Oliver Glogue – Forget Camus: A Book Reviewing the Work of the French Philosopher

CultureNow

04-22-2024 / 11:46

22/04/2024

The book “Forget Camus”, signed by Oliver Gloag, is published by the Twenty-First Editions.

From textbooks to politicians’ speeches, from the media to secular living rooms, o Albert Camus eit is everywhere the symbol of an abstract humanism that has the convenient peculiarity of being liked by both the right and the left. Few books have studied the author’s contradictions as he does here Oliver Glogue, based on a new reading of Camus’s texts – contradictions which nevertheless constitute the driving force of Camus’s work, provide the key to his ‘style’ and explain his current popularity. Glogue recalls Camus’s deep commitment to colonialism and the colonial way of life, which permeates his three major novels, The Stranger, The Plague, and The First Man. It examines his political campaigns in the light of his break with Sartre: the tension between rebellion and revolution, his recourse to the absurd as a denial of the flow of history, his anti-communism and his rejection of the struggle of colonized peoples. He finally tackles the appropriations of Camus: the most popular writer in France and the most widely read Frenchman around the world has become a political and ideological litigator. The invocation of a mythologized Camus flatters but misleadingly illuminates colonial history. It is precisely this Camus that we must forget, in order to recognize the inner cracks of a writer who supported the social achievements of the Popular Front as fanatically as the French presence in Algeria.

Oliver Glogue – About the Author

THE Oliver Gloag is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Asheville. His research mainly concerns representations of colonialism in French literature and the cultural and intellectual history of France in the 20th century. He has also written the book Albert Camus: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020).