The plague and the Panopticon

I ‘Plague power’: Camus before Foucault

Albert Camus remained fondest of his little-known play L’État de Siege (State of Siege), amongst all his dramatic productions and adaptations. The play, staged in Paris in October 1948, was almost a complete failure, critically and at the ticket office. Co-written by the author of La Peste, many theatre-goers expected Camus’s new play to be a direct adaptation of the novel. Yet it is not exactly that. Critics found its action ponderous, its characters unconvincing, and the elaborate effects accompanying the ‘total spectacle’ over the top (Freeman, 1971: 76–7). ¹ L’État de Siege is knowingly created on the model of medieval French morality plays, and the Spanish autos sacramentales, in which Catholic dogmata was proselytised. Camus did not deny the play’s intention ‘to create a myth which could be intelligible to all spectators of 1948’. He open ‘pled guilty [sic.] to all charges of creating symbolic characters in this play’ in the Preface to the American edition (in Freeman, 1971: 78). No-one in 1948 or since can mistake its political message. State of Siege is a garish allegory about the need for individuals to revolt against the crimes and excesses of totalitarian regimes.

Camus’s The Plague had also been an experiment in literary genre which aimed at coming to terms with the new forms of tyrannical government facing 20th-century Europe. On one side, the text was a transparent allegory of a very specific set of historical events: those of the French people under the Nazis’ occupation between 1941 and 1944, and the resistance in which Camus, as editor at Combat, had played a role. On the other hand, the famous novel comprises a chronicle of dispassionate observations of Doctor Rieux, who only reveals his identity as narrator at tale’s end. Camus’s story, which follows what transpires in the Algerian town of Oran, struck by the plague unaccountably ‘in 194–’, draws on the precedent of Defoe’s Chronicle of a Year of Plague. As critics led by Archambault have noted, Camus was also clearly emulating classical models: notably, the dispassionate naturalistic accounts of the Athenian plague of 431–427 BCE given by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War and Lucretius at the end of De Rerum Natura. (Archambault, 1972)

For critics of the novel like Roland Barthes or the Marxist commentator Emmanuel Astier de Vigerie, the two dimensions of Camus’s literary experiment do not square up (Camus, 1979b: 220–23; 2006c: 457–74). Or rather, the use of the motif of a plague striking a modern town to allegorize National Socialist barbarism does not succeed. The French resistance was after all not a struggle against a natural or metaphysical force which disappeared as unaccountably as it arrived. Almost no one will deny the uprightness of the responses of Camus’s Grand, Rieux, Rambert, Paneloux and Tarrou who form the équipes sanitaires, to fight the plague in Oran. This resistance involves a struggle against a faceless physical ‘abstraction’ (as Rieux calls it) rather than a political regime. Yet the situation of French men and women contemplating resistance to the occupiers was more morally ambiguous, given the Nazis’ proven brutal willingness to target civilian populations in reprisal for the résistants’ activities. Wasn’t Camus’s assimilation of this totalitarian form of government with a natural evil an exercise in obfuscating the specifically historical and political nature of the resistance and progressive politics more widely (Freeman, 1971: 82–4)?

In response to Barthes and Astier de la Vigerie, Camus in no way denied that, by choosing the motif of the plague to allegorize the Nazi occupation, he aimed also to propose a reflection on ‘existence in general’:

I want to express through the medium of the plague the suffocation from which we have all suffered and the atmosphere of menace and exile with which we have all lived. I want at the same time to extend this interpretation to the notion of existence in general. The plague will give the image of those in this war who have had the part of reflection, of silence – and that of moral suffering. (in Freeman, 1971: 84)

In Part IV of The Plague, we learn of the existence of an ‘isolation camp’ at the Municipal Sports Ground: for French readers a chilling reminder of June 1942’s Operation Spring Breeze (Opération Vent printanier) in which some 28,000 Jews were interred by the Nazis in Paris’s Velodrome d’Hiver before being deported, including over 13,000 to Auschwitz (Camus, 1948: 195–8). Finally, as the numbers of dead grow towards the epidemic’s height, the regime finds it necessary ‘to find new space and strike out in a new direction’, reopening the old crematoria to the east. Bodies of the dead are moved there en masse by train in closed streetcars, in a thinly veiled representation of the Shoah:

Thereafter only when a strong wind was blowing did a faint, sickly odour coming from the east remind them that they were living under a new order and that the plague fires were taking their nightly toll … What with the gunshots echoing at the gates, the punctual thuds of rubber stamps marking the rhythm of lives and deaths, the files and fires, the panics and formalities, all alike were pledged to an ugly but recorded death … amidst noxious fumes and the muted clang of ambulances. (Camus, 1948: 152)

