Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a French-Algerian philosopher and novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. He is the defining thinker of absurdism, author of The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger, and The Plague.

What is Camus's absurdism?

Camus defined absurdism as the conflict between human desire for meaning and the universe's silence. His response was not despair but revolt — embracing life fully in the face of its meaninglessness.

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Albert Camus

Albert Camus (1913–1960) defined absurdism as a philosophy. The Myth of Sisyphus is its founding document. Camus argued that the absurd — the gap between human meaning-seeking and the universe's silence — is not a problem to solve but a condition to embrace.

The absurd as philosophy

Camus defined the absurd as the conflict between humanity's 'unreasonable silence' of the world and our need for meaning. The Myth of Sisyphus imagines Sisyphus — condemned to push a boulder uphill forever — as happy. The revolt against meaninglessness is the point.

The Stranger

Meursault, the narrator of The Stranger, feels nothing at his mother's funeral and kills a man without meaningful cause. Camus strips narrative of moral scaffolding. The reader is left with the act and the heat — no explanation that satisfies.

Camus and humor

Camus did not write comic fiction, but the Archive draws on his philosophical position: the absurd is not tragic. It can be met with revolt, with joy, and — the Archive's contribution — with humor. The joke of a one-word novel is a form of Camusian revolt.

Albert Camus

The absurd as philosophy

The Stranger

Camus and humor

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