Albert Camus and Education

Albert Camus and Education
Albert Camus and Education
Aidan Hobson
Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction xiii
Chapter 1: The Myth of Sisyphus 1
The Broad and Enduring Appeal of the Camusean Absurd 1
The Emerging Educational Interest 3
The Predominant Theme: The Absurd and Pedagogy 4
The Imagery of Sisyphus and Education 8
Education and Sisyphus 10
Educative Feelings 12
Exile 13
The Absurd 14
Limits 16
Absurd Reasoning 17
Absurd Learner 18
Absurd Creation 20
Chapter 2: Exile and the Kingdom 23
23
23
25
28
36
37
39
Chapter 3: The Outsider 41
Looking Back at This Article 41
The Importance of the Stranger 41
The Absurd 42
Doubt 43
Limits 45
Ambiguity 47
Dialogue 50
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Solidarity and Hope 51

Creativity53
Diversity and Hope 54
Conclusion56
Chapter 4: The Rebel 57
Introduction57
Background and the Critique of the Rebel 58
Authentic Revolt and Education 61
Education and Failed Rebellion 64
Teaching67
Conclusion68
Chapter 5: The Fall 71
Introduction72
The Stranger and Its Place in Educational Theory 72
The Experience of Little Ease 77
Education and the Little Ease 82
Chapter 6: The Plague 85
Introduction85
Plague and Education 86
Plague and Exile 89
Education and Exile 91
Oran as an Education System 95
The Habitat of Strangeness 96
Concluding Remarks 99
References103
vi
PREFACE
I said that the world is absurd but I was too hasty. This world in itself
is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the
confrontation of the irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose
call echoes in the human heart. (Camus, 1955a, p. 26)
From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the
most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with ones
passion, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the
heart they simultaneously exalt, that is the whole question. (p. 27)
A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.
(p. 35)
The six works interpreted in this monograph were considered over a 14 year
period. However, five of the six chapters were written between 2013 and
2016, bringing together ideas that had percolated since the 2003 article I
wrote on Exile and the Kingdom. Ideas had percolated because during that
decade I had kept reading Camus. But more so because I had started to look
for the absurd in education: beyond the philosophy towards practice. There
were certain markers I was interested in: where I could see the emotions and
feelings of the absurd in the behaviour of educators or learners, where I could
see existential space deliberately being planned for, and where I noticed the
language of existentialism in how people talked and what had been written
down.
In this decade I was doing academic development and worked on
approximately 250 qualifications from around 40 different industries. This
work included course design from high school to doctorate level. It included
qualifications from the academic, vocational and professional sectors. This
exposed me to a significant number of learning contexts and educational
management cultures (academic, corporate, community). Adding these
experiences up, they gave me a very privileged insight into what people
wanted from their educational experience:
what they wanted to learn
how they wanted to learn
how that learning would be utilised (work, community, family, self)
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I am still yet to have my first conversation within an academic development

forum about how best to deal with existential anxieties, the sense of
strangeness, the feeling of being an outsider; how to engage and care for
this as a teacher. There have certainly been many conversations which have
come close and these normally related to physical and psychological learning
difficulties and how curriculum can engage and respond positively to research
showing new ways of understanding learning and teaching. New research
has significantly reshaped how educators over the last 20 years plan and
deliver learning. The change I have seen has typically responded to emerging
behavioural research about how learning happens and consequently what
learning design needs to look like.
But still absent from this (very positive, student-centred movement) has
been the world of existentialism, specifically existential anxiety and how
educators can connect with the experience.
The recurring absence of this discussion indicated to me that the absurd
was not a significant feature on the learning landscape. But I experienced
in my work two constant contradictions which meant, for me, Camus
remained of interest. The first was the contradiction between the absence
of explicit educational-existential conversations compared to what I heard
when I talked to educators, workplaces and learners about their aspirations
for pedagogy. When they described what they hoped for from education the
purpose was almost always existential; a device and journey for choice, well-
being, community, fraternity, family, change, authenticity. It struck me that
they wanted the journey which Camus had written about but did describe it
in those terms. The language of Camus would not fit with the discourse of
academic development.
I had the same impression when I saw the language that qualifications
were written in and how they were marketed. Although this is the discourse
of credentialism, it was often embedded in language which referred to
shifting consciousness, whether it be towards self, community, or more
broadly some sort of self-actualisation. Although I recognised that some of
this language was just marketing, it still reinforced to me the sense that there
was a special place in education for the existential, the absurd, strangeness
and the outsider. Perhaps characterised slightly differently but nevertheless
the principles were there.
So this monograph is for those who are interested in connecting with these
education ideals but connecting them in a different way to the philosophical
and literary traditions they are part of. It is about furthering the case for
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strangeness as an important characteristic of postmodern education. It is

about also explicitly situating the writer: interpreting Albert Camus as having
something to say to education about conditions and challenges it is facing.
Analysis of the following six works form my interpretation of Camus
and education. Although there is much overlap and duplication of messages,
there is a slightly different weighting given to each of the chapters:
1. The Myth of Sisyphus: how education is connected with the absurd and
why the absurd has a special place in education
2. Exile and the Kingdom: the sorts of relationships needed in education for
existential questions and experiences to emerge
3. The Outsider: the principles and outcomes of a pedagogy of the absurd
4. The Rebel: the practices themselves
5. The Fall: the feelings and emotions inside this pedagogy
6. The Plague: how to stay vigilant towards this pedagogy and consequence
of not doing so.
Its hard to know what the impact of talking about the stranger might be
for current educational debate or practice. The rise and fall of the influence of
existential thinking in educational planning has been ongoing, for some time.
However, there seems some original opportunities within this publication:
a first-time analysis of a set of Camus major works through the lens of
pedagogy
a new argument for the absurd in education, and education for the absurd
a summary of this debate to date
a new interpretation of Albert Camus as a writer of significant educational
value.
There are some caveats to this project. The first is recognition that Camus
wouldnt have advocated a pedagogical system based on his work as perhaps
we are doing here. Camus was always resistant to this type of construction
and naming. Camus throughout his work demanded action which merged
principles and context. He rejects principles and models which are not
subject to the moment. This monograph tries to walk the tightrope between
provocation and advocacy.
Camus would also be reluctant to use the term absurd as a central feature
of a pedagogy or way of living or learning. Following early publications
and in interviews he made it clear the term, as a descriptor for his work, was
problematic for him. However his focus on exploring the consequences of
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the absurd remained throughout his work. He wrote about how people act
when faced with the absurd (often through metaphor), and these descriptions
are what we follow in this monograph. These descriptions are what we use
to understand the behaviour and interpret what it looks like in an educational
context. Less focus is given to unpacking exactly what the absurd is, its
connection to other writers and concepts, and its metaphysical-philosophical
validity.
Another caveat is around the use of the two terms outsider and stranger
(and perhaps strangeness). These terms are used interchangeably when I am
drawing on characteristics they have in common. Sometimes strangeness
will be used to reinforce the physical or emotional experience. I also
link both stranger and outsider to the absurd in a range of ways, which
doesnt reflect the complexity of the concepts and the contestability of the
interrelationship. Camus himself never offered this level of analysis to his
readers. It seems he wasnt doing this in his writing. He instead preferred
the freedom to explore, across a range of styles and forms, the experience of
disjuncture. He was more interested in giving us the story of the absurd in
all its diversity, perhaps more so than naming it and treating it (and perhaps
defending it) in an academic or philosophers manner. Given this the reader
will have to accept a fair amount of slippage, interplay, and flexibility across
these terms.
And the last caveat is that this monograph is about Camuss absurd,
stranger, outsider and rebel. It is not analyses of the outsider in general. It
does not provide an interpretation of what could be the pedagogy of Sartres
outsider for example, or the outsider of Hemingway or Barbusse. This
monograph contains itself to what Camus can tell us about pedagogy in the
context of his outsider characters.
This monograph has also tried, in keeping with much of the work of Camus,
to be non-judgemental towards those (educational systems or people) who
choose not to build or confront the stranger. Educators and learners have
a lot going on and this monograph shouldnt be read as a demand for the
absurd. The aim is for this publication to support positive transitions, relative
to contexts of practice. This means it could be read as something enabling
which might be used by a broad range of educationalists who feel they are
ready to consider deeply the place and purpose of the stranger in their own
professional practice.
In conclusion this monograph came from a curiosity. I was wondering
what the pragmatic consequences would be for educators if we agreed on
three things:
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PREFACE
that the absurd in some form is real in education and present now, and
we know what type of questions, worries, processes, reactions make up
this experience for the young mind, and
we care about the type of educational and educator engagement this state
of mind and body needs.
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INTRODUCTION
THE PEDAGOGY OF ALBERT CAMUS
The realisation that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.
This is a truth that nearly all great minds have taken as their starting
point. It is not the discovery that is interesting, but the consequences
and rules for action that can be drawn from it. (Camus, 1968, p. 205)
This monograph analyses six major works by Albert Camus. Our analysis
asks the same question in the context of each work: what does the absurd
mean for educational practice and theory? If strangeness is something that
is experienced in and through education this question becomes central.
It demands we consider how best to connect or respond to existential
strangeness within our own education practices potential gain, harm,
and synergy. For anyone interested in considering their practice in light of
stranger commentaries it is hoped this interpretation of the major works of
Albert Camus are a meaningful grounding for understanding the mentality,
decision-making and action of the outsider, the experience and value of the
absurd.
The work of Albert Camus gives us the opportunity to consider
consequences and rules for action. This monograph assumes education has
long discovered the absurd but it might benefit from being reminded of its
presence and hence call to action from time to time. This is one guide
for that reflective process. Via metaphor, motif, and symbolism the works of
Albert Camus offer us one way of seeing and caring for the absurd and its
stranger in education.
The following analysis of six texts by Albert Camus suggests the absurd
gives rise to a range of concepts, principles and lessons that have positive and
reciprocal relationships with the goals and practice of education. The absurd
is educational and the absurd already lives in education. The analysis of how
to respond to this is done with reference to characters found in Camuss
fictional work. These interpretations for the education practitioner are
also informed by other writers on Camus. This related body of work is diverse
in terms of where writers are from; disciplines, audience, purpose. As a result
this monograph records the application of Camus; there is a malleability in
his work that actively encourages readers to re-locate his ideas. The aim of
this monograph is to bring to one place these stories, and by doing so provide
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a comprehensive story of the relationship between Camus and educational

theory and practice to date. And alongside this produce an original reading of
his major works through the specific lens of outsider pedagogy.
One result of this is a call to education that it should consider critically how
the work of Camus is currently engaged through practice, and in turn, what
new ways are available to understand and connect with it. This is a wholly
practice-focused question. The case is made that the experience of strangeness
is present already in education and has a special and enduring relationship to
education. And on this basis, when practitioners are considering their work,
it seems that Camusean concepts and stories around strangeness might offer
them access to this unique world, one of extraordinary potential, for both
harm and enlightenment.
Each of the six Camus works are explored through this lens. The reader
will find some duplication as a result. The same language is used, the same
conclusions are reached, the same methodology applies. Similar lessons,
messaging and interpretations for pedagogy are gleaned. This might feel
repetitive at times. But the point is not to reiterate these messages, rather it
is to try and show there is something coherent and sustained across the body
of work which can be utilised for educational thought. I am stopping short of
saying that Camus offers us a pedagogy but for those interested in exploring
the absurd and practice then the works of Camus could be our best starting
point.
Finally, while there is evidence that Camus considered questions of
educational practice, substantial interpretive licence has been taken here to
extend this towards a coherent set of principles. So what it is undertaken
here is the attempt to interpret a pedagogy through a set of literary works,
in order to understand how to engage a real phenomenon (the experience
of strangeness). This means building and describing pedagogy through
metaphor, imagery, symbolism. These signposts describe a range of human
endeavours, responding to a specific consciousness and condition, which has
significant relevance today in education contexts. Hopefully coming out of
literature rather than the educational sciences, increases, rather than reduces,
the application and interest.
USING CAMUS FOR EDUCATIONAL REFLECTION
Of the six chapters in this publication four have been adapted from published
articles, and two are original. The same writing/interpretive process is
repeated across each of the six works. The analysis looks for key stranger
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INTRODUCTION
concepts/moments/tensions in each of the texts (both literal references and

