Solitaire-Solidaire [solitary, in solidarity]: Camus and the Vita Contempliva ideal in Polemical Times
AsPro Matthew Sharpe (Deakin University )

June 10, 2014, 12:00pm - 1:30pm
European Philosophy and the History of Ideas Research Group (EPHI), Deakin University

C2.05
221 Burwood Hwy
Melbourne 3125
Australia

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  • School of Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Centre for Citizenship and Globalization

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Deakin University

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"No, I am not an existentialist," Camus would repeat throughout his short life: "but it is more convenient for critics to exploit a cliché than a nuance: so I am the prophet of the absurd, as before".  Amongst the large volume of French and English-language work  produced on Camus since 1990, there has been a growing recognition of the extent to which Camus was primarily shaped by his early encounters with classical Greek thought and poetry, not the German thinking (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger) which shaped the existentialists Camus met when he arrived in the rive gauche in 1942.  This paper continues this strand of Camus-reception, by looking at his lifelong philosophical reflections on aesthetics, and arguing that Camus' thought here is interesting and singular in the way that he wrestles with, and tries to keep alive, the old ideal of the vita contempliva which Arendt and many others have lamented as lost in the modern West.  From his earliest published essays, Camus remained interested in reflecting not simply on art, but on the persona and role of a creative artist in wider society.  As he would report in another 1940s interview, his lasting thwarted longing was to create literature in the same spirit in which Mozart produced music.  But this is an endeavour requiring great contemplative leisure and serenity of mind.  And, as his own biography attests, Camus could not accept, or justify, the living of such a vita contempliva (contemplative life) in the age of total war and total states.  Artists used "to sing purposely, for their own sake, or at best to encourage the martyr and make the lion forget his appetite.  But now the artist is in the amphitheatre".  She is "impressed" into service alongside everyone else, and more likely than most to attract the censure of his contemporaries, and of illiberal states.  What to do?  Should the artist, or the thinker, give up on beauty or the pursuit of non-political knowledges as an irresponsible sham?  But can an art exist which wholly subordinates itself to present issues and commitments, without losing its own soul, and the identity of the artist, thereby?  As per the dark fable "Jonas" in Exile and the Kingdom, Camus' characteristically two-sided position was to aim to defend a space for "free creation": of artistic forms between realism and formalism, and for artistic creators between apolitical withdrawal and ceaseless polemical engagement.

Matthew Sharpe is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin University. His ongoing research interests include political philosophy, psychoanalysis and critical theory, epistemology, and conservative and reactionary political thought. He is the author of Slavoj Žižek: A Little Piece of the Real (Ashgate, 2005), the co-author with Geoff Boucher of Žižek and Politics (Edinburgh UP, 2010) and The Times Will Suit Them: Postmodern Conservatism in Australia (Allen & Unwin 2008), and the co-author with Jo Faulkner of Understanding Psychoanalysis (Acumen 2008).

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