African Nobel Prize Winners The Rebel (book)

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Name Country Year Prize
This article is about the book by Albert Camus. For other works with this
Camus, Albert Algeria 1957 Literature
title, see The Rebel (disambiguation).
Cohen-Tannoudji, Claude Algeria 1997 Physics
Al-Sadat, Mohamed Anwar Egypt 1978 Peace The Rebel
Mahfouz, Naguib Egypt 1988 Literature
Zewail, Ahmed Hassan Egypt 1999 Chemistry
El Baradei, Mohamed Egypt 2005 Peace
Annan, Kofi Ghana 2001 Peace
Maathai, Wangari Kenya 2004 Peace
Soyinka, Wole Nigeria 1986 Literature
Theiler, Max South Africa 1951 Medicine
Luthuli, Albert John South Africa 1960 Peace
Cormack, Alan McLeod South Africa 1979 Medicine
Klug, Aaron South Africa 1982 Chemistry
Tutu, Desmond Mpilu South Africa 1984 Peace
Gordimer, Nadine South Africa 1991 Literature
De Klerk, Frederik Willem South Africa 1993 Peace
Mandela, Nelson South Africa 1993 Peace
Cover of the first edition
Brenner, Sydney South Africa 2002 Medicine
Coetzee, John Maxwell South Africa 2003 Literature Author Albert Camus
Lessing, Doris Zimbabwe 2007 Literature
Johnson Sirleaf, Ellen Liberia 2011 Peace Original title L'Homme révolté

Gbowee, Leymah Liberia 2011 Peace

Translator Anthony Bower

Country France
Language French
Subject Rebellion
Published 1951
Media type Print
ISBN 978-0679733843
The Rebel (French: L'Homme révolté) is a 1951 book-
length essay by Albert Camus, which treats both the metaphysical and
the historical development of rebellion and revolution in societies,
especially Western Europe. Camus relates writers and artists as diverse
as Epicurus and Lucretius, the Marquis de Sade, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max
Stirner, André Breton, and others in an integrated, historical portrait of
man in revolt. Examining both rebellion and revolt, which may be seen as
the same phenomenon in personal and social frames, Camus examines
several 'countercultural' figures and movements from the history of
Western thought and art, noting the importance of each in the overall
development of revolutionary thought and philosophy. This work has
received ongoing interest, influencing modern philosophers and authors
such as Paul Berman and others.
Fred Rosen has examined the influence of ideas of Simone Weil on
Camus' thinking in The Rebel.[1] George F Selfer has analysed parallels
between Camus and Friedrich Nietzsche in philosophical aesthestics. [2]
Themes[edit]
One of Camus' primary arguments in The Rebel concerns the motivation
for rebellion and revolution. While the two acts - which can be interpreted
from Camus' writing as states of being - are radically different in most
respects, they both stem from a basic human rejection of normative
justice. If human beings become disenchanted with contemporary
applications of justice, Camus suggests that they rebel. This rebellion,
then, is the product of a basic contradiction between the human mind's
unceasing quest for clarification and the apparently meaningless nature
of the world. Described by Camus as "absurd," this latter perception must
be examined with what Camus terms "lucidity." Camus concludes that
such an 'absurdist' sensibility contradicts itself because when it claims to
believe in nothing, it believes in its own protest and in the value of the
protester's life. Therefore, this sensibility is logically a "point of departure"
that irresistibly "exceeds itself." In the inborn impulse to rebel, on the
other hand, we can deduce values that enable us to determine that
murder and oppression are illegitimate and conclude with "hope for a new
creation."
Another prominent theme in The Rebel, which is tied to the notion of
incipient rebellion, is the inevitable failure of attempts at human
perfection. Through an examination of various titular revolutions, and in
particular the French Revolution, Camus argues that most revolutions
involved a fundamental denial of both history and transcendental values.
Such revolutionaries aimed to kill God. In the French Revolution, for
instance, this was achieved through the execution of Louis XVI and
subsequent eradication of the divine right of kings. The subsequent rise
of utopian and materialist idealism sought "the end of history." Because
this end is unattainable, according to Camus, terror ensued as the
revolutionaries attempted to coerce results. This culminated in the
"temporary" enslaving of people in the name of their future liberation.
Notably, Camus' reliance on non-secular sentiment does not involve a
defense of religion; indeed, the replacement of divinely-justified morality
with pragmatism simply represents Camus' apotheosis of transcendental,
moral values.
Faced with the manifest injustices of human existence on one hand, and
the poor substitute of revolution on the other, Camus' rebel seeks to fight
for justice without abandoning transcendental values, including the
principle of the intrinsic value of human life. Consequently, of all the
modern revolutionaries, Camus admires the "fastidious assassins",
namely the Russian terrorists led by Kalyayev, active in the early
twentieth century were prepared to offer their own lives as payment for
the lives they took, rather than licensing others to kill others.
A third is that of crime, as Camus discusses how rebels who get carried
away lose touch with the original basis of their rebellion and offer various
defenses of crime through various historical epochs.
At the end of the book, Camus espouses the possible moral superiority of
the ethics and political plan of syndicalism. He grounds this politics in a
wider "midday thought" which opposes love of this life, and an
unrelativisable normative commitment to fellow human beings, against
ideological promises of the other world, end of history, or triumph of an
alleged master race.

References[edit]
1. Jump up^ Rosen, Fred (August 1979). "Marxism,
Mysticism, and Liberty: The Influence of Simone Weil on
Albert Camus". Political Theory. 7 (3): 301–
319. doi:10.1177/009059177900700302. Retrieved 2017-11-
02.
2. Jump up^ Selfer, George F (Spring 1974). "The
Existential vs. the Absurd: The Aesthetics of Nietzsche and
Camus". The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 32 (3):
415–421. Retrieved 2017-11-02.