Michel Onfray: L'Ordre libertaire: La Vie philosophique d'Albert Camus (2012)

Michel Onfray's huge book on Albert Camus's philosophy is a long read, but not at all a heavy one: Onfray's whole ethos is away from the turgid, academic style, and towards a serious but popular way of looking at the writer's work. In so doing, Onfray also sketches out a biography, shows how Camus's thinking is a reflexion of his life.

What Onfray shows us is a man who knew that his life was limited not just because all human life is, but more because he was suffering from tuberculosis. The ultimate absurdity, of course, is that he ended up in the 'dead man's seat' of a Facel Vega car driven by his friend Michel Gallimard on 4 January 1960, in the commune of Villeblevin, Yonne, at the age of 47.

Onfray's Camus is an anarchist, a 'French' (as opposed to German) Nietzschean, a lover of the sun, the Mediterranean, women, a man from a poor background who supported the oppressed and detests oppressors, nationalism, dictators (Hitlerian or Stalinian, any), in fact any kind of injustice. Onfray's Camus is a man of sensations, emotions and perceptions as opposed to words and concepts.

As much as this is an enormous work of praise for Camus, it's also a work of clear hatred for Sartre, and Onfray can't resist at the slightest opportunity to pour scorn on Sartre and the 'germanopratin' world: after all, Camus bought a small house in September 1958 in Lourmarin, Vaucluse, a world away from Saint-Germain-des-Prés, from the Paris the Algeria-born writer couldn't really relate to. Sartre, as distinct from Camus, was born with a silver philosophical spoon in his mouth, in a France of learning, a library within an arm's reach. Onfray pokes away at Sartre (and by extension Beauvoir) for being part of a world Camus had never been brought up with, criticises him for perceived dubious tactics during the war, for going on a cut-price holiday for foreigners to Mussolini's Italy with Beauvoir, and on and on he goes.

One incredible sentence (my translation) reads: 'The future author of [one of his favourite expressions] Le deuxième sexe [Beauvoir of course] was born a monogamous woman; she became the opposite by becoming Sartrean'. This is, obviously, an Onfrayian take on Beauvoir's famous 'We are not born a woman, we become one', but it's not funny, although I fear that Onfray intended it as such. And Onfray continues by shrugging off Camus's infidelities, shrugging off Camus's wife's suicide attempt by suggesting that Camus was a libertine because of his wife's mental health, not the reverse: René Char, Camus's friend, had suggested this. Oh, so it's OK for Camus to screw around, but not Sartre and Beauvoir?

And this is the problem. Questioned on France 3's On n'est pas couché, Onfray revealed that he has read all of Camus's works. Reading this book, that much is obvious, as is his conviction of the greatness of Camus. This is a great book too (and not just in volume (799 pages)), but it's marred by the all-too-predictable potshots at Sartre and Beauvoir that Onfray just can't stop taking.

My Albert Camus posts:
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Michel Onfray: L'Ordre libertaire
Albert Camus in Lourmarin