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CC & RG in unison: He was not an existentialist!
RG: He always refused to be.
RW: Another example of being solitaire et solidaire,
of being great friends with Sartre but remaining apart
from the existentialist credo?
CC: Yes, today, we’re starting to see how it works.
But usually it’s when you get smacked in the face with
things that you start to understand them. Everyone has
so much hope for a better humanity, and many, including
Sartre, turned to the idea of communism in its beginnings.
Generosity had a place in people’s hopes. But
Camus points out that we have a lot of things to pass
through. Everything has to be accepted before it can be
improved. When Sartre was asked whether or not he
would live under a communist regime he said, ‘No, for
others it’s fine, but for me, no.’ He said it! So it’s hard
to say just how intellectual his stance is. How can you
think that never in your life would you go to live in a
communist regime and still say it’s fine for everybody?
A very difficult thing, that, but Sartre managed it.
Camus didn’t; and today this is what we are confronted
with, I mean what is pure ideology, which
takes no account of the human context. In economics
it’s the same. Economics wanted to take into account
theory over and above human criteria, or the
parameter ‘man’. And you end up beating your head
against a wall again, it doesn’t work. Not if you make
an abstraction of man. That’s why Camus is more à la
BUY Albert Camus books online from and
mode now, because he always says ‘yes, but there’s
man. That’s the first thing, because myself, I’m a
man.’ And that’s what solidarity is.
RW: Is The First Man his ‘bridge’, then, between experience
and philosophy?
CC: What the articles which have been written about
The First Man propose is humility. The acceptance of
these contradictions. Seeking an explanation is death.
The lie is death in Camus. That’s why in Camus’ play
The Misunderstood the son dies, killed by his sister and
his mother, because he lied. He never told them who
he was. They killed him because they didn’t recognise
him. But Camus also says that nothing is true which
forces exclusion. From that, you’re obliged to accept
contradictions if you don’t want to reject certain obvious
things about life, certain evidences. If you create a
system, and you say ‘here there is truth’, in that kind
of pathway [chemin], then you’ll evacuate all the other
pathways and you’ll kill life. It’s up to each individual.
It wasn’t exactly the establishment he attacked. He
said, “if it’s good, so much the better.” His aim was to
help people to live. That’s the most important thing. I
think for an artist what is most important is to touch as
many hearts as possible.
RW: Being written for his mother, do you think The
First Man gives a clearer picture of his ideas on
femininity?
CC: It’s true that women appear very little in his other
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