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Chapter 1 Rebellion and Feminism 1 Notes Chapter 1 Rebellion and Feminism 1. For example, Greta Gaard argues that ecofeminism is unlike rebellion in that it offers an alternative, in addition to rebellion’s perceived limitations in critique alone (Ecological 31). 2. John Cruickshank also argues that the meaning of “rebellion” changes from the beginning of The Rebel, in which it is a metaphysical concept and a philosophical attitude, to the end, in which it is a political philosophy of moderation and political reform. I would agree with his further argument that the multiple uses of the word “revolt” causes confusion in Camus’s work (118). 3. Camus also explored the question of absurdity in three genres: (1) a play, Caligula; (2) a novel, The Stranger; and (3) a philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus. These early works are the ones with which most people in the United States are familiar, especially since they are often assigned in high school English or French classes, or in college survey courses on existential- ism, but being only the first stage in a long series, they are hardly represen- tative of Camus’s thought. 4. Though born in Algeria into a poor family of European descent, Camus spent the bulk of World War II in Paris, where Nazism and resistance to it were everpresent realities. A recurrence of tuberculosis had prompted him to travel to the mountains of France in the winter of 1942, during which time the Allies invaded North Africa, preventing his return to Algeria. He and his wife were separated for the remainder of the war. Already a noted author, Camus took up residence in Paris where he was employed as an editor at the Gallimard publishing house, and soon became part of the intellectual circle that included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (though never becom- ing one of Sartre’s disciples or one of “The Family”—which seemed to irritate de Beauvoir), Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Arthur Koestler, and Jean and Michel Gallimard. After the occupation of Paris, Camus became active in the resis- tance group, Combat, eventually becoming the editor of their underground newspaper by the same name, and was renowned for his rebellious editorials. 5. This was the development of a theme he had actually contemplated nearly twenty years earlier. He wrote in his journal around 1932, “ ‘Should one accept life as it is? That would be stupid, but how to do otherwise? Should one accept the human condition? On the contrary, I think revolt is part of human nature’ ” (qtd. in Todd 21). 194 / notes 6. At the time it was published (1951), L’Homme révolté (The Rebel) was hugely controversial, particularly within the French intellectual community, who were appalled by Camus’s critiques of revolution and communism. The Rebel received a scathing review in Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes (though Sartre himself did not write it), to which Camus responded bitterly, provoking an even more biting response from Sartre himself: “ ‘And what if your book bore witness merely to your philosophical incompetence? If it were composed of hastily gathered knowledge [It took Camus six years to write The Rebel.], acquired secondhand? If, far from obscuring your brilliant argu- ments, reviewers have been obliged to light lamps in order to make out the contours of your weak, obscure, and confused reasoning?’ ” Sartre, “Réponse à Albert Camus,” Les Temps modernes, 82, August 1952, rpt. in Situations IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1964, 90–126, qtd. in Judt 100). Camus found himself dismissed by the community of which he had once been a part. His work, however, was embraced by others. The poet, René Char, wrote to Camus that he thought L’Homme révolté was Camus’s best book so far. Polish painter and writer Josef Czapski told Camus, “ ‘Immediately after the attack that was concentrated on you, I wanted to write to tell you why I love you, and why you have more friends than you might think’ ” (qtd. in Todd 314). Witold Gombrowicz asked Czeslaw Milosz to send Camus a copy of his own works as an act of solidarity with him. Hannah Arendt wrote Camus a letter of admiration and praise for The Rebel (Judt 129). Camus suffered from the controversy, writing to his wife in September 1952, “ ‘Decidedly, this book has cost me dearly, and today I only have doubts about it, and about myself, who resembles it too much’ ” (qtd. in Todd 311). Nevertheless, Camus continued to believe that L’Homme révolté was his best work, writing, “ ‘It’s a book that has provoked lots of noise, and which has earned me more enemies than friends, . but if I had to do it all over again, I would rewrite the book just as it is. It’s the book of mine which I value the most’ ” (qtd. in Todd 315). Writing thirty years after its publication, Camus-scholar Raymond Gay- Crozier writes: “The significance of The Rebel clearly transcends the political and historical circumstances of its gestation and the acrimonious polemics that accompanied it,” Gay-Crozier, La Revues lettres Modernes: Albert Camus, 12: la révolté en question (Paris: Minad, 1985, 3 (qtd. in Brée 88) ). 