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Sarkozy to rob grave of Albert Camus but shall leave Sartre at rest!?!?
international |
history and heritage |
news report
Saturday November 21, 2009 18:59 by iosaf mac diarmada
(me thinks French highbrow news might be of interest to the Irish highbrow peoples at the moment) The French chattering classes are reacting to the news that Sarkozy wishes to move the body of Albert Camus from his grave in Lourmarin in southern France where he was buried after the car crash which killed the then recently Nobel Laureated writer and his publisher to the Pantheon in Paris where France has collected over 70 "illustrious dead men" and one "radioactive woman". Camus will be the second individual claimed by anarchism to be given a place in the Pantheon following the pacifist and anarchosyndicalist opposer to WW1, Jean Jaures moved there in 1924). Camus would be the first Pantheon resident to have been born in Algeria. His kids don't want him moved at all. However, I see in this a consistent concern I have articulated over the years at how contemporary regimes and society abuse the memory of the dead and use their legacy :- Foucault's pendulum at the Pantheon in Paris. "still swinging away over the stolen dead - thus turneth our world" Every nation state with an exagerated and selective notion of its dead knows full well the importance of relics & dead bodies. Leaving aside any deep contemplation of the lack of remains and marked graves of many of humanity's most noted individuals (e.g. Mozart, Jesus, Muhumad) & those of the Irish nation's bosom who simply disappeared in the lime pit - the symbolic importance of Daniel O Connell's body enterred below a fake round tower in Glasnevin cemetery Dublin without its heart which is buried in Rome well exemplifies a 19th century habit of honouring the dead. The Polish composer Chopin likewise is one of those much admired individuals who died in that century whose body was seperated and is now found without heart in Paris and without body in Warsaw. So if we have a a garden of remembrance in Ireland without any bodies & a lime pit in Kilmainham without any bones - so too do the English enjoy their poet's corner of Westminister Abbey. The Americans have long excelled all the world with the city of Washington which is little more than a walking tour of war memorials and the bone marrow curdling lists of names which serve little purpose but to put Arlington Cemetary with its once racially segregated graves in context. |
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Jump To Comment: 1 2 3Sarkozy has not apologised for French Atrocity in Algeria but wishes to exhume one of it's most famous sons?
That is quite Catholic in it's expression, save that most of the interesting French writers went to the inquisition
and years (years+centuries) later they were rehabilitated, those radical thoughts (mostly gnostic) being
unearthed for the delectation of the bored ones.
The fetish for bones, relics and symbols is rather crude -
http://www.neoows.com/story/9824200
Albert Camus was a moralist in his novels (moralistic writing has a noble tradition in French culture) and a philosophical essayist. In the France of the 40s and 50s he tended to be a loner where reflections on political morality were concerned. He reminds me of George Orwell in England at a similar time, only Orwell didn't do philosophy at a Lycée and concentrated on a critique of politically loaded language instead. Camus was anticolonial but wrote some naive things about Algeria. He wouldn't have approved the FNL violence tout court because maybe he saw that state violence post- Algerian independence would be turned on outspoken critics of government policy. That is what happened, beginning with the arrest and long detention of Ben Bella, and detention of suspected dissidents and torture. The Algerian state has also been anti-Berber. Its violence and hypocrasy have also led to a vicious reactive islamist campaign of terror. In August 1944 Camus wrote a series of articles in the French resistance underground paper Combat entitled Ni victimes ni bourreaux (neither victims nor executioners) in which he questioned the morality of mob lynchings of collaborators throughout France following the liberation and obscenities like the public undressing and tarring of French women known to have slept with German officers. These essays have become classic arguments against the death penalty as well as the blood lust of mob justice. Camus unhesitatingly condemned the Soviet use of tanks on the streets of Budapest in 1956, while Sartre, de Beauvoir and others among the left wing intelligentsia showed reluctance or ambivalence. Sartre foolishly sold copies of a maoist magazine after its editor was arrested in the 1970s, and praised Mao. Sartre's existentialist assertion that man is what he creates and his emphasis on 'engagement' by intellectuals will remain as key twentieth century ideas in political philosophy, but his wobbling public attitudes towards Soviet state violence will continue to attract adverse comment. Camus went against the grain when he questioned the morality of radical violence in his book L'Homme révolté, examining the writings of de Sade, the Bolsheviks and others. This book led to his being shunned for a time by Sartre and others.
I don't care either whether Camus' remains are re-interred in the Pantheon. The Pantheon serves as a vulgar religion substitute for la France laïque and has sort of become the Temple of Humanity envisaged by 19th century social thinker Auguste Comte.
Interesting that you should single out Paul Ricoeur for praise along with the deconstructionist Derrida. Ricoeur was a christian ethical philosopher of deep protestant orientation whose prose writings were clear, while many of Derrida's writings are undecipherable and their import destructive of European cultural heritage. Several British academics signed a petition of protest when Oxford decided to award him with an honorary degree.
Of the four mentioned writers Camus was also an outsider because he earned his living outside academic cloisters.
I'd be interested to know why anarchists claim fraternity with Camus.
I am sorry I did not get back to this, it appears to be a crazy run around year for me:
so two questions here then:
i). Is Sarkozy doing this because as Prez , he can ?
ii). Is his celebration of Camus racist, cos Camus wasn't very dark but (eg) Ndiaye is?
Ndiaye is not Algerian, she is the black winner of the Prix Goncourt who has left Paris with her
two children to live in Berlin because of Police surveillances against the Immigrant community
in Paris.
This is the most overt public protest against the half-pint/half-termer who likes to underscore
his power by making exhumation decisions *cos he can*.
http://aflit.arts.uwa.edu.au/NDiayeMarieEng.html
http://afroeurope.blogspot.com/2009/11/marie-n-diaye-wi....html
(unfortunately Mitterand got involved in the Row, refusing to take the side of the boss or
indeed of Ndiaye).
It's not *quite* dreyfus but Ms Ndiaye has let loose her J'accuse. the President is either Tokenist
on race or is sounding out his blowhole on his perceived intellectualism.
O and btw, as I may have emailed the author sartre's partna was most likely a broadcast
collaborationist thus a link in some minds with the Nazi era -