Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
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"The Outsider" A Review of Ronald Aronson's Camus & Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It. University of Chicago Press, 2004. 291 pp.
<1>
On 11 December 2007, the fiftieth anniversary of Camus's
notorious press conference after winning the Nobel Prize, when the
author told students that he would choose his mother before justice,
five scholars (Tom Conley, Stanley Hoffman, Jeffrey Mehlman, Hazel
Rowley, and Susan Suleiman) gathered at Harvard to discuss and debate
before a packed crowd the political, aesthetic, and ethical issues that
continue to rise from the "Camus/Sartre"
conflict. Avoiding partisanship, Homi Bhaba introduced the
conversation with the (self-admittedly) lame pronouncement, "We need
them both."
<2>
More than once in his book, Camus & Sartre: Their
Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It, Ronald Aronson asks
of his subjects, those famous correlates to Cold War polarities, "Which
was right?" The question is
obviously rhetorical but suggests a similarly impossible entanglement
of values and sympathies. The purpose of his book is really
to rehabilitate both in the post-Cold-War world as public intellectuals
whose strengths and weaknesses are best understood in relation to each
other.
<3> In general, Aronson strikes the right balance, although he doesn't entirely avoid binary thinking. In the last chapter, for instance, he summarily writes that in the years of the intensifying Algerian anticolonial struggle,
their antagonism hardened as each man took the other as the exemplar of the attitude he was fighting against. It was a situation of tragic ironies. In the name of serving the oppressed, Sartre accepted oppression. In loving his people, Camus muted his usual denunciations of oppression. Each one was half-right and half-wrong, locked into two separate but mutually supporting systems of bad faith.
It's worth
asking, however, whether the generous comparative approach that shaped
both the Harvard discussion and (to a lesser degree)
Aronson's valuable study predetermines the outcome of the
analysis and reproduces a familiar and politically evasive
narrative. In both, quantity ("half-right and
half-wrong") can be weirdly confused with quality.
Reciprocity in certain matters (e.g., the Soviet purges, which Camus
refused to rationalize; Algeria, which Sartre saw presciently) becomes
an interminable balancing act whose effect is to immobilize us on the
fulcrum of the scales.
<4>
Unlike Aronson, the members of the Harvard panel, for instance, almost
unanimously reiterated the claim that Camus was the better artist,
offering numerous comparisons of their achievements as novelists, while
Sartre was the real philosopher (which provided a pretext to ignore his
plays, which, fortunately, Aronson attends to with gusto).
Rather than provide another stalemate, however, it would be better to
examine their different attitudes and output as artists qualitatively.
<5> The commonplace privileging of Camus as writer is right so far as his political thinking was circumscribed by largely aesthetic commitments. Camus felt certain that Sartre's emphasis on historical situated-ness was a categorical denial of freedom - a concept with which Camus would always closely identify. While Sartre was developing the concept of the delimited, historicized writer in What is Literature? (1947), Camus wrote in his journal in 1946:
I prefer committed men to literatures of commitment. Courage in one's life and talent in one's works - this is not so bad. And moreover the writer is committed when he wishes to be. His merit lies in his impulse? But if this is to become a law, a function, or a terror, where is the merit?
In the realm of aesthetic
activity, Camus assumes that the spontaneous, self-originating impulse
is a true engine for creative thought, and that this impulse is the
basis of freedom. Sartre might have responded that the artist
(or political actor) who posits impulse (arbitrary, non-contingent) is
stranded - politically and artistically. "One is in one's
historical situation,"
Aronson explains, "and one is therefore responsible for
it," precisely because it is only by means of an accurate
recognition of one's specific, conditioned, and constitutive situation
that one can develop the specific forces, strategies, and discourses to
resist, produce, dismantle, raise up. (Although Camus chose the myth of
Sisyphus to represent the kind of perseverance he felt necessary in an
absurd world, it may suit Sartre's thought better.
Like Sisyphus, Sartre understood that the world materially pushed
back - as Sisyphus's predicament, a political
punishment - encapsulates better than anything.)
