Journal articles on the topic 'Camus, Albert, Absurd (Philosophy) in literature'

The two world-wars and its massive destruction and horror had a great impact on human mind. Inevitably complete cynicism , pessimism , alienation , nothingness , existentialism reflected in the literature of that time. Pinter's play The Birthday Party (1957) is based on the philosophy of existentialism which later on became the source for the " Theatre of the Absurd ". Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre gave the philosophy of existentialism according to which the universe and man's experience in it are meaningless. All attempts by human mind to understand the world are futile . All philosophical systems and religion which claim that they can enable man to make sense of the world are delusive and useless. Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) wrote :-
 " In a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light , man feels a stranger. ... This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting constitutes the feeling of Absurdity. "

This articule is a study about the relation between the philosophy of the absurd and the Eros in the literary work of the french writer Albert Camus, with the aim to show how these two conceptions are incompatible. To do this, the different settings of the absurd that are present in the books of Camus and their implications with the Eros were analyzed. This relation was approached with the visions of the characters that act with the presence or ausence of Eros

The focus of this paper is to examine Albert Camus' work on disability. The research method used is library philosophy research with qualitative descriptive characteristics. Camus' works are used as formal objects to analyze material objects, namely people with disabilities in Indonesia. Data analysis was performed by applying methodical hermeneutic elements: interpretation, historical continuity, heuristics, and description. This paper aims to explore the meaning of life for persons with disabilities in Indonesia from the perspective of Albert Camus' philosophy. The findings of this paper, from Camus' philosophy, make disability absurd. In order to have meaning in life, they must face absurd situations through loving themselves. That can be achieved by being self-aware and doing good things for yourself and others. These people use these ethical competencies to carry on the responsibility of doing good things for others.

ResumoEste artigo traz as contribuições do literato e filósofo argelino Albert Camus para se problematizar a ética desde a perspectiva de uma filosofia existencial, mais especificamente, de uma Filosofia do Absurdo. Pretende-se com esse referencial retirar o problema ético de sua dimensão puramente intelectual para – a partir daquilo que será proposto como uma substancialização da ética – apontar as relações concretas dessa discussão com a vida, isto é, com a materialidade pressuposta nos modos de viver – ou estilos existenciais –, isto é, no modo como as pessoas relacionam-se consigo mesmas, com os outros e com o mundo. Depois de apresentadas as noções de “absurdo” e “revolta” cunhadas por Albert Camus, é feita uma aproximação destes com o conceito de Amor Mundi discutido por Hannah Arendt. Conclui-se, assim, que a ultrapassagem do absurdo em direção a novos estilos éticos pode se dar pela assunção do amor como um movimento de luta, constante e ininterrupto, responsável por valorizar a singularidade do viver.Palavras-chave: Ética; Absurdo; Amor; Albert Camus. AbstractThis article brings the contributions of the Algerian writer and philosopher Albert Camus to discuss ethics from the perspective of an existential philosophy, more specifically, a Philosophy of the Absurd. It is intended with this referential to remove the ethical problem of its purely intellectual dimension to – on the basis of which will be proposed as a substantiation of ethics – pointing out the concrete relations of this discussion with life, i.e., with the presupposed materiality of ways of living – or existential styles –, i.e., in the way people relate with themselves, with others and with the world. After presented the notions of "absurd" and "revolt" presented by Albert Camus, it is made an approach of these to the concept of Amor Mundi discussed by Hannah Arendt. It follows, therefore, that the exceeding of the absurd toward new ethical styles can be given by the assumption of love as a constant and uninterrupted movement of struggle responsible for valuing the uniqueness of living.Keywords: Ethics; Absurd; Love; Albert Camus.

This research aims to find out the absurdity in Jalan Lurus drama script by Wisran Hadi. This study uses qualitative descriptive method. The absurdity theory used in this study is based on Albert Camus's opinion on the themes of absurdity. The result of this research shows Jalan Lurus by Wisran Hadi is a form of absurd drama. The absurdity is the meaning of life, alienation, suicide, hope, and rebellion. The theme of life is most often presented in this drama. Meanwhile, the theme of suicide and rebellion in this drama became the least talked theme. Implications in literary learning in high school, teachers can use this drama as an alternative teaching material. However, it needs to be accomodated to the student's development. In learning, the discussion includes unconventional literary works, absurd drama types, absurd drama characteristic, and absurdity aspects.
 Keywords: absurdity, drama, Jalan Lurus, Albert Camus, literature learning
 Abstrak
 Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui absurditas dalam naskah drama Jalan Lurus karangan Wisran Hadi. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode deskriptif kualitatif. Teori absurditas yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini berdasarkan pendapat Albert Camus tentang tema-tema dalam absurditas. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan drama Jalan Lurus karangan Wisran Hadi merupakan bentuk drama absurd. Absurditas tersebut ialah makna hidup, keterasingan, bunuh diri, harapan, dan pemberontakan. Tema makna hidup paling sering disampaikan dalam naskah drama Jalan Lurus. Sementara itu, tema bunuh diri dan pemberontakan dalam naskah drama Jalan Lurus menjadi tema yang paling sedikit disampaikan. Implikasinya dalam pembelajaran sastra di SMA, guru dapat menggunakan drama ini sebagai alternatif bahan ajar. Namun, hal tersebut perlu disesuaikan dengan perkembangan siswa. Dalam pembelajaran, pembahasan meliputi karya sastra inkonvensional, jenis drama absurd, ciri-ciri drama absurd, dan aspek absurditas.
 Kata kunci: absurditas, drama, Jalan Lurus, Albert Camus, pembelajaran sastra

The most powerful thing about the literature on future-oriented education is what it tells us about our orientation to the present. This article explores some of the key ideas of future orientation that show the importance of both the present and, in particular, the presence of the teacher. The contributions of science fiction and of Albert Camus are explored to support this analysis and to generate some practical philosophical approaches to making sense of the present in an absurd world.

In the article, the author discusses one of the most significant branches of literary science, existentialism and the trends of absurd, which are the main part of the literary trend, Modernism, which made a radical difference in literature when traditional stereotypes and traditional conclusions were out-of-date, and when a full-scale investigation was launched into the essence of human being in the early XX thcentury

Abstract This article discusses Sisyphus as a recurrent (philosophical) image in Samuel Beckett’s work. Starting from his prewar reading notes, it moves on to the 1940s and the radio play All That Fall (1956), which is studied in light of Albert Camus’s essays Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942) and L’ Homme révolté (1951). By focussing on how the radio play deals with the absurd, revolt, suicide and murder, the article reads All That Fall as one of Beckett’s most critical but overlooked engagements with Camus, merging classical and modern versions of the character Sisyphus.

In the ethics of ambiguity (1947), Simone De Beauvoir suggests that to be human is to be subject to change and contradiction. Paradox, she claimed, was the only truth concerning human existence because of the tension created between mortality and the desire to give meaning to life. “Death,” Beauvoir suggests, “challenges our existence. … [I]t also gives meaning to our life” (Prime 731). Unlike Albert Camus, however, she clearly refuses to conceive of existence as absurd. “To declare existence absurd is to deny that I can ever be given meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed” (Ethics 129). Recognizing the facticity created by the inevitability of death and the constraints death imposes on existence, she implores us, nevertheless, to seize our freedom and give meaning to it through ethical acts.

This article seeks to an approach between the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, in Feeling of the world (1940), and the philosophy of Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus - the work of art as adventure of a spiritual destiny (2012), for, to think through by the language praticed by Drummond in two poems – Poem of necessity and Holding hands –, the be in the world and the passing of the man's condition of the being ontic to the be ontological, using also Durand (2012) and another theorists. Making use, as methodology, by the bibliographical research, and theory express of poetic text, concepts and analysis based on the phenomenological critique. Still in an interdisciplinary approach, to reflect the subject and its constitution as speech, will use theories of French line of discourse analysis (DA) and the line Anglo-Saxon (ADC), whose leading exponents are respectively, Michel Pêcheux and Norman Fairclough, relying on the concept of dialectical materialism.
 
 
 O Homem Absurdo na filosofia camusiana e na poesia drummondiana: a linguagem como fonte da (trans)formação
 
 Este artigo busca aproximações entre a poesia de Carlos Drummond de Andrade, em Sentimento do Mundo (1940), e a filosofia de Albert Camus, em O mito de Sísifo – a obra de arte como aventura de um destino espiritual (2012), para, por meio da linguagem praticada por Drummond em dois poemas – Poema da necessidade e Mãos dadas –, pensar o estar no mundo e a passagem do homem da condição de ser ôntico para ser ontológico, valendo-se, também, de Durand (2012) e de outros teóricos. Utiliza, como metodologia, a pesquisa bibliográfica e expressa teorias do texto poético, conceitos e análises com base na crítica fenomenológica. Ainda, numa atitude interdisciplinar, para refletir sobre o sujeito e sua constituição como discurso, baseia-se nas teorias da Análise de Discurso de linha francesa (AD) e de linha anglo-saxã (ADC), cujos principais expoentes são, respectivamente, Michel Pêcheux e Norman Fairclough, apoiando-se na concepção do materialismo dialético.