symbolic) and then unpacks them in terms of (1) how they might exist in
educational settings, and (2) how practitioners might engage them, and
(3)how they might feel or exist for a learner.
Strangeness is often easy to spot in the work of Camus. For this reason the
application of his work to education is instructive: I can see his characters in
my classroom, and I can see their struggles in my own practice. Camus has
unintentionally created a portrait of my classroom.
Of course Camus doesnt give us the whole picture I believe his offer to
education and his value for reflection on practice is limited to one particular
motif and condition we find in education: that is the absurd, and the sense
of strangeness and the outsider. So the analysis here tries to find these key
moments and unpack his descriptions of them: the setting, physical and
emotional impact, the learning that arises, and the metaphysical lessons.
From these Camus shows us what the stranger experience looks like. We are
now taking this experience and interpreting it within the education context.
We explore what this experience the experience looks like, how to respond,
and how to understand its potential.
Fortunately Camuss use of metaphor means much of his work has unique
ambiguity, and therefore it encourages multiple and varied interpretation.
It lacks a belligerence towards key philosophical concepts. As outlined in
The Preface the chapters in this monograph do the same thing; there is a
flexibility between concepts for the purpose of style, which certainly breach
convention.
This position means this isnt a book about concepts it is an argument
for using a writer in an original way. The aim is to make the case first,
and then let others, more versed in rules than I am, to take the next, much
more analytical steps. But by deliberately copying the way Camus himself
worked with language, this style might better encourage the new reader
to make malleable, semi-permanent connections between their emerging
understandings of the outsider/stranger/absurd experience and their
particular contexts for practice. The threshold here is deliberately low so as
to allow comparison and curiosity.
This is a Camusean trait; there is an openness to his writing that allows
for application. This is perhaps its appeal across so many cultures and
conversations. It has synergies across discourses which means his work can
run alongside other philosophies and concepts without creating an either/or
response. For this reason it continues to have widespread appeal. It continues
to get considered and its purpose is to be applied. Of course this lends (and
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did lend) itself to criticism on the grounds that the purpose of writing, if not
pointed enough, cannot effect the change it intends. But I believe Camus was
rarely concerned with a purpose beyond positive provocation. Because of
this he does not meet certain methodological standards. But perhaps this is
the best reason for re-thinking his work in the context of education. Engaging
literature has the capacity for provocation and reflection, perhaps far greater
than proper educational research offers.
In summary this book takes its starting point from the quote above. It
assumes that education has already discovered the absurd. The task now is
to explore what education should do with it. There is some space dedicated
here to explaining why education and the absurd necessarily co-exist. But
largely the interpretations of Camuss work assumes education has already
stepped off the precipice and is living with the absurd and the stranger. These
interpretations do not take a position whether education should do more or
less in response. They are written for the curious practitioner wanting to
know more.
STRUCTURE
The Myth of Sisyphus

In this chapter the educational themes in The Myth of Sisyphus are explored.
This is done with reference to a number of others who have written on Camus,
a small but important number of whom are from the educational philosophy
discipline. The vast majority are not. Both groups have drawn insights from
Camus from a number of different academic lenses and professional contexts.
Analyses and applications range from the creative arts, to public health, to
foreign policy to community development.
This body of work gives us a number of themes, a selection of which help
us read Camus in a way that is relevant and useful for thinking differently
about education. Illumination of these themes in The Myth, of interest to
education, centre on the interrelationship between the absurd and the process
of learning:
I want to know, one of my deepest desires is to know, but the world is
resistant to this kind of intelligibility. (Foley, 2008, p. 6)
And when (I) consciously make this observation I experience the absurd.
This chapter explores why this experience is relevant to education. Some
readers will naturally gravitate to the stranger and see it as having a very
special relationship to education. There will be others who will not see the
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INTRODUCTION
concept in education at either a practical or philosophical level. This will also

mean a varied enthusiasm for the following chapters where the investigations
focus on the treatment, construction, creation, care and responsibilities for
outsider pedagogy. This chapter finishes with the affirmation that we can see
education as absurd and the absurd as educational.
Exile and the Kingdom

This chapter is adapted from an article published in 2003 (Curzon-Hobson,
2003). Exile and the Kingdom is a set of stories that are colourful, vibrant
and penetrating. They feature storylines and contexts that are rarely, if at all
related to formal education settlings. Instead they are urban, social, foreign,
and personal. They all tell the story of absurd awakening for individuals
andcommunities. The question underpinning this chapter is what canand
should we import from Exile that will support more positive student
experiences of the absurd. This analysis, drawing on the work of Martin
Buber, offers the educator significant insight into the type of relationship that
is part of a safe and meaningful journey into and out of the absurd. Solidarity
is the centre of this experience. Implications for pedagogy are explored and
described with reference to Paulo Freire.
The Outsider
This chapter was originally published in 2013 as part of an Educational
Philosophy and Theory collection (Curzon-Hobson, 2013a). This article
started at a slightly different point from Exile but applied the same method,
that is; if we agree that Camuss absurd is real and exists in education what
does this mean for our practice. If the outsider is here, what do we do with
it? A blueprint for pedagogy based on The Outsider quickly turns to the
importance of ambiguity, doubt, strangeness and dialogue. The chapter
explores this pedagogy and connects it with language and practice we find in
learning and teaching discourses. By doing this the chapter tries to generate
interest in the close proximity between influential educational writing and
concepts found in Camus. In turn helping readers feel more comfortable
(and confident) to locate the stranger in their own education context, and
consider the consequences of remaining conscious and deliberate towards
the phenomenon. The article finishes by summarising the positive and unique
additions which strangeness and the stranger might have to offer education.
Analysis of The Outsider through an education lens suggests strangeness
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is educative. The stranger embodies qualities we want in our educated, and

education wants to develop attributes that the experience of strangeness does
(perhaps better than anything else). In this way the article starts to advocate
for a pedagogy of the outsider.
The Rebel
The Rebel offers Camuss most detailed portrait of the heroic response to
mortal injustice and metaphysical absurdity. The rebel substantially extends
the (teacher) portrait given to us in the first three chapters. This chapter was
originally published as an article in 2013 (Curzon-Hobson, 2013b). It focuses
on the teacher and the type of practice that could positively engage the absurd
and the stranger. It focuses on whether the concepts and characteristics
of revolt and the rebel can legitimately connect with educational practice
and discourse. What is suggested is that these connections add a radical
and overtly positive dimension to strangeness and specifically the absurd
confrontation.
The Rebel also shows the importance of limits. In particular understanding
how limits can mediate reaction to the absurd and how consciousness of limits
can enable us the confidence to positively explore existential strangeness.
These are interpreted here as educational journeys hence the question of
pedagogy arises: who walks alongside during this journey? The chapter
traces those characteristics of revolt and the rebel which appear relevant to
the monographs emerging outsider pedagogy.
The Fall
This chapter was first published in 2016, again as an article in Educational
Philosophy and Theory (Curzon-Hobson, 2016). It interprets The Fall as a
story about manipulative, authoritarian pedagogy. This is illustrated through
two storylines: a story of self-accusation (the teaching of self), and the
parallel accusation of everyone else (the teaching of others that they too can
be judged). The Fall is interpreted as a story of a society ill at ease with
itself. Its rules and norms constrain and discipline, jeopardising authenticity.
In one mans struggle against this it has had a de-humanising effect and he
seeks justice by manipulating others. This provides a portrait of a man who,
having experienced the absurd, now finds himself and his society at odds
with the world as he knew it and wanted it to be. He attempts to escape
this lucidity. The singular focus of the monograph, reinforced through
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monologue, gives us Camus deepest exploration of an individuals feeling

of existential strangeness. The Fall was chosen for this description of the
feeling. I believe this is a unique contribution to understanding outsider
pedagogy. The symbol Camus uses to describe (and reference) this feeling is
the medieval torture mechanism known as the little ease. Utilising the little
ease gives us something additional to interpret pedagogy. Firstly the little
ease uniquely captures the feelings of the mind and body as awkward, rather
than hurt or broken; the whole self aches with absurd ambiguity. Secondly,
by using the little ease, something historically used as an educative space,
the feeling of strangeness is linked to the physical context of learning and the
physical nature of learning.
The Plague
This story is about a town struggling with the recognition, treatment and life
of plague. The narrator focuses his energy on recounting struggles related
to changing consciousness of ones place and agency in the world, and the
subsequent reaction around meaning and value. He encourages the reader
to see the symbolic nature of plague and its consequence; how individuals,
self and communities respond when suddenly deprived of meaning. In notes
and interviews on this work Camus encouraged readers to see plague as
symbolic. The interpretation here is that plague in Oran is symbolic of the
absurd in education; how and why it lives in education, why it rises up, and
how we might act when faced with it. The discussion asks what vigilance
means for an educator and the consequences for deliberately turning towards
or away from plague.
The Plague reminds us that the absurd is always present. The story shows
us how we might respond and metaphorically how education can choose
to respond. It shows us the mind-set of a system, apparatus, and individuals
actively turned towards plague. I believe for this reason The Plague
offers something post-pedagogy; how a system needs to be vigilant, the
characteristics of one that is not, and the nature and cost of this complacency.
I believe this novel offers a warning and makes transparent lethargic and
inauthentic behaviours, and it offers the hero and describes lucidity and
action; the work of the rebel. Interpreting Plague as an educational text
shows us that education does not have the option to evade the absurd the
latter is already and always present. It is often hidden and latent but also
immediate and physical and real. The Plague shows us characters who
respond to bacillus differently prior, during and post disease. The story
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shows us the consequences for consciousness if we fail to take the absurd

into proper account.
STEPPING OFF
It seems fitting to start (and finish) this monograph with the following
quote from The Plague. It is metaphorical, curious and subversive. It is a
perfect snapshot capturing the complexity and joy of Camuss writing. But
it also shows/signals/reminds us (this writer at least) of the humility and
humiliation inherent within the educational condition. The physical and
emotional experience of the absurd will always return and overcome our
best educational endeavours without any necessary reason. That is because
the absurd is inherent within any contemplation of meaning. As soon as
we connect with knowledge of the world, the world itself gives rise to the
absurd. Hopefully the work of Camus offers a pedagogy that can respond to
this moment:
And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town,
Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperilled. He knew what
those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books:
that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good: that it can
lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it
bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that
perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of
men, it roused up its rats again and sent them forth to die in a happy city.
(Camus, 1948, p. 297)
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CHAPTER 1
THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS
THE BROAD AND ENDURING APPEAL OF THE CAMUSEAN ABSURD
Albert Camus absurd continues to capture the imagination of a diverse

