Core Theses
The absurd is a relation — human longing confronting an indifferent universe.
Three responses — physical suicide, philosophical suicide (the leap), or revolt. Only revolt is honest.
Live without appeal — no hope beyond this life, but with full freedom and passion.
Formulated by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Close cousins: the Theatre of the Absurd of Beckett and Ionesco.
Members
1
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsThe Myth of Sisyphus
Camus’s essay on the absurd — why not suicide? — ending with the image of Sisyphus pushing his rock, happy.
The Stranger
Camus’s first novel — Meursault, who will not pretend to feel what he does not feel, kills an Arab on a beach and is condemned for not weeping at his mother’s funeral.
The Rebel
Camus’s history of revolt — metaphysical and political — arguing that rebellion that kills for history betrays its own origin. It ended his friendship with Sartre.
Sartre vs. Camus
The most famous intellectual break of the twentieth century — two friends of the Resistance fall out in 1952 over revolution, violence, and The Rebel.
Samuel Beckett
Irish playwright, novelist and poet who wrote in English and French, the master of minimalism and the absurd — Waiting for Godot made a play in which “nothing happens, twice” into the defining drama of the twentieth century.
Søren Kierkegaard
The melancholy Dane, father of existentialism, who set the passionate individual against Hegel’s System and faith against reason — “truth is subjectivity”.