The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (Vintage International)

by Albert Camus

The future cannot be foreseen and it may be that the renaissance is impossible.

This kind of resignation is, quite simply, rejected here: we must stake everything on the renaissance.

The revolutionary is simultaneously a rebel or he is not a revolutionary, but a policeman and a bureaucrat who turns against rebellion. But if he is a rebel, he ends by taking sides against the revolution. So much so that there is absolutely no progress from one attitude to the other, but coexistence and endlessly increasing contradiction.

Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic. In the purely historical universe that they have chosen, rebellion and revolution end in the same dilemma: either police rule or insanity.

To slander the world leads to the nihilism defined by Nietzsche. Thought that is derived from history alone, like thought that rejects history completely, deprives man of the means and the reason for living. The former drives him to the extreme decadence of “why live?” the latter to “how live?”

History, necessary but not sufficient, is therefore only an occasional cause. It is not absence of values, nor values themselves, nor even the source of values. It is one occasion, among others, for man to prove the still confused existence of a value that allows him to judge history. Rebellion itself makes us the promise of such a value.

rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power.

The fate of the world is not being played out at present, as it seemed it would be, in the struggle between bourgeois production and revolutionary production; their end results will be the same. It is being played out between the forces of rebellion and those of the Cæsarian revolution.

At this exact point the limit is exceeded, rebellion is first betrayed and then logically assassinated, for it has never affirmed, in its purest form, anything but the existence of a limit and the divided existence that we represent: it is not, originally, the total negation of all existence. Quite the contrary, it says yes and no simultaneously.

Only total negation justifies the concept of a totality that must be conquered. But the affirmation of a limit, a dignity, and a beauty common to all men only entails the necessity of extending this value to embrace everything and everyone and of advancing toward unity without denying the origins of rebellion.

To escape this absurd destiny, the revolution is and will be condemned to renounce, not only its own principles, but nihilism as well as purely historical values in order to rediscover the creative source of rebellion.

we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world. But it rejects the world on account of what it lacks and in the name of what it sometimes is.

Moreover, by creating beauty outside the course of history, art impedes the only rational activity: the transformation of history itself into absolute beauty.

What does it matter! The trial of art has been opened definitively and is continuing today with the embarrassed complicity of artists and intellectuals dedicated to calumniating both their art and their intelligence.

The artists of our time resemble the repentant noblemen of nineteenth-century Russia; their bad conscience is their excuse.

rebellion. In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.

The demands of rebellion are really, in part, æsthetic demands. All rebel thought, as we have seen, is expressed either in rhetoric or in a closed universe.

In these sealed worlds, man can reign and have knowledge at last.

Art realizes, without apparent effort, the reconciliation of the unique with the universal of which Hegel dreamed.

periods, such as ours, which are bent on unity to the point of madness, turn to primitive arts,

Van Gogh’s admirable complaint is the arrogant and desperate cry of all artists. “I can very well, in life and in painting, too, do without God. But I cannot, suffering as I do, do without something that is greater than I am, that is my life—the power to create.”

The revolutionary spirit, born of total negation, instinctively felt that, as well as refusal, there was also consent to be found in art; that there was a risk of contemplation counterbalancing action, beauty, and injustice, and that in certain cases beauty itself was a form of injustice from which there was no appeal.

To create beauty, he must simultaneously reject reality and exalt certain of its aspects. Art disputes reality, but does not hide from it.

perhaps there is a living transcendence, of which beauty carries the promise, which can make this mortal and limited world preferable to and more appealing than any other.

Balzac once terminated a long conversation about politics and the fate of the world by saying: “And now let us get back to serious matters,” meaning that he wanted to talk about his novels.

The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering if we knew that it was eternal.

The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.

This is real rebellion. Those who have not insisted, at least once, on the absolute virginity of human beings and of the world, who have not trembled with longing and impotence at the fact that it is impossible, and have then not been destroyed by trying to love halfheartedly, perpetually forced back upon their longing for the absolute, cannot understand the realities of rebellion and its ravening desire for destruction.

There is not one human being who, above a certain elementary level of consciousness, does not exhaust himself in trying to find formulas or attitudes that will give his existence the unity it lacks.

It is not sufficient to live, there must be a destiny that does not have to wait for death.

This is why the unity of this novel form is only the unity of the flash of recognition. Its technique consists in describing men by their outside appearances, in their most casual actions, of reproducing, without comment, everything they say down to their repetitions,5 and finally by acting as if men were entirely defined by their daily automatisms.

This technique is called realistic only owing to a misapprehension.

It would seem that for these writers it is the inner life that deprives human actions of unity and that tears people away from one another.

rebellion, which is one of the sources of the art of fiction, can find satisfaction only in constructing unity on the basis of affirming this interior reality and not of denying it.

The realist artist and the formal artist try to find unity where it does not exist, in reality in its crudest state, or in imaginative creation which wants to abolish all reality.

what is commonly called the realistic novel tries to be the reproduction of reality in its immediate aspects. To reproduce the elements of reality without making any kind of selection would be, if such an undertaking could be imagined, nothing but a sterile repetition of creation.

In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.

To write is already to choose.

It is the same thing with creation as with civilization: it presumes uninterrupted tension between form and matter, between evolution and the mind, and between history and values.

Through style, the creative effort reconstructs the world, and always with the same slight distortion that is the mark of both art and protest.

Art is an impossible demand given expression and form. When the most agonizing protest finds its most resolute form of expression, rebellion satisfies its real aspirations and derives creative energy from this fidelity to itself.

Just as genuine classicism is only romanticism subdued, genius is a rebellion that has created its own limits. That is why there is no genius, contrary to what we are taught today, in negation and pure despair.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

Civilization is only possible if, by renouncing the nihilism of formal principles and nihilism without principles, the world rediscovers the road to a creative synthesis.

Rebellion in itself is not an element of civilization. But it is a preliminary to all civilization.

Industrial society will open the way to a new civilization only by restoring to the worker the dignity of a creator; in other words, by making him apply his interest and his intelligence as much to the work itself as to what it produces.

Every act of creation, by its mere existence, denies the world of master and slave.