Abstract The purpose of this essay is to capture and convey, through the use of different works of philosophy that encapsulate thoughts on the same idea, the motif of the absurdity of life in Ernest Hemingway’s first novel The Sun Also Rises. The concept of the absurd will be, first and foremost, examined through absurdist criticism of the novel, using the philosophical thought of Albert Camus, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and other philosophers who captured the essence of the absurd in their philosophy, all in order to represent this concept in Hemingway’s novel and to show how it truly manifests itself upon some of the most important characters’ psychology and their actions, portrayed throughout the three parts of the book. Mention will be made of the concept of “Lost generation” as it is the cornerstone to understanding, firstly, the characters’ background and current psychological status and the effects that the war had on an entire generation, leading them to an unwilling search for meaning in what this essay strives to present as a meaningless life.

A characterization of the shame-inducing legacy of colonialism lies at the heart of Rawi Hage’s Cockroach. By employing Albert Camus’s aesthetic style, Hage’s novel investigates the ironic paradoxes in Camus’s philosophy of absurdism and his political stance regarding Algerian independence from France. Through the motif of the “gaze,” (the mode of looking that shames the specular object), the novel links shame to what Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks calls the “regime of the look,” a system of visualizing and encoding race. Through three textual manifestations of shame, Cockroach points out that Camus’s own representation of Arab bodies instantiates a paradox in his attitude about independence. Indeed, because of his commitment to the absurd and an ethics of fraternity, an oblique feeling of shame surfaces in Camus’s writing; this shame both disrupts the logic of Camus’s philosophy and contributes to the affective experiences of some postcolonial subjects.

Lê Tuyên was among the most notable literary critics of South Vietnam during the period 1954 – 1975. He has been best known for being one of the first Vietnamese to adopt and apply phenomenological criticism, especially Bachelardian analysis of the imaginaire and poetic reveries. However, in our opinion, there are other philosophical views rather than Bachelardian thought embedded in Lê Tuyên’s literary criticism, one of which is existentialist ideas. In this paper, based on the fact that Lê Tuyên frequently cited Camus and published several articles introducing Camus’s ideas, we would like to discover the notable relationship between Lê Tuyên and Albert Camus with an aim to get deeper insight into the existential perspective in Lê Tuyên’s literary criticism. We thus make a comparison between Camus’s existentialist philosophy and Lê Tuyên’s view of human life presented in his works of literary criticism. There are two main similarities. Firstly, Camus and Lê Tuyên both focused on discovering and analyzing the absurdity of human condition. They also both argued that absurdity is not a property of life, but an experience formed in our relationship with the world. Secondly, while analyzing the revolt of heroes and heroines in Vietnamese late-medieval literature agaisnt absurdity, Lê Tuyên agreed with Camus that illusory hopes, metaphysical beliefs and ignorant rebellions should be criticized, but it is crucial to dialogue with life, to fully understand what life is and what we truly are.

Studies of color symbolism of existentialism and expressionism are of relevant importance in several branches of knowledge: in philosophy, literature, dramaturgy, ethics and aesthetics. The phenomenon of color perception is also essential in the figurative and music arts. Thus, the main focus of this article, dedicated to the literary and philosophical works by Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Kafka, is on interpretation of light and color perception.

<div><p><em>Albert Camus, a French philosopher, thinker and writer, along with Jean Paul Sartre gave a philosophical base to French existentialism. Though he would publically disavow any ideological association to this movement which gripped post-war Europe, it was his writings, nevertheless, which would shape much of the future direction that this movement would take. In his book The Rebel, An Essay on Man in RevoltCamus gave a philosophical construct to the existential conundrum which fueled and sustained this movement. In this seminal work he defines rebellion as the quintessential human response to a seemingly absurd existence. According to him it is an act of simultaneous denial and acceptance: we negate the forces which strike at the root of our existence and, in the same breath celebrate the validity of our existence in our day today living. This is what helps us retain our faith in our own humanity while pitted against the depredations of a subversive social, moral and cosmological order. Though separated by vast intercontinental distances, cultural differences andvarying tastes and sensibilities, there is a remarkable degree of convergence of thought between Camus, the French thinker and Tennessee Williams, the American playwright. Camus’ rallying call to his ‘rebel’ finds resonance in the redoubtable fight of Williams’ protagonists in play after play wherein these ‘sensitive non-conformists’ would continue to wage a relentless battle against the inequities of the world despite their foreknowledge that they are doomed to fail. At the heart of their common philosophy, is the need to assert the fact of our existence without succumbing to the forces of negation even when the quotidian reality of life would seem to preclude any hope.</em></p></div>

Abstract:Much of the current discussion of evil within business and professions locates evil within the individual employee. Dennis Moberg (1997) has argued for conceiving of employee viciousness as a lack of self-control. This paper argues, that while some evil behaviors may be well-modelled as instances of low self-control, this model does not fit much of what might qualify as evil (e.g., child-caregivers falsely accusing their fellow employees of ritual child abuse). The paper examines three alternative models of evil, two drawn from literature, one from theology, and shows why these alternative models are just as relevant for thinking about the nature and cause of evil as the low self-control model drawn from the criminology literature.How intoxicating to feel like God the Father and to hand out definitive testimonials of bad character and habits—Albert Camus

AbstractThis article draws out the political implications of some of the avatars of ancient skepticism in modern fiction. It relies on Martha Nussbaum’s claim that fiction can provide some of the best lessons in moral philosophy to refute her claim that ancient skepticism was a bad influence on morals. It surveys references to skepticism from Shakespeare through such diverse writers as Isabel de Charrière, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Anatole France, and Albert Camus down to recent writers such as Orhan Pamuk and Michel Houellebecq. The most substantial treatment is of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, which is interpreted in two ways: one, as an example of isosthenia or equipollence in arguments on both sides of questions about gender in the Islamic world, and two, as the biography of a person who claims to be a self-conscious skeptic. Skepticism emerges as a multi-faceted concept in modern literature, but there are definite references back to the ancient skeptics, including mention of the name Pyrrhonism and knowledge of the writings of Sextus Empiricus. The political implications militate against dogmatic claims to truth and knowledge of a one-dimensional justice.

The article analyses V. Domontovych’s biographical novel “The lonely traveller is heading along the lonely way” as a fictional specimen of the philosophy of existentialism in the Ukrainian prose of the 40s of the XXth c. that proves the intellectuality of Ukrainian literature. It is proved that the main statements of this direction in the philosophy of the twentieth century penetrate the entire work from the beginning to its completion at all levels, starting from the concept-headline, the essence of the central hero of the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, plot-compositional features, means of shaping, external and internal structure. Understanding of the work through the prism of this problem is carried out with the help of involvement of relevant considerations of Socrates, Hryhorii Skovoroda (the idea of finding an own place in life – “know yourself”), Albert Camus, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Nikolai Berdyaev (“Sisyphean work” (“The Myth of Sisyphus”) for the sake of establishing oneself ; a comparative description of Van Gogh and Mersot from the story “The Stranger”: the conflict between the person and the society, the problem of “the other”, voluntary “suffering – the highest law of life”, suffering as one of the main existential things, coming/escaping to God, testing yourself by a religion as your destination, disappointment in the voluntary apostolate, etc.), as well as the thoughts of Soren Kierkegaard, Carl Jaspers, Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. The analysis of the work is carried out accordingly in the context of Ukrainian and world literature.