<6>
Sartre's concept of commitment complicates the reputed
antagonism between the men. Camus cut the figure of the
rugged working-class pied noir firmly rooted in the
land and his simple origins, his journalism and artistry associated
with a tough directness of style and the celebration of the
concrete. In sharp contrast, the bespectacled Sartre embodied
the cold intellectual. And yet, a phenomenologist at heart,
Sartre often recognized what was in front of his eyes, at hand,
utilizable, much better than his antagonist. He can exude
humility and a sense of the individual's connectedness to the
larger world around him.
<7>
For Aronson, Camus cast himself as "lone prophet" - notwithstanding his
early involvement in the Algerian
Communist Party (with which he broke when the Party gave up on
addressing the terrible conditions of the Arabs, who were subordinated
to the fight against the Fascists) and his real-world clandestine
journalism during the Resistance, when (he wrote in Combat)
"distraction or indifference in only one person leads to the
death of tens of others." Meanwhile,
Sartre's thinking had become more concrete, concerned as it
was with "French state violence and the built-in violence of
its economic system" - not to mention the "staggering
brutality" it exercised in Algeria and
its reenergized colonial war in southeast Asia.
<8>
Contrary to Camus's charge that Sartre had rejected freedom,
Sartre's philosophy consistently "sought the
ontological root of oppression" to build the foundation for engagement.
As Aronson puts it, "Sartre's stress on choice,
situation, historicity, and responsibility and his vision of a
collectivity of equals added to his developing moral basis for
political intervention." It is the rejection of our
temporality, our conditionality, that alienates us, seduces us into
thinking that the means of social transformation
(or the nature of that transformation) lies outside history.
Freedom in any meaningful sense requires first of all the recognition
of how, specifically, we are not free.
<9> "Committed as Camus always was," Aronson
observes, "he saw history as alienating us from ourselves and from all
that is most vital." Consequently, Camus was able
to reject Communism as though it were an abstraction. He
warned against "Marxism" (which he equated with
murder) and backed the Politics of Moderation in colonialist
France - which meant driving the viable and pervasive
workers' party, the PCF, from power despite
its backing by "one-quarter of the French
population."
<10>
More broadly, with
Man in Revolt (1951) Camus rejected revolution itself, which
he quickly cast aside as a cruel machinery unleashed by power-crazed
ideologues and "deifiers of man" - from
Saint-Just to Stalin - incapable of recognizing the absurdity
of existence. Refusing to see that revolutionary violence "is
the cost of social change, especially given the massive
forces usually available to those in power," Camus sublimates
revolutions into the utopian schemes of dangerous
intelligentsias. It is, ironically, a lofty, patronizing
concept of revolution.
<11>
Camus would come to correct some of the weaknesses of Man in
Revolt (if only to himself: he never published "Defense of Man
in Revolt") and
in doing so made a (tacit) rapprochement with the radical Left,
qualifying "his former emphasis on the individual as opposed
to history, now making each necessary to the other, and
observing that their best relationship is one of
tension." Nevertheless, he withdrew this concession
to revolutionary action as events in Algeria grew worse.
Camus would die (his artistic reputation intact) under the shadow of
the struggle, whose legitimacy he would not recognize, effectively
"ignoring until it was too late the nine million people who
were making themselves into Algerians in response to the
settlers' economic, political, and cultural
domination."
<12> Sartre, by contrast, offered a radical defense of anti-colonial violence in North Africa and elsewhere. He stopped writing plays and instead "compose[d] the twentieth century's ode to violence as liberation and therapy": the preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961). What Aronson sees as worryingly morbid exultation, however, could better be understood as a fitting articulation of the defining issue of the time: the necessary emergence into history of the world population whose domination underpinned Western capitalist "civilization." It is precisely the dedication of his intellectual energies to this geopolitical conjuncture (rather than the timeless, easily appropriable non-violence of Camus) - that is, Sartre's own historicity as a polemicist, philosopher, and artist - that privileges him in this contest.
Carl Grey Martin
Emerson College
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