Revolt and its limits
Trace how a slave’s refusal becomes a value shared by all, and how revolutions that kill in the name of history betray that origin.
An original introduction. This guide accompanies the work; it is neither the complete text nor a translation.
Situating the text
Published by Gallimard in October 1951, the essay extends the reasoning of The Myth of Sisyphus: if the absurd forbids suicide, it also forbids legitimized murder. Its critique of Hegel, Marx and the Soviet camps, written at the height of the Cold War, drew Francis Jeanson’s hostile review in Les Temps modernes in May 1952 and then, in August, Sartre’s reply to Camus, which ended their friendship. Camus asks whether murder can ever be justified and follows revolt from its first movement, a slave’s no that also affirms a shared value, through metaphysical revolt against God in Sade, Ivan Karamazov and Nietzsche to historical revolt, from the regicides of 1793 to the Nazi and Soviet states. He argues that revolution betrays revolt when it kills in the name of history, and closes by calling for a thought of measure and limits.
Following the arguments
A no that says yes : The rebel refuses an intolerable order, but in refusing he discovers a limit and a part of himself that he holds in common with all, so that revolt founds solidarity. Metaphysical revolt : From Sade to the surrealists, the protest against the human condition and against God tends to end in the will to remake the world without limits, at the price of crime. Crimes of logic : The great crimes of the century are crimes of logic, justified by doctrines; revolt keeps its truth only if it refuses to kill in the name of an abstract future.
Continuing the reading
Read the introduction and the first chapter, then the pages on the fastidious assassins of 1905 in the historical part, and finish with Thought at the Meridian, setting it against the later exchange with Sartre. Published by Gallimard in October 1951, the essay extends the reasoning of The Myth of Sisyphus: if the absurd forbids suicide, it also forbids legitimized murder. Its critique of Hegel, Marx and the Soviet camps, written at the height of the Cold War, drew Francis Jeanson’s hostile review in Les Temps modernes in May 1952 and then, in August, Sartre’s reply to Camus, which ended their friendship.
Revolt keeps its meaning only by respecting the limit it discovered in its first movement; once it consents to murder in principle, it becomes the oppression it opposed.
Your turn to think.
- In what sense does the rebel’s no already contain a yes, and to what does it say yes?
- Can a just cause ever make murder legitimate, and what does Kaliayev’s choice suggest about the limits of political action?
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