The paper presents a series of arguments which indicate that significant historiographic works describing and analyzing bygone political phenomena as well the literary works which picturesquely depict political situations and human destinies - with their specific approaches and methods - contribute to the better insight and understanding of the phenomena in the political life which philosophy and social sciences express by notions. Social and political life have their bright and dark sides. It is less arguable that political sciences - in the study of phenomena included in their topic -find great help in history, if it is - as Leopold von Ranke advised - oriented only to "show what really happened". Historical studies, specially the ones of the socalled great historians, present to us the images of the situation in a certain period or event with all significant details and contribute to the understanding of that phenomenon, helping to clarify its essence. Thus for example, Appian's Roman Civil Wars or Tacitus' descriptions in The Annals of the suffering of the innocent victims in the power struggle during civil wars and during the ferocious persecution of Christians -innocent, but accused of all possible crimes. What astonishes the reader is the grea similarity between the phenomena, processes, actions happening two millennia ago and in the 20th century. Philosopher and political thinkers (like Aristotle), but also some historians (like Thucydides) offer explanations why some patterns repeat and why they would "keep repeating". In Khalil Inalcik's work, we find detailed descriptions of brutal mutual killings among the sons of the majority of the Turkish sultans in the power struggle after their fathers' death. Generalizing on the basis of the material provided by history, we reach an entire string of general notions in political and social sciences. Great thinkers and writers, from the oldest Eastern and the greatest antique philosophers till the ones from the 20th century, used found inspiration and drew ideas and incentives or material from the sources with which they supplemented their theoretical categories, notions and explanations, including the images of political life. These sources are represented in the great literary works. Contradictory opinions about the character and significance of ail and literature are found in Plato's and Aristotle's writings. Aristotle, who analyzed this problem, presented arguments why literary insights - precisely because of the character of insights they offer - deserve to stand in the same pedestal with philosophy. He used the expression he himself introduced to mark one aspect of the effect of art and literature - and that is catharsis. Psychology facilitates our insights into the motives and consequences of the participants' behavior social psychology being particularly important, but also ethics. The means used to convey a certain truth is less important, its essence is more important. Several Greek philosophers (Parmenides, Empedocles, Xenophon) even the Roman ones (for example, Lucretius Cains) wrote their philosophical treatises in verse. Kant's famous words Sapere aude! with which he asks people to have courage to use their own mind and thus become enlightened originate from the Roman poet Horace, and Michel de Montaigne also used them. Plato and Aristotle referred not only to the available sources about preceding philosophical ideas and political systems, including the first Greek historians, but also to the tragedians, primarily Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, to the comedy writers (like Aristophanes), to the lyricists (Solon, Simonides, Archilochus). When Aristotle expounds one of the key categories of his political theory about man as a political animal (zoon politikon), he refers to Homer to confirm what he himself believes. Anica Savic-Rebac quotes Strabo's formulations about poetry as "the first philosophy", as well as about Homer's work as "poetic philosophy" and as a source of every kind of wisdom, even every kind of knowledge. With his ideas and images he presented in his literary works, Dostoyevsky influenced several philosophers (Nietzsche, Camus and others) and scientists (Freud, Adler and others). "The philosophy of existence" and its ethical orientation were presented not only in the philosophical, but also in the literary works (Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus). The so called philosophy of the absurd and "the literature of the absurd" mutually merge and supplement. Not even the best 20th century theoretical treatise about the nature of power - like those by Charles Merriam, Bertrand Russell, Bertrand de Jouvenel or Harold Lass well can depict what man gets to know through the tragedies of Marlowe Shakespeare, Goethe, in which main participants are driven and urged by the yearning to achieve absolute power. "The Great Inquisitor", "The Iron Heel" "Dark at Noon", but also the personalities like Raskolnikov or Verhovensky from the novel The Possessed help us to understand many things. "Gulag" became a political notion because of the title of the novel Gulag. Literature-antiutopia pointed to the dangers of the closed mind and of the technological society before scientific studies had done that.

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 Your right is to perform your work but never be oriented to the results. Never be motivated by the results of your actions, nor should you be attached to not performing your prescribed duties.
 The above mentioned philosophy however, can be best understood in the present scenario of the pandemic of COVID 19. The pandemic which has kept everybody unsettled, restless from within, Shrimad Bhagwad Gita serves a torchbearer to the humanity. It holds our faith in karma, the true meaning of life.
 As WHO reported, 2020 gripped the whole world into the saga of darkness which is started with a disease from animal. Not only that in fact it has engulfed the whole world into it. The entire world it seems has locked and blocked not only its movements but life. The numbers of death and patients increasing every day and with this increase in number is increasing the social stigma towards people. Health workers, women, children, sex workers, all are victim of it. This saga of disease has restricted not only our breathing but livelihood, happiness. We all succumb now to our own shell. Aristotle said once, “man is a social animal” and look at the world around today, a small little animal has brought that man to just a tiny individual who is always at the hands and prey to the nature. Be it Ebola Virus (EVD) of 1976 that was considered one of the deadliest viruses until then of its own kind, severely fatal to human illness or the Spanish Flu or the Bubonic Plague, Black Death epidemic. All these have always been fatal and deadliest in their own specific ways. Still, we human always feel surprised whenever we face such sudden outbreak of any disaster, what so ever. The catastrophic, xenophobic behaviour, subjects to be analysed from anthropological point of view try to justify one of the foremost evolution myths by Herbert Specncer, “Survival of the Fittest”. However, in literature, it is said that everything has a purpose in a narrative or a situation, it has a meaning to interpret. Things and situations are always interpretational. So is the case in this pandemic. This COVID-19 is much more than just a “disease”. It’s a social-cultural construct that shapes, reshapes or de-shapes humanities responses and behaviour.
 The objective of this paper is to look these constructs from a different lens and analyse the underlying existential philosophy, an existential absurdity drawing adjacent connections between the age old two classics piece of literature, The Bhagwad Gita (a long conversation between Arjuna and Lord Krishna before the battle of Mahabharata in the battle field Kurukshetra and The Plague by Albert Camus.

This article aims to point out that the study of emotions in literary works is an intersection of discursive research in literature and in linguistics. We rely on characteristics of the genre, the writer's style, the philosophy of the work to understand the emotions expressed by the narrator and the character. Basing on that, the study identifies the means of expressing emotions used in the work. In the theoretical part, we present directions to study emotions in discourse, characteristic of fictional discourse, and clarify the connotation of two concepts: ethos and pathos. From that theory, we investigate the emotions that make up the irrational sentiment in The Stranger and the rebellious sentiment in The Plague as well as identify the means of expressing the two emotions above. The comparison of the means of expressing emotions in the two works allows us to understand the worldview and perspective of the writer Albert Camus in the two writing periods that he calls "Absurd period" and "Rebellion period".

With the COVID-19 pandemic, clients and therapists alike are apt to experience an increase in existential anxiety. Irvin Yalom formulates existential anxiety as the result of a confrontation with the givens of death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. As a formulation for COVID-19 pandemic anxiety, Yalom’s formulation provides a means to grasp the existential crisis facing the individual wherein the ability to cope with anxiety and despair is overwhelmed. As a prophylactic for the paralyzing existential terror and despair faced through the existential threat of COVID-19, Albert Camus’ concepts of the absurd and the absurd hero are developed as a means to embrace the absurd and tragic character of the COVID-19 pandemic. The absurd and tragic heroes Sisyphus and Dr. Bernard Rieux become role models for the pandemic therapist.

Albert Camus is closely associated with French literature in Europe. He is one of the major contributors of Existentialism philosophy. His first novel that deals with this idea are, “The Outsider”/ The Stranger” published in 1942. Following ‘The outsider’ His novel ‘The plague’ and ‘The Fall ‘were published in 1947 and 1956 respectively. It is for his novel ‘The plague” that got him Nobel Prize for literature. Camus ‘The Outsider’ reflects the existential crisis of human life. It is through the action and works of the main protagonist and his relation with other characters, and thus we can considered the novel as existentialism, and we have critically analyzed the Novel.

Among the various human attitudes toward a pandemic, along with fear, despair and anger, there is also an urge to praise the catastrophe or imbue it with some sort of hope. In 2020 such hopes were voiced in the stream of all the other COVID-19 reactions and interpretations in the form of predictions of imminent social, political or economic changes that may or must be brought on by the pandemic, or as calls to “rise above” the common human sentiment and see the pandemic as some sort of cruel-but-necessary bitter pill to cure human depravity or social disorganization. Is it really possible for a plague of any kind to be considered a relief? Or perhaps a just punishment? In order to assess the validity of such interpretations, this paper considers the artistic reactions to the pandemics of the past, specifically the images of the plague from Alexander Pushkin’s play Feast During the Plague, Antonin Artaud’s essay “The Theatre and the Plague” and Albert Camus’s novel The Plague. These works in different ways explore an attitude in which a plague can be praised in some respect. The plague can be a means of self-overcoming and purification for both an individual and for society. At the same time, Pushkin and Camus, each in his own way and by different means, show the illusory nature of that attitude. A mass catastrophe can reveal the resources already present in humankind, but it does not help either the individual or the society to progress.

