Chapter 14 Camus and Psychoanalysis
In: Brill's Companion to CamusSearch for other papers by Matthew H. Bowker in
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Several of Camus’s later fictional works, led by The Fall, cover many of the same themes that were central to psychoanalysis in the 20th century. Yet, as Matthew Bowker notes in his powerful contribution to this collection (chapter 15), few authors have tried to plumb the psychodynamics of Camus’s specifically philosophical works, beginning with The Myth of Sisyphus, with its preoccupation with the absurd. Yet, Bowker provocatively contends that Camus’s philosophy of the absurd, with its sense of the fundamental “divorce” between the human desire for meaning and a world which ultimately refuses it significantly anticipates, if it does not directly shape, many of the key, deeply melancholic motifs of later postmodern and post-structuralist thought. For Bowker, the “absurd man” and his postmodern legatees remaining moored in an attitude of “melancholic revolt.” Camus’s inability to mourn the loss of a sense of metaphysical at-homeness, Bowker ties to his political stance in Algeria (examined in this collection in the contributions by Dunwoodie and Orme).