audience. This interest has predominantly focused on The Myth of Sisyphus.
The absurd in The Myth has been explored from a range of disciplines such
as art (Gotz, 1987; Bennett-Hunter, 2009) and in fiction (Vaught, 2016) and
across new media forms (for example the comic book style of Appignanesi
and Zarate, 2015). It has been analysed from biographical (Kassoul &
Maouga, 2006), literary (Davison, 1997) and philosophical perspectives
(Bronner, 1999).
Analyses almost always find ambiguity in the way the absurd is defined
by Camus (Shobeir et al., 2009) but the importance of the concept, for
interpreting his work, remains:
In an effort to appropriately engage the moment in which he was situated,
Camus worked out the implications of the metaphor of the absurd. It
was through this metaphor that the world made sense to Camus. As his
moment changed, he also began working with the metaphor of revolt.
This should not be viewed as moving away from using the absurd but
as adding further texture to his understanding of absurdity. (Sleasman,
2012, p. 7)
The moment Sleasman is referring to influenced three works by Camus
originally intended as a single volume: The Myth, LEtranger, Caligula
(Lottman, 1979, p. 248). The absurd found across these works (the importance
given to it, use and meaning) received substantial attention from the literary
world at the outset. A dozen key texts laid the foundation and reference
points for the dialogue, often critical, which influenced debate for the first
15 years (for example Barthes, 1957; Bree, 1962; Cruickshank, 1960; Cruise
OBrien, 1970; Hanna, 1958; Kauffmann, 1959; Lauer, 1960; Sartre, 1962;
Thody, 1961).
As part of the peer and public scrutiny of his work Camus reiterated a
resistance towards his writing being associated with the absurd (Camus, 1968,
p. 349). But this did not dent initial critical interest in Camus treatment of the
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concept and experience. From the mid-Seventies this interest has expanded;
moving from the more philosophical analysis to one of application. What
resulted was a significant move to apply Camus and his wider body of work
to new contexts. For example, comparative analyses have now been made
between his work, concepts of absurd and the idea as found in other writers;
such as Dostoevsky (Krapp, 2002) in the work of Nietzsche (Sefler, 1974),
more broadly across continental philosophers (Solomon, 1999), Karl Popper
(Weyembergh, 1998) and with Levinas in regards educational questions
(Roberts, 2013d). He also brought new dimensions to debates about moral
education as the philosophical and pragmatic conversations adapted to
poststructuralist influence (see for example Carter, 1984) and Camus has
been utilised in discussions on the future of regional education policy and
practice. See for example Lang (1998) in relation to Europe and Zhang
(2010) in the context of China.
The flexibility of Camus to be applied for radical, interpretive purposes
cannot be underrated and makes for a compelling case to keep widening
readership into new contexts, such as education. By way of example, note
the utility of applying the absurd to biomedical ethics, specifically the care
of patients doing predictive testing:
To interpret her experiences, we refer to the concept of absurdity,
developed by the French Philosopher Albert Camus. Camus writings
on absurdity appear to resonate with patients stories when they talk
about their body and experiences of illness. In this paper we draw on
Camus philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, and compare
the absurd experiences of Sisyphus with the interviewees story. This
comparison opens up a field of ethical reflection. We demonstrate that
Camus concept of absurdity offers a new and promising approach to
understanding the fragility of patients situations, especially in the field
of predictive testing. (Porz & Widdershoven, 2011, p. 342)
And in other contexts, writers such as Brian Sleasman (2011) have
systematically applied Camus and a critical reading of the concept of the
absurd to their own professional practices in order to better understand
present and future challenges around meaning and action in the postmodern
condition. There is also a continuing body of work advocating for a re-
reading of Camus and the application of ideas to contemporary cultural and
artistic challenges (Shobeiri et al., 2007), problems, understanding of self,
and rethinking the future direction of society (Foxlee, 2011; Francev, 2014;
Maze, 2011; Margerrison et al., 2008; Sigley, 2011).
2
Others have explored in detail the politics of Camus and by doing so applied
new insights to contemporary thinking; in the context of ethics see Robert
Zaretsky (2010) and Emmanuelle Vanborre (2012); in relation to France and
political tranformation (Judt, 1998) or in the context of the politics of violence
see Davis (2007). These types of publications, encouraging breadth and depth
of reading Camus represent the upsurge in contemporary interest in the man
and his writing. This interest continues to cross boundaries: a recent re-write/
adaption of LEtranger by Kamel Daoud (2015) The Mersault Investigation
found international success (100,000 copies translated into 28 languages);
Camus has also been the subject of a new film people interviewed from
across the world on the impact of reading his work (Calmette, 2013); and
he continues to interest the blogosphere (Maguire, 2015; Mitra, 2012). The
ongoing and most recent rise in popularity of the work of Albert Camus is
summed up by the Huffington Post:
recent Camus anniversaries, including the centenary of his birth (in
2013) and 50th anniversary of his death (2010), have also been observed
energetically. I think its fair to say that were experiencing a veritable
Camus moment, in which attention is not only being showered on the
man himself, but on his fictional characters and his main ideas, which
have been showing up with increasing frequency in books, films, and
even newspaper columns. (Dobie, 2016)
THE EMERGING EDUCATIONAL INTEREST
There continues a corresponding rise in interest within educational circles.

There is a greater quantity of writing, often re-connecting with older texts, and
bringing to light a transdisciplinary approach to applying and investigating.
Historically this conversation is thanks to two seminal texts. The work of
David Denton in 1964 who set out the premise for investigation:
In regards to education, Camus thought provides at least three
conclusions. The first concerns the nature of education itself. Education,
in its institutional form, can justify its existence only to the extent that
it implements programs for the development of lucid individuals
The second conclusion follows from the first; the central purpose of
education is to develop moral personsThe thirdWe must educate
man because of what he is. (Denton, 1964, p. 99)
Dentons original contribution was followed by a series of publications
by Maxine Greene. These broadly engaged the work by Camus, linking
3
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these analyses to contemporary debates about existentialism and teaching.

The foundational work is Teacher as Stranger (1973). Continuing work over
thirty years kept returning readers to the absurd, often as part of criticising
totalitarian approaches within education. A collection dedicated to Greene
gives us a compelling insight into how she saw the connections (for practice)
between the stranger and the educator, for example:
The teacher must be an active walker. Maxine Greenes (1973) teacher-
as-stranger too must be free not necessarily of entanglement it is the
nature of living to be caught in the contradictory aspects of existence
but of being entangled and incapable of wresting free. It is in this
capacity that the category of stranger served the teacher for it is in this
looking awry that permits a critical glance. (Block, 1998, p. 18)
Other writers have provided foundational and significant insights into the
links between Camus and education. These writers are referred to throughout
this monograph. Their body of work continues to extend the influence of
Camus. They include analyses on the concept of education and the educated
person (Oliver, 1973) the potential relationship between Camus and other
educational writers (Hendley, 1993), and the concept of learner (Felman,
1995). Others have used Camusean symbolism to highlight educational
policy tensions (Fleming, 2003) or have applied Camusean principles to
new education contexts such as management (Hjorth, 2003). Many have
focused on political and power questions relating to education and questions
of identity (Heraud, 2013) or have explored pedagogy (Burgh & Thornton,
2014), or have simply kept asking the question, on behalf of us all, about the
relevance and interconnections between Camus, other outsider literature and
education (Roberts, 2008a).
THE PREDOMINANT THEME: THE ABSURD AND PEDAGOGY
The above, diverse investigations have given us a range of perspectives and

ways to think about Camus and education. I have been most interested in
investigations which have insight for practice. And the part of this debate
which offers a particularly rich offering (for thinking about practice) are those
writers who have addressed the absurd; its physicality, psychology, imagery
and metaphor. These normally address the complexity of the relationships
between education and the absurd.
Sometimes the debate specifically addresses the word as Camus treated
it, or it explores the challenge of the concept more generally. For example, a
significant research project in the UK focussing on the absurd as pedagogical
4
play still implicitly reveals important Camusean themes. In reviewing the

role of the absurd and carnivalesque researchers saw kinds of play that
were profoundly serious in their intent and effect (Thomsen et al., 2012,
p. 15). This research explored the character and impact of pedagogies used
by creative practitioners as they visited schools through 2011. Researchers
looked for the specific characteristics of these interactions which they believe
promoted learning in the creative arts. Although these pedagogies didnt
explicitly reference Camus they have a number of similarities. These were
called signature pedagogies and they represented a significant challenge to
the default approaches the researchers saw in some schools:
Creative signature pedagogies open up third spaces which are
characterised by their hybridity, permeability, mobility and time
flexibility.
Practices within these third spaces are underpinned by:
a universality approach to inclusion
a commitment to genuine choice and agency
a willingness to confront the challenges of scale and ambition
a readiness to use and sanction the absurd and carnivalesque
a focus on the lived experience of the present (p. 16).
The absurd is found elsewhere as part of the creative pedagogy debate.
From creative arts we see a description of a teacher turning consciousness to
the absurd as an educational device:
Thats really the point of the RATIONAL FUNK series; its an
anti-instructional video series. By throwing the fallaciousness of
pedagogical methods and an attendant music industry more interested
in image and content, as opposed to world building human activity,
into high relief, King takes the air out of the idea of buying chops, that
theres a right way to do anything. Two things that are repeatedly on
the chopping block are pedagogy in general and the personal and social
effects of neoliberalisms commoditization of art. This roasting is done
by magnifying the absurdity of what is the case. (Kluth, 2016)
In discussions on art education we find advocates for pedagogy which
recognises the absurd and utilises a certain consciousness moment:
that is why the relationship between pedagogy and art is absolutely
crucial, because pedagogy and education are about emphasis on the
embodiment of the process, on the dialogue, on the exchange, on
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intersubjective communication, and on human relationships. The

product may or may not be necessary or important. But it cannot happen
if this exchange does not take place. (Helguera, 2010)
This echoes the rich history of the creative arts and the theatre particularly,
representing the absurd and deliberately providing the experience of the
absurd for its audience. The experience can be educational. This is implied
by Martin Esslin in his foundation article on the theatre of the absurd:
Each of these writers has his own special type of absurdity: in Beckett
it is melancholic, coloured by a feeling of futility born from the
disillusionment of old age and chronic hopelessness; Adamovs is more
active, aggressive, earthy, and tinged with social and political overtones;
while Ionescos absurdity has its own fantastic knock-about flavour of
tragical clowning. But they all share the same deep sense of human
isolation and of the irremediable character of the human condition.
(Esslin, 1960, p. 4)
A conversation on guerrilla pedagogy finds similar themes of disruption
and self-reflection:
Of key importance, these strategies effects may be unpredictable
for all involved and, in this way, guerrilla pedagogy involves
disruptive learning from below and from the side. Furthermore, the
formation of communities, especially communities of dissensus, can
be inauguratedthrough surprise rather than prescription. As such,
guerrilla pedagogy dislodges the teachers interpretive authority while
re-positioning him or collective responsibility, and transformation.
(Weems, 2013, p. 59)
The learner at the centre of guerrilla pedagogy has similarities to the nomad
and the vagabond described by DeLeon as examples of learner archetypes
that defy ideological and spatial constraints, exhibiting a uniquely anarchist
subjectivity (DeLeon, 2010, p. 35).
This type of language resonates with educational readings of Camus.
The habitat of this language seems educational: Camusean characters have
something special about their outsider relationships but they also have a
closeness to others and a commitment to solidarity. Across these different
writers the absurd has synergies with the big themes found in Camus: the
absurd provides for positive and negative tensions often constituted through
dialogue (which might be applied to Camus and his own life and his
characters):
6
Camus exemplified existential dialogue: he attended to existence on its

