,
strategies of evasion that dramatize the difference between what is
close and what will forever remain distant. In effect, these stories
represent the alienation experienced by central characters who are
isolated in the exile of pied-noir consciousness which, despite the
desire for change, prevents them from getting outside the prison of a
culturally determined self and entering into communion with a
kingdom incarnating a shared reality.
In "La femme adultere," the first of the stories in the collection,
Camus's narrative recounts the story of a pied-noircouple Marcel and
Janine who journey into the heart of the hostile and sterile landscape
that comprises Algeria's heartland. Marcel, a petit bourgeois mer-
chant finding himself threatened by the economic realities of a
changing world where he can no longer depend on intermediaries
for the sale of his fabrics, travels south with his wife and deals with the
Arab population on his own. Marcel is a rather hostile creature, the
quintessential colonracist who inhabits a country to which he belongs
but in which he and Janine can never completely be at home.
Confronted by the presence of Arabs, Janine experiences estrange-
ment from both their disturbing silence and the alienating force of
their language which disrupts her hold on existence. "Leur silence,
leur impassibilit6 finissaient par peser a Janine; il lui semblait qu'elle
voyageait depuis desjours avec cette escorte muette ... Le chauffeur
dit a la cantonade quelques mots dans cette langue qu'elle avait
entendue toute sa vie sansjamais la comprendre" (1560; 1562).
The opening scene of the story emblematizes the imprisonment
that Janine experiences in a multicultural world where she has
internalized the perceived effects of othering which ironically she
herself has projected onto her Arab neighbors. Caught in the
claustrophobic space of a bus buffeted by the winds and clouded in "a
mineral mist," she is described as the passive object of a soldier's gaze,
a paradoxically absent presence, a virtual subject waiting to be
fulfilled. But perhaps even more startling is the intensity of the
discomfort thatJanine experiences in the unexpectedly cold climate
of the desert. Unfettered by the difficulty of the voyage, the Arabs on
the bus are depicted, through thejealous gaze of her eyes, as being at
ease in their voluminous clothes and the luxury of traveling empty-
handed. She, on the other hand, perceives the weight of her being
M LN 569
and the imprisonment of her isolation in a private space that she

cannot transcend.
L'autocar etait plein d'Arabes qui faisaient mine de dormir, enfouis dans
leur burnous. Quelques-uns avaient ramen6 leur pieds sur la banquette et
oscillaient plus que les autres dans le mouvement de la voiture. Leur
silence, leur impassibilite finissaient par peser aJanine ... elle remarqua
qu'ils semblaient au large, malgre leurs amples vetements, sur les ban-
quettes oiu son mari et elle tenaient a peine. (1560-61)
Experiencing the burden of her solitude, Janine ironically exposes

the unhomeliness of being amongst these Arabs whose nomadic
existence represents everything that she perceives she is not.
Indeed from a symbolic perspective Janine enters a foreign world
with a good deal of excess baggage which, in fact, represents her
relationship to the past. Like her husbandJanine has become more
physically corpulent in middle age and she dreams nostalgically of
the flexibility and freedom that she once had as a young girl. "Elle
revait aux palmiers droits et flexibles, et a la jeune fille qu'elle avait
ete" (1565). Finally, her twenty-five year marriage to Marcel, charac-
terized as a gradual constriction of existence, has produced what may
be described as an "angina of the soul" depicted in the spatial
metaphors representing imprisonment and claustrophobia. "Les
anndes pass6es, dans la p6nombre qu'ils entretenaient, volets mi-clos.
L'ete, les plages, les promenades, le ciel meme etaient loin" (1562).
The inhospitability of the environment to the couple is not simply
limited to the physical space of the bus. The landscape of southern
Algeria is represented as being sterile described as it is with palm trees
"cut out of metal" and dry plants growing in a background of hard
stone. As a European woman observing the nomads of the desert she
experiences isolation because of the incompatibility she discovers
between herself and the world she now inhabits. "Elle marchait sans
voir personne, courb6e sous une immense et brusque fatigue, trainant
son corps dont le poids lui paraissait maintenant insupportable.... A
prdsent, elle se sentait trop grande, trop epaisse, trop blanche aussi
pour ce monde ou elle venait d'entrer" (1571). Estrangement as it is
depicted here is the result of the foregrounding of perceived bodily
differences; the excess that is attached to the portraiture of Janine
locates her exile in the inverted image of what is absent from her
stereotypical perception of Arab physicality. The hyperbolic repeti-
tion of negative images installs classificatory distinctions; they impose
radical barriers between ethnic identities and transform the perceived
otherness of Arabs into the European subject's self-imposed projec-

