Suicide,silence and authorship in Camus

Abstract

Camus famously declares that ‘there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide’. I argue that while Camus finally rejects suicide as a response to the forsakenness of the human condition – both literal suicide and what he calls ‘philosophical suicide’, the effort to escape the absurd into a hope for meaning – there is actually a form of suicide he embraces without ever directly thematizing it, namely authorial suicide. Camus anticipated by a quarter of a century Roland Barthes’s proclamation of the ‘death of the author’ and Michel Foucault’s announcement that the author ‘must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing’. Camus leaves the reader with texts that replicate the absurd itself, uncanny, paradoxical, dizzying, with no signposts for understanding – texts like the world itself, ‘divested of illusions and lights’. The reader is left to his own resources, without appeal to the author for instruction or consolation, so that he must face ‘the heart-rending and marvellous wager of the absurd’ and compose his own response.