terms and responded on hisresponsive humanism in action never
giving up, just getting tired, frustrated, sick, and then mobilising again.
Existential dialogue is a communicative version of Sisyphus in daily
action. (Arnett, 2016, p. 20)
A recent article by Wolken positioned this principle into the educational
context; in turn advocating that the absurd has value as an educational
experience, and we should unpack its pedagogical characteristics:
My modest attempt at responding to this challenge is to posit the absurd
as holding value precisely given its constitutive ambiguity, impurity,
and disruptive capacities. Moreover, and crucially, this is what is
unique and intriguing about the way Camus advocates responding to
the absurd. In a word, he insists on not only facing and living within
the absurd but embracing a commitment to it; this is the absurd passion.
(Wolken, 2016, p. 73)
Wolken goes on to synthesise a range of postmodern writing with synergies
to the absurd to offer new insight regarding the nature of the learning and
identity (under the absurd tension):
This action- and lucidity-sustaining tension is a key part of the ultimate
value of the absurd for critical academics. To think the absurd is to
maintain this tension, to respect the constitutive contingency of its
animating characteristics. In dealing with issues of identity, the self/
subject, the limits of reason, and historical dislocation, the absurd
thinker confronts many of the same troublesome (yet potentially
productive) features of the postmodern condition. (p. 76)
Wolken supports these ideas by referencing educational writing on Camus,
for example Bowker (2014) and Skrimshire (2006) to highlight new synergies
between the language of the absurd and influential contemporary discourses
in education.
Positioning the absurd like this in education resonates with other writers.
One of the most recent collections is Education, Ethics and Existence (Roberts
et al., 2013), one of the first collections dedicated to Camus and education.
This publication and a number of closely connected others (for example
Burgh & Thornton, 2014; Curzon-Hobson, 2013; Gordon, 2016; Roberts,
2013a; Weddington, 2007) are referred to throughout this monograph.
This body of work is a systematic provocation; that the absurd and senses
of strangeness and the stranger are both an educational opportunity and an
educational problem. We remain unsure exactly where it fits.
7
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THE IMAGERY OF SISYPHUS AND EDUCATION
The imagery of Sisyphus has been connected with education before. This
discussion normally uses Sisyphus as a symbol for an education system being
subjected and constrained under wider political and economic structures (see
for example Eaton, 1990).
Other work focuses on the toil of teachers. In 1925 Siegfried Bernfeld
wrote a book highly critical of education called Sisyphus or The Limits of
Education and it used the character of Sisyphus to symbolise a number of
tensions found in the teaching vocation. The parallel is made between how
the gods treated Sisyphus, and how the system was treating teachers, to
the point of making them automatons to serve a range of new political and
psychological ideologues, and this was having dire consequences for leaners:
Pedagogues have occasionally expressed themselves quite
pessimistically about the capability of the child, so much so that they
should really have declared the whole enterprise futile. My own view
tends in that direction, but is not quite that bleak. Of course, under
the influence of Darwinism, the doctrine of heredity, and determinist
psychology it was easy enough to imagine that the course of the human
life was pre-determined at the moment of conception. What followed
seemed no more than a wound-up puppet show, and only those children
who did not know of the mechanism and understand it could think that
the puppets moved freely. (Bernfeld, 1973, p. 109)
In a similar way, almost 100 years later, Frederic Miller used the futile
and hopeless labour of Sisyphus to critique the rise of policy that he believed
undermined genuine educational ideals and the work of teachers:
Noting that one always finds ones burdens again, Camus concludes
that the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a mans
heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Therein lies the danger
the temptation to retrieve our rock and start contentedly back up the
mountain. To avoid the fate of Sisyphus, we may need a different rock;
we may even need a different mountain. We certainly ought to think
about it. (Miller, 2000, p. 236)
The imagery of Sisyphus as brave and fighting against the odds is also used
by Gene Glass (referencing Bernfeld) to highlight the increasing challenges
teacherswere facing in contemporary society. The question he poses is
philosophical suicide: how, against the odds and without adequate support can
8
teachers continue to make positive impact and therefore retain an important

role in communities?
Bernfeld likened the task of the teacher to the labors of Sisyphus:
arduouswork over long periods of time against huge odds, both
psychological and environmental. Of course, the modern myth is that
Teacher is Zeus all powerful, able to accomplish any goal, hence if the
Teacher fails, the Teacher is entirely to blame; and in the end, there are
severe limits to what any teacher can accomplish. (Glass, 2014)
Sisyphus has also represented the wider education system struggling under
macro- economic and political change:
Like the labors of Sisyphus, China seems consigned to a never-ending
struggle out of underdevelopment. Whether Dengs [education] reforms
are sufficient to propel China in the ranks of industrialised nations
remains to be seen. (Chang, 2009, p. 18)
And in the context of Special Education as it struggles to find purchase in the
wider political arena:
Sisyphus was compelled to roll a huge rock up a steep hill, but before
he could reach the top of the hill, the rock would always roll back down,
forcing him to begin again. Special education seems to suffer from the
maddening nature of the punishment reserved for Sisyphus, binding it
to an eternity of reform and frustration. (Alter, 2010)
The specific phrase pedagogy of the absurd has been used by critics of
education policy, arguing that the consequences of proposed initiatives are
detrimental to sound learning principles. The word absurd has been used
as imagery for critique; that an initiative/approach will result in something
meaningless, not connected with reality, or will jeopardise what is valued.
Using absurd to achieve this emotive affect in readers is a powerful device.
See for example Ken Goodman who over a period of ten years regularly
referred to a pedagogy of the absurd; using it as part of a critique of American
education policy (2011), the move to online schooling, reading testing
approaches and whole language policy:
And in the future wise men and women will look back on this period
in education as that of the pedagogy of the absurd in which invalid and
unworkable methods and materials were the law of the land and sound
and sane pedagogy was forbidden. (2005, p. 286)
9
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In a more positive way the character and travail of Sisyphus, has been
used to symbolise humanist role models and educational ideals:
Only through the discipline of an education in arts and sciences can
human intervention become equal to nature and enable individuals to
come to terms with the physical, moral, and intellectual burdens that
have been imposed on them. Like Sisyphus labour with his rock-burden,
Erasmus and Vives assert that human beings are divinely obliged to
acquire knowledge, learn virtuous behaviour, and comprehend the
sanctity upon which all intelligence rests even though that obligation
may be beyond their capabilities. (Simon, 2007, p. 161)
Elsewhere the imagery of Sisyphus has been used to support, or bring to
life, critique and commentaries across other educational contexts. See for
example John Franklin (2003) in the U.S. context of school funding and class
size debates, Lowyck (2005) and Mahoney (2015) in relation to the utility
and use of technology in education. Other publications explore (and present
positions) in regards educations response to professional changes that make
labour and learning a Sisyphean-like encounter.
These commentaries come from a range of professional contexts. See for
example (Akhter, 2014; Conrad, 1981; Cheville, 2012; Haines, 1988; Hecht,
2015; Hjorth, 2003; Merrim, 2011; Puolimatka & Airaksine, 2001). This type
of Sisyphean symbolism in educational discourses can be divided into two
types; sometimes it is used to represent educations struggle within a wider
political system, in other instances it is the struggle for new educational
needs to be heard within the education system itself.
EDUCATION AND SISYPHUS
There is also a third body of work that has explored the psychology of Sisyphus
and the links to feelings and emotions we find in education. Reviewing the
Peter Roberts (2013f) article about the role of despair in education (itself
relevant to The Myth), Kip Cline writes:
The kind of despair education produces, for Roberts, is generative
in twoways. First, it provides us with a kind of coping mechanism.
Education may be risky because it opens us to an existence of perpetual
unease, but it also offers compensation in the form of a way to
navigate the despair into which it leads usIt turns out that despair
is meliorative. Without it, we end up falling for cheap antidotes to our
problems and sufferings. With it, we press on like Sisyphus, willing
10
to commit ourselves to noble ends even though we never reach them.

(Cline, 2013, pp. 277288)
These types of publications reinforce the sense that Camus could be
understood as an educational writer and that he is talking (or can be made to
talk) to the classroom.
For example, in The Myth Camus writes about those who explored, who
sought to reconcile, create and live within the absurd. The Myth describes
that type of life as a vocation; one which for the absurd man is not a matter
of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing (p. 87). This
imagery is explored throughout this monograph. Writing to date has helped
us to see the absurd, as we find it in The Myth holding promise for education.
The experience of the absurd and the labour of Sisyphus may be solitary
but like education it also has a collective dimension as it recognises and is
embedded in what is common. Sisyphus works as an individual but through
this connects to the cause of others (Carroll, 2007). This imagery of Sisyphus
has appeal for educationalists striving to bring this balance to their practice
contexts; lucidity of the absurd has potential to bring the individual and the
collective together in a powerful and unique way.
Explored here is the nature of this relationship between the absurd and
education, in the context of a wider political system, and the consequences
for practice: for the learning, the learner and teacher. The following quote
lays out this challenge and the opportunity:
While the mechanical life of education as an enterprise may produce
weariness and thus provoke a consciousness of the absurdity of ones
relation to life, the world itself is not absurd. Rather the world itself is
unreasonable. Furthermore, it is not education as an enterprise that is
absurd, but rather that the enterprise ethos pretends to be reasonable in
the way it configures the experience of the educator/student relationship;
a mechanical life that is wearisome to both educator and student because
it fails to recognise the more profound nature of the relation between
the need for political subjectivity and creative activity. The absurd
embodies the confrontation between the irrational (the pragmatic act
from the point of view of what pragmatism does not recognise in the
subject of education) and the subject of educations wild longing for
clarity. The context of this confrontation is that in which we visualize
the need in contemporary education for an interaction between the
educator and the student that produces a disagreement. (Gibbons &
Heraud, 2007)
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EDUCATIVE FEELINGS
The language of absurdity can sit uneasily alongside typical educational

imagery. For example Camus describes creation embedded in humiliated
thought. He sees creativity as dogged revolt and advocates that any thought
that abandons unity glorifies diversity and that diversity is the home of art
(105). The happiness of Sisyphus itself is confirmed on the basis that he
accepts his fate and everything within it. From Baldaccinos reflections on
the work of Maxine Greene:
To take on ones burden is neither humiliating nor denigrating, but
humanizing. This is what gives Sisyphus a unique existenceSisyphus
is not distanced from what Camus calls the artists difficult calling.
(Baldaccino, 2009, p. 19)
Our inquiry is whether education can look like this, wants to look like this
or perhaps needs to look like this. Should it embed this kind of futility into
the creative process, and what are the consequences of doing so? How does
education already do this, and what might be the opportunities and risks of
bringing this pedagogy into practice?
It seems education takes its place on both sides of the absurd pendulum. It
is an instrument of totality and an instrument of diversity. It can be used for
opening or closing the mind curious to the absurd. Education can offer both
strangeness and certainty. Literature on the subject to date suggests it cannot
easily escape the ambiguity of knowledge nor the experience of strangeness,
nor the temptation for totality. Its currency is the same as the absurd; sense
making between knowledge, self and existential purpose. It therefore lives
close to the absurd. The experience of the absurd might look like what many
would call educational:
born precisely at the very meeting point of that efficacious but limited
reason with the ever-resurgent irrational. (Camus, 1955a, p. 39)
If education lives close by to the absurd we can potentially learn much
by reading Albert Camus. We would have more guidance for the choices we
need to make. His characters and contexts show us different ways to respond
and live authentically in the absurd perhaps increasingly relevant or helpful
for engaging for postmodern ambiguity. They show the life that the absurd
gives rise to, and by doing so how to live meaningfully when faced with our
own Sisyphean moments.
The Myth is the required starting point for these provocations. It offers
us a story of those historical and fictional characters who lived cognisant
12
of thefutility of ones efforts. Although critical, The Myth advocates the