While the device of personifying the Plague and Death, together with many elements of the ensuing ‘total spectacle’, borrow heavily from medieval conceits, as State of Siege proceeds it becomes very clear that Camus has a very specific, modern kind of political power in his sights in the play. No less than La Peste, set ‘in 194–’ (Camus, 1948: 5), the play is contemporary political comment. Indeed, it contains some of Camus’s most detailed depictions of the particular modalities of totalitarian modes of government. The Plague himself laughingly observes that people would like their villains to be obvious and spectacular, like the romantics’ Satan or pre-modern monarchs adorned in ceremonial purple. He is something new:

Well, they won’t be satisfied this time. I don’t wield a sceptre or anything like that. In fact I prefer to look like a quite ordinary person, let’s say a sergeant or a corporal. That’s one of my ways of vexing you … so now your king has black nails and a drab uniform. He doesn’t sit on a throne, but in an office chair. His palace is a barracks and his hunting lodge a court house. (Camus, 1948: 191)

One of the new regime’s first measures sees a sinister observation tower erected in the centre of Cadiz, to ensure the entire population can be constantly, efficiently, surveyed (Camus, 1948: 175). Death meanwhile carries out an exacting administrative census, animated by her happy scientistic conviction that ‘everything can be expressed in terms of figures, formulas’ (Camus, 1948: 206). ‘[W]e’re not against slaughterhouses – quite the contrary’, she explains: ‘Only we apply to them the latest methods of accounting’ (Camus, 1948: 175). Every aspect of life in Cadiz is soon subject to these ‘latest methods’. All citizens are listed, numbered and badged by the authorities, moved by their hatred of ‘untidiness and irrationality’. Anyone who resists the idea must wear a second kind of badge to indicate this resistance: ‘that way we see at once with whom we have to deal’ (Camus, 1948: 172, 178–9). One citizen erroneously thinks he might withhold a ‘private’ matter from the authorities. ‘Your private concern, do you say?’, he is reprimanded: ‘These words don’t mean anything to us. What interests us is your public life, and that as a matter of fact is the only life you are allowed by us to have’ (Camus, 1948: 176).

All people infected with the disease are assigned black stars with long rays, bearing the Orwellian inscription ‘we are all brothers’. All food is centrally requisitioned, to be distributed ‘to all those who can prove their adhesion to the new social order’ (Camus, 1948: 166). No one is to help others stricken by plague, except by reporting the case to the authorities. Reporting on family members is especially encouraged by a double ‘good citizenship’ ration. A 9 pm curfew is applied to prevent nocturnal assemblies, and no one is allowed in public without a permit, ‘to be admitted only in very special cases and at our good pleasure’ (Camus, 1948: 166). ‘The whole point of our regime is that you need a permit to do anything whatsoever’, Death again explains: and indeed, as the action proceeds, we are introduced to citizens’ needs to always have at hand their ‘certificates of existence’, which are ‘temporary and of short duration’, again subject to the authorities’ executive discretion (Camus, 1948: 175, 178). It is not that there are no pay-offs for this kind of rule. Indeed, the Plague specifies that one advantage of it is a maximization of the working efficiencies of the population: ‘the dead man is refreshing enough, but he’s not remunerative; not nearly so rewarding as a slave’ (Camus, 1948: 226, 224). Nada, the aptly-named nihilist who makes peace with the new regime, is reprimanded at one point for supposing that the role of this kind of power ‘suppresses everything’ (Camus, 1948: 212, 163). If he were asked to give one word to describe his highest goal for the people of Cadiz, the Plague avows that it would be ‘discipline, my friend, discipline’ (Camus, 1948: 185).

II Panopticon, political dream of the plague: Foucault after Camus

Anyone distantly familiar with the great motifs of Foucault’s masterpiece Surveillir et Punir [Discipline and Punish] will hear in the Plague and Death’s declamations in State of Siege uncanny echoes of Foucault’s accounts therein of ‘disciplinary power’. Yet, amidst the rush of work on Camus since 1990, this comparison has not been made. ² Discipline and Punish is of course a very different work from Camus’s 1940s’ novel and play allegorizing the take-over and administration of fascist forms of government in mid-century Europe. Its proximate goal is to analyse the emergence of modern forms of punishment and penitentiary institutions, pre-eminently in liberal or republican regimes like the author’s native France. Foucault had been motivated, and informed, in this research by his participation in the Maoist Group d’Information des Prisons formed in the years following May 1968. This group, a support group for imprisoned Maoists, aimed also to provide the prisoners with a means of describing their own experiences, according to the Maoist principle that ‘one must descend from the horse in order to smell the flowers’ (Wolin, 2012: 32). The book followed on the heels of revolts in the French prisons in the period following the événements of 1968: revolts which Foucault describes as not simply protests against poor conditions, or the cruelty of the guards, ‘but … also revolts against model prisons, tranquilizers, isolation, the medical and educational services’ (Foucault, 1979a: 30). Nevertheless, Foucault’s book, the first fruits of his adaptation of the Nietzschean methodology of genealogy, has much wider implications. The book opens out on to a new theory of specifically modern forms of power, of which the Fifth Republic’s penitentiary system is but a local example. ‘Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus’, Foucault clarifies: ‘it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole series of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets: it is a physics or anatomy of power, a technology’ (Foucault, 1979a: 215).

