Abstract
During his famous visit to Stockholm in 1957, Albert Camus was repeatedly invited to comment upon the evolution, meaning, and future directions of his work. In one particular conversation, he summed up his works as a trilogy loosely organized around the following three concepts (or “layers”): absurdity, revolt, and love.2 Indeed, Camus identified love as the third “layer” that was going to be at the heart of his reflections in the years to come. In the preface to the second edition of L’Envers et l’Endroit, Camus also admitted that the œuvre that he “dreamed of” would speak of “a certain kind of love.”3 But unfortunately for us, Camus died soon after making these statements, leaving us with an unfinished trilogy. His “third layer” failed to get as sustained a treatment as the absurd received in The Myth of Sisyphus, or revolt received in The Rebel. While some of Camus’s novels and plays are peppered with vivid pronouncements on the difficulties or beauty of love (whether erotic love, the love of a mother, or the love of living),4 on the whole it seems that we have a fairly modest textual basis to work with in order to theorize what could be called “Camusian love.” This silence is particularly regrettable given the fact that revolt, a central concept for Camus, ends—if not begins—with love.5 Love seems to be the “backdrop” of everything, as he intimates at the end of The Rebel and in his Carnets. “From the starting point of the absurd,” he writes, “it is impossible to live in rebellion without leading, in some manner, to the experience of a love that remains to be defined.”6
“I know only one single duty, and that is the duty to love.”
—Camus, Notebooks I (1937)1
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Notes
“Je ne connais qu’un seul devoir et c’est celui d’aimer”; Camus, Carnets I (1937). Unless otherwise stated, all translations are mine.
“I was already foreseeing a third layer, around the theme of love. These are the projects I am working on”; “J’entrevoyais déjà une troisième couche, autour du thème de l’amour. Ce sont les projets que j’ai en train.” Camus, Essais, ed. Roger Quilliot (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 1610.
Cited in Arnaud Corbic, Camus. L’absurde, la révolte, l’amour (Paris: Les Editions de l’atelier, 2003), 27–28.
Albert Camus, L’Homme révolté (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 380–81.
“Parti de l’absurde, il n’est pas possible de vivre la révolte sans aboutir en quelque point que ce soit à une expérience de l’amour qui reste à définir”; Albert Camus, Carnets (1946), in Œuvres complètes, ed. Raymond Gay Crosier and Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). My italics. The Œuvres complètes (La Pléiade) will hereafter be referred to as OC.
Camus, OC, 864. See also Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, trans. Benjamin Ivry (New York: Knopf, 1997), 291.
Due to space constraints, I will only be able to touch on some of the affinities between these two authors. Readers who would like to learn more could consult Fred Rosen, “Marxism, Mysticism, and Liberty: The Influence of Simone Weil on Albert Camus,” Political Theory 7, no. 3 (August 1979): 301–19;
Stefan Skrimshire, “A Political Theology of the Absurd? Albert Camus and Simone Weil on Social Transformation,” Literature and Theology 20, no. 3 (September 2006): 286–300;
Linda Rasoamanana, “Simone Weil et Albert Camus lecteurs d’Héraclite. Notes sur la Némésis,” Cahiers Simone Weil 28, no. 4 (December 2005): 341–64;
M. C. L. Bingemer, “Simone Weil et Albert Camus. Sainteté sans Dieu et Mystique sans Eglise,” Cahiers Simone Weil 28, no. 4 (2005): 365–86;
and Gabriella Fiori, “Albert Camus et Simone Weil: Une amitié sub specie aeternitatis,” Cahiers Simone Weil 29, no. 2 (June 2006), 128–39.
“On ne peut pas penser à autre chose—on ne pense à rien”; Simone Weil, La Condition ouvrière, ed. Robert Chenavier (1951; repr., Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 192).
See, for instance, Albert Camus, “Création et liberté,” in Essais. See also Jacques Cabaud, “Albert Camus et Simone Weil,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 3 (1974): 386–87.
“de [son] œuvre, il existe deux clés: le mythe de Moby Dick et la pensée de Simone Weil”; Jean Grenier, Albert Camus, souvenirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 142.
“Ce qu’estimait par dessus tout Albert Camus chez Simone Weil, c’est qu’elle ait fait jusqu’au bout l’expérience d’une vie conforme à un idéal; c’est une exigence et une ténacité (qui faisaient penser aux siennes)”; Grenier, Albert Camus, souvenirs, 136. In his Carnets, Camus also commends Weil for her heroic asceticism: “Moi qui depuis longtemps vivais, gémissant, dans le monde des corps, j’admirais ceux qui, comme S.W., semblaient y échapper. Pour ma part, je ne pouvais imaginer un amour sans possession et donc sans l’humiliante souffrance qui est le lot de ceux qui vivent selon le corps” Albert Camus, “Janvier 1942–mars 1951,” in Carnets, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 341. “I, who for a long time lived, trembling, in the world of bodies, admired those who, like S.W., appeared to have escaped it. For my part, I could not imagine a love without possession and thus without the humiliating suffering that is the lot of those who live according to the body.”
Detailed accounts can be found in La Condition ouvrière, but also in the authoritative biography by Simone Pétrément, La vie de Simone Weil (Paris: Fayard, 1973).
Camus, Essais, 6. For Weil on the “beauty” of poverty, see, for instance, Simone Weil, Ecrits de Londres et dernières lettres (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 180–82.
See Albert Camus, Théâtre, récits, nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 1599.
In many writings, she insists that it is manual work that should be deemed most significant and valuable. “La civilisation la plus pleinement humaine serait celle qui aurait le travail manuel pour centre, celle où le travail manuel constituerait la suprême valeur”; Weil, Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale, in Œuvres, ed. Florence de Lussy (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 330. “The most completely human civilization would be the one that had manual labor at its center, the one in which manual labor would constitute the supreme value.”
See particularly Attente de Dieu. For a detailed discussion of the link between justice and compassion in Weil, see Richard Bell, Simone Weil: The Way of Justice as Compassion (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).
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© 2012 Emmanuelle Anne Vanborre
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Bourgault, S. (2012). Affliction, revolt, and Love. In: Vanborre, E.A. (eds) The Originality and Complexity of Albert Camus’s Writings. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137309471_10
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