Albert Camus, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, died in a car crash on 4 January 1960, aged 46. Sixty years on, RFI speaks to Professor Robert Zaretsky, French history expert at the University of Houston and Camus biographer, about the French-Algerian’s extraordinary legacy.
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What are the core ideas of Camus’ philosophy?
““For Camus, meaninglessness or absurdity is a consequence of two forces: humankind’s thirst for meaning and the world’s silence. No matter how insistent, loud or ardent our demand for meaning is, the response from the world or the cosmos, as Camus more than once called it, is tender indifference. So the convergence of our need for meaning and the refusal of the world to offer any form of meaning leads to our absurd condition. And acknowledging the absurdity of the world for Camus means that we need to turn to one another and to collective action for meaning.
“His first cycle of works, which he called the cycle of absurdity, has three works in it: The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus and Caligula. During the Second World War, when he became the editor of the resistance newspaper Combat, and in the years immediately following the war, he wanted to know what our response to this absurd condition should be. He thus turns to a second cycle of works. In the cycle of absurdity, he gave us a diagnosis of absurdity while in the second cycle, which he called the rebellion, he offers a prescription to what our response should be. That cycle also has three works: The Plague, The Rebel and The Just.
