is enslaved only by his own consent” (R, 144). “Guided by a determinist hypothesis that calculates the weak points and the degrees of elasticity of the soul, these new techniques have . . .
literally created the physics of the soul” (R, 239). It is as if Clamence dreams of
the destruction, not only of the individual, but of the universal possibilities of the individual, of reflection, solidarity, and the urge to absolute love. Propaganda and torture are the direct means of bringing about disintegration; more destructive still are systematic degradation, identification with the cynical criminal, and forced complicity. The triumph of the man who kills or tortures is marred by only one shadow: he is unable to feel that he is innocent. Thus, he must create guilt in his victim so that, in a world that has no direction, universal guilt will authorize no other course of action than the use of force and give its blessing to nothing but success. When the concept of innocence disappears from the mind of the innocent victim himself, the value of power establishes a definitive rule over a world in despair. That is why an unworrhy and cruel penitence reigns over this world where only stones are innocent. The condemned are compelled to hang one another (R, 184) .9
In short, you see, the essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. When we are all guilty, that will be democracy. Without counting, cher ami, that we must take revenge for having to die alone. Death is solitary, whereas slavery is collective, the others get theirs, too, and at the same time as we—that’s what counts. All together at last, but on our knees and heads bowed (F, 136).
Is this not the definitive picture of the defeat of rebellion? Nurtured in the increasingly deranged mind of the guilt-ridden and hypocritical bourgeois, whose response to the death of God has been to assume the unbearable burden of an absolutized individualism in the context of a pervasive political cynicism glossed as morality and practical idealism, the other is reduced to either impediment or utility. Often, a confused mixture of both, suffused with a repressed nostalgia for a lost community.
“Without innocence there are no human relations and no reason,” observes Camus. “Without reason, there is nothing but naked force, the master and slave waiting for reason one day to prevail. Between master and slave, even suffering is solitary, joy without foundation” (R, 144). Until then, what? And what can one do who is so brought up as to be constitutionally incapable of entering into anything but hierarchical relations of domination and subservience? The cultural roots and religious quality of this modern pathology were nicely traced by Nietzsche, to whom Camus was so deeply indebted.
One must not let oneself be led astray: “judge not,” they say, but they confine to hell everything that stands in their way. By letting God judge, they themselves judge; by glorifying God, they glorify themselves; by demanding the virtues of which they happen to be capable—even more, which they require in order to stay on top at all—they give themselves the magnificent appearance of a struggle for virtue. . . . One should read the Gospels as books of seduction by means of morality. . . . With morality it is easiest to lead mankind by the nose (“The Antichrist,” in PN, 621).
They too proclaim their guilt in order to avoid judgment. They see clearly that for their morality to prevail others must be made to feel their guilt. “Only the sacrifice of an innocent god could justify the endless and universal torture of innocence” (R, 34). The doctrine of original sin rationalizes this strategy, which the appeal to God and the Christian drama of salvation legitimizes.
Through the universalization of guilt, the absolved will dominate. But though the need remains, the church no longer suffices to obtain subservience. Thus “as a joke,” this hero of our time volunteers for the role of new pope in the prison camp “on the sole condition that he should agree to keep alive, in himself and in others, the community of our sufferings,” only to “drink the water of a dying comrade” (F, 125—6). “Thus . . . empires and churches are born under the sun of death” (F, 127).
DREAMS OF SALVATION
A mind of absolute attachments cannot do without an object of a saving faith. When one absolute fails, the psyche demands that another take its place. It may also feel deeply betrayed by the failed absolute, even violently seeking revenge against its adherents. Faith or fetish, Christ or Antichrist, at a deeper psychic level they may be one. “Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man” (R, 147). From the perspective of the absolute, the finite is in principle inadequate. From the perspective of the inadequacy of the finite, only an absolute system could heal our existential wounds. There seems to be a dialectical bond uniting absolutist ideologies and self-denigration. The latter feeds the need for the former, without which it is nothing; the former gives assurance to the self that it is now worthwhile. No wonder that dominating passions can be generated on behalf of such belief systems, or that violent hatreds tend to be directed at failed absolutes. No wonder also that a failed Christianity may have nurtured a passionate search for a new and antagonistic system of ultimate belief.
