L’ordre libertaire: la vie philosophique d’Albert Camus by Michel Onfray

Abstract

Rêveries, a confusion that yields a more modern conception of the soul. In the sixth chapter, O’Neal addresses the socio-cultural implications of Rousseau’s use of confusion . In the Lettre à d’Alembert, Rousseau objects to establishing a theater in Geneva because he fears the dangerous confusion it would engender, yet he rescues theatricality in his proposed public festivals. Here O’Neal notes a salubrious intermingling of the sexes, social classes, and actors/spectators. Chapter seven explores gender confusion in three different but related contexts. First, O’Neal examines such blurring in Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse, manifest in Saint-Preux’s transgendered behavior (for example, Saint-Preux’s ability to enter spaces typically reserved for women and to partake of a diet normally associated with women). O’Neal subsequently turns to Diderot’s deconstruction (and ultimate fusion) of traditional gender categories in L’éloge de Richardson, Le rêve de d’Alembert, and Le neveu de Rameau. Finally, O’Neal considers what the cases of Mlle Rosette (Pierre-Aymond Dumoret) and the chevalier d’Éon reveal about changing attitudes toward sexuality and gender in the eighteenth century. In chapter eight, O’Neal examines how Philippe Pinel replaces a rigid typology of mental illness with one that clouds distinctions between sanity and insanity. O’Neal integrates this blurring into a general confusion of“all categories of human beings into the one allembracing category of humanity” (187). The final chapter is devoted to Sade’s Justine, the most difficult piece of the puzzle. Yet O’Neal fits Sade into the arc of the study by showing how his disruption of traditional categories (moral, gender, etc.) reinforces a view of existence not unlike Diderot’s,a view based on contingency and mutability rather than certitude and fixity. In closing with Sade, O’Neal shows how even the most vexing of Enlightenment figures contributes to a progressive poetics of confusion. University of Oklahoma Michael Winston Onfray, Michel. L’ordre libertaire: la vie philosophique d’Albert Camus. Paris: Flammarion, 2012. ISBN 978-2-0812-6441-0. Pp. 599. 22,50 a. The rise and fall of an artistic or intellectual reputation probably has more to do with the cultural climate at the time of the evaluation than with the merits of an author’s writings. Thus Sartre’s intransigent pro-Soviet, anti-American stance was a perfect fit for the Cold War era where simplistic dualities were the order of the day. In such a climate the more nuanced positions of an Albert Camus were readily dismissed as indecisiveness, and Camus’s choice during the Algerian War of his mother over the truth derided as a puerile utterance of a would-be philosopher. These days, however, opinions have shifted. Camus’s stock is on the rise while Sartre’s has apparently been entrusted to Lehman Brothers. L’ordre libertaire presents itself as a philosophical biography of Camus and to a great extent it is just that, but what is most striking is the impassioned defense of Camus as an individual and a philosopher, and the disparagement of Sartre as a man and a thinker. Thus one aspect of this study provides 234 FRENCH REVIEW 87.1 Reviews 235 a fine contribution to the rehabilitation of Camus’s reputation, and the other slides into an extended series of dichotomies worthy of the Cold War mentality that Onfray so decries. Toward the end of this study Onfray quotes Camus’s desire: “être lu avec attention” (521), and one explanation for the excellent aspects of L’ordre libertaire is that Onfray has done just that. He contends, with considerable justification, that Camus’s writings were largely ignored by his critics. Onfray has seemly read everything Camus ever wrote or at least published, and this leads to fresh approaches to the man’s thinking. Perhaps Onfray’s greatest contributions are his pages on L’homme révolté, a work much derided in French intellectual circles when it first appeared. Ofray reads this text as an extensive meditation on the postwar situation, and on the proclivity to allow ideological purity to override clear thinking and even common sense. He is equally strong on La peste...