Foucault’s genealogical works on modern power have had such impact that we need only recount here very briefly his key theses, with an eye back to Camus’s Oran and Cadiz, and forward to The Rebel. Discipline and Punish opens with the vivid documentation of what the reader is tempted to think of as an incomparable pre-modern barbarism: the spectacular public dismemberment and execution of the prisoner Damiens as his amende honourable before God and Louis XIV, the sun King. Damiens’ ‘tortured, dismembered, amputated body, symbolically branded on face and shoulder, exposed alive and dead to public view’ (Foucault, 1979a: 8) outside the Church of Paris is presented by Foucault as representative of a kind of political power the modern era has supplanted. In The History of Sexuality, this will be called sovereign power (Foucault, 1979b: 259): the power of the monarch to publicly kill all those who, like Damiens, he deems to have committed lèse-majesté, amidst a carnivalesque display of the might and fearful glory of throne and altar. In the France preceding the revolution (the amende honorable was abolished in 1791), there was no dedicated police force. The power of the state to survey its citizens was characterized by a comparatively ‘irregular and inadequate extension’; a fact that itself can to be taken as one more expression of the sovereign indifference of the monarch to his subjects (Foucault, 1979a: 219). When a person was apprehended, after whatever trial or torture the King’s men felt it fit to subject them to, they were in effect left to rot in the darkness of dungeons – ‘the old simple schema of confinement and control – thick walls, a heavy gate that prevents entering and leaving’ (Foucault, 1979a: 190) – until the hour of their execution or release at His Majesty’s Good Grace. No knowledge concerning the prisoner’s upbringing, deeper motives, relationship with family members, or his socio-political circumstances was sought after or produced. No statistics listing and tabulating such information across multiple cases was solicited or filed. It was sufficient that the threat to the sovereign had been neutralized and placed at the disposal of the King’s voluntas. ‘Knowledge of the offence, knowledge of the offender, knowledge of the law: these three conditions made it possible to ground a judgment in truth’, at least to the satisfaction of the sovereign. No more was required (Foucault, 1979a: 19).

All this changes in the modern regimes that have come into being in the West since the end of the 18th century, Foucault famously argues. Damiens’ spectacular execution is followed immediately in Discipline and Punish by Leon Faucher’s meticulous rules ‘for the House of young prisoners in Paris’ from only 80 years later. These rules do not stipulate means of public violence to which prisoners are to be subjected. Instead, they plan in advance prisoners’ every action (including nine hours of productive labour), from six in the morning until half-past seven or eight at night, down to five minute allotments (‘at five minutes to one, at the drum-roll, they form into work teams. Art 24: At one o’clock they must be back in the workshops …’, etc.) (Foucault, 1979a: 6–7). ‘We have, then, a public execution and a timetable’, Foucault crisply summarizes in a contrast emblematic of what his book goes on to document by recourse to the ‘archives’ concerning the conception and daily workings of modern prisons, schools, military camps, barracks, factories and hospitals (Foucault, 1979a: 7).

For, as we know, this kind of exacting timetable that Faucher envisages for the young Parisian, prisoners in language akin to the réportage of a scientific lab, Foucault presents as typifying a new modality of the exercise of power over subjects in the modern era. At stake in this new kind of power is a veritable ‘political anatomy’, ‘anatomopolitics’ or ‘microphysics’ of power (Foucault, 1979a: 215): the proliferation of regimes of exercises, examinations, work, solicitations to talk and objectify oneself as a ‘case’ and a ‘history’, or to observe oneself and monitor every movement. This disciplinary power completely supplants the éclat characterizing pre- and early modern sovereigns’ exercise of their august prerogatives. Indeed, at every level, it represents a different kind of power over modern subjects. ‘The peculiarity of these disciplines [sic.]’, Foucault summarizes, is threefold. Firstly, they ‘obtain an exercise of power’ over individuals’ behaviour:

… at the lowest possible cost: politically by its discretion … its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses; second, [they] bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and … extend them as far as possible, without either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this economic growth of power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial or medical) within which it is exercised; in short, to increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system. (Foucault, 1979a: 218)