Among the various human attitudes toward a pandemic, along with fear, despair and anger, there is also an urge to praise the catastrophe or imbue it with some sort of hope. In 2020 such hopes were voiced in the stream of all the other COVID-19 reactions and interpretations in the form of predictions of imminent social, political or economic changes that may or must be brought on by the pandemic, or as calls to “rise above” the common human sentiment and see the pandemic as some sort of cruel-but-necessary bitter pill to cure human depravity or social disorganization. Is it really possible for a plague of any kind to be considered a relief? Or perhaps a just punishment? In order to assess the validity of such interpretations, this paper considers the artistic reactions to the pandemics of the past, specifically the images of the plague from Alexander Pushkin’s play Feast During the Plague, Antonin Artaud’s essay “The Theatre and the Plague” and Albert Camus’s novel The Plague. These works in different ways explore an attitude in which a plague can be praised in some respect. The plague can be a means of self-overcoming and purification for both an individual and for society. At the same time, Pushkin and Camus, each in his own way and by different means, show the illusory nature of that attitude. A mass catastrophe can reveal the resources already present in humankind, but it does not help either the individual or the society to progress.

Jerzy Stempowski and Lev Shestov — existentialism imbued with eastern melancholy. A short history of a friendship: The main objective of this article is to present the friendship between Jerzy Stempowski — Polish writer, essayist and Lev Shestov — Russian writer and philosopher. The article consist of three parts an and short conclusion. In the first part I focus on Stempowski’s predilections for Eastern Europe, and I also explore Stempowski’s complicated, though clearly evident, relation with existentialism. It is in this context that I show both Stempowski’s close affinity with Shestov philosophy, and his evident antipathy to French existentialism. In the second part I attempt to answer the following question: why did Stempowski have such a strong aversion to Albert Camus’ work. In this part of my essay I briefly refer to a Serbian writer and dissident — Mihajlo Mihajlov. In the third part I explore Stempowski’s friendship with Shestov and I also sketch the ideological horizon they both shared. Moreover, I mention Shestov’s presentations at the philosophical conferences in Kraków and Berlin as well as his meeting with Edmund Husserl in Amsterdam. In the short conclusion to my article I suggest that Stempowski’s existentialism is an individual, original project even if his existentialism draws upon most of the major themes in philosophical treatises and literature of existentialism. His “existential project” is based on: 1. reason which rationally orders reality, 2. sympathy towards antirational and prophetic philosophy of Russian thinkers which he analyses from the positions of a professed atheist and 3. deeply-rooted humanistic values.