tion of a position on the margins of the community.
Camus's use of the image in this story and the agonistic relation-
ship it establishes between self and other reveal how the imagination
functions as a social practice in this tale. From a narratological
perspective it allegorizes social relations and is central to the discur-
sive tensions that are negotiated between various sites of agency in the
text. Accordingly, in the dramatic scene near the end of the story
Camus's text conflates the topoiof temporality and sexuality through
a network of images that represent the desire to transcend the
imprisonment of the past through the dynamics of love.
Realizing that her imprisonment was due in large part to the
suffocating life that she has lived with Marcel and all that he
represents, Janine describes her recognition of the somatic effects of
this failed relationship: "Son coeur lui faisait mal, elle 6touffait sous
un poids immense dont elle d6couvrait soudain qu'elle le trainait
depuis vingt ans, et sous lequel elle se debattait maintenant de toutes
ses forces" (1573). Anticipating her freedom Janine flees the sordid
environment of her hotel room and her husband's bedside for the
parapet of a fort where she attempts to commune with the cosmic
forces of the universe.
Au bout d'un instant . . . il lui sembla qu'une sorte de giration pesante

entrainaitle ciel au-dessusd'elle. Dans les epaisseursde la nuit seche et
froide, des milliers d'etoiles se formaient sans treve et leurs glacons
etincelants, aussit6t detaches, commenCaientde glisser insensiblement
versl'horizon.Janine ne pouvaits'arrachera la contemplationde ces feux
a la derive. Elle tournaitavec eux et le meme cheminement immobile la
reunissaita son etre le plus profond, ouile froid et le desir maintenantse
combattaient .... Devant elle, les etoiles tombaient,une a une ... et a
chaque fois Janine s'ouvraitun peu plus a la nuit. Elle respirait,elle
oubliait le froid, le poids des etres, la vie demente ou fig6e, la longue
angoisse de vivreet de mourir ... il lui semblaitretrouverses racines,la
seve montaita nouveaudans son corps qui ne tremblaitplus ... avec une
douceur insupportable, l'eau de la nuit commenca d'emplir Janine,
submergea le froid, monta peu a peu du centre obscur de son etre et
debordaen flots ininterrompusjusqu'asa bouche pleine de gemissements.
L'instantd'apres,le ciel entier s'etendaitau-dessusd'elle, renvers6esur la
terre froide. (1574-75)
In the face of things this scene exquisitely stages the performance of

