Albert Camus’ Hellenism, Between Saint Augustine and Hegel
AsPro Matthew Sharpe (Deakin University )

September 4, 2014, 8:00am - 9:00am
Centre for Citizenship and Globalization, Deakin University

Room C2.05
Building C, Burwood Campus
Melbourne
Australia

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Abstract: Much French thinking since 1960 has gravitated towards forms of decisionism or messianism which secularises eschatological hopes and modes of thinking inherited from the Jewish and Christian tradition. Albert Camus is almost unique in French letters (alongside his friend, the poet Rene Char) in arguing for the need to reanimate motifs from the classical Mediterranean legacy, beginning in Greece: notably, the value of mesure (moderation), the notion of a constant human nature, the urgent need to recapture a non-instrumental, contemplative sense of our place in the natural world, and an opposition to all ideas of an 'end of history' or a single 'great leap forward'. From this perspective, much of contemporary theory's continuing fascination with the possibility of extreme or radical ruptures overturning all previous modes and orders continues the kinds of thinking which legitimated the National Socialists' and Stalinists' secularised millenialisms, rather than pointing in viable new directions, particularly in a period where our relation to non-human nature needs to become paramount. According to Camus' often-maligned "midday thought," human beings are not solely historical, language-using, political beings. We are also mortal, natural beings in an ecosphere we did not create, but in whose profoundly interconnected (and now as we know profoundly threatened) recurrences Camus saw the basis for a new philosophy limiting human hybris, this side of thermonuclear or ecological collapse. In this paper, I'll reconstruct the different registers of Camus' hellenism: beginning from his own youthful experiences growing up in Algeria (for him, a 'Greece in rags'), passing through his early work on the end of antiquity, his continuing work with pagan myths (Sisyphus, Prometheus, Oedipus, Nemesis), culminating in his position that "nothing can be true which compels us to exclude," a difficult wisdom which he sees preeminently figured in classical tragedy.

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