Word: camus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...might intermesh -- but never with the coarse ideological reductiveness of argument so common in America nowadays. Said's theme is how the three big realities of empire -- imperialism, "native" resistance, decolonization -- helped shape, in particular, the English and French novel. Culture and Imperialism includes brilliant readings of Conrad, Kipling, Camus, Yeats and other writers. It has been extolled by such critics as Camille Paglia and Henry Louis Gates Jr., and roundly damned by others, especially English ones, who fixated on Said's suggestion that an awareness of Caribbean slavery ran under the ironic tranquillity of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park...
...novel is good, but it's not Sontag at her best. Though she shuns it, the temptation to contrast Volcano Lover with her earlier work is irresistible. Sontag--the same woman who was influenced by the novels and plays of Batille and Artaud and the philosophy of Sartre, Camus, Lukacs, Barthes and Canetti--has turned her back on the present by ignoring the history of her work...
Only in those moments when Siegert reflects upon his "most personal" action--choosing the victim, committing the deadly act or burying the remains--does he actually seem to take part in the decisions he makes and take responsibility for his actions. More than anyone else he reminds one of Camus' Stranger. The irony is that the Stranger was condemned because of his lack of emotion. As for Siegert, he seems immune to suspicion...
...World War II began, Albert Camus wrote in his notebook: "The reign of beasts has begun." In the past year or two, the reign of beasts seemed to end, in some places anyway: brilliant days, miraculous remissions. But as Jung thought, different people inhabit different centuries. There are many centuries still loose in the world today, banging against one another. The war in the gulf was in part a collision of different centuries and the cultural assumptions that those centuries carry with them. Camus's beasts are still wandering around in the desert and in the sometimes fierce nationalisms reawakening...
Which returns my gaze to the wreckage. Out of all these broken things, I pull pieces for my collection, detritis, filed away and rigorously catalogued. The architects of cowardice come from all sides: the pacifists, Albert Camus, Kurt Schwitters, Ilya Kabakov, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ross McElwee's "Sherman's March," Sidney Lumet's "The Pawnbroker," Robert Oppen-heimer, Ella Baker. It is not much, but, as King said in '67, "Now there is little left to build on--save bitterness...