David R. Ellison

Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (review)

David Carroll’s 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 Camus’s politics that branded him a “colonialist sympathizer” (in their different ways, Albert Memmi, Conor Cruise O’Brien, 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 Camus’s 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 O’Brien 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 Camus’s 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 Camus’s appeals to human feelings (revolt, for example, begins in a strong personal feeling: je me révolte) 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.

Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion

Humanity at zero hour Totalitarianism and the intoxication of power The ambiguities of humanism Revolt and foundations of politics Rebellion and democratic politics Swimming against the tide Rebellious politics reconsidered.