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and the cultural duality of his upbringing?
CC: Not on a political level. He is The First Man
because he is poor, which has never been much to human
beings. He really did know Algeria. He was an
exile from his country, but still living in its language.
Solitaire et solidaire. It’s not like those who are exiled
to a country where the language is not theirs. He didn’t
have much hope that things would work out, but he
wanted them to. Algeria had reached such a degree of
violence that once such violence is created there’s no
more room for reflection. And there’s no mediating position.
If you look at Bosnia today, the Croats, Bosnians
and Serbs, they’ve all created so much horror that one
starts to wonder how these peoples can live together,
after having done what they have. Already the violence
has reached such a degree that everybody is living in
hate, there’s no possibility of reflection, no mediating
position. There’s no one who can say ‘this person is
wrong there and right here’, and that ‘one is right about
that and wrong about this’. This is what could allow
populations, or even two human beings, to live together.
We will only solve problems by the acceptance of, and
enrichment by, our differences.
Albert Camus PLC
RW: So Camus tried to live the paradox of being both
“solitaire et solidaire”?
CC: I think Camus felt very solitary. You can see it
BUY Albert Camus books online from and
in all his books. The Outsider isn’t Camus, but in The
Outsider there are parts of Camus. There’s this impression
of exile. But where he is in exile isn’t especially
in Paris or elsewhere, but from the intellectual world,
because of his origins. And that’s a complete exile. Just
because of his way of sensing before thinking. He’s in
a field that he often feels like escaping from. In any
case, you have to learn what blood is. It all has to be
rationalised. In that he feels exiled, solitary…
RG: … And yet one thing that is evident is that Camus
could never be a ‘neutral’ man. This is because he
was committed; look at his real physical involvement
in the Resistance. He took part, there, in the combat
against Nazism. And he always held a profound
commitment [engagement], a real resistance to all
totalitarianism. For example, it’s often forgotten that
Camus was extremely hostile [farouche] towards the
Franco regime, and right to the end. He refused to
travel to Spain, he left UNESCO because UNESCO
accepted Franco’s Spain and allowed it a discourse.
Camus was completely intransigent, and that’s not at
all a neutrality. It’s combat, it’s a man who involved
himself, committed himself. Of course, he wasn’t an
existentialist, but he was a committed man. He was a
man of combat. It wasn’t for nothing that he directed
the Resistance journal called Combat.
RW: What makes his commitment different from that
of the existentialists?
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