Chapter 6 Camus and Nietzsche: on the Slave Revolt in Morality

In: Brill's Companion to Camus
Author:
Michael Ure
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Michael Ure brings a Nietzschean, critical perspective to reading Camus. Ure’s article opens by considering Camus’s reading of Nietzsche in the decisive section “Absolute Affirmation” of The Rebel. Camus’s criticism of modern revolutionary traditions, Ure notes, echoes Nietzsche’s diagnosis that modern liberal and socialist political forms have incompletely overcome Christianity. Camus’s concept of rebellion, Ure notes, involves a kind of balancing act in which the rebel “must negate suffering and injustice and yet nonetheless maintain an aesthetic appreciation of an arational world which can never definitively satisfy the “frantic desire for complete unity”. According to Ure, this balancing act ultimately fails. Camus wants to sever rebellion from resentment, the psychological motive for the slave revolt in morals that Nietzsche had posited in Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals as having taken place within Judaism and Christianity against the world of the classical, aristocratic masters. For Ure, the key background text for understanding Camus’s conception of the rebellion of the archetypal “slave” against the “master” is not Kojève, and before him Hegel. But Camus’ attempt to locate a pure, uncontaminated core of modern rebellion – with resentment instead accruing only to modern revolutionaries – fails, for Ure, as his recourse to the profoundly psychologically ambivalent figure of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights attests.

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