The pathological depths of mis commitment to absolutes is further explored by Camus in “The Renegade.” While unlike The Fall in that its passionate hatreds are no longer sublimated—
with what Nietzsche termed that “instinct directed against the healthy”—the Christian missionary turned rene-gadc clearly reveals a profound need for an object of absolute attachment, as well as the violence that failed absolutes so often engender.
My confessor couldn’t understand when I used to heap accusations on myself. . . . There was nothing but sour wine in me, and that was all for the best; how can a man become better if he’s not bad, I had grasped that in everything they taught me. That’s the only thing I did grasp, a single idea, and, pig-headed bright boy, I carried it to its logical conclusion, I went out of my way for punishments, I groused at the normal, in short I too wanted to be an example in order to be noticed and so that after noticing me people would give credit to what had made me better, through me praise my Lord (EK, 37, my italics).
As Christianity fades away, a growing need is felt for a faith to fill the void that is left. If not bourgeois progress, then messianic Marxism or the fascistic volk have offered themselves as
“fetishes” for the ex-believer. “Dostoevsky, the prophet of the new religion,” had declared, “‘If Aliosha had come to the conclusion that neither God nor immortality existed, he would immediately have become an atheist and a socialist'” (R, 60). Others, less generously motivated, have drawn similar conclusions.
Whatever his dreams, however, our modern day judge-penitent offers only a provisional solution. His strategy promises personal salvation on a small scale, and only “for the duration”; so long as one is alive. After death, we are once again reduced to the status of object for The Other, who will then be free to dispose of us at will. The meaning of our life will be for The Other to determine. We will be unable to speak in our own defense. Thus, the haunting limits of this personal strategy. Death is the inevitable defeat looming on the horizon, with others the conquerors. Tormented by the thought that he “might not have time to accomplish [his] task”—”What task?”—”a ridiculous fear pursued [Clamence]: . . . one could not die without having confessed all one’s lies” (F, 89-90). Incomplete or dishonest, either way he is defenseless before the judgment of others. Thus his ambivalence. Perhaps his confidant is really a policeman.
Perhaps he will be arrested for stealing “The Just Judges,” thus, with the establishment of a definitive law and a final judgment, putting an end to a freedom that is becoming increasingly unbearable. Or perhaps a new church and a new law will arrive, transforming this loneliness into cosmic significance. Personal freedom cries out for direction and purpose. His character longs for a redemptive master. Herein lies the ambivalence at the core of the bourgeois absolutization of the sovereign individual.
Torn between unlimited self-centeredness and longing for an objective meaning that will give larger direction and purpose to existence, in manic-depressive fashion Clamence alternates between deification and destruction, between expansive self-affirmation and constrictive self-abnegation. And, finally, so does Sartre, according to Camus. In its most passionate apologia for an ontological freedom, to which we are condemned and that knows no limits other than those of self-imposed bad faith, Sartrean existentialism seems dialectically to be preparing the way for a servitude that will remove from humanity the terrible weight of an unbearable freedom. Either absolute freedom for one who succeeds in the dehumanizing struggle to reduce the other to object-for-me; or the universal servitude that follows on the commitment to an objective historical meaning—and perhaps to the party that is its bearer and motive force—thus relieving us of the weight of personal responsibility for our life. Sartre, the foremost demystifier of bourgeois hypocrisy, burrows into the interstices of bourgeois life and character to unmask its pervasive bad faith—even when it presents itself as sincerity. Yet at the root of the Sartrean world lies the vision of an ahistorical, non-situated ego whose absolute freedom is an ontological curse from which it is condemned ever to flee in search of an impossible identity.