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

by Albert Camus

The rebel slave will help us to throw light on this point. He established, by his protest, the existence of the master against whom he rebelled. But at the same time he demonstrated that his master’s power was dependent on his own subordination and he affirmed his own power: the power of continually questioning the superiority of his master.

Thus rebellion affirms that, on its own level, any concept of superior existence is contradictory, to say the least.

Contradictory because you only affirm existence when rebelling. By rebelling you drag the superior into humankind and its absurd life.

When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God.

Metaphysical rebellion,

Rebelling towards the creator

It cannot be said, therefore, that the ancients were unaware of metaphysical rebellion.

I believe Camus is tracing the origin of rebellion by using the metaphysical.

The idea of innocence opposed to guilt, the concept of all of history summed up in the struggle between good and evil, was foreign to them.

The only thing that gives meaning to human protest is the idea of a personal god who has created, and is therefore responsible for, everything. And so we can say, without being paradoxical, that in the Western World the history of rebellion is inseparable from the history of Christianity.

“Death has no meaning for us, for what is indefinable is incapable of feeling, and what is incapable of feeling has no meaning for us.” Is this the equivalent of nothingness?

All the unhappiness of human beings springs from the hope that tempts them from the silence of the citadel and exposes them on the ramparts in expectation of salvation.

A god who does not reward or punish, a god who turns a deaf ear, is the rebel’s only religious conception.

Only when this strategic retreat has been accomplished does Epicurus, like a god among men, celebrate his victory with a song that clearly denotes the defensive aspect of his rebellion. “I have escaped your ambush, O destiny, I have closed all paths by which you might assail me. We shall not be conquered either by you or by any other evil power. And when the inevitable hour of departure strikes, our scorn for those who vainly cling to existence will burst forth in this proud song: ’Ah, with what dignity we have lived.’ ”

By building a citadel of silence against destiny, we rebel successfully.

“When in the eyes of all mankind humanity was leading an abject existence on earth, crushed beneath the weight of a religion whose hideous aspect peered down from the heights of the celestial regions, the first to dare, a Greek, a man, raised his mortal eyes and challenged the gods.… In this way religion, in its turn, was overthrown and trampled underfoot, and this victory elevates us to the heavens.”

The enormous number of sects among the second-generation Gnostics indicates how desperate and diversified was the attempt on the part of Greek thought to make the Christian universe more accessible and to remove the motives for a rebellion that Hellenism considered the worst of all evils.

Each time a solitary cry of rebellion was uttered, the answer came in the form of an even more terrible suffering. In that Christ had suffered, and had suffered voluntarily, suffering was no longer unjust and all pain was necessary. In one sense, Christianity’s bitter intuition and legitimate pessimism concerning human behavior is based on the assumption that over-all injustice is as satisfying to man as total justice.

During the two centuries which prepare the way for the upheavals, both revolutionary and sacrilegious, of the eighteenth century, all the efforts of the freethinkers are bent on making Christ an innocent, or a simpleton, so as to annex Him to the world of man, endowed with all the noble or derisory qualities of man. Thus the ground will be prepared for the great offensive against a hostile heaven.

Here we rebel and drag divinity to man.

From rebellion Sade can only deduce an absolute negative. Twenty-seven years in prison do not, in fact, produce a very conciliatory form of intelligence. Such a long period of confinement produces either weaklings or killers and sometimes a combination of both. If the mind is strong enough to construct in a prison cell a moral philosophy that is not one of submission, it will generally be one of domination.

Well thats not nice...

Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.

desperate demand for freedom led Sade into the kingdom of servitude; his inordinate thirst for a form of life he could never attain was assuaged in the successive frenzies of a dream of universal destruction.

Sade is an example of absolut rebellion.

The idea of God which Sade conceives for himself is, therefore, of a criminal divinity who oppresses and denies mankind. That murder is an attribute of the divinity is quite evident, according to Sade, from the history of religions. Why, then, should man be virtuous?

If God kills and repudiates mankind, there is nothing to stop one from killing and repudiating one’s fellow men. This irritable challenge in no way resembles the tranquil negation that is still to be found in the Dialogue of 1782. The man who exclaims: “I have nothing, I give nothing,” and who concludes: “Virtue and vice are indistinguishable in the tomb,” is neither happy nor tranquil.

But he denies God even though He has served as his accomplice and guarantor up to now. For what reason? Because of the strongest instinct to be found in one who is condemned by the hatred of mankind to live behind prison walls: the sexual instinct. What is this instinct? On the one hand, it is the ultimate expression of nature,1 and, on the other, the blind force that demands the total subjection of human beings, even at the price of their destruction.

Super rebellious. Seems as if Sade is denying on basis of hedonism.

The long arguments by which Sade’s heroes demonstrate that nature has need of crime, that it must destroy in order to create, and that we help nature create from the moment we destroy it ourselves, are only aimed at establishing absolute freedom for the prisoner, Sade, who is too unjustly punished not to long for the explosion that will blow everything to pieces. In this respect he goes against his times: the freedom he demands is not one of principles, but of instincts.

He shows us, by this means, that one of the purposes of rebellion is to liberate the whole world, in that, as the movement accelerates, rebellion is less and less willing to accept limitations.

Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires and who must dominate everything, lies in hatred. Sade’s republic is not founded on liberty but on libertinism. “Justice,” this peculiar democrat writes, “has no real existence. It is the divinity of all the passions.”

their republic is founded on the murder of the King—who was King by divine right—and that by guillotining God on January 21, 1793 they deprived themselves forever of the right to outlaw crime or to censure malevolent instincts.

Logic founded on passions reverses the traditional sequence of reasoning and places the conclusions before the premises.

Freedom, particularly when it is a prisoner’s dream, cannot endure limitations. It must sanction crime or it is no longer freedom.