The reader will by now appreciate the wide-ranging parallels between Camus’s depiction of the new forms of totalitarian power in State of Siege and The Plague in the late 1940s, and Foucault’s genealogical analyses of modern disciplinary power in the middle-1970s. Of course Camus, even in his most extended treatment of Hitlerism and Stalinism in The Rebel (Part III), never undertook such extensive documentary work as Foucault’s extraordinary studies of the modern disciplines and governmentality. Yet Camus’s descriptions of the exactions of ‘plague power’ evidence that attention to the particular that he extols in The Myth of Sisyphus as recommending literature as a post-metaphysical form of intelligence (Camus, 1978: 26–7, 87–8). They also bespeak Camus’s continuing fascination with all forms of human cruelty, from the ‘little ease’ of La Chute to the death penalty, which continues to emerge as a theme in his work from L’Étranger onwards.

Certainly, in Camus’s post-war fiction, we have seen the evocation of forms of power which, far from being merely prohibitive, work by actively surveying individuals, surveying and disciplining their thinking, acting, working and loving, all the while compiling and applying new forms of knowledge (Part I). If these documented parallels between this work and Foucault’s anatomization of modern power were not direct enough, however, it is remarkable (although it has not been remarked) ³ that Foucault’s central chapter in Discipline and Punish on the Panopticon, which opens by tracing back the ‘ignoble’ enstehung of modern forms of disciplinary power (Foucault, 1984a: 77–81, 83), begins with the shutting down of Vincennes, stricken by plague in the 17th century. As in Camus’s Oran – whose imagining drew on similar historical sources ⁴ – the plague-stricken Vincennes was walled off from the outside world, and its intramural space was divided into quarters administered by attendants. In this ‘segmented, immobile frozen space’, inspection became more or less continuous, with guards posted at the city gates to prevent escape, and syndics responsible for each street who would daily call upon houses individually, armed with exhaustive lists (Foucault, 1979a: 196). The regime thus put in place ‘a system of permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the intendants, from the intendants to the magistrates or mayor’, as in Camus’s Oran (Foucault, 1979a: 196). In this system, even ‘the relation of each individual to his [own] disease passed through the representatives of power’, as Foucault puts it: regardless of all familial, erotic or filial ties – again, just as Camus’s characters suffer in La Peste (Foucault, 1979a: 196–7).

When it comes to understanding modern power’s specific genealogy, Foucault thus at this decisive point in his most famous genealogy echoes Camus’s earlier choice of the plague as a means to allegorize and dissect totalizing forms of government. As Foucault intones in a characteristic, almost Ciceronian sequence which might have come from the pen of Dr Rieux:

But there was also a political dream of the plague …: not the collective festival, but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power; not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of his ‘true’ name, his ‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease. The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms [of modern prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, asylums] can be read the haunting memory of ‘contagions’, of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder. (Foucault, 1979a: 197–8)

III Camus against total critiques of modernity

Foucault remained tellingly qualified about his assessment of what Camus and others in the post-war period dubbed the ‘totalitarian’ states of National Socialism, Stalinism, or Mao’s China in the period of the cultural revolution, and how his analysis of the disciplinary ‘carceral city’ related to these most openly and completely oppressive of modern regimes (Dean, 2010). Certainly, the competing theorizations of totalitarianism that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, amongst which Camus’s political novels, drama and theory should be numbered, tended to focus on the question of state power. Camus cites Mussolini’s ‘nothing outside the State, nothing above the State’ as illustrating the kind of ‘State Terror’ he means to oppose in The Rebel (Camus, 1952: 233). To the extent that this is so, the theories of totalitarianism would seem to represent the kinds of theorizations of power which, in Foucault’s happy phrase, have yet ‘to cut off the head of the King’ (Foucault, 1979a: 88–9): still conceiving power as a hierarchical, more or less substantial thing concentrated, possessed, and deployed by individuals or parties (Dews, 1979: 140–1).