7. Susan Griffin has made a similar argument that until the rebel comes to understand him or herself, rebellion ultimately imitates what it rebels against (Pornography 16). Rebellion that ends in imitating what it rebels against is revolution. Rebellion that stays true to its origins is that in which the rebel understands herself, especially her capacity to engage in the very acts she is is fighting against. 8. Eric Bronner makes an important criticism of Camus’s tactic in The Rebel of embracing the initial source of rebellion, but critiquing it when it goes awry. As he suggests, plenty of Nazis began their efforts with rebellious attempts to eradicate injustices while invoking a value of something they believed worth- while (91). I do believe, however, this is exactly why Camus needed to inves- tigate rebellions, in order to discover all the initial sources of rebellion, not notes / 195 just the initial impulse to refuse injustice. The enumeration of all of these initial sources is my task in the next few pages. 9. Beginning with the initial critiques of L’Homme révolté following its publi- cation (see note 7), Camus has been criticized for the weakness of his philo- sophical argumentation. As Tony Judt writes, “Sartre was right, at least so far as the structure and arguments of Camus’s book were concerned...” (100). Likewise, Eric Bronner argues that The Rebel “lacks philosophical grounding” (86). Henri Peyre calls The Rebel, “a confused and imperfect volume that fails to come up to its philosophical claims,” and should instead be read as a collection of maxims (27). Lev Braun states that The Rebel is not a systematic philosophy but rather an “unwieldy and rather confused sequence of ideas” (107). Serge Doubrovsky says that Camus “has no system, no general framework, no philosophy” (153). But Camus’s French biographer, Olivier Todd has argued that it was in fact Camus’s opposition to systematic thinking that has contributed to advances in polit- ical philosophy, likening Camus’s maxims more to a “clash of cymbals” than to philosophical ideas. “Not being a philosopher did not prevent him from being a stimulating thinker” (418). As for himself, Camus never claimed to be a philosopher, “ ‘I am not a philosopher, because I don’t believe in reason enough to believe in a system. What interests me is knowing how we must behave,...”(qtd. in Todd 408). Tony Judt sums it up: “These—philosopher, engaged intellectual, Parisian—are all the things Camus was not. But he was, despite his misgivings at the idea, quite assuredly a moralist. a moralist in France was someone who told the truth” (121–122). 10. I have distilled the elements in this chart distinguishing rebellion from revo- lution primarily from pages 246–252 of The Rebel, though Camus wrote about the distinction throughout. 11. Please refer back to the chart contrasting rebellion and revolution. Unity, a characteristic of rebellion, is distinguished from totality, a characteristic of revolution. 12. My appreciation to Rita Gross and China Galland, whose discussion of the meaning of compassion in the contexts of Buddhism and feminism in their works enabled me to recognize this equivalence of compassion and solidarity. 13. I should point out that despite popular conceptions of Camus as an exis- tentialist, stemming from his friendship with Sartre, he never regarded himself as such. The nonexistence of such key existentialist terms as “imma- nence,” “poursoi,” “en soi,” and “mitsein” in his works also is evidence of this. 14. For more discussion of this quality in Camus’s works, see Judt 97 ff.; Bronner 14–18; Sprintzen; Tisson-Braun; and Amoia. 15. Some have argued that one of the failings of The Rebel is that it has no suggestions for political practice (Doubrovsky 153; Sprintzen 280). This will be taken up further in chapter eight. 16. Though I do not know of any particular direct intellectual links between the works of Camus and feminist authors and activists, beyond my own, it is possible that certain elements of feminist thought were directly 196 / notes influenced by Camus’s philosophy of rebellion. A confluence of events— Camus’s winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, Camus’s untimely death in an automobile accident in 1960, and the rise of various protest movements in the United States in the 1960s—catapulted Camus to a posi- tion of a sort of folk hero of the New Left. “He [Camus] was the single most popular writer during the student revolt of the 1960’s” (Bronner 143).
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