Janine's desire to refigure the paralysis that her female subjectivity
has become. Through a figurative reversibility established between
M LN 571
human sexuality and the relationship between Janine and the physi-
cal geography of the Algerian landscape, the text portrays Janine's
"recovering of her roots" as the simulated consummation of a unity
forged with desert and sky, a rebonding, not as an "imperial pres-
ence," but of humanity's symbolic copulation that ultimately proves
to be fruitless. However symbolic it may be the adultery in question
here stems fromJanine's betrayal of her relationship to the past: her
marriage and her cultural myopia. As she flees Marcel's world of the
"pied noir profond" she opens herself to a world in which love has
become aestheticized in the eroticized language representing her
communion with nature. If Janine's sexual arrousal is figuratively
represented in her lust for the land, it is to demonstrate how the
transfiguration of desire from the claustrophobic pied-noirworld of
Marcel to the vast open space of the universe temporarily facilitates a
spiritual rebirth in the name of love.
Like Camus who finds justice and harmony in the dehistorizied
space of an idealized ethic emphasizing human good,Janine can only
find her freedom and redefine her relationship to the world in a
spatial expanse situated outside of the vicissitudes of time. In an
earlier visit to the fortJanine describes the ontological effect on her
of the fullness associated with temporal deferral. "IIlui semble que le
cours du monde venait alors de s'arreter et que personne, a partir de
cet instant, ne vieillirait plus ni ne mourrait." Subsumed by the
paradoxically empty plenitude of eternity, the pleasure that Janine
experiences is based on an abstract rapport with a universe that is
devoid of a relationship to the "real."The imaginary nature of the
encounter portrayed in the text carries with it a discourse of personal
struggle that, although described in eroticized terms, will ultimately
make true consummation impossible and renderJanine the victim of
a "still-born"spiritual rebirth.
In the end Janine's symbolic adultery and her quest for freedom
fail. Inextricably tied to the world of Marcel despite her consciousness
of its suffocating force, she returns to the hotel and assumes once
again the exile that results from her failure to sustain a productive
communion with the universe and assume the freedom that it entails.
Mired in sadness for what can never be, Janine's desire for another
temporality and another topography culminates in the sterility of the
alienated silence and the breakdown in communication on which the
narrative finally rests.
"L'h6te" recounts the story of Daru, a school teacher educating
Arab children in a remote location in Algeria where, despite his
ambiguous status as pied-noir,he feels he inhabits a land to which he

naturally belongs. "Lui qui vivait presque en moine dans cette ecole
perdue, content d'ailleurs du peu qu'il avait, et de cette vie rude,
s'6tait senti un seigneur.... Mais Daru y 6tait n6. Partout ailleurs, il se
sentait exile" (1612-13). As a teacher Daru is meant to represent a
more humane and measured colonial presence using education to
transmit the ideal of French knowledge to an Arabic-speaking popu-
lation which perhaps in no way serves their real needs. Yet in contrast
to the poverty experienced by the young victims of famine in this
region, Daru recognizes his own relative fortune and in this manner
the text foregrounds the way in which estrangement impinges upon
subjectivity. Wishing to engage in humanitarian aid through the
distribution of food and supplies, Daru, described as having felt like a
"lord"before "cette armee de fant6mes haillonneux" (1612), demon-
strates how Camus's concept of fraternal thought needs an outside,
an exterior in order to truly function. The condition for the construc-
tion of a humane subjectivity in this world is through the enlightened
opening of boundaries, a phenomenon that creates community
through the bracketing of a fundamental alienation.
As the narrative begins Daru is told by Balducci, a Corsican
policemen, that he must guard a nameless Arab prisoner accused of
murdering his cousin, and deliver him to a tribunal in a nearby town.
Camus's text projects the many ambivalences within Daru. He is torn
between his anger for his own people who have imposed on him a
task he does not wish to perform and the nameless Arab character
whose murder created a situation in which he is now irreversibly
implicated. "Le crime imbecile de cet homme le r6voltait, mais le
livrer etait contraire a l'honneur: d'y penser seulement le rendait fou
d'humiliation. Et il maudissait a la fois les siens qui lui envoyaient cet
Arabe et celui-ci qui avait os6 tuer et n'avait pas su s'enfuir" (1621).
Yet beyond this perceived annoyance the text dramatizes the exem-
plarity of Daru's will to do good and the ensuing conflict between the
enlightened pied-noirteacher and the obedient policeman. Despite
his shameful reluctance to put a rope around the Arab's neck,
Balducci ultimately represses his guilt as a sign of allegiance to a
French judicial system through a conscious commitment not to
witness and an unmitigated effort to forget. "Apres, ce sera fini,"
claims Balducci trying to convince Daru to deliver the Arab, "Tu
retrouveras tes eleves et la bonne vie" (1615). But if Daru refuses to
be complicitous with the demands put on him it is because he refuses
to isolate the Arab in a culturally separate realm.
M LN 573
Exhibiting neither a desire to harm the prisoner nor an imperative

