What does /lit/ think of Albert Camus?

from my experience /lit/ is mostly interested in memeing about The Stranger and name dropping The Myth of Sisyphus

>>9490482
Along with Sartre, an utter hack.

>>9490650
Correct.
>>9490675
Incorrect.
All and all I like the guy.

Good, but not as great as he is made out to be, in my opinion

It's mostly stoicism with a popped collar and a cigarette

>>9490726
I agree with anon, people who are beginners in this area of philosophy tend to overpraise Camus. Not to say he is bad but there are better absurdists and existentialists out there.

>>9490742
>there are better absurdists and existentialists out there
Beginner here. Can you direct me to them?

>>9490482

Wicked smart

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I have both read it in English and French because everyone here was memeing it as shit.

I agree why Englishmen shit on it, it's not the same book in french.

The book is awesome in French.

t. francophone

Better writer than philosopher

>Camus devotes a section of THE REBEL to Stirner. Despite a fairly accurate summarization of some of Stirner's ideas he nonetheless consigns him to dwelling in a desert of isolation and negation "drunk with destruction". Camus accuses Stirner of going "as far as he can in blasphemy" as if in some strange way an atheist like Stirner can "blaspheme" against something he does not believe in. He proclaims that Stirner is "intoxicated" with the "perspective" of "justifying" crime without mentioning that Stirner carefully distinguishes between the ordinary criminal and the "criminal" as violator of the "sacred". He brands Stirner as the direct ancestor of "terrorist anarchy" when in fact Stirner regards political terrorists as acting under the possession of a "spook". He furthermore misquotes Stirner by asserting that he "specifies" in relation to other human beings "kill them, do not martyr them" when in fact he writes "I can kill them, not torture them" - and this in relation to the moralist who both kills and tortures to serve the "concept of the 'good'".

>Although throughout his book Camus is concerned to present "the rebel" as a preferred alternative to "the revolutionary" he nowhere acknowledges that this distinction is taken from the one that Stirner makes between "the revolutionary" and "the insurrectionist". That this should occur in a work whose purpose is a somewhat frantic attempt at rehabilitating "ethics" well illustrates Stirner's ironic statement that "the hard fist of morality treats the noble nature of egoism altogether without compassion."

What was his problem?

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>>9490482
Absolutely secondary author on whole french lit space ever

>>9490966
Any takers?

>>9491096
Any self respecting frenchman would have put t.Baguette you filthy french-canadian cuck.

t.francophone

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>>9491573
Désolé de t'avoir offusqué crisse de pute nègre.

T. nègre blanc d'Amérique

>>9490482
Teen writer tier, just like Orwell and company.

>>9490482
Great writer. Forget that he gets tagged as an absurdist (which he isn't) or an existentialist (which he denied). He wrote good novels that ask questions about meaning and morality. Though his style is obviously different, I think a comparison to Hemmingway is more helpful (though such a comparison will be similarly dubious on this shithole board).

His lyrical essays are wonderful, too.

>>9493554
How dare u dis Orwell-kun

>>9493568
>Forget that he gets tagged as an absurdist (which he isn't)
I agree that people shouldn't be obsessed with labeling philosophers but wasn't term "absurdist" essentially invented to describe Camus' thought?

>>9493735
I associate 'absurdist' with writers like Beckett and Albee, who dramatize the absurdity of existence and something like the uselessness of seeking out or projecting meaning upon the void. I read Camus as doing something different. While his books do deal with existential issues and do address the concept of absurdity, his protagonists are those that struggle (rebel?) against absurdity and eke out values and something like purpose. His reading of Sisyphus is an inelegant and theoretical way of stating this, though his novels deal with it with much more nuance. In the plague, I think of Joseph Grand, who becomes something heroic for his work as secretary. Or Raymond, who chooses to remain in Oran and feels that he belongs there.

I may be totally wrong, but it's how I've made sense of him. I guess you could argue that such attempts to rebel against absurdity are themselves absurd, but I think Camus's dramatizing the struggle differentiates him from the absurdists.

>>9493568
Uhhh he literally created the absurdist school of thought...
read myth of sisyphus.
Sure the term has evolved since he coined it, but you're retarded if you think hes not an absurdist

>>9490482
He is a faggot, just like me!

Asking people their opinion in Camus is a great way of discovering the psueds. I know the people who shit on him actually have no idea what thier talking about and instead put up an image on contranianism and being "above" his novels because thier peers most likely have read him the same. "How can I prove my superiority and intellect by understanding the same author that 'plebs' have read" It's honestly hilarious when you ask them why, they spout shit confirming thier knowledge is based on a quick summary or reading the stranger over the summer when they were 16 and believing the understood it after reading other people's comment's on it. They never know his amazing innovations, like popularizing the first truely unreliable narrator in a novel

>>9494572
their*

>>9494586
yea I'm too lazy to proofread my autocorrect, don't know why it even changes it in the first place

>>9490966
Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel

>>9490726

I agree with said anon. His absurdism, and im trying hard to don't reduce that much, is a limitless free will stoicism. Stoicism is define by the connection to a pre-existing universe on which you are the only controllable factor. Absurdism is the thought that the universe is inherently meaningless and the process of existing must be a process of resisting. It's much more of a mid-term betwen Seneca and Nietzsche.

>>9490482
When I was young I would've told you he's insightful and elegant, now I'd tell you he's a hack rehashing old insights and his style is masturbatory.

That evolution makes me wary of anyone who thinks about him as I did when I was younger and makes me feel like I'm right, but of course I may still be wrong.

>>9494572
Asking people their opinion in Camus is a great way of discovering the snobs. I know the people who praise on him actually have no idea what thier talking about and instead put up an image on superiority and being "above" people who find him vain and boring because thier peers most likely have read him the same. "How can I prove my superiority and intellect by understanding the same author that 'plebs' have read" It's honestly hilarious when you ask them why, they spout shit confirming thier knowledge is based on a quick summary or reading the stranger over the summer when they were 16 and believing the understood it after reading other people's comment's on it. They never know his amazing innovations, like doing something that has been around since the Greeks but doing it a bit different

>>9494747
Nobody considers people who like Camus as snobs, because every fucking kid has read it already. It's like calling people who defend the Great Gatsby as snobs. There is valid criticisms on Camus but 9/10 times its some kid (starting with the Stranger) who just started reading beyond it and believes everything well known and accessible is instantly shit without knowing why and by reading it at a time where they wouldn't fully grasp the message of the book just based on their age(16-20). It's a book that should be revisited, it's a very short. And there is no way to twist that the Greeks had unreliable narrators, the whole attraction to the tragedies was the audience being able to see something the tragic hero doesn't, the is no instance where the audience's perception of the event is warped by the narrator or character

>>9494655
Thanks for the info

>>9490482
i love la peste, l'etranger was a solid meh

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>>9490482
Camus is a lot like Billy Joel.Every twenty something that just discovered him feels like they're better than their peers. In reality though they're just pop artists making mid tier work that got caught up in larger movements and carried past their worth.

>>9496243
Literally who listens to Billy Joel

he's cool but people don't like him on /lit/ because normies like Camus