A political minimalism? That would obviously go against the grain of our current political ideology → in fact, we are in an era of political maximalisation (Roland Barthes 200, arrow in original).Barthes’ comment is found in the ‘Annex’ to his 1978 lecture course The Neutral. Despite the three decade difference I don’t things have changed that much, certainly not insofar as academic debate about the cultural and social is concerned. At conferences I regularly hear the demand that the speaker or speakers account for the ‘political intent’, ‘worth’ or ‘utility’ of their work, or observe how speakers attempt to pre-empt and disarm such calls through judicious phrasing and citing. Following his diagnosis Barthes (201-206) proceeds to write under the title ‘To Give Leave’. Here he notes the incessant demand placed upon us, as citizens, as consumers, as representative cultural subjects and as biopolitical entities and, in this context, as academics to have and to communicate our allegiances, views and opinions. Echoing the acts, (or rather the ‘non-acts’), of Melville’s Bartleby, Barthes describes the scandalous nature of suspending the obligation of holding views; the apparent immorality of suspending the obligation of being interested, engaged, opinionated, committed – even if one only ever suspends provisionally, momentarily even. For the length of a five thousand word essay perhaps. In this short, unfortunately telegraphic and quite speculative essay I want pause to consider a few gestures or figures of ‘suspension’, ‘decline’ and ‘remaining aside’. What follows is in three parts. First a comment on the nature of the ‘demand to communicate’ identified by Barthes and its links to longer running moral and practical imperatives within Western understandings of the subject, the social and the political. Second, the most substantial section but still an all too brief account of the apparent ‘passivity’ of the narrator of Imre Kertész’s novel Fatelessness and the ways in which the novel may be read as a reflection on the nature of agency and determination. Third, a very brief conclusion, the question directly; what politics or what apprehension of politics, could a reflection on stillness and its ‘political minimalism’ offer? 1.For Barthes, (in 1978), one of the factors defining the contemporary intellectual scene was the way in which “politics invades all phenomena, economic, cultural, ethical” coupled with the “radicalization” of “political behaviors” (200), perhaps most notably in the arrogance of political discourse as it assumes the place of a master discourse. Writing in 1991 Bill Readings identified a similar phenomenon. For Readings the category of the political and politically inspired critique were operating by encircling their objects within a presupposed “universal language of political significance into which one might translate everything according to its effectivity”, an approach which has the effect of always making “the political […] the bottom line, the last instance where meaning can be definitively asserted” (quoted in Clark 3) or, we may add, realized. There is, of course, much that could be said here, not least concerning the significant differences in context, (between, for example, the various forms of revolutionary Marxism, Communism and Maoism which seem to preoccupy Barthes and the emancipatory identity and cultural politics which swept through literature departments in the US and beyond in the last two decades of the twentieth century). However it is also possible to suggest that a general grammar and, moreover, a general acceptance of a telos of the political persists.Barthes' (204-206) account of ‘political maximalisation’ is accompanied by a diagnosis of its productivist virility, (be it, in 1978, on the part of the increasingly reduced revolutionary left or the burgeoning neo-liberal right). The antithesis, or, rather, the outside of such an arrangement or frame would not be another political program but rather a certain stammering, a lassitude or dilatoriness. A flaccidness even; “a devirilized image” wherein from the point of view of the (political) actor or critic, “you are demoted to the contemptible mass of the undecided of those who don’t know who to vote for: old, lost ladies whom they brutalize: vote however you want, but vote” (Barthes 204). Hence Barthes is not suggesting a counter-move, a radical refusal, a ‘No’ shouted back to the information saturated market society. What is truly scandalous he suggests, is not opposition or refusal but the ‘non-reply’. What is truly scandalous, roughish even, is the decline or deferral and so the provisional suspension of the choice (and the blackmail) of the ‘yes’ or ‘no’, the ‘this’ or the ‘that’, the ‘with us’ or ‘against us’.In Literature and Evil Georges Bataille concludes his essay on Kafka with a comment on such a decline. According to Bataille, the reason why Kafka remains an ambivalent writer for critics, (and especially for those who would seek to enrol his work to political ends), lays precisely in his constant withdrawal; “There was nothing he [Kafka] could have asserted, or in the name of which he could have spoken. What he was, which was nothing, only existed to the extent in which effective activity condemned him” (167). ‘Effective activity’ refers, contextually, to a certain form of Communism but more broadly to the rationalization or systematization intrinsic to any political program, political programs (or ideologies) as such, be they communist, liberal or libertarian. At least insofar as, as implied above, the political is taken to coincide with a certain metaphysics and morality of action and the consequent linking of freedom to work, (a factor common to communist, fascist and liberal political programs), and so to the labour of the progressive self-realization and achievement of the self, the autos or ipse (see Derrida 6-18). Be it via, for example, Marx’s account of human’s intrinsic ‘capacity for work’ (Arbeitskraft), Heidegger’s account of necessary existential (and ultimately communal) struggle (Kampf), or Weber’s diagnoses of the (Protestant/bourgeois) liberal project to realize human potentiality (see also Agamben Man without Content; François 1-64). Hence what is ‘evil’ in Kafka is not any particular deed but the deferral of deeds; his ambivalence or immorality in the eyes of certain critics being due to the question his writing poses to “the ultimate authority of action” (Bataille 153) and so to the space beyond action onto which it opens. What could this space of ‘worklessness’ or ‘unwork’ look like? This non-virile, anti-heroic space? This would not be a space of ‘inaction’, (a term still too dependent, albeit negatively, on action), but of ‘non-action’; of ‘non-productive’ or non-disclosive action. That is to say, and as a first attempt at definition, ‘action’ or ‘praxis’, if we can still call it that, which does not generate or bring to light any specific positive content. As a way to highlight the difficulties and pitfalls, (at least with certain traditions), which stand in the way of thinking such a space, we may highlight Giorgio Agamben’s comments on the widespread coincidence of a metaphysics of action with the determination of both the subject, its teleology and its orientation in the world:According to current opinion, all of man’s [sic] doing – that of the artist and the craftsman as well as that of the workman and the politician – is praxis – manifestation of a will that produces a concrete effect. When we say that man has a productive status on earth, we mean, that the status of his dwelling on the earth is a practical one […] This productive doing now everywhere determines the status of man on earth – man understood as the living being (animal) that works (laborans), and, in work, produces himself (Man without Content 68; 70-71 original emphasis).Beyond or before practical being then, that is to say before and beyond the determination of the subject as essentially or intrinsically active and engaged, another space, another dwelling. Maybe nocturnal, certainly one with a different light to that of the day; one not gathered in and by the telos of the ipse or the turning of the autos, an interruption of labour, an unravelling. Remaining still, unravelling together (see Harrison In the absence).2.Kertész’s novel Sorstalanság was first published in his native Hungary in 1975. It has been translated into English twice, in 1992 as Fateless and in 2004 as Fatelessness. Fatelessness opens in Budapest on the day before György Köves’ – the novel’s fourteen year old narrator – father has to report for ‘labour service’. It goes on to recount Köves’ own detention and deportation and the year spent in the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald and Zeitz. During this period Köves’ health declines, gradually at first and then rapidly to a moment of near death. He survives and the novel closes with his return to his home town. Köves is, as Kertész has put it in various interviews and as is made clear in the novel, a ‘non-Jewish Jew’; a non-practicing and non-believing Hungarian Jew from a largely assimilated family who neither reads nor speaks Hebrew or Yiddish. While Kertész has insisted that the novel is precisely that, a novel, a work of literature and not an autobiography, we should note that Kertész was himself imprisoned in Buchenwald and Zeitz when fourteen.Not without reservations but for the sake of brevity I shall focus on only one theme in the novel; determination and agency, or what Kertész calls ‘determinacy’. Writing in his journal Galley Boat-Log (Gályanapló) in May 1965 Kertész suggests ‘Novel of Fatelessness’ as a possible title for his work and then reflects on what he means by ‘fate’, the entry is worth quoting at length.The external determinacy, the stigma which constrains our life in a situation, an absurdity, in the given totalitarianism, thwarts us; thus, when we live out the determinacy which is doled out to us as a reality, instead of the necessity which stems from our own (relative) freedom – that is what I call fatelessness.What is essential is that our determinacy should always be in conflict with our natural views and inclinations; that is how fatelessness manifests itself in a chemically pure state. The two possible modes of protection: we transform into our determinacy (Kafka’s centipede), voluntarily so to say, and I that way attempt to assimilate our determinacy to our fate; or else we rebel against it, and so fall victim to our determinacy. Neither of these is a true solution, for in both cases we are obliged to perceive our determinacy […] as reality, whilst the determining force, that absurd power, in a way triumphs over us: it gives us a name and turns us into an object, even though we were born for other things.The dilemma of my ‘Muslim’ [Köves]: How can he construct a fate out of his own determinacy? (Galley Boat-Log 98 original emphasis).The dilemma of determinacy then; how can Köves, who is both determined by and superfluous to the Nazi regime, to wider Hungarian society, to his neighbours and to his family, gain some kind of control over his existence? Throughout Fatelessness people prove repeatedly unable to control their destinies, be it Köves himself, his father, his stepmother, his uncles, his friends from the oil refinery, or even Bandi Citrom, Köves’ mentor in the camps. The case of the ‘Expert’ provides a telescoped example. First appearing when Köves and his friends are arrested the ‘Expert’ is an imposing figure, well dressed, fluent in German and the director of a factory involved in the war effort (Fatelessness 50). Later at the brickworks, where the Jews who have been rounded up are being held prior to deportation, he appears more dishevelled and slightly less confident. Still, he takes the ‘audacious’ step of addressing a German officer directly (and receives some placatory ‘advice’ as his reward) (68-69). By the time the group arrives at the camp Köves has difficulty recognising him and without a word of protest, the ‘Expert’ does not pass the initial selection (88).Köves displays no such initiative with regard to his situation. He is reactive or passive, never active. For Köves events unfold as a series of situations and circumstances which are, he tells himself, essentially reasonable and to which he has to adapt and conform so that he may get on. Nothing more than “given situations with the new givens inherent in them” (259), as he explains near the end of the novel. As Köves' identity papers testify, his life and its continuation are the effect of arbitrary sets of circumstances which he is compelled to live through; “I am not alive on my own account but benefiting the war effort in the manufacturing industry” (29). In his Nobel lecture Kertész described Köves' situation:the hero of my novel does not live his own time in the concentration camps, for neither his time nor his language, not even his own person, is really his. He doesn’t remember; he exists. So he has to languish, poor boy, in the dreary trap of linearity, and cannot shake off the painful details. Instead of a spectacular series of great and tragic moments, he has to live through everything, which is oppressive and offers little variety, like life itself (Heureka! no pagination).Without any wilful or effective action on the part of the narrator and with only ‘the dreary trap of linearity’ where one would expect drama, plot, rationalization or stylization, Fatelessness can read as an arbitrarily punctuated series of waitings. Köves waiting for his father to leave, waiting in the customs shed, waiting at the brick works, waiting in train carriages, waiting on the ramp, waiting at roll call, waiting in the infirmary. Here is the first period of waiting described in the book, it is the day before his father’s departure and he is waiting for his father and stepmother as they go through the accounts at the family shop:I tried to be patient for a bit. Striving to think of Father, and more specifically the fact that he would be going tomorrow and, quite probably, I would not see him for a long time after that; but after a while I grew weary with that notion and then seeing as there was nothing else I could do for my father, I began to be bored. Even having to sit around became a drag, so simply for the sake of a change I stood up to take a drink of water from the tap. They said nothing. Later on, I also made my way to the back, between the planks, in order to pee. On returning I washed my hands at the rusty, tiled sink, then unpacked my morning snack from my school satchel, ate that, and finally took another drink from the tap. They still said nothing. I sat back in my place. After that, I got terribly bored for another absolute age (Fatelessness 9). It is interesting to consider exactly how this passage presages those that will come. Certainly this scene is an effect of the political context, his father and stepmother have to go through the books because of the summons to labour service and because of the racial laws on who may own and profit from a business. However, the specifically familial setting should not be overlooked, particularly when read alongside Kertész’s other novels where, as Madeleine