The Absurd and Power

Abstract

In March 1941, a few weeks after completing the manuscript of Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Camus notes in his Carnets: ‘L’Absurde et le Pouvoir – à creuser (cf. Hitler). (The Absurd and Power – to be investigated (cf. Hitler)’ (II, p. 921). The Italian anti-fascist intellectual refugee from France, Nicola Chiaromonte, recalls meeting Camus in Oran that year, before fleeing to the United States. It is not difficult to imagine the political tenor of the conversations between these two men, whose friendship back then was sealed by an ecstatic love and admiration of the sea. Hitler had just occupied Greece and Chiaromonte was obsessed with the idea that humanity had reached its lowest point, that history was senseless and the only thing that made sense was the part of the living human being that is irreducible to history. ‘Camus told me then that he was writing a tragedy about Caligula, and I tried to understand what could attract a modern writer to such a subject. Unfettered tyranny? But contemporary tyranny did not seem to me to have much in common with Caligula’s’ (Chiaromonte 1977, p. 52).

Celui qui a conçu ce qui est grand doit aussi le vivre. (Nietzsche)