Camus and forgiveness, after the fall

The chapter has two main parts. Part One looks at Camus’s argument that totalitarian regimes universalize a sense of guilt in their populations,without possibility of reprieve. It then exposes Camus’s wider argument that the twentieth-century totalitarian notion of “objective guilt” secularizes the Augustinian solution to the problem of evil, by blaming it upon innate human sinfulness. Part Two turns to La Chute (The Fall). It examines how the monologue of Jean-Baptiste Clamence in this novella is shaped by a possibility that he glimpses but cannot accept. This is the possibility of a forgiveness that would also be the precondition for relations with others that escape the dialectics of master and slave, guilt and reprisals, and which is more positively staged in the short story “La Pierre Qui Pousse” (“The Growing Stone”) that closes L’Exil et le Royaume (Exile and the Kingdom). In our Concluding Remarks, we draw out three features of Camus’s philosophy of forgiveness, as they emerge from Camus’s later texts.