Gustafsson writes, Communist dictatorship is “portrayed almost as an uninterrupted continuation of life in the camp – which in turn [...] is depicted as a continuation of the patriarchal dictatorship of a joyless childhood” (no pagination, see, for example, Kertész Kaddish). Time to turn back to our question; does Fatelessness provide an answer to the ‘dilemma of determinacy’? We should think carefully before answering. As Julia Karolle suggests, the composition of the novel and our search for a logic within itreveal the abuses that reason must endure in order to create any story or history about the Holocaust […]. Ultimately Kertész challenges the reader not to make up for the lack of logic in Fatelessness, but rather to consider the nature of its absence (92 original emphasis).Still, with this point in mind, (and despite what has been said above), the novel does contain a scene in which Köves appears to affirm his existence.In many respects the scene is the culmination of the novel. The camps have been liberated and Köves has returned to Budapest. Finding his father and step-mother’s apartment occupied by strangers he calls on his Aunt and Uncle Fleischmann and Uncle Steiner. The discussion which follows would repay a slower reading, however again for the sake of brevity I shall focus on only a few short excerpts. Köves suggests that everyone took their ‘steps’ towards the events which have unfolded and that prediction and retrospection are false perspectives which give the illusion of order and inevitability whereas, in reality, “everything becomes clear only gradually, sequentially over time, step-by-step” (Fatelessness 249): “They [his Uncles] too had taken their own steps. They too […] had said farewell to my father as if we had already buried him, and even later has squabbled about whether I should take the train or the suburban bus to Auschwitz” (260). Fleischmann and Steiner react angrily, claiming that such an understanding makes the ‘victims’ the ‘guilty ones’. Köves responds by saying that they do not understand him and asks they see that:It was impossible, they must try to understand, impossible to take everything away from me, impossible for me to be neither winner nor loser, for me not to be right and not to be mistaken that I was neither the cause nor effect of anything; they should try to see, I almost pleaded, that I could not swallow that idiotic bitterness, that I should merely be innocent (260-261).Karolle (93-94) suggests that Köves' discussion with his uncles marks the moment where he accepts and affirms his existence and, from this point on begins to take control of and responsibility. Hence for Karolle the end of the novel depicts an ‘authentic’ moment of self-affirmation as Köves steps forward and refuses to participate in “the factual historical narrative of Auschwitz, to forget what he knows, and to be unequivocally categorized as a victim of history” (95). In distinction to Karolle, Adrienne Kertzer argues that Köves' moment of self-affirmation is, in fact, one of self-deception. Rather than acknowledging that it was “inexplicable luck” and a “series of random acts” (Kertzer 122) which saved his life or that his near death was due to an accident of birth, Köves asserts his personal freedom. Hence – and following István Deák – Kertzer suggests that we should read Fatelessness as a satire, ‘a modern Candide’. A satire on the hope of finding meaning, be it personal or metaphysical, in such experiences and events, the closing scenes of the novel being an ironic reflection on the “desperate desire to see […] life as meaningful” (Kertzer 122). So, while Köves convinces himself of his logic his uncles say to each other “‘Leave him be! Can’t you see he only wants to talk? Let him talk! Leave him be!’ And talk I did, albeit possibly to no avail and even a little incoherently” (Fatelessness 259). Which are we to choose then? The affirmation of agency (with Karolle) or the diagnosis of determination (with Kertzer)? Karolle and Kertzer give insightful analyses, (and ones which are certainly not limited to the passages quoted above), however it seems to me that they move too quickly to resolve the ‘dilemma’ presented by Köves, if not of Fatelessness as a whole. Still, we have a little time before having to name and decide Köves’ fate. Kertész’s use of the word ‘hero’ to describe Köves above – ‘the hero of my novel…’ – is, perhaps, more than a little ironic. As Kertész asks (in 1966), how can there be a hero, how can one be heroic, when one is one’s ‘determinacies’? What sense does it make to speak of heroic actions if “man [sic] is no more than his situation”? (Galley Boat-Log 99). Köves’ time, his language, his identity, none are his. There is no place, no hidden reservoir of freedom, from which way he set in motion any efficacious action. All resources have already been corrupted. From Kertész’s journal (in 1975): “The masters of thought and ideologies have ruined my thought processes” (Galley Boat-Log 104). As Lawrence Langer has argued, the grammar of heroics, along with the linked terms ‘virtue’, ‘dignity’, ‘resistance’ ‘survival’ and ‘liberation’, (and the wider narrative and moral economies which these terms indicate and activate), do not survive the events being described. Here the ‘dilemma of determinacy’ becomes the dilemma of how to think and value the human outside or after such a grammar. How to think and value the human beyond a grammar of action and so beyond, as Lars Iyer puts it, “the equation of work and freedom that characterizes the great discourses of political modernity” (155). If this is possible. If such a grammar and equation isn’t too all pervasive, if something of the human still remains outside their economy. It may well be that our ability to read Fatelessness depends in large part on what we are prepared to forsake (see Langar 195). How to think the subject and a politics in contretemps, beyond or after the choice between determination or autonomy, passive or active, inaction or action, immoral or virtuous – if only for a moment? Kertész wonders, (in 1966), ”perhaps there is something to be savaged all the same, a tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail that may be a sign of the will to live and still awakens sympathy” (Galley Boat-Log 99). Something, perhaps, which remains to be salvaged from the grammar of humanism, something that would not be reducible to context, to ‘determinacies’, and that, at the same time, does not add up to a (resurrected) agent. ‘A tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail’. The press release announcing that Kertész had been awarded the Nobel prize for literature states that “For Kertész the spiritual dimension of man lies in his inability to adapt to life” (The Swedish Academy no pagination). Despite the difficulties presented by the somewhat over-determined term ‘spiritual’, this line strikes me as remarkably perspicuous. Like Melville’s Bartleby and Bataille’s Kafka before him, Kertész’s Köves’ existence, insofar as he exists, is made up by his non-action. That is to say, his existence is defined not by his actions or his inaction, (both of which are purely reactive and functional), but rather by his irreducibility to either. As commentators and critics have remarked, (and as the quotes given from the text above hopefully illustrate), Köves has an oddly formal and neutral ‘voice’. Köves’ blank, frequently equivocal tone may be read as a sign of his immaturity, his lack of understanding and his naivety. However I would suggest that before such factors, what characterizes Köves’ mode of address is its reticence to assert or disclose. Köves speaks, he speaks endlessly, but he says nothing or almost nothing - ‘to no avail and even a little incoherently’. Hence where Karolle seeks to recover an ‘intoned self-consciousness’ and Kertzer the repressed determining context, we may find Köves' address. Where Karolle’s and Kertzer’s approaches seek in some way to repair Köves words, to supplement them with either an agency to-come or an awareness of a context and, in doing so, pull his words fully into the light, Köves, it seems to me, remains elusive. His existence, insofar as we may speak of it, lies in his ‘inability to adapt to life’. His reserves are not composed of hidden or recoverable sources of agency but in his equivocality, in the way he takes leave of and remains aside from the very terms of the dilemma. It is as if with no resources of his own, he has an echo existence. As if still remaining itself where a tiny foolishness, something ultimately comic and frail.3.Is this it? Is this what we are to be left with in a ‘political minimalism’? It would seem more resignation or failure, turning away or quietism, the conceit of a beautiful soul, than any type of recognisable politics. On one level this is correct, however any such suspension or withdrawal, this moment of stillness where we are, is only ever a moment. However it is a moment which indicates a certain irreducibility and as such is, I believe, of great significance. Great significance, (or better ‘signifyingness’), even though – and precisely because – it is in itself without value. Being outside efficacy, labour or production, being outside economisation as such, it resides only in its inability to be integrated. What purpose does it serve? None. Or, perhaps, none other than demonstrating the irreducibility of a life, of a singular existence, to any discourse, narrative, identity or ideology, insofar as such structures, in their attempt to comprehend (or apprehend) the existent and put it to use always and violently fall short. As Theodor Adorno wrote;It is this passing-on and being unable to linger, this tacit assent to the primacy of the general over the particular, which constitutes not only the deception of idealism in hypostasizing concepts, but also its inhumanity, that has no sooner grasped the particular than it reduces it to a thought-station, and finally comes all too quickly to terms with suffering and death (74 emphasis added).This moment of stillness then, of declining and remaining aside, represents, for me, the anarchical and all but silent condition of possibility for all political strategy as such (see Harrison, Corporeal Remains). A condition of possibility which all political strategy carries within itself, more or less well, more or less consciously, as a memory of the finite and corporeal nature of existence. A memory which may always and eventually come to protest against the strategy itself. Strategy itself as strategy; as command, as a calculated and calculating order. And so, and we should be clear about this, such a remaining still is a demonstration.A demonstration not unlike, for example, that of the general anonymous population in José Saramago’s remarkable novel Seeing, who ‘act’ more forcefully through non-action than any through any ends-directed action. A demonstration of the kind which Agamben writes about after those in Tiananmen Square in 1989:The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be the struggle for control of the state, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity) […] [who] cannot form a societas because they do not poses any identity to vindicate or bond of belonging for which to seek recognition (Coming Community 85-67; original emphasis).A demonstration like that which sounds through Köves when his health fails in the camps and he finds himself being wheeled on a handcart taken for dead;a snatch of speech that I was barely able to make out came to my attention, and in that hoarse whispering I recognized even less readily the voice that has once – I could not help recollecting – been so strident: ‘I p … pro … test,’ it muttered” (Fatelessness 187 ellipses in original).The inmate pushing the cart stops and pulls him up by the shoulders, asking with astonishment “Was? Du willst noch leben? [What? You still want to live?] […] and right then I found it odd, since it could not have been warranted and, on the whole, was fairly irrational (187).AcknowledgmentsMy sincere thanks to the editors of this special issue, David Bissell and Gillian Fuller, for their interest, encouragement and patience. Thanks also to Sadie, especially for her comments on the final section. ReferencesAdorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London: Verso, 1974.Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.———. The Man without Content. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1999.Barthes, Roland. The Neutral. New York: Columbia U P, 2005.Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. London: Marion Boyars, 1985.Clarke, Timothy. The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Late Gadamer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2005.Deák, István. "Stranger in Hell." New York Review of Books 23 Sep. 2003: 65-68.Derrida, Jacques. Rogues. Two Essays on Reason. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2005.François, Anne-Lise. Open Secrets. The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2008.Gustafsson, Madeleine. 2003 “Imre Kertész: A Medium for the Spirit of Auschwitz.” 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/articles/gustafsson/index.html›.Harrison, Paul. “Corporeal Remains: Vulnerability, Proximity, and Living On after the End of the World.” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 423-445.———.“In the Absence of Practice.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space forthcoming.Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. London: Yale U P, 2000.Iyer, Lars. Blanchot’s Communism: Art, Philosophy and the Political. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.Karolle, Julia. “Imre Kertész Fatelessness as Historical Fiction.” Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature. Ed Louise O. Vasvári and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue U P, 2005. 89-96.Kertész, Imre. 2002 “Heureka!” Nobel lecture. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2002/kertesz-lecture-e.html›.———. Fatelessness. London: Vintage, 2004.———. Kaddish for an Unborn Child. London: Vintage International, 2004.———.“Galley Boat-Log (Gályanapló): Excerpts.” Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature. Ed Louise O. Vasvári and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2005. 97-110.Kertzer, Adrienne. “Reading Imre Kertesz in English.” Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature. Ed Louise O. Vasvári, and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue U P, 2005. 111-124.Langer, Lawrence. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. London: Yale U P, 1991.Melville, Herman. Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. New Jersey: Melville House, 2004.Marx, Karl. Capital Volume 1. London: Penguin Books, 1976.Readings, Bill. “The Deconstruction of Politics.” In Deconstruction: A Reader. Ed Martin McQuillan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2000. 388-396.Saramago, José. Seeing. London: Vintage, 2007. The Swedish Academy. "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2002: Imre Kertész." 2002. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2002/press.html›.Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge, 1992.