Nevertheless, we are not the first to align Foucault’s critique of disciplinary power with either Camus or the criticisms of totalitarianism, although this has yet to be done systematically. Notoriously, the nouveaux philosophes led by André Glucksmann and Bernard Henri-Lévy took Camus’s progressive, anti-Stalinist stance in the 1950s as a precursor. They built the criticisms of Stalinism they proselytised in the wake of the 1974 translation of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in France by significant recourse to Foucault’s genealogical work on disciplinary and biopower, and his earlier book on The History of Madness. Despite some of his defenders’ disavowals, Foucault for his part did not disown Glucksmann’s and his friends’ anti-Stalinist moment in the 1970s, praising Les Maitres Penseurs’ ‘éclat, its fits of rage, its thick clouds and its laughter’ (in Lecourt, 2002: 53). More than this, as Peter Dews in particular has argued, if we look for arguments in Foucault’s work that do seem to license the kinds of anti-Marxist positions Lévy and Glucksmann were to take après Camus, several present themselves. Foucault’s claim that the disciplinary mechanisms he documents in Discipline and Punish are ‘technologies of power’ which do not need to be manned and implemented by any particular kind of sovereign implies what Foucault openly avows: that they can operate ‘in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses or institutions’, including in the modern total states (Foucault, 1979a: 221). ⁵ Then there is the uneasy proximity between Foucault’s critique of ‘power-knowledge’ and the nouveaux philosophes’ signature hyperboles – which nevertheless echo better-credited claims in The Dialectic of Enlightenment and other mid-century thinking – that ‘to conceive is to dominate’ and ‘science is oppression’ underlining their attacks on the maîtres penseurs Marx, Hegel, Fichte, or even (in Lévy’s case) Plato and ‘the Greeks’. As Dews has argued in ‘The “New Philosophers” and the End of Leftism’ (1985), it is difficult not to see proximities to Foucault in such ‘hyper-pessimism’ about modern rationality. Foucault, famously, remained evasive about his own epistemological commitments. Nevertheless, after 1970 he tries to show how the modern ‘human sciences’ are not the progressive products of a benign will to know, so much as the products of ‘the mechanisms of examination … the formation of the mechanisms of discipline …. the modern play of coercion of bodies, gestures, and behaviours’ (Foucault, 1979a: 200). Thus, they are forms of what he sometimes hyphenates as ‘power-knowledge’ in ways which the nouveaux philosophes were to magnify. By the time ‘power is everywhere’, for Foucault, or ‘coextensive with the entire social body’ (Foucault, 1979a: 213) such a gloomy assessment can be readily applied to the analysis of totalitarian forms of government. No matter how it is finessed, this is a seemingly determinist position which leads him into the notorious difficulties encapsulated in the paradoxical claim which Lévy echoes that even resistance is a product of the power it ostensibly rebels against (Dews, 1979: 162). ⁶ Indeed, Foucault’s early-1970s position threatens at every moment to collapse all differences between ostensibly liberal states, founded however faltingly on the civil, political, and economic liberties, and the total states of the 20th century. Foucault does not shrink in Discipline and Punish from describing the liberal subject whom ‘humanism invites us to free’ as ‘already the effects of a subjection much more profound than himself’. The disciplines are ‘the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties’ of the liberal West: ‘the other, dark side’ of the ostensible protections of law (Foucault, 1979a: 30, 222).

So while we may agree when Dews declaims against the new philosophers’ ‘reductio ad absurdum of a decade of French thought in which the concepts of reason, theory and history have been subject to incessant critique’ (Dews, 1985: 381), we must also remark with him that their reductio echoes much wider tendencies in 20th-century social and political theory, motivating recent theological criticisms of modernity (Dews, 1985: 381). Adorno and Horkheimer may not so baldly state, in the over-heated phrases of the nouveaux philosophes, that ‘to conceive is to dominate’, that ‘the Prince is the other name of the World’, or that ‘the idea of the good society is an absurd dream’ (in Dews, 1985: 380). But the kinship is clear between this kind of sensationalized pessimism and Adorno and Horkheimer’s tracing back of the totalitarian désatre to Homer’s epics, whose mythological fatalism modern natural laws sublate. Indeed, to be fair to the nouveaux philosophes, there are passages in Adorno and Horkheimer which are not far away from this rhetoric. ‘For the Enlightenment’, the Dialectic tells us:

… whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect. So long as it can develop undisturbed by any outward repression, there is no holding it. In the process, it treats its own ideas of human rights exactly as it does the older universals. Every spiritual resistance it encounters serves merely to increase its strength. Which means that Enlightenment still recognizes itself even in myths. Whatever myths the resistance may appeal to, by virtue of the very fact that they become arguments in the process of opposition, they acknowledge the principle of dissolvent rationality for which they reproach the Enlightenment. Enlightenment is totalitarian. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1989: 6)

These observations set the task for Part 3 of the essay. We now want to set out Camus’s important distances from what seem to us the more problematic aspects of Foucault’s position, as developed by the nouveaux philosophes into one component of a total critique of modernity and Western rationality mirroring other pessimistic, politically reactionary narratives of an inescapably baleful ‘age of technik’, ‘nihilism’, or Gestell.