power (of this type) of ephemeral creation.
This is a restoration of a voice and the individual struggle in the universe
suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the
earth rise up (p. 110). For Camus this relies on the individual recognising
that not all has been exhausted (p. 110). It is perhaps a special space that the
Outsider (pedagogy) can inhabit and create within.
The Myth has always been considered an argument for the absurd and in
particular the strength of character that may come with its confrontation. Read
in this way The Myth is the argument for ones committed confrontation to
the absurd, not as an end in itself or an appeal to some type of existential truth
but rather as a mechanism for authenticity. Camus sees the absurd as a reality
provided to consciousness, experienced (deliberately or not) under certain
conditions which individuals choose to engage or turn away from. The Myth
outlines why the absurd is valuable; what the strength of character is, and why
this character is essential to our societies. He arrives at ephemeral creation:
For Camus, art is a paramount way of living under the shadow of the
absurd. Consequently the artist is the most absurd character Camus
deals with in his writings. (Gotz, 1987, p. 265)
This monograph explores whether a teacher can be this type of artist and
whether it is sustainable bringing the absurd to education experienced as a
combination of difficult feelings. These feelings are relational ones such as
dislocation, exile, solidarity, euphoria. The Myth traces these feelings. The
remainder of this chapter introduces some of these concepts and begins the
examination of whether they can be understood as educational and perhaps
under what conditions they already exist or exist positively in educative spaces.
EXILE
The feeling of exile is central to most conversations to date on education

and Camus. In The Myth exile is not a total revolt against meaning (a type
of nihilism). It is more a feeling that one is in a new place. The rules and
assumptions in this place are ambiguous. They can be accompanied by the
sense that things are no longer worth the trouble (p. 13). The Myth states that
from the moment the absurd is recognised, and it is recognised as belonging
to I, it is a passion which is the most harrowing of all (p. 27). In The Myth
this is where contradiction, antinomy, anguish or impotence reigns (p. 28).
It is at the outer limits of reason: the mind, when it reaches its limits, must
make a judgement and choose its conclusions (p. 31).
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Experiences of the absurd and the sense of exile and the Outsider are not
all consuming, and unlikely constant; they are privileged and bitter moments
(p. 31). The Myth asks us whether we choose philosophical suicide at these
times. It provokes action in readers by describing the stories of others. It
asks what we as individuals, or our institutions would do. How should we
respond when choice is not an option the absurd must be reckoned with:
living under that stifling sky forces one to get away or stay (p. 32). The Myth
describes the incalculable feeling of exile:
a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights
no memory of and no way back to the world of meaning
divorce between the actor and his setting (p. 13).
These feelings are one consequence from dealing with the absurd exile
of this type does not end well for many Camusean characters. The Myth
explores how other writers have considered this question, particularly the first
encounter and the question of fear and consequence: if I go down this path
what would life be but despair? (p. 43).
Educationalists are encouraged to accept this challenge and explore
consequences for practice. This is advocating for the place of the absurd but
recognising the precipice it walks. But utilising Camus allows us to signpost
where emotional and physical danger might be, and where the promise might
lie. His characters offer us alternative ways of seeing the teacher and student,
interactions, policy and principle. They have aspects of the rebel and the
outsider that might appeal as metaphors or literal models for what we want
to see (and perhaps even need) in education.
This is where The Myth starts: with the simple question of what counts
and what does not and the challenge of whether we should step into the
equilibrium of the absurd and risk emotions, those such as exile. The Myth
in many ways demands we must. It opens with this one truly serious
philosophical problem the judgement of whether (the curious) life is worth
living or not under the gaze of the absurd. The question for Camus was
whether the absurd challenge only leads to nihilism, or if it also leads to
alternative, positive ways of being, seeing and knowing.
THE ABSURD
In all these cases, from the simplest to the most complex, the magnitude
of the absurdity will be in direct ratio to the distance between the two
terms of my comparison. (p. 33)
14
This passage from The Myth suggests that where there is no significant
investment in certainty and control there can no absurd. Or put differently,
the absurd arises within those contexts where there exist apparatus investing
in meaning-making. For example Camuss stories such as The Plague would
not make sense if set in a community of Dadists or Behemians. It would be
a story of illness rather than tragedy. The absurd requires air to breathe. This
air comes from the human feelings of space found between certainty and
ambiguity. The space where education also lives, from time to time.
There are very few institutions in our society which give energy to both
ends of this confrontation or divorce as The Myth phrases it: institutions
which permit (and can reward) both certainty and consciousness of the
uncertain. Normally our social experiences are clearly signposted as sense
making or nonsense making: as taking the trouble versus trouble making.
Institutions will rarely allow us to play at both ends of the spectrum.
However education, unlike other meaning-making apparatus, is licensed
to generate both feelings simultaneously; the promise and the doubt. It
humiliates and constructs. It encourages the knower to believe in the potential
for knowledge to explain, and yet also rewards fragility meaning we are
cognisant that knowledge will be overcome. Education is unique because
it encourages (and rewards) us to act through knowing and yet refuses to
allow us a certainty to this learning. It asks us to roll the rock but in full
consciousness that our efforts will be overcome. This has a very particular
psychological effect on learners and learning. They are rewarded for learning
but remain suspicious of it.
These two feelings are also contained in the absurd, longing met with
ambivalence. That they cannot be divided is a defining principle. It results
in an awkward balance. Camus explores what it means to live with this
consciousness:
the first and, after all, the only condition of my inquiry is to preserve the
very thing that crushes me. (p. 34)
The Myth traces this nexus and the leap of other writers and characters in
fiction. Camus demands we stay true to the paradox. He sees the absurd as
that which defines him and binds him his answers to ethical and existential
questions are mediated through this awkward space.
The absurd challenge in the context of education might look something
similar. For the mind imbued with the absurd doesnt education look like
a charade? A rock-like meaningless activity? Or can this mind still find
meaning can Sisyphus have both the rock and happiness; can education
15
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have both the absurd and purpose. This phrase in The Myth puts the challenge
succinctly, and I believe it looks like education:
this mind and this world straining against each other without being able
to embrace each other. (p. 42)
LIMITS
In the Cruise OBrien translated 1955 publication of The Myth, Penguin

included the story Helens Exile. This short story has relevance for educational
questions too. It gives imagery to this mind and this world straining against
each other.
This imagery comes from the way Camus writes about the limits which
he found characteristic of Greek thought, and that he found the modern era
turning away from. He sees them instead turning to totalities and hence
the negation of limits. Living through a time of extreme violence and revolt
Camus longed for the resurrection of, or to get back in touch with, limits:
Nemesis the goddess of measure keeps watch (Camus, 1995b, p. 167).
Camus doesnt describe his age as one believing in no limits but rather one
without balance.
Adherence to limits means (or demands) a relative freedom and a relative
justice; Foley sees Camus concept of limits comparable to the Greek concept
of sophrosyne: usually translated as either moderation or temperance [it]
is one of the four cardinal virtues as defined by Plato in the Republic (Foley,
2008, p. 83). Because of this loyalty to, and demand for, limits Camus can
locate himself in a unique political and moral context. He brings a different
lens to analyses and ethical questions:
In a drunken sky we light up the suns we want. But nonetheless the
boundaries exist and we know it. In our wildest aberrations we dream
of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to
find at the end of our errors. (Camus, 1955c, p. 168)
Camus believed that consciousness of limits allows recognition of and
respect for diversity. It is not that Camus doesnt want totality, he describes
and knows well the temptation of ideological sense-making for society. But
he and his characters have glimpsed the absurd and he believes in fidelity to
this condition and the limits therein. The alternative for Camus is far worse.
It is to eventually rule over a desert (p. 168). Camus finds examples of
this through history and explains these moments when we merely lack[ed]
manspride which is fidelity to his limits, lucid love of his condition (p. 171).
16
How do limits and Helens Exile speak to education? I believe the story
reinforces the idea of learning as creation and discovery of limits. It mirrors
some educational discourses advocating for learning to retain a sense
humility, where limits are recognised and learning retains balance. Limits
also re-position the purpose and role of the educator, ushering in the concept
of balance; elevating to consciousness the sense of humility, collectiveness,
and incompleteness. Limits therefore allow us to recover the absurd, which
we should have known was always there waiting for us. And perhaps
conversely, the absurd allows us to live conscious of limits.
ABSURD REASONING
Is education, or should education, or can education be absurd? In turn can the

absurd be educational? The question in The Myth is what type of reasoning
follows the absurd awakening, and what the value is of this way of thinking.
We know education sides with the absurd because it starts with the incomplete
world. It also sides with the absurd because it deals in ambiguity. There is
also, like the absurd, no nostalgia in education: its imperative is to overcome
and in doing so retain an existential fragility.
Absurd reasoning aims to enumerate what it cannot transcend and in
doing so it affirms that without any unifying principle thought can still
take delight in describing and understanding every aspect of experience
(p.45). This description is taken from the critique of phenomenology in
The Myth, and in this passage Camus is signalling there are many things
within phenomenology that make it appear on the side of absurd reasoning.
He agrees that it is a way of awakening a sleeping world and of making it
vivid to the mind and that it has a modesty of thought that limits itself to
describing what it declines to explain (p. 45). The step the method takes,
siding with the absurd is to reject a unifying principle that allows us to
describe experience without recourse to reason; to see the diversity of an
image mediated by the moment and consciousness: in that magic lantern all
the pictures are privileged (p. 45).
But Camus rejects Husserls method on the basis that it takes a step
that for the absurd mind is incomprehensible. The step is the one where
phenomenology moves from a psychological attitude to the metaphysical.
If Husserl was offering only a self-imposed focus for critical consciousness
it would have similarities to absurd reasoning. But Camus rejects it on the
basis that it is more than just a way of looking at the world. It implies that
through a certain, psychological lens one can claim to discover the essence
17
CHAPTER 1
of an object. The reasoning may look like it is energised by the absurd but
its outcome is not. It eventually falls to the temptation of explaining, and the
explanation assumes, or wants to purport, a metaphysical truth.
We might use this same method to see if education also fails the Camusean
test. The test is whether education remains true to the absurd or not. This can
be explored by asking three questions:
the level to which epistemologies in education see, consider, or embrace
the absurd
the level to which learning journeys bring individuals into contact with
the absurd, and
where the absurd is experienced outside education contexts; to what extent
does education then respond to these moments as they are carried into its
context.
The first two questions are about how education (knowledge and then
pedagogy) is deliberately designed to connect with the absurd. The third
question is how education engages personal experiences of the absurd that
happen elsewhere and yet remain present to the mind. And it concludes
by asking whether it is possible and what might the benefits be, if education
was able to locate itself into the absurd so that it deliberately engaged the
mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this
fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together (p. 50).
To answer this we need to examine, like Camus does in The Myth, to what
extent we (or educational practices) mask the evidence and suppress the
absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation (p. 50). This monograph
asks the same question of education: in what ways does it too unintentionally
suppress or celebrate, and what are the implications for the young mind in
pursuing an existential education? And most importantly with reference to
intentionality, if one believes in education as having potential and a role to
play in absurd reasoning, how can it remain on that dizzying crest: what is
the cost and investment of doing so.
ABSURD LEARNER
Thus, suicide provides an avenue for escaping an unreasonable and

cumbersome existence. Yet, complete escape requires exiting the paradox
in an attempt at existential transcendence. Such an attempt presupposes
hope at least the hope that such transcendence might provide a means
of escape from the present existence. For this reason, Camus ultimately
18
denies the efficacy of suicide, for it requires giving up the absurd