Introduction The first “Aquarius Festival” came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971 and was reprised in 1973 in the small rural town of Nimbin, in northern New South Wales. Both events reflected the Zeitgeist in what was, in some ways, an inchoate expression of the so-called “counterculture” (Roszak). Rather than attempting to analyse the counterculture as a discrete movement with a definable history, I enlist the theory of cultural memes to read the counter culture as a Dawkinsian cluster meme, with this paper offered as “testimonio”, a form of quasi-political memoir that views shifts in the culture through the lens of personal experience (Zimmerman, Yúdice). I track an evolving personal, “internal” topography and map its points of intersection with the radical social, political and cultural changes spawned by the “consciousness revolution” that was an integral part of the counterculture emerging in the 1970s. I focus particularly on the notion of “consciousness raising”, as a Dawkinsian memetic replicator, in the context of the idealistic notions of the much-heralded “New Age” of Aquarius, and propose that this meme has been a persistent feature of the evolution of the “meme cluster” known as the counterculture. Mimesis and the Counterculture Since evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins floated the notion of cultural memes as a template to account for the evolution of ideas within political cultures, a literature of commentary and criticism has emerged that debates the strengths and weaknesses of his proposed model and its application across a number of fields. I borrow the notion to trace the influence of a set of memes that clustered around the emergence of what writer Marilyn Ferguson called The Aquarian Conspiracy, in her 1980 book of that name. Ferguson’s text, subtitled Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time, was a controversial attempt to account for what was known as the “New Age” movement, with its late millennial focus on social and personal transformation. That focus leads me to approach the counterculture (a term first floated by Theodore Roszak) less as a definable historical movement and more as a cluster of aspirational tropes expressing a range of aspects or concerns, from the overt political activism through to experimental technologies for the transformation of consciousness, and all characterised by a critical interrogation of, and resistance to, conventional social norms (Ferguson’s “personal and social transformation”). With its more overtly “spiritual” focus, I read the “New Age” meme, then, as a sub-set of this “cluster meme”, the counterculture. In my reading, “New Age” and “counterculture” overlap, sharing persistent concerns and a broad enough tent to accommodate the serious—the combative political action of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), say, (see Elbaum)—to the light-hearted—the sport of frisbee for example (Stancil). The interrogation of conventional social and political norms inherited from previous generations was a prominent strategy across both movements. Rather than offering a sociological analysis or history of the ragbag counterculture, per se, my discussion here focuses in on the particular meme of “consciousness raising” within that broader set of cultural shifts, some of which were sustained in their own right, some dropping away, and many absorbed into the dominant mainstream culture. Dawkins use of the term “meme” was rooted in the Greek mimesis, to emphasise the replication of an idea by imitation, or copying. He likened the way ideas survive and change in human culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. While the transmission of memes does not depend on a physical medium, such as the DNA of biology, they replicate with a greater or lesser degree of success by harnessing human social media in a kind of “infectivity”, it is argued, through “contagious” repetition among human populations. Dawkins proposed that just as biological organisms could be said to act as “hosts” for replicating genes, in the same way people and groups of people act as hosts for replicating memes. Even before Dawkins floated his term, French biologist Jacques Monod wrote that ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. (165, emphasis mine) Ideas have power, in Monod’s analysis: “They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighbouring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains” (Monod, cited in Gleick). Emblematic of the counterculture were various “New Age” phenomena such as psychedelic drugs, art and music, with the latter contributing the “Aquarius” meme, whose theme song came from the stage musical (and later, film) Hair, and particularly the lyric that runs: “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”. The Australian Aquarius Festivals of 1971 and 1973 explicitly invoked this meme in the way identified by Monod and the “Aquarius” meme resonated even in Australia. Problematising “Aquarius” As for the astrological accuracy of the “Age of Aquarius meme”, professional astrologers argue about its dating, and the qualities that supposedly characterise it. When I consulted with two prominent workers in this field for the preparation of this article, I was astonished to find their respective dating of the putative Age of Aquarius were centuries apart! What memes were being “hosted” here? According to the lyrics: When the moon is in the seventh house And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars. (Hair) My astrologer informants assert that the moon is actually in the seventh house twice every year, and that Jupiter aligns with Mars every two years. Yet we are still waiting for the outbreak of peace promised according to these astrological conditions. I am also informed that there’s no “real” astrological underpinning for the aspirations of the song’s lyrics, for an astrological “Age” is not determined by any planet but by constellations rising, they tell me. Most important, contrary to the aspirations embodied in the lyrics, peace was not guiding the planets and love was not about to “steer the stars”. For Mars is not the planet of love, apparently, but of war and conflict and, empowered with the expansiveness of Jupiter, it was the forceful aggression of a militaristic mind-set that actually prevailed as the “New Age” supposedly dawned. For the hippified summer of love had taken a nosedive with the tragic events at the Altamont speedway, near San Francisco in 1969, when biker gangs, enlisted to provide security for a concert performance by The Rolling Stones allegedly provoked violence, marring the event and contributing to a dawning disillusionment (for a useful coverage of the event and its historical context see Dalton). There was a lot of far-fetched poetic licence involved in this dreaming, then, but memes, according to Nikos Salingaros, are “greatly simplified versions of patterns”. “The simpler they are, the faster they can proliferate”, he writes, and the most successful memes “come with a great psychological appeal” (243, 260; emphasis mine). What could be retrieved from this inchoate idealism? Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind’s true liberation Aquarius, Aquarius. (Hair) In what follows I want to focus on this notion: “mind’s true liberation” by tracing the evolution of this project of “liberating” the mind, reflected in my personal journey. Nimbin and Aquarius I had attended the first Aquarius Festival, which came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971. I travelled there from Perth, overland, in a Ford Transit van, among a raggedy band of tie-dyed hippie actors, styled as The Campus Guerilla Theatre Troupe, re-joining our long-lost sisters and brothers as visionary pioneers of the New Age of Aquarius. Our visions were fueled with a suitcase full of potent Sumatran “buddha sticks” and, contrary to Biblical prophesies, we tended to see—not “through a glass darkly” but—in psychedelic, pop-, and op-art explosions of colour. We could see energy, man! Two years later, I found myself at the next Aquarius event in Nimbin, too, but by that time I inhabited a totally different mind-zone, albeit one characterised by the familiar, intense idealism. In the interim, I had been arrested in 1971 while “tripping out” in Sydney on potent “acid”, or LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide); had tried out political engagement at the Pram Factory Theatre in Melbourne; had camped out in protest at the flooding of Lake Pedder in the Tasmanian wilderness; met a young guru, started meditating, and joined “the ashram”—part of the movement known as the Divine Light Mission, which originated in India and was carried to the “West” (including Australia) by an enthusiastic and evangelical following of drug-toking drop-outs who had been swarming through India intent on escaping the dominant culture of the military-industrial complex and the horrors of the Vietnam War. Thus, by the time of the 1973 event in Nimbin, while other festival participants were foraging for “gold top” magic mushrooms in farmers’ fields, we devotees had put aside such chemical interventions in conscious awareness to dig latrines (our “service” project for the event) and we invited everyone to join us for “satsang” in the yellow, canvas-covered, geodesic dome, to attend to the message of peace. The liberation meme had shifted through a mutation that involved lifestyle-changing choices that were less about alternative approaches to sustainable agriculture and more about engaging directly with “mind’s true liberation”. Raising Consciousness What comes into focus here is the meme of “consciousness raising”, which became the persistent project within which I lived and worked and had my being for many years. Triggered initially by the ingestion of those psychedelic substances that led to my shocking encounter with the police, the project was carried forward into the more disciplined environs of my guru’s ashrams. However, before my encounter with sustained spiritual practice I had tried to work the shift within the parameters of an ostensibly political framework. “Consciousness raising” was a form of political activism borrowed from the political sphere. Originally generated by Mao Zedong in China during the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the vested colonial interests that were choking Chinese nationalism in the 1940s, to our “distant, foreign brains” (Monod), as Western revolutionary romantics, Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book were taken up, in a kind of international counterculture solidarity with revolutionaries everywhere. It must be admitted, this solidarity was a fairly superficial gesture. Back in China it might be construed as part of a crude totalitarian campaign to inculcate Marxist-Leninist political ideas among the peasant classes (see Compestine for a fictionalised account of traumatic times; Han Suyin’s long-form autobiography—an early example of testimonio as personal and political history—offers an unapologetic account of a struggle not usually construed as sympathetically by Western commentators). But the meme (and the processes) of consciousness raising were picked up by feminists in the United States in the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Brownmiller 21) and it was in this form I encountered it as an actor with the politically engaged theatre troupe, The Australian Performing Group, at Carlton’s Pram Factory Theatre in late 1971. The Performance Group I performed as a core member of the Group in 1971-72. Decisions as to which direction the Group should take were to be made as a collective, and the group veered towards anarchy. Most of the women were getting together outside of the confines of the Pram Factory to raise their consciousness within the Carlton Women’s Liberation Cell Group. While happy that the sexual revolution was reducing women’s sexual inhibitions, some of the men at the Factory were grumbling into their beer, disturbed that intimate details of their private lives—and their sexual performance—might be disclosed and raked over by a bunch of radical feminists. As they began to demand equal rights to orgasm in the bedroom, the women started to seek equal access within the performance group, too. They requested rehearsal time to stage the first production by the Women’s Theatre Group, newly formed under the umbrella of the wider collective. As all of the acknowledged writers in the Group so far were men—some of whom had not kept pace in consciousness raising—scripts tended to be viewed as part of a patriarchal plot, so Betty Can Jump was an improvised piece, with the performance material developed entirely by the cast in workshop-style rehearsals, under the direction of Kerry Dwyer (see Blundell, Zuber-Skerritt 21, plus various contributors at www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/). I was the only male in the collective included in the cast. Several women would have been more comfortable if no mere male were involved at all. My gendered attitudes would scarcely have withstood a critical interrogation but, as my partner was active in launching the Women’s Electoral Lobby, I was given the benefit of the doubt. Director Kerry Dwyer liked my physicalised approach to performance (we were both inspired by the “poor theatre” of Jerzy Grotowski and the earlier surrealistic theories of Antonin Artaud), and I was cast to play all the male parts, whatever they would be. Memorable material came up in improvisation, much of which made it into the performances, but my personal favorite didn’t make the cut. It was a sprawling movement piece where I was “born” out of a symbolic mass of writhing female bodies. It was an arduous process and, after much heaving and huffing, I emerged from the birth canal stammering “SSSS … SSSS … SSMMMO-THER”! The radical reversioning of culturally authorised roles for women has inevitably, if more slowly, led to a re-thinking of the culturally approved and reinforced models of masculinity, too, once widely accepted as entirely biologically ordained rather than culturally constructed. But the possibility of a queer re-versioning of gender would be recognised only slowly. Liberation Meanwhile, Dennis Altman was emerging as an early spokesman for gay, or homosexual, liberation and he was invited to address the collective. Altman’s stirring book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, had recently been published, but none of us had read it. Radical or not, the Group had shown little evidence of sensitivity to gender-queer issues. My own sexuality was very much “oppressed” rather than liberated and I would have been loath to use “queer” to describe myself. The term “homosexual” was fraught with pejorative, quasi-medical associations and, in a collective so divided across strict and sometimes hostile gender boundaries, deviant affiliations got short shrift. Dennis was unsure of his reception before this bunch of apparent “heteros”. Sitting at the rear of the meeting, I admired his courage. It took more self-acceptance than I could muster to confront the Group on this issue at the time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, “homosexuality” was still something I was supposed to “get over”, so I failed to respond to Altman’s implicit invitation to come out and join the party. The others saw me in relationship with a woman and whatever doubts they might have carried about the nature of my sexuality were tactfully suspended. Looking back, I am struck by the number of simultaneous poses I was trying to maintain: as an actor; as a practitioner of an Artaudian “theatre of cruelty”; as a politically committed activist; and as a “hetero”-sexual. My identity was an assemblage of entities posing as “I”; it was as if I were performing a self. Little gay boys are encouraged from an early age to hide their real impulses, not only from others—in the very closest circle, the family; at school; among one’s peers—but from themselves, too. The coercive effects of shaming usually fix the denial into place in our psyches before we have any intellectual (or political) resources to consider other options. Growing up trying to please, I hid my feelings. In my experience, it could be downright dangerous to resist the subtle and gross coercions that applied around gender normativity. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, of the British object-relations school, argues that when the environment does not support the developing personality and requires the person to sacrifice his or her own spontaneous needs to adapt to environmental demands, there is not even a resting-place for individual experience and the result is a failure in the primary narcissistic state to evolve an individual. The “individual” then develops as an extension of the shell rather than that of the core [...] What there is left of a core is hidden away and is difficult to find even in the most far-reaching analysis. The individual then exists by not being found. The true self is hidden, and what we have to deal with clinically is the complex false self whose function is to keep this true self hidden. (212) How to connect to that hidden core, then? “Mind’s true liberation...” Alienated from the performative version of selfhood, but still inspired by the promise of liberation, even in the “fuzzy” form for which my inchoate hunger yearned (sexual liberation? political liberation? mystical liberation?), I was left to seek out a more authentic basis for selfhood, one that didn’t send me spinning along the roller-coaster of psychedelic drugs, or lie to me with the nostrums of a toxic, most forms of which would deny me, as a sexual, moral and legal pariah, the comforts of those “anchorage points to the social matrix” identified by Soddy (cited in Mol 58). My spiritual inquiry was “counter” to these institutionalised models of religious culture. So, I began to read my way through a myriad of books on comparative religion. And to my surprise, rather than taking up with the religions of antique cultures, instead I encountered a very young guru, initially as presented in a simply drawn poster in the window of Melbourne’s only vegetarian restaurant (Shakahari, in Carlton). “Are you hungry and tired of reading recipe books?” asked the figure in the poster. I had little sense of where that hunger would lead me, but it seemed to promise a fulfilment in ways that the fractious politics of the APG offered little nourishment. So, while many of my peers in the cities chose to pursue direct political action, and others experimented with cooperative living in rural communes, I chose the communal lifestyle of the ashram. In these different forms, then, the conscious raising meme persisted when other challenges raised by the counterculture either faded or were absorbed in the mainstream. I finally came to realise that the intense disillusionment process I had been through (“dis-illusionment” as the stripping away of illusions) was the beginning of awakening, in effect a “spiritual initiation” into a new way of seeing myself and my “place” in the world. Buddhist teachers might encourage this very kind of stripping away of false notions as part of their teaching, so the aspiration towards the “true liberation” of the mind expressed in the Aquarian visioning might be—and in my case, actually has been and continues to be—fulfilled to a very real extent. Gurus and the entire turn towards Eastern mysticism were part of the New Age meme cluster prevailing during the early 1970s, but I was fortunate to connect with an enduring set of empirical practices that haven’t faded with the fashions of the counterculture. A good guitarist would never want to play in public without first tuning her instrument. In a similar way, it is now possible for me to tune my mind back to a deeper, more original source of being than the socially constructed sense of self, which had been so fraught with conflicts for me. I have discovered that before gender, and before sexuality, in fact, pulsing away behind the thicket of everyday associations, there is an original, unconditioned state of beingness, the awareness of which can be reclaimed through focused meditation practices, tested in a wide variety of “real world” settings. For quite a significant period of time I worked as an instructor in the method on behalf of my guru, or mentor, travelling through a dozen or so countries, and it was through this exposure that I was able to observe that the practices worked independently of culture and that “mind’s true liberation” was in many ways a de-programming of cultural indoctrinations (see Marsh, 2014, 2013, 2011 and 2007 for testimony of this process). In Japan, Zen roshi might challenge their students with the koan: “Show me your original face, before you were born!” While that might seem to be an absurd proposal, I am finding that there is a potential, if unexpected, liberation in following through such an inquiry. As “hokey” as the Aquarian meme-set might have been, it was a reflection of the idealistic hope that characterised the cluster of memes that aggregated within the counterculture, a yearning for healthier life choices than those offered by the toxicity of the military-industrial complex, the grossly exploitative effects of rampant Capitalism and a politics of cynicism and domination. The meme of the “true liberation” of the mind, then, promised by the heady lyrics of a 1970s hippie musical, has continued to bear fruit in ways that I could not have imagined. References Altman, Dennis. Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972. Blundell, Graeme. The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts. 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