IV Total critique on trial

Camus was of course, alongside Adorno, Horkheimer, Neumann, Arendt, Aron, or Fraenkel, one of the first public thinkers in the post-war period to try to theorize both the enormity and the specificity of Hitlerism and Stalinism as ‘totalitarian’, ⁷ from the speeches he gave in the United States in 1946 onwards. A lasting temptation faced by any such attempt lies in forms of despair as ironically totalizing as what they have set out to comprehend. The atrocities of the total states exert an unmistakable, horrifying fascination. It becomes possible under the sway of this fascination to see these regimes’ rule as all-but-inescapable, their inhuman visage writ large nearly everywhere (Aron, 1984: 40). These regimes have arisen in the modern period which had hoped to supplant forms of mythical and theological forms of authority with ‘the light of reason’. The crimes of these regimes involved their inhumane use of new scientific, administrative and political technologies generic to the modern period. Thus, it can seem truth-preserving and urgent to assign historical responsibility for these regimes to ‘modernity’, ‘liberalism’, ‘reason’ or ‘the Enlightenment’ themselves.

However, we would argue that Camus’s position in The Rebel and more widely does not represent another kulturpessimistic metanarrative. ⁸ As we saw above in Camus’s literary descriptions of totalitarian forms of ‘plague-power’ which anticipate Foucault’s genealogical claims, Camus accepts the imbrication of modern technologies in the totalitarian crimes of the last century, and of the modern political ideologies of Nietzscheanism and Marxism in justifying them. In the addresses Camus gave leading up to L’Homme Révolté, beginning with ‘The Crisis of Man’ in 1946, he argues that this contemporary ‘crisis’ is manifest first and foremost in the proven ability of men of these regimes to kill other human beings without any sense of horror, but “coldly and scientifically [sic.]”‘, “in the name of logic”, as “an affair of statistics and administration”‘ (Camus, 2008: 351–2). Asked in 1956 in a seminar in Greece on ‘The Future of European Civilization’ to discuss the threats facing the West, Camus likewise reflected on whether ‘the singular success of occidental civilization in its scientific aspect was not in part responsible for the singular moral flaw [echec] of this civilization’ (Camus, 2008: 996–7).

In L’Homme Révolté, Camus’s most developed theoretical treatment, he argues that fascism and Stalinism’s uniqueness resides first of all in their ideological and political ambition to conquer what he terms ‘totality’: a term much more prominent in Camus’s texts than ‘totalitarianism’ itself. ‘Totality is, in effect, nothing other than the ancient dream of unity common to both believers and rebels [against the deity], but projected horizontally onto an earth deprived of God,’ Camus writes (1952: 292). Stalinism at least (see below) was for Camus the political instantiation or ‘immanentization’ of a deeply theological or philosophical ambition, ‘to control the world and introduce a universal rule’, if not ‘to annex all creation’ in the name of a unifying, definitive vision of human nature and history (Camus, 1952: 135). From the 18th century to 1951, Camus thus directly echoes Adorno and Horkheimer in the section ‘Nihilism and History’, the West’s purported progress:

… has consisted of gradually enlarging the enclosure where, according to his own rules, man without God brutally wields power. In defiance of the divinity, the frontiers of this stronghold have been extended, to the point of making the entire universe a fortress erected against the fallen deity. Man, at the culmination of his rebellion, incarcerated himself: from Sade’s lurid castle to the concentration camps, man’s greatest liberty consisted only of building the prison of his crimes. (Camus, 1952: 134)

The deciding features of Camus’s writings on totalitarianism emerge from his close analyses of the workings of these regimes’ control over subject populations, particularly in the key section ‘Totality and Trial’ in L’Homme Révolté (Camus, 1952: 292–306). For Camus, like both George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, totalitarianism represents an unprecedented attack on the specific nature and liberties of human beings using the best available means of technological and political manipulation. Foucault, as we have commented, claims that the individuals imagined by forms of modern liberal humanism are the products of forms of power that exceed their control, and that at most generate their own forms of resistance. Camus accepts only that this claim stands as an accurate description of the ambition of the avowedly illiberal totalitarian regimes. These set out to ideologically deny, and politically crush, any dimensions of human experience not subject to their political control. At their limits, these regimes’ deployment of propaganda, using the most advanced aesthetic and psychological techniques, approximates for Camus to a kind of ongoing political ‘experiment’, testing with live subjects the hybristic hypothesis that ‘if there is no human nature, the malleability of man is, in fact, infinite’ (Camus, 1952: 297, 311). The willingness of totalitarian regimes, behind closed doors, to use torture again bespeaks this Olympian or Titanic willingness to treat human beings as ‘only an interplay of forces that can be rationally influenced’ (Camus, 1952: 297). Under Stalinism at its height, Camus like many others notes, dissenters led by Bakunin were made to publically repent their ‘errors’ in the spectacular show trials. Or else – as under National Socialism – they were simply deported or disappeared. The reason is that their continued existence and visibility, as unrepentant prisoners, ‘would be a silent protest and might cause une fissure in the totality’. Yet this is an unacceptable prospect, and a bad example for potential ‘terrorists’ or ‘enemies of the volk’ (Camus, 1952: 298). Torture, Camus notes, targets human beings as embodied vulnerable animals, to ‘allow the object to subdue the person in the soul of man’. As Camus writes in a passage again replete for more recent readers with Foucaultian associations:

From this point of view, the only psychological revolution brought about in our time since Freud’s has been brought about by the NKVD and the political police in general. Guided by a determinist hypothesis which calculates the weak points and the degree of elasticity of the soul, these new techniques … thrust aside one of man’s limits and have attempted to demonstrate that no individual psychology is original and that the common measure of all human beings is matter. They have literally created the physics of the soul. (Camus, 1952: 299–300) ⁹

Camus’s powerful criticism of the idea that we have here the culmination of scientific or enlightened rationality is clearest in his treatment of the near-complete collapse of the grounds of rational communication under these regimes. The language of the totalitarian government is always a lifeless, scholastic jargon, monologically closed to understanding by subjects outside of the ruling elites. ¹⁰ This ensures that these elites have maximum freedom to coordinate actions without provoking dissent, while subjects have the least ability to scrutinize the powers or hold them to factual account. ¹¹ ‘Inconvenient truths’ that cannot be obfuscated behind the bureaucratese are, famously, simply denied – with dissenters facing imprisonment or worse. Thus, Goebbels would continue announcing imminent German triumph as Soviet tanks and ammunitions were bombarding Berlin in 1945; just as the inveterate ideological opposition between National Socialism and Stalinism was promptly denied by both regimes’ propaganda machines in 1938, when Hitler and Stalin signed their non-aggression pact – before it was cynically and brutally reaffirmed in June 1941, when the entente cordiale ended and Operation Barbarossa began.

This kind of absurd, near-complete disregard for publicly verifiable, factual truth, except when it happens to support ideological aims, is what Camus homes in on in L’Homme Révolté when he claims that these regimes gambled at dominating not simply people but ‘time’ itself. Camus cites under this header of ‘domination of time’ the remarkable enterprise epitomized by Stalin’s attempt to not simply assassinate Trotsky but retrospectively ‘write him out’ of the history of the Russian revolution, as a kind of second symbolic death. ‘Year by year, sometimes month by month, Pravda corrects itself, and rewritten editions of the official history books follow one another off the presses’, he observes (Camus, 1952: 296). The same assault on factual, historical reality was at play when the Nazis simply wiped all traces of the town of Lidice from the map, after her citizens had resisted (Camus, 1952: 236). Of course, we can describe these actions as ‘rational’, if we are willing to stretch the term. Such actions are aimed to secure the continuing ‘good news’ that the present political order never faced resistance or challenge. Camus’s emphasis in The Rebel is, however, clearly on how, if ‘rationality’ is the term we want to use, we do so at the price of denying this human faculty the function almost universally assigned to it of critically reflecting upon, monitoring, expressing and coordinating our responses to a mind- or ‘regime-independent’ reality. Instead, under totalitarianism we witness the almost complete triumph of ‘truth’ as coherence with what the regime wishes to be true – at the price of eliminating discordant data, ‘the achievements of modern science’ and dissenting voices (Camus, 1952: 296) – over truth as correspondence with what is and was in fact the case. ¹² ‘At this point, comparison [of the totalitarian regimes] with religious obscurantism is no longer even fair’, Camus comments. We are for him that far from the necessary or ultimate culmination of the dreams of a Bacon, Bayle, Montaigne, Locke, Montesquieu or Voltaire:

… the fabrication of truth … accomplished at this pace, becomes pure fantasy. As in a fairy story in which all the looms of an entire town wove the empty air to provide clothes for the King, thousands of men whose strange destiny it is, rewrite a presumptuous version of history which is destroyed the same evening while waiting for the calm voice of a child to proclaim suddenly that the King is naked. (Camus, 1952: 296)

