Strangeness; Nadia and Albert Camus

Abstract

In his Stranger Camus meets the absurd in the day-to-day activity turning the familiar strange. Nadia and myself meet and, from then on, find each other in the observations as if thrown into them. We become aware, through each other, of the act of observation as a strange act, a kind of doing that relies on and exposes a not doing. Nadia mirrors herself in my observing and allows me into some of her experience of being an observer in her nursery, a stranger to it. She allows me to observe her observing, observe her wandering turning my attention to the space it occupies. It is by means of her very wandering that Nadia comments on the absurdity of the nursery—the world—as a space of doing or constantly becoming and by means of her ‘strange’ presence that she questions the space of the nursery as a place of belonging, the world as a place in which one feels at home.