luciditythat makes life respectable. (Weddington, 2007, p. 120)
Hope is a pivotal concept in The Myth. Hope, as defined by Camus at the time
of writing, was an individual escape from the absurd; a reconciliation of some
sort. This type of hope is found in characters committed to universal truths,
whether they be political or personal. Hope and nostalgia are acceptable
responses to the absurd; Camus is rarely critical. The Myth accepts that hope
cannot be eluded for ever and The Myth could be summarised as a record
of artists and others who were beset [by hope] even those who wanted to be
free of it (p. 102).
Resistance to the temptation offered by hope requires unfailing alertness
(p. 103). There is a section in The Myth introducing the attitude against
hope. It reads like pedagogy. The attitude is called ephemeral creation and
it seems to have parallels with concepts and goals found across all types of
educational writing. This discussion is in the section titled Absurd Freedom.
This section revisits the fundamental existential challenge: to leap beyond or
to live without appeal.
This leads Camus to posing his famous question of philosophical suicide.
This too has relevance for education. Readers of Camus will be familiar with
his characters that live a life without certainty, and they, rather than turning to
suicide choose a life better lived: at last man will again find there the wine
of the absurd and the bread of indifference on which he feeds his greatness
(p. 52). This positive response relies on a continuing consciousness of the
absurd and a commitment to keeping it alive. But it also has purposeful
action. It is through this peculiar (and at first glance contradictory) blend of
indifference and commitment that we find both the outsider and perhaps, at
the same time, a sense of belonging.
The central place that Camus gives to this choice (across his writing)
suggests that a certain sort of freedom underpins the absurd. Perhaps he sees
the purpose of freedom as that which will help individuals witness the absurd
contradiction, which in turn leads them to make choices to revolt or leap (i.e.
a means to authenticity). Awareness of the absurd does not one give us new
freedom from it; one cannot use this freedom to cross out the contradictions
of the absurd (p. 51).
In The Rebel Camus (1956) advocates for a sense of unity as the harmony
of opposites. He contrasts this with totality: the reduction and the stamping
out of differences (p. 234). In The Myth he similarly reflects on what absurd
freedom means for our knowledge projects: its purpose is to return reflection
to what I already knew. This means one cannot reject either the appetite
19
CHAPTER 1
for unity or what I know of the impossibility of reducing this world to a

rationale and reasonable principle (1955a, p. 51).
This type of freedom is likely to negate the normal sense of the future
as something we plan, project or contemplate. Our absurd freedom can do
nothing for the future it cannot make sense of it it is settled in the present.
This is because it does not escape the absurd: authentic freedom promises
permanent revolution (p. 53). Camus writes about historical figures and
fictional characters who found this type of freedom and those that could not
live within it. From the hysterical to the heroic.
To answer this; how we should as educators act in the face of the absurd
we need to compare the educational venture and the language and imagery
of living without appeal. This latter freedom is not an outburst of relief or
of joy but rather a bitter acknowledgement of a fact (p. 65). The absurd in
the context of the learner does not negate nor does it liberate; it just binds
differently.
ABSURD CREATION
What normally brings the individual into confrontation with his absurd
condition, suggests Camus, is the awareness not of human mortality
per se, but of his own personal mortalityHowever, this is not to say
that the absurd is born out of an irrational response to the realisation
of human mortality. While feelings of the absurd may thus be awoken,
awareness of the absurd, Camus insists, is specifically a rational,
intellectual discovery, deduced from recognition of the division between
our expectations of the world and the world itself, unresponsive to those
expectations. (Foley, 2008, p. 6)
Finishing with Absurd Creation the working hypothesis is that this is the
closest thing to a Camusean pedagogy we find in The Myth. Absurd creation
comes from a commitment to remain faithful to the condition one finds
oneself and others: the limits and barriers discussed above.
Although absurd creation begins with lucid indifference (p. 87) it
demands we find meaning through knowledge: meaning that leads to action,
and action embedded by principles of the absurd. Camus believes this need
not mean we lose either lucid indifference or the sense of the absurd. Absurd
creation is not the outright rejection of parameters but the commitment to
them even if transient: such men know to begin with, and then their whole
effort is to examine, to enlarge, and to enrich the ephemeral island on which
they have just landed (p. 87).
20
These are certain lofty goals for education practice. But it does seem that
absurd creation has significant links to concepts already found in education.
In some ways it sounds like a type of learning process underpinned by a
deliberate act of reflection. Camus describes that before creation follows a
pause that space where the mind acknowledges the absurd contradiction
and implications. The absurd stays with us. There might be an argument to
link this to the educational attribute of contemplation; the deliberate taking
stock of the distinctness of a moment. Camus uses the word describing
when he unpacks the process of absurd creation. This might be a form of
education how to use the absurd as a device for those who wish to live a
life of conscious clarity (Sagi, 1994, p. 279).
Read this way we might start to draw Camus further into the educational
discourses. He talks of absurd creation as a place where explanation is of
less worth than the sensation of seeing diversity. Camus is arguing that
recognition of the absurd can help us understand the existential. It shatters
and fragments: he talks of seeing in the wonderful and childish world of
the creator (p. 88). In The Myth Camus is starting to describe educational
attributes: lucid indifference, sculpture in clay, describe and enlarge.
He also states that the work of art is born of the intelligences refusal to
reason the concrete (p. 89). Again this resonates with the critical purposes
of education; to search and see anew. This creation is not transcending the
lucid mind always knows that creating or not creating changes nothing
the absurd creator does not prize his work (p. 90). Camus is instead arguing
for an art form that does not have pretension to the eternal (p. 90). He
describes moments constructed deliberately where expression begins and
thought ends and perhaps, in practice, it is a moment where we find thought
renouncing of its prestige (p. 90).
Again, as a working hypothesis, this language suggests a pedagogy of the
absurd which has both push and pull affects: it offers the promise of a world
remaining of which man is the sole master and yet at the same time tempts
consciousness with the illusion of another world (p. 106). But at the same
time it does not hide us from the whole extent of [our] wretched condition
(p. 109). Perhaps for education as for the Greeks, this lucidity might crown
[our] victory (p. 109).
For now we will take this as the monographs working hypothesis. That
the absurdhas a relationship to education:
that the absurd is educational and that education is absurd.
21
CHAPTER 2
EXILE AND THE KINGDOM1
LOOKING BACK AT THIS ARTICLE
This chapter offers the second analyses exploring the work of Camus in the
learning context. When this was published as an article (Curzon-Hobson,
2003) it was the first time that this type of analysis had been completed for
Exile. My premise was that Exile and the Kingdom could and should be read
as an attempt by Camus to explicate in full his conceptualisation (and the
practices) of the empowering and transforming relationship. These stories
reveal the very fleeting and precarious nature of moments of insight and
empowerment. I argued that the way these experiences and their contexts
were described would be useful for people interested in education. The
environments described by Camus are not educational in a formal sense
but aspects of them seem very similar to those experienced by teachers
contexts of power, hope, care and fear. They involve individuals confronting
one anothers differences in terms of language, religion and culture, and they
dealt with tension and disharmony over privileged knowledge, perceived
authority, relations of power, and conflicting perceptions of ignorance, pride
and egotism. In showing us the challenges and conflicts inherent in these
sorts of contexts contexts that teachers readily find themselves within I
suggested these stories by Camus could provide teachers with an original,
specifically existential insight into the nature of educational moments in
which trust and transformation was both won and lost.
In 2008 Peter Roberts published an article which explored in much greater
detail the character of Daru, compared to what is here. The later timing of
course meant this article was not considered in the original text below.
Robertss article on The Guest focused on the ethical dilemmas faced by
Daru (Roberts, 2008b).
THE PRECIPICE BETWEEN EXILE AND THE KINGDOM
The title, Exile and the Kingdom, signals the dichotomy Camus uses to
scrutinise the divergence between solidarity and existential isolation.
Camus, following in the footsteps of Martin Buber (1947, p. 98), affirmed
23
CHAPTER 2
the positionthat ones own freedom can only ever be won alongside the
promotion of anothers. Caring community is needed so that each individual
can bring forth the potentiality of the other (Buber, 1966, p. 25).
The ability to transform through new perceptions and understanding
requires others to question, create and juxtapose the actions and ideals of the
individual. Where one pole of this relation is staid or objectifying then the
relation cannot grow because each cannot aid the other to perceive and test
out empowering possibilities. Camus perceived this relation in the following
way:
Moderation, on the one hand, is nothing but pure tension. It smiles,
no doubt, and our Convulsionists, dedicated to elaborate apocalypses,
despise it. But its smile shines brightly at the climax of an interminable
effortModeration is not the opposite of rebellion. Rebellion in itself is
moderation, and it demands, defends, and re-creates throughout history
and its eternal disturbances. (Camus, 1956, p. 301)
Thus the title Exile and the Kingdom confronts the reader; it suggests
that ones own potentiality is dependent upon others. It is the nature of the
relation that one forges with others, and indeed oneself and the world, which
determines whether one will be exiled by and from others, or enjoy the
kingdom of humankind. The choice of the word exile is therefore important
because it denotes a separation from ones homeland and the certainty of
never returning to how things once were. It is a separation from others
through a punishment handed down by a community for the benefit of this
bond. Thus exile is a thoroughly relational term. It is about separation,
disjuncture and alienation. It connotes feelings of betrayal or allegiance to
the limits that have been set, and it is an enduring sentence one that aims to
haunt the loneliness of its subject.
The kingdom on the other hand is St Francis-like; something that has been
promised to all and belongs to all. In Christian terms it is a reward for an
arduous life of love, forgiveness and sympathy. It is relational; the kingdom
could never be realised without individuals constructing a community and
this community also being connected through God. Kingdom in this and the
political sense is a place of belonging and community founded on the values
of care, love and respect.
It denotes a place of belonging, citizenship and community of values,
language and customs. In both senses of kingdom there exists a desire to
rebel from that which objectifies the individual and his or her relations in
the world. Instead, through solidarity and the attributes of trust and care,
24
EXILE AND THE KINGDOM
the potentiality of these relations is re-cognised and augmented. Whereas

exile ensures separation and therefore leads to objectification and stillness,
the kingdom affords a sensation of trust and belonging that brings together
possibility and potentiality, care and projection.
But it is a precarious moment (of existential strangeness) that separates
exile and the kingdom; the work offers us this myriad of moments where
existential balance is won and lost. Like Buber (1947, p. 184) who defines the
relation between I-It and I-Thou as a narrow ridge, Camus also expresses
the nature of the precipice that is walked by all in a modern community
between a will to potentiality and a will to objectivity. Both are tempting.
In one sense all of Camus characters are exiled for they all experience a
world that appears without any form of enduring meaning or explanation.
Out of this, even as they form bonds of solidarity, they still continue to
experience existence in a world that feels ambivalent to their projections
of value. But importantly Exile also shows us how these characters come to
terms with their condition, revel in a kingdom of revolt, within the exile that
is the human condition. This is the fundamental aim of revolt and what is
at stake; to forge relations with oneself, others and the world in a manner
that transforms (but can never displace) the inescapable exile of all (Camus,
1956, p. 20).
Camus shows us in Exile and beyond how this attempt at transformation is
thwarted by its proponents inability to care, speak truthfully, trust, and will
the potentiality of the other. His characters both historical and fictional are
shown at the moments that determine their enduring exile or their experience
of the kingdom. These can be termed moments of choice between servitude
and revolt.
EMPOWERING RELATIONS, REVOLT AND MARTIN BUBER
It is argued here that the aim of empowering relations, both in the classroom
and beyond, is to forge the possibility for revolt. The notion of revolt is in
evidence throughout all of Camus writing. In Notebooks, The Outsider and
The Myth of Sisyphus, revolt is primarily an individual endeavour against the
indifferent universe and against those forms of thought and action that offer
escapism from the confrontation with the absurd condition. Themes include
nihilism and the negation of will, the problem of freedom and choice. From
these foundations a second enduring principle evolved that was evident
in his later works of The Plague, The Just Assassins, and The Rebel. This
principle is that of responsibility: humans not only have the ability to choose,
but they also must undertake the responsibility to respect, allow and indeed
25
CHAPTER 2
encourage the choice of others. Revolt therefore became the movement

