This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
See the passage on dialectic in Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1968), 89–95.
Within the extensive literature dedicated to this topic, one reference can be singled out for the clarity in which it presents the Hegelian alternative: Paul Redding, Hegel’s Hermeneutics, Cornell University Press, 1996.
The Visible and the Invisible, 137.
Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, #51, trans. M. Vogel (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), 67–68.
As well as in his first, unpublished, novel, A Happy Death. Space does not permit to include this text, but many passages in it would fit the analyses that follow.
‘Lui parti, j’ai retrouvé le calme. J’étais épuisé et je me suis jeté sur ma couchette. Je crois que j’ai dormi parce que je me suis réveillé avec des étoiles sur le visage’. L’Étranger (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 182–83. I am using the translation by Joseph Laredo (Penguin, 1982 for the first edition) as a basis, but at times also the Stuart Gilbert translation. I alter both translations substantially to try and give a sense of the syntactic twists operated by Camus. For all their merits, the English translations tend to normalise Camus’ style.
‘Des bruits de campagne montaient jusqu’à moi. Des odeurs de nuit, de terre et de sel rafraichissaient mes tempes. La merveilleuse paix de cet été endormi entrait en moi comme une marée’.
L’Étranger, 183–84.
Against the opposition that has just been suggested, one could in fact show a direct link between the grand visions of Hellenistic pantheism Camus studied in his dissertation and the “sensualism” of his early prose.
Nuptials at Tipasa, in Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. E. C. Kennedy (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 68. I have substantially amended the translation to give a sense of the way in which Camus depersonalises the depiction of bodily experiences, by avoiding the use of pronouns and adjectives that would denote the first person perspective.
Nuptials at Tipasa, 72.
The surprising yet uninterrupted importance of Cartesian tropes within Merleau-Ponty’s vitalistic phenomenology is well illustrated in Eye and Mind, his final text, in which a whole chapter is dedicated to Descartes’ optics. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings (London: Routledge, 2003), 290–324.
See L. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. G. Eliot (New York: Prometheus Books, 1989), 59–64.
See The Visible and the Invisible, 152–55, as well as Merleau-Ponty’s 1957 lecture course, reproduced in Nature, trans. R. Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003).
See the oppressive atmosphere in The Growing Stone, the last story in Exile and Kingdom.
See the passage quoted above from Nuptials at Tipasa.
The Wind at Djemila, in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 73–79: ‘rubbed against for so long by the wind, shaken for more than an hour, staggering from resistance to it, I lost consciousness of the pattern my body traced. Like a pebble polished by the tides, I was polished by the wind, worn through to the very soul. I was a portion of the great force on which I drifted, then much of it, then entirely it, confusing the throbbing of my own heart with the great sonorous beating of this omnipresent natural heart’.
The Desert, in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 103.
For instance: ‘We enter a blue and yellow world and are welcomed by the pungent, odorous sigh of the Algerian summer earth. Everywhere, pinkish bougainvillea hangs over villa walls… After a few steps, the smell of absinthe seizes one by the throat. Their grey wool covers the ruins as far as the eye can see. Its oil ferments in the heat, and the whole earth gives off a heady alcohol that makes the sky flicker…The thick scent of aromatic plants tears at the throat and suffocates in the vast heat’, Nuptials at Tipasa, 65–66.
Nuptials at Tipasa, 69.
In the already quoted passage from The Desert, we find this exemplary expression: ‘a stone amongst stones’.
See in particular the already mentioned short story that concludes Exile and Kingdom: ‘The Growing Stone’.
For instance, in the last lines of Nuptials at Tipasa: ‘Sea, landscape, silence, perfumes of this earth, I became filled with a scented life and sunk my teeth into the world’s fruit, already golden, overwhelmed by the feeling of its strong, sweet juice flowing along my lips’, 72.
See the end of The Desert, 105: ‘People rarely understand that it is never through despair that a man gives up what constituted his life… This clearly involves undertaking the survey of a certain desert. But this strange desert is accessible only to those who can live there in the full anguish of their thirst. Then, and only then, is it peopled with the living waters of happiness’.
The Desert, 103.
The Wind at Djemila, 79.
The Desert, 103.
Helen’s Exile, in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 150–51.
Summer in Algiers, in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 92.
Summer in Algiers, in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 83.
Note that for Merleau-Ponty this is not an issue. Since he stresses the exchanges and indeed the continuum from nature to the human world, the passage from the ontological to the ethical and political is far easier for him to account for.
The Desert, 105.
The Desert, 102.
Nuptials at Tipasa, 68.
Again, this is not a problem for Merleau-Ponty since his immanentism is premised on the continuity between natural and symbolic realms. In the words of his last philosophy, the Visible (the world of perception) is the ground of the Invisible (the world of ideas).
See this telling declaration in The Enigma: ‘I should like to have been an objective writer. What I call an objective author is one who chooses subjects without ever taking himself as the object’, in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 159.
One thinks of poets such as Rimbaud, Valéry, or Ponge, who defined the poetical ideal as the definition of a language that would be that of the world itself.
The Wind at Djemila, 79.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Deranty, JP. The Tender Indifference of the World: Camus’ Theory of the Flesh. SOPHIA 50, 513–525 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0273-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0273-1