This irrational totalitarian dynamism is clearest, as Camus documents, in statements of the Nazi ideologues concerning what Hitler insisted upon calling the National Socialist ‘movement’. Rauschnig’s Revolution of Nihilism identified the Hitlerian revolution with an ‘unadulterated dynamism’. Frank at the Nuremberg trials emphasized the ‘hatred of form’ that animated Hitler. Junger declaimed on how ‘becoming is far more important than living’, in direct citation of one of the celebrated theses of libertarian Nietzscheanism (Camus, 1952: 229–33). To be sure, for Camus, the most obvious difference between the fascists and communists was ideological. The former explicitly ‘chose to deify the irrational, and the irrational alone’, from the divided heritage of modern ideas (Camus, 1952: 228). Nevertheless, Camus’s argument in L’Homme Révolté is that, with the absence of any checks on the actions of the executive under both Hitlerism and Stalinism, there were for the people living in these regimes ¹⁴ far more similarities than existed between inhabitants of either and the fates of the citizens of the liberal West, for all its real and continuing injustices. If, echoing Montesquieu, we were to ask what the ‘spirit of the Laws’ was under these regimes, Camus – drawing on his experience in Nazi-occupied France – answers that it was: isolation, anxiety and guilt (Camus, 1948: 148; 1952: 301–5). In La Peste, when Rieux ends up by reflecting on the best way to describe what the plague’s ravages had made of the people of Oran, he hits upon the idea that they had been made to live as exiles, emigrants, or refugees in their own lands (Camus, 1948: 233–4). ¹⁵ With no stable, publicly accessible legal or rational standards establishing what or who could at any given time be declared ‘objectively guilty’ or an ‘enemy of the volk’ by the Party, meanwhile, we can see why Camus talks of ‘the affirmation of general culpability’ as the psychological premise of these regimes’ reigns of terror (Camus, 1952: 235, 301–5). ‘[W]e start by the premise that you are guilty’, Nada explains in State of Siege: ‘But that’s not enough, you must learn to feel yourself that you are guilty’ (Isaac, 1992: 57). If anyone can be imprisoned, exiled, or killed without charge or habeus corpus, independent of their words, actions or intentions – on grounds of race alone or because of the allegedly ‘objective’ effects of their action in the Party’s present interpretation of History ¹⁶ – we have arrived for Camus at the point of a nightmarish ‘pseudo-rationality’ rather than an inevitable expression of modern scientific modes or reasoning and inquiry. Indeed, as Myth of Sisyphus in 1942 had philosophically defended descriptive rationality, despite (or because of) his metaphysical scepticism (Camus, 1978: 87–9, 26–7), Camus in The Rebel a decade later defends as a source of resistance against totalitarian ideology the kinds of rationality the sciences strive towards. It is the sciences’ attempt to enshrine a culture of epistemic claims answerable to factual reality and subject to the uncoerced agreement of independent observers that makes it a key basis for his criticism of the 20th-century’s terrifying forms of counter-enlightenment, epitomized in Stalin’s category of the ‘objective guilt’ of his opponents:

The objective criminal is, precisely, he who believed himself innocent. His actions he considered subjectively inoffensive or even advantageous for the future of justice. But it is demonstrated to him that ‘objectively’ his actions have been harmful to that future. Are we dealing with scientific objectivity? No, but with ‘historical objectivity’ … Real objectivity would consist in judging by those results which can be scientifically observed and by facts and their general tendencies. But the concept of objective culpability proves that this curious kind of objectivity is based on results and facts which will only become accessible to science in the year 2000, at the very earliest. Meanwhile, it is embodied in an interminable subjectivity which is imposed on others as objectivity: and that is the philosophic definition of terror. (Camus, 1952: 303–4) ¹⁷

V Concluding remarks: Camus beyond historicism

We have thus shown how, proximity with Foucault’s and other more totalizing criticisms of the modern age notwithstanding, Camus’s political thought cannot be aligned with those pessimistic accounts of the total states of the 20th century which assert one or both that:

(claim a) the totalitarian regimes successfully enshrined for the first time the complete, incontestable dominance of scientific and technological rationality over entire societies;

(claim b) such power represented the more or less inevitable unfolding of the true meaning of Western rationalism, and/or the modern age.

Moreover, Camus does not, despite several despairing formulations, think that these regimes could in fact ever succeed in their distorted Promethean or Caesarian ambitions (Camus, 1952: 305–6). The reason is that Camus rejects the historicist claim about infinite human malleability on which the totalitarian regimes wagered ‘in so far as human nature to date has never been able to live by history alone and has always escaped from it by some means’ (Camus, 1952: 297). The human beings we are invited to free in Camus’s works – contra Foucault’s more pessimistic formulations – are not wholly the products of History, or the political forces and technologies that are brought to bear upon them. Camus’s critical and literary work is founded on the untimely affirmation of a series of phenomena – dialogue, nature, beauty, the human powers to love, admire, and create – which ‘escape the Empire’ of political power. Thus, even the totalitarians’ deployment of terror, torture, and propaganda themselves in Camus’s eyes attest obliquely to the existence and political pertinence of dimensions of the world and human experience that ‘do not come under the reign of quantity’ and which, as such, can only be violently subdued (Camus, 1952: 293):

Totality is not unity. The state of siege, even when it is extended to the very boundaries of the earth, is not reconciliation. The claim to a universal city is supported in this revolution only by rejecting two-thirds of the world and by denying, to the advantages of history, both nature and beauty and by depriving man of the power of passion, doubt, happiness, and imaginative invention. (Camus, 1952: 300–1) ¹⁸