Assuming you are chained by crimes, then his arguments are definitely invalid...

“To kill a man in a paroxysm of passion is understandable. To have him killed by someone else after calm and serious meditation and on the pretext of duty honorably discharged is incomprehensible.” Here we find the germ of an idea which again will be developed by Sade: he who kills must pay with his own life.

Again--justification via passion.

You cannot simultaneously choose crime for yourself and punishment for others. You must open the prison gates or give an impossible proof of your own innocence. From the moment you accept murder, even if only once, you must allow it universally. The criminal who acts according to nature cannot, without betraying his office, range himself on the side of the law.

The plan that Sade had in mind assures the benevolent neutrality of the authorities. The republic of crime cannot, for the moment at least, be universal. It must pretend to obey the law. In a world that knows no other rule than murder, beneath a criminal heaven, and in the name of a criminal nature, however, Sade, in reality, obeys no other law than that of inexhaustible desire. But to desire without limit is the equivalent of being desired without limit. License to destroy supposes that you yourself can be destroyed. Therefore you must struggle and dominate. The law of this world is nothing but the law of force; its driving force, the will to power.

The only problem for them consists in organizing themselves so as to be able to exercise fully their rights which have the terrifying scope of desire.

Is Sade not creating some sort of rebellion too? There is an aristocratic class hiearchy now.

They cannot hope to dominate the entire universe until the law of crime has been accepted by the universe.

But if crime and desire are not the law of the entire universe, if they do not reign at least over a specified territory, they are no longer unifying principles, but ferments of conflict. They are no longer the law, and man returns to chaos and confusion. Thus it is necessary to create from all these fragments a world that exactly coincides with the new law. The need for unity, which Creation leaves unsatisfied, is fulfilled, at all costs, in a microcosm. The law of power never has the patience to await complete control of the world. It must fix the boundaries, without delay, of the territory where it holds sway, even if it means surrounding it with barbed wire and observation towers.

I'd imagine this is where Camus is alluding to rebels. Criminal rebels who are hedonistic, are the "master", but rebel against the world, isn't the world somewhat a superior? Isn't Sade a rebel too?

For Sade, man’s emancipation is consummated in these strongholds of debauchery where a kind of bureaucracy of vice rules over the life and death of the men and women who have committed themselves forever to the hell of their desires.

Unlimited freedom of desire implies the negation of others and the suppression of pity.

The system, which plays a role of capital importance in Sade’s fabulous castles, perpetuates a universe of mistrust. It helps to anticipate everything so that no unexpected tenderness or pity occur to upset the plans for complete enjoyment.

What is the system?

Sade often evokes the “pleasant habit of crime.” Nothing here, however, seems very pleasant—more like the fury of a man in chains. The point, in fact, is to enjoy oneself, and the maximum of enjoyment coincides with the maximum of destruction. To possess what one is going to kill, to copulate with suffering—those are the moments of freedom toward which the entire organization of Sade’s castles is directed.

But from the moment when sexual crime destroys the object of desire, it also destroys desire, which exists only at the precise moment of destruction. Then another object must be brought under subjection and killed again, and then another, and so on to an infinity of all possible objects.

If infinite--then is rebellion cyclic?

If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation. We must become, according to Sade’s formula, nature’s executioner.

The attack against creation is doomed to failure. It is impossible to destroy everything, there is always a remainder.

Strangely enough, it is Sade who sets rebellion on the path of literature down which it will be led still farther by the romantics. He himself is one of those writers of whom he says: “their corruption is so dangerous, so active, that they have no other aim in printing their monstrous works than to extend beyond their own lives the sum total of their crimes; they can commit no more, but their accursed writings will lead others to do so, and this comforting thought which they carry with them to the tomb consoles them for the obligation that death imposes on them of renouncing this life.” Thus his rebellious writings bear witness to his desire for survival.

Sade’s success in our day is explained by the dream that he had in common with contemporary thought: the demand for total freedom, and dehumanization coldly planned by the intelligence. The reduction of man to an object of experiment, the rule that specifies the relation between the will to power and man as an object, the sealed laboratory that is the scene of this monstrous experiment, are lessons which the theoreticians of power will discover again when they come to organizing the age of slavery.

Crime, which he wanted to be the exotic and delicious fruit of unbridled vice, is no more today than the dismal habit of a police-controlled morality.

By putting emphasis on its powers of defiance and refusal, rebellion, at this stage, forgets its positive content. Since God claims all that is good in man, it is necessary to deride what is good and choose what is evil. Hatred of death and of injustice will lead, therefore, if not to the exercise, at least to the vindication, of evil and murder.

In order to combat evil, the rebel renounces good, because he considers himself innocent, and once again gives birth to evil.

The birth of Satan. He renounces God as a rebel, but is fated to become evil.

The romantic hero first of all brings about the profound and, so to speak, religious blending of good and evil.4 This type of hero is “fatal” because fate confounds good and evil without man being able to prevent it. Fate does not allow judgments of value. It replaces them by the statement that “It is so”—which excuses everything, with the exception of the Creator, who alone is responsible for this scandalous state of affairs. The romantic hero is also “fatal” because, to the extent that he increases in power and genius, the power of evil increases in him. Every manifestation of power, every excess, is thus covered by this “It is so.”

“So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, farewell remorse.… Evil, be thou my good.” It is the cry of outraged innocence.

Innocence is the key word.

The romantic hero, therefore, considers himself compelled to do evil by his nostalgia for an unrealizable good.

The Prince of Darkness has only chosen this path because good is a notion defined and utilized by God for unjust purposes.

Subjective innocence

If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action. To love someone whom one will never see again is to give a cry of exultation as one perishes in the flames of passion.