to judge the specificity of his crime, Daru demonstrates a fraternal
kindness to the Arab and even affords him the possibility to escape.
Ironically when presented with this option the Arab chooses to follow
the road leading to the prison and thereby seals his fate. On the one
hand Daru betrays the directives of the colonial administration
represented by the figure of Balducci. Yet the consequences of
affording the prisoner the possibility of choosing for himself when he
appears somewhat unable to execute that decision produces a disas-
trous situation that paradoxically makes Daru betray the very prin-
ciples to which he appears to subscribe.
By displacing the choice onto the Arab, the story defers the
possibility of establishing true fraternity and renders Daru's earlier
kindness of sharing his food and shelter somewhat superfluous. Upon
returning to the school Daru encounters a frightening message on
the blackboard of a classroom revealing that for some there is no
salvation without unmitigated commitment and that the irony of fate
can render one an accomplice of harm even after the fact. "Tuas livre
notre frere. Tu paieras" (1623). As English Showalter has pointed out
concerning the inscription of this message, "'brother' can be taken
literally, as blood kind, or more loosely, as an active member of some
organization (a political party for example), or as a passive member
of some group (fellow countryman, for example)."13 Whatever inter-
pretation one might attribute to the possible meaning of the massage
on the blackboard one thing remains quite clear: the semi-viscous
behavior of Daru, his failure to act more definitively, results in an
ambivalence that may finally be interpreted by others as an act of
betrayal.
Within the context of the narrative Daru becomes the victim of the
moral ambiguity resulting from the consequences of his action; he is
therefore implicated retroactively in a disavowal of the humanistic
imperative. Although he repeats 'Je ne le livrerai pas" (1616) regard-
ing the fate of the Arab, he nevertheless fails to truly afford him the
freedom that he believes he deserves. Despite his commitment to
humane values the irony resulting from his ambiguous choice ulti-
mately subverts that commitment through the story's inability to
sustain a positive instrumentality. Daru has put into circulation a
social predicate subject to the revisionist effect of its perlocutionary
13English Showalter,Jr., Exilesand

Strangers(Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
1984), 74.
force through the truth lense of belief systems that are politically
motivated.
The effect of Daru's action (or perhaps his inaction) transform an
activity originally conceived as the manifestation of fraternal benevo-
lence into a tragically nefarious act through the protagonist's failure
to assume a more definitive and specified position. To be sure, the
representation of Daru as historical subject in the arena of the
Algerian conflict is not tied to a relationship of total identity with a
European discourse of hegemony. Although the text sometimes
situates Daru in a position of superiority by ascribing to him qualities
of perception and insight before the relative silence of the Arab, he
possesses nevertheless a basic sense of honor and fairness. Camus's
text complicates the idea of what might have been characterized by
some as a mere gesture of paternalism through a narrative pattern
that questions more than it identifies and in so doing challenges the
historically determined concepts of master and slave. There is no
simple solution, as Camus's text suggests, for applying any principle
that would reconcile the narrative to a singular notion of virtue or a
possible standard of interpretive truth.
Camus's story dramatizes the conflict at the core of his positioning
regarding the Algerian conflict as it holds up for scrutiny the
ambiguous effects of a curiously humanist action realized in the
indeterminate status of the story's end. The fundamental instability of
the story's conclusion suggests that Daru's attempt to disentangle
himself from a matrix of power where he would be in a position of
total agency produces a fracture in the efficacy of a humanistic
discourse of limits. Like Camus himself, Daru could be considered a
traitor from the perspective of the colonial administration due to the
refusal not to execute the legalistic demands made on him.14Yet from
the implied perspective of Arab consciousness Daru is equally
complicitous, but this time his complicity results from ambivalent
behavior. The decision not to choose isolates him even further and
makes him a total stranger in a country he considers his own.
Represented as rejecting a relative position of mastery, the figure of
Daru acts ambiguously and creates for this humanist persona a crisis
of authority manifesting itself in his tragic exile. "Dans ce vaste pays
qu'il avait tant aim6, il 6tait seul" (1623).
14
As Felman has demonstrated "betrayal"is a key literary toposin Camus's work and
that it may be modeled on what she terms "the betrayal of... friends and allies" in the
Camus/Sartre debate. "Camus now realizes that the real witness is a dissenter by
definition, doomed by his very function to remain alone" (181).
M LN 575
Like the principle characters in these critical allegories, Camus was