whereby individuals come to recognise the limits of freedom which must
be afforded to all, and the responsibility to ensure those limits remained
respected and realised (Camus, 1955a, p. 65).
Thus revolt becomes a relational act in which ones rebellion becomes an
appeal to something which bonds all and forges a sense of community and
meaning but specifically for that moment and for that context. This again
is very similar to Bubers notion of I-Thou. It is a revolt against that which
objectifies a stand towards the forging of possibility, meaning and value
for that very moment:
The realisation of community, like the realisation of any idea, cannot
occur once and for all time; always it must be the moments answer to
the moments question, and nothing more. (Buber, 1958, p. 135)
There are complex foundations for the Camusean revolt described in
Exile. They are complex because sometimes they read as ambiguous and
contradictory. Initially, there must be agreement on what counts as the
authentic limit. This restrains (perhaps paradoxically) revolt to that which
aspires to order (Camus, 1956, p. 23). It requires entering into a relation
dialogical or silent that is underpinned by trust, truth, courage and respect.
This is a relation that does not seek and cannot provide an answer that is
necessarily enduring or absolute. It is instead a decision of what counts as
value and meaning for those people in that very particular time and place.
The moment this answer becomes absolute it objectifies the relations that
live within their unique existential space: There is an evil, undoubtedly,
which men accumulate in their frantic desire for unity (p. 303).
In these instances the participants of dialogue turn away from the
confrontation with the absurd, and away from the positive dimensions of
doubt and fragility that can be found in existential strangeness. In Exile
particularly it is this doubt, connected to existential strangeness which
licenses potentiality and transforms possibility. Relations that dont enjoy this
moment (of new strangeness) remain staid and objectified: and knowledge,
values and even other individuals become demarcated instruments for use
by the other.
This form of knowing and relating can be defined as a will to objectivity.
In the work of Camus and Outsider literature this will leads to servitude
and mistrust. It is very similar to Bubers notion of I-It in which people and
knowledge are viewed as instruments and their value is determined by their
ability to realise the enduring ideals of the other. This again recalls Bubers
26
narrow ridge concern for self and others. At one extreme there exists a form
of teaching that Buber defines as the mode of I-It, and at the other apex there
is the mode of I-Thou.
In an educational exchange one might consider that I-It is primarily
different from I-Thou because it is a teaching process that is not relational.
Instead it denotes an individualist stance in which a student or teacher
seeks to objectify the world by ignoring and indeed destroying the sense
of ones changing and forever incomplete relationships within it. This kind
of pedagogy conveys to the student a world already finished (Buber, 1937,
p.39).
Learning in this sense is not relational. The potentiality of the other is
stagnated, as are the students relationships to it. Thus a pedagogy of I-It is
always going to present both the object of inquiry and (to some measure) the
students relationships to it, as something beyond personal interpenetration
and transformation. For Buber, a fundamental responsibility of the teacher
is to instil within students a sense of the radically unknowable; that reality
is, and should be, constituted by our different, yet collective interventions,
hence limits in the world.
The antithesis of this instrumental form of teaching in the work of Buber
is the pursuit of an I-Thou mode of learning and existence. This form of
inquiry seeks to uncover the relations between oneself, the other, and the
world, and find meaning through an understanding of these relationships
(Buber, 1947, p. 98). Pedagogy of this type enters into and retains a sense
of the betweenness that exists between students and teachers and between
students and the objects of inquiry. It brings to the fore a recognition of
the ever-changing and fragile nature that can, with hard work, characterise
these relationships. For Buber the students realisation of the unfinished and
the unique potentiality of oneself and of the other, and of the non-necessity
of therelationships existing between them and their objects of inquiry, is
primarily dependent upon the creation of a trusting learning environment
(Friedman, 1955, p. 249). This trust extends to the relationship not only
between the teacher and the student but also between the students themselves.
Camus notion of servitude is very similar to Bubers relation of I-It.
Both are forms of engagement that seek to escape the particularity of each
moment, ones responsibility to the freedom of others, and the anguishing
experienceof choice without absolutes. It is servitude constituted by
silence, terror and totalitarianism (Camus, 1956, p. 284). These inauthentic
relations constitute a subjugation of the will to potentiality, and subject our
projectionsto categories deemed essential and beyond question. It is this
27
CHAPTER 2
negation of doubtthat hinders revolt the most, for lucidity of the absurd
a confrontation with strangeness is what keeps bringing our ideals,
knowledge, values and relations back to reflection and critique.
Thus doubt and fragility are the experiences through which Exiles
characters make the most positive transformations. The flight to objectivity,
although tranquilising, cannot create within oneself the sensation of freedom
and choice, the responsibility one has to the freedom and choice of others,
and hence the awareness of potentiality and radical possibility. The will to
objectivity demands totalising, enduring and encompassing frameworks that
breach time and cultures and do not recognise their limits. What is missing
for these characters is that the absurd becomes hidden. In contrast the
authentic revolt demands limits; limits that are fragile and exist for that
moment and place within the absurd (Camus, 1955b, p. 167). These limits
are founded on the free exchange of conversation, in which each individual
is brought into relation with the other and in openness and truth each reaches
out and engages with the ideals and hopes of the other (Camus, 1956, p. 282).
Authentic relations therefore refuse to calculate and categorise the present;
they are movements cognisant rather than forgetful of the generous origins
of revolt.
ALMOST AUTHENTIC CHARACTERS ON THE PRECIPICE
It is in Exile and the Kingdom (perhaps closely followed by The Plague)

that the Camusean community, under the gaze of the absurd, can be best
experienced by the reader. In Exile the reader can most acutely sense the
precarious tightrope between the kingdom of solidarity and the exile of
solitude. In both these forms of engagement the determining factor is how
the characters forge their relationships between themselves, others and the
world. But, as Camus highlights in his discussions of revolt, these relations
are always imperilled; the question is whether we turn consciousness towards
it. In The Plague this initial gnawing is powerfully presented through
(Ibelieve) the metaphor of bacillus in Oran:
From now on it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us.
Hitherto, surprised as he may have been by the strange things happening
around him, each individual citizen had gone about his business
as usual, so far as this was possible. And, no doubt, he would have
continued doing so. But once the town gates were shut, every one of us
realised that all, the narrator included, were, so to speak, in the same
28
boat, and each would have to adapt himself to the new conditions of
life. (Camus,1948, p. 63)
Turning consciousness towards the absurd provides paradoxically for
the foundations required for both the experience of solitude and solidarity.
This is the emotional tension that haunts all of Camus characters in Exile
and is the dilemma faced by his historical and metaphysical rebels. Camus
is the master of this moment where existential strangeness settles; between
potentiality and objectivity. This too is an educational moment.
Camus character that best exemplifies this anguishing sense of freedom
is Janine in The Adulterous Woman. She is a woman who has always been,
and remains, unable to enter into mutuality with either people or her cosmos.
She lives in an exile that she recognises yet is unwilling to alter, for it gives
her a sense of meaning and value. She lives this exile and accepts it in the
silences between herself and her husband Marcel (p. 26), the muteness of
those around her (p. 14), and the barren world that she inhabits (p. 13).
Janine lives in continual bad faith needing and presupposing the nature of
her relationship to others and her expectations of the world. Even at moments
of absurd confrontation, she remains, except for a fleeting experience,
unwilling to enter into the particularity of a moment beyond objectivity and
hope. Her relation with her husband, her own physical self-reflection, and
her understanding of her place in the world, remain objectified and staid.
These relations are reduced to instruments for the sake of benefit whether it
be profit or a psychological feeling of necessity and need. Hence Janine and
Marcel objectify one anotheras each struggles to negate their confrontations
with the absurd. In some way their prize is the enduring, yet safe, emptiness
of their union.
This failure to enter into relation with one another begets an inability
to forge mutuality with others who they live in contact with. Marcel lives
in a country that he loathes and disrespects, yet prizes for its ability to
make him profit. He does not speak the native language, he does not care
for the values of the people nor does he see them as individuals sharing
the common bond (of exile) with him (p. 19). He is therefore existentially
numb in their presence unless manipulating self-interested opportunity.
Janine, however, has a longing for a different relation, and her experience
with the soldier on the bus, the shepherds on the bus trip, the sounds
of the wind and the river at the oasis, and her experience at the fort, all
show a longing which is tragically sacrificed by her final resignation;
its nothing (p. 30).
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CHAPTER 2
Camus describes his own feelings of revolt, first experienced in Florence,

in the Santissima Annunziata:
Alone against the column, I was like someone who is seized by the
throat and who cries out his faith as a final word. Everything within
me protested against this kind of resignation. One must said the
inscriptions. But I said no, and my revolt was true. (Camus, 1968,
pp.8889)
This might be the same feeling of revolt that drives Janine a second time to
the fort. This is in response to the anguishing sense of solitude she had always
felt. But it was unique to this trip because she has discovered a deeper measure
of existential strangeness, which has in turn a more profound influence on
her perceptions of herself, Marcel and their relationship. It is this journey
to a place of such physical barrenness that allows Janine to realise that she
has not been spared exile but has lived it through her relation to Marcel. In
witnessing the freedom and honesty of the nomads, she recognises that the
pursuit of the kingdom must begin and remain in confrontation with our
fundamental conditionthat of doubt, fragility and exile.
Thus, in a moment of longing for authenticity she gives herself to utter
potentiality. As the archetypal adulteress, she steals away from her husband,
from their frigid room, from a dialogue only she can hear, and in silent
confrontation she opens herself to relation. But on her return this moment
of mutuality gives way to the same resignation that had always haunted her
marriage to Marcel and her own openness to potentiality. Marcel speaks but
Janine cannot understand his words, he puts on the light and momentarily
blinds her, and he drinks the mineral water that is so physically and spiritually
different from the symbolic water of night she had just experienced.
Their relation is not, as Buber would define it, one of a new inclusiveness
and betweenness, but rather one that remains founded on need, confusion,
and eventually exploitation:
He spoke and she didnt understand what he was saying. He got up,
turned on the light, which blinded her He was about to slip between
the sheets when, one knee on the bed, he looked at her without
understanding. She was weeping copiously, unable to restrain herself.
Its nothing, dear, she said, its nothing. (Camus, 1958a, p. 30)
Thus she acquiesces to the relationship they have had for so long, and in
doing so she constructs the potential of other relationships she will have to
the world and others. The relation she experienced on top of the fort both
30
between herself and others and between herself and the passing universe
of movement reveals to her a kingdom she had always longed for but
remains unwilling to accept as present. This is a kingdom beyond all the
ideals that constitute her relationship with Marcel and she would rather live
in resignation than face her (new found) responsibility to choose and to
be free. Like Dostoyevskys cardinal of Seville accusing Christ of giving
mankind exactly what they did not want free will Janine sacrifices the
experience of the kingdom for slavery. She negates the becoming nature
of humankind, and, by doing so, any new relation between herself and
Marcel. Her relationships to others and the world, will remain subject to her
objectifying needs and fears. Like his dismissal of her initial revolt when he
called her a fool and awkwardly [took] her hand (p. 24) their relation will
continue to be one of darkness, silence and subjection.
This final moment in The Adulterous Woman captures the precariousness
of the moment between potentiality and objectivity. The path taken from this
moment depends upon such a fleeting act as a word, a glance or a sign. Just
as there is an unspoken bond between Jan and his mother and sister that leads
to his murder in Camus play The Misunderstanding, here Janine and Marcel
are unable even though it would only take a single word to enter into
a new openness with one another (one perhaps of existential strangeness).
But Camus does not critique these characters. His fallen characters are
portrayed as tragic, often ignorant and very human. They do not recognise the
potentiality of key moments and perhaps when they act upon them they are
reluctant and half-hearted. This is understandable; the absurd is fundamental
and frightening. Camus remains sympathetic towards the initial moment of
existential strangeness.
There are a number of characters in Camus work who are captured at
this moment on the precipice between potentiality and objectivity. This is
a moment in which they must choose either/or, and, in doing so, construct
themselves, their own relations, and the freedom of others. I believe we
can see these moments in educational contexts; choices that teachers are
continually faced with in all kinds of interactions with students. They are the
moments in which the teacher can open or close possibility, create trust or
mistrust, transform horizons or reproduce expectations.
Each of these possibilities in the classroom are so precarious yet so
defining and important. They are existential choices: they can be altered
through a single movement, touch, command or question.
This is the sense of failed choice: alienation on the precipice. And Camus
gives readers a range of characters struggling with this choice. One of these
31
CHAPTER 2
is specifically educational. Daru in The Guest is a teacher who lives and

