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Camus and forgiveness, after the fall
chapter
posted on 2018-01-01, 00:00 authored by Matthew SharpeThe chapter has two main parts. Part One looks at Camus’s argument
that totalitarian regimes universalize a sense of guilt in their populations,without possibility of reprieve. It then exposes Camus’s wider argument that the twentieth-century totalitarian notion of “objective guilt” secularizes the Augustinian solution to the problem of evil, by blaming it upon innate human sinfulness. Part Two turns to La Chute (The Fall). It examines how the monologue of Jean-Baptiste Clamence in this novella is shaped by a possibility that he glimpses but cannot accept. This is the possibility of a forgiveness that would also be the precondition for relations with others that escape the dialectics of master and slave, guilt and reprisals, and which is more positively staged in the short story “La Pierre Qui Pousse” (“The Growing Stone”) that closes L’Exil et le Royaume (Exile and the Kingdom). In our Concluding Remarks, we draw out three features of Camus’s philosophy of forgiveness, as they emerge from Camus’s later texts.
that totalitarian regimes universalize a sense of guilt in their populations,without possibility of reprieve. It then exposes Camus’s wider argument that the twentieth-century totalitarian notion of “objective guilt” secularizes the Augustinian solution to the problem of evil, by blaming it upon innate human sinfulness. Part Two turns to La Chute (The Fall). It examines how the monologue of Jean-Baptiste Clamence in this novella is shaped by a possibility that he glimpses but cannot accept. This is the possibility of a forgiveness that would also be the precondition for relations with others that escape the dialectics of master and slave, guilt and reprisals, and which is more positively staged in the short story “La Pierre Qui Pousse” (“The Growing Stone”) that closes L’Exil et le Royaume (Exile and the Kingdom). In our Concluding Remarks, we draw out three features of Camus’s philosophy of forgiveness, as they emerge from Camus’s later texts.
History
Title of book
Phenomenology and ForgivenessChapter number
9Pagination
149 - 163Publisher
Rowman & LittlefieldPlace of publication
London, Eng.Edition
1stLanguage
engPublication classification
B1 Book chapterCopyright notice
2018, Rowman & LittlefieldExtent
12Editor/Contributor(s)
Marguerite La CazeUsage metrics
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