never completely able to extricate himself from his ties to the past
concerning the Algerian conflict. The critical allegories constituting
these two stories dramatize the personal struggle to effect change and
the isolation that it ultimately entailed. Camus was trapped by a
sincere desire to establish a human community unfettered by ideo-
logical absolutism and the belief that justice in Algeria could only be
realized if the French were part of it. In the end, Camus chose to live
as a humanist intellectual endlessly balancing limits and calling into
question essentialized categories of force. The call for a more limited
redemption left Camus tragically abandoned in the exile resulting
from the ambiguous vicissitudes of his own humanness and the
unexpected negative interpretations that some of his choices would
finally produce.
DartmouthCollege

Camus's Curious Humanism or the Intellectual in Exile

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Camus's Curious Humanism or the Intellectual in Exile

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Camus's Curious Humanism or the Intellectual in Exile

Author(s): Lawrence D. Kritzman

In the Companyof Criticsthe social theorist Michael Walzer character-

MLN112 (1997): 550-575 ? 1997 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

as early as Le mythede Sisyphe(1942) Camus suggests that judgment

of a more balanced ethos devoid of specified ideological content. It is

By its attempt to conceptualize history on the principle of absolute

4 See Jeffrey C. Issac, Arendt,Camusand ModemRebellion(New Haven: Yale

into the progress of "humanity,"Camus acknowledges the necessity of

What ultimately triggered the Sartre-Camus controversy in May

5Herbert R. Lottman, AlbertCamus (New York: Doubleday, 1979), 500.

for his participation in the Resistance and the exemplarity resulting

Quite clearly Sartre assumes the role of a disappointed lover (he

7Jean-Paul Sartre, "Reponse a Albert Camus," Les tempsmodernes82 (August 1952),

ized standard of equity and one of critical abstraction. "Ou est

Making history the object of either a positive or negative absolute

nihilisrne,de l'extremeliberte a l'extremenecessite;ce n'est rien d'autre,

invoked a humanitarian idealism that could be implemented by the

o1See Ernest Renan, "Qu'est-ce qu'une nation," in Oeuvrescompletesde ErnestRenan,

moderate colonial presence. In this regard, inspired by the 1936

According to Camus's logic the universal and the particular are

presupposition that justice is a French phenomenon; he conflates

" Edward W. Said, Cultureand Imperalism(New York: Knopf, 1993).

seeks to legitimate a kinder and gentler society predicated on the

For Camus the authorization of violence cannot be stipulated by any

self-conscious struggle concerning the desire for community and the

and the imprisonment of her isolation in a private space that she

Experiencing the burden of her solitude, Janine ironically exposes

otherness of Arabs into the European subject's self-imposed projec-

Au bout d'un instant . . . il lui sembla qu'une sorte de giration pesante

In the face of things this scene exquisitely stages the performance of

ambiguous status as pied-noir,he feels he inhabits a land to which he

Exhibiting neither a desire to harm the prisoner nor an imperative

13English Showalter,Jr., Exilesand

Like the principle characters in these critical allegories, Camus was

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