works on the barren plateau overlooking Tanguit, Algeria. He feels exiled
anywhere else except in his classroom where he feels like a lord in this
desolate environment. Yet Daru is eventually exiled in this story for he is
faced with a choice he must make, and although doing what he feels is right,
he is objectified and hence alienated by those who live with him. This is
a tragic story in the mould of The Adulterous Woman, for Daru does his
best to enter into a caring and trusting relationship (with a prisoner he is
asked to transport) yet his best intentions and hopes are dashed by others
through their inability to forge genuine solidarity. This eventual alienation is
experienced by Daru as he realises that he cannot control how others perceive
and construct him, and that the world he thought was there for him retains
the indifference that he had experienced many years before, but thought had
passed. This is described in the final sentences of the story:
Daru looked at the sky, the plateau, and, beyond, the invisible lands
stretching all the way to the sea. In this vast landscape he had loved so
much, he was alone. (Camus, 1958a, p. 84)
Yet in Exile and the Kingdom there is an even more tragic figure; that
of Yvars in The Silent Men. As the title suggests, these men are silent
not silent from a bond of love and care that exists between them, but silent
because this bond does not exist and they are unable to forge its possibility
even in circumstances that demand it from them. Yvars has two opportunities
to forge relations of solidarity.
Firstly, he is part of a strike requesting more pay, and secondly, he is
confronted by his boss who has a daughter fallen ill. In both instances he
reacts in a half-hearted manner: the strike was not successful yet he will not
leave his work; he remains unwilling to talk to his boss or to forge solidarity
with his co-workers; he views nature and his own body as hostile and holding
forth no more promises; and he recognises that his labour and his life have
become an instrument for an employers gain but he cannot free himself
from this objectification. Yvars is a man who has succumbed to a perceived
fate that renders him silent and solitary.
Yet like all life even within exile, there remains perhaps because the
absurd remains the possibility of transformation through community and
revolt. Yvars verges on both, yet these precarious moments are met in all
instances by resignation and objectification: Yvars now felt only his fatigue
and his still heavy heart. He would have liked to talk. But he had nothing to
say, nor had the others (Camus, 1958a, p. 64). This is a resignation which,
32
given the way it is described by Camus, forces the reader to recognise

both existential sadness and silence: they say little when they return from
the strike, they do not greet each other as brothers, they fall silent when
the foreman Ballester opens the doors to the factory, they work in silence,
and when spoken to by Ballester and their boss M. Lassalle, they do not
respond. Even once the work has begun and some sort of sense of solidarity
has returned, these men are unable to sustain it and extend it to relations with
their boss. They instead meet his dialogical attempts with silence and return
to suspicion and distrust of one another.
Why does this happen? Mainly because they feel that M. Lassalle had
previously taken away the possibility for dialogue by his obstinate demand
that they either take his offer or leave it. They feel nothing more can be
said inside this type of relational space. Yet it is clear that Yvars (p. 53)
wants to say something more that he feels resignation isnt easy either.
This temperate treatment by Camus highlights the precariousness between
existential moments of solidarity and solitude and its often unconscious
tragedy.
This failure to enter into new relationships through dialogue is again
evident when M. Lassalles daughter is taken away by the ambulance. The
men are aware of the pain felt by M. Lassalle and the machines become
silent, yet so do the men themselves, unable and unwilling to talk to one
another, and when Lassalle comes in they do not say a word although each
feels that one ought to. But their keenness to talk is only from a sense of
etiquette. The strike and Lassalles denial of dialogue has wrenched these
men from immediate possibility of solidarity and hence transformation.
Perhaps in the same way as a teachers demand can silence a class and
silence the students relations with one another, Lassalles communiqu
has destroyed the momentary possibility for solidarity between the workers
and himself, and also between the workers themselves. Interpreting this
through an existential lens it is about the failure to remain lucid. Lucidity
can be frightening but also overcomes everything. Yvars would have liked
to talk, a sorrow is evident in the mens faces, and he feels a sense of
calamity (p.64). These descriptions suggest that possibility remains, as
does an awareness of responsibility to each others potentiality. Yet the
tragedy of the moment returns when the men, because of obstinacy, do not
engage with Lassalle and leave the yard in silence and in solitude. Even
when Yvars returns home and appears to exist on the brink of an openness
towards nature, himself and others, he once again resigns himself to exile
by the simple dismissal of his commonality with Lassalle in the statement
33
CHAPTER 2
that the latters misfortune was his own fault. He remains resigned without
hope: he steps back from the precipice. He dreams of the past, of places far
off, and things that might and should have been.
This tragic awareness of the failure to transform relations is that which
also haunts Gilbert Jonas, the subject of The Artist at Work. Unlike Janine,
who seems to stumble on an awareness, and Yvars, who is aware yet refuses
to seize his opportunities, Jonas is both ignorant and inept. His search for
meaning only begins when his selfish way of life no longer provides the
comforts it once did, and his desire to forge relations with others is only the
result of his exploitive relations failing to deliver the kudos he craves. Thus
he is similar in ways to Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the central character of
The Fall. They are both selfish and exploitive characters who, even having
recognised their inabilities to forge empowering relations of care and trust
with others, still continue to exploit those around them to serve their desire
to feel needed and wanted. They both exist, metaphorically and physically,
in higher places. They are both men who are self-obsessed and use others
so that they may remain free from what lucidity of the absurd might demand
of them: a certain type of responsibility and care for the other. They both
like and need the attentions of those around them yet do not enter into
empowering relations. They remain strange to others but wont allow others
to be part of the habitat of strangeness they have in common. Others exist as
instruments for Jonas.
Therefore Jonas, unlike Yvars and Janine, does not provide a necessary
foundation (into strangeness) to enable either transformation of consciousness
or solidarity. His only relational disposition is one that exploits others, and
this I-It relation extends to the universe which he feels has a special place
and fate marked out for him and all he needs to do is find this star that had
always guided and shielded him. He does not, possibly at any point, recognise
that his success and happiness have only ever been a result of the compassion
and kindness of those around him. At the point where Jonas loses his star and
the system it gave rise to, he takes to drink, commits adultery and seeks out
the company of strangers. This is his response to the sense of alienation he
feels. It is a failed response however because it is couched in individualistic
and exploitive relations. The company of strangers allows him to act in bad
faith, and alcohol and adultery free him momentarily from his own sense of
strangeness and his responsibility to the freedom and happiness of those who
care for him.
This form of escapism is halted by the appearance of his wife Louise.
This moment represents a different moment on the precarious tightrope,
34
and like Janine with Marcel, and Yvars with his fellow workers, Jonass
response falls into exile. He swaps one form of objectification for another.
Rather than entering into relation with Louise and committing to the moment
and the potentiality of those around him, he resorts to his search for his
unchanging star. He isolates himself and takes (literally) to the loft in his
house to rekindle his search. He looks inward rather than outward his revolt
is inauthentic. Thus he can retain his solitude and the sense that he is beyond
(and possibly higher) than others. He fails to recognise the commonality
that binds him to others and his responsibility to forge and defend alongside
them what counts as value and meaning. Yet even within the loft there are
still moments of possibility and transformation, though they are dashed by
Jonass inability to remain open to those who care for him. He instead lives
in a place described as a desert (p. 115), unable to enter dialogue with Louise
(p. 116) and eventually shut off from all.
But his story ends in an image of possibility and this is in keeping with
Camus claim that even the worst exile holds the possibility of transformation.
Like Janine and Yvars, he wants to respond to the community of others and
he is rescued by the continuing care of them who draw his attention to
the world and to their interactions. He hears their activity and the sounds
beyond the house, and for this moment he re-cognises his love for them and
for all humankind. Camus describes this in language we also find in The
Plague:
The world was still there, young and lovable. Jonas listened to the
welcome murmur rising from mankind Louise too now, and he
hadnt heard her laugh for so long. He loved them! How he loved them!
(p. 118)
In entering into a new (and therefore perhaps strange) relation with them,
his potentiality is projected by them, and they rescue him from his exile.
This is a fleeting moment, however, and Camus, in describing Jonas seeing
his star again, creates an ambiguous ending. But the message of the story
remains clear. Meaning and value which gives rise to existential insight
and empowerment can only be won in community with others. Without this
community, meaning for Camus risks being a tool for imposition; structuring
and constructing the freedom of others. This form of living and learning closes
possibility and potentiality, and by doing so, hides one from the necessary
conditions for transformation: that is the experience of new environments
of strangeness the deliberate presence and directed consciousness towards
doubt and fragility.
35
CHAPTER 2
Thus the lesson learnt but not embraced by Jonas, Janine and Yvars, is
that authentic relations, hence empowering transformation, can only exist
in the milieu of solidarity. In being with others we necessarily risk their
objectification of us, yet it is only alongside others that empowering relations
can be won and real transformation exist.
POSSIBILITIES ANNIHILATED A PREFERENCE FOR SLAVERY
This unwillingness to enter into an openness with others is a form of life

most clearly demonstrated in Exile and the Kingdom by the title character of
The Renegade. This man is to be pitied for he portrays the same longing for
meaning and value as all other characters but he cannot break out from the
relation of I-It that he forges with others, knowledge-claims and religion. In
a similar way to Jonas, the renegade views others as instruments for his own
gain, which he attempts to exploit so that he can find an order and meaning
that stretches to the realm of the absolute. Thus he loathes that which reveals
doubt and fragility. He instead embraces whatever provides a sense of the
absolute, to the point where he will undergo torture and mutilation for the
glory of (whatever) its name.
This longing for order is the most inauthentic form of revolt because it
seeks to replace one doctrine with another:
In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limit it
discovers in itself a limit where minds meet and, in meeting, begin to
exist. Rebellious thought, therefore, cannot dispense with memory; it
is a perpetual state of tension. In studying its actions and its results, we
shall have to say, each time, whether it remains faithful to its first noble
promise or if, through indolence or folly, it forgets its original purpose
and plunges into a mire of tyranny or servitude. (Camus, 1956, p. 22)
This is the renegades condition. As he travels from his home he grows to
loathe it, when he thinks of his father he contemplates murder, when he flees
the Protestant seminary he comes to hate all it stands for, and when he is cast
out by the people of Taghasa he then in his dying breath strives to build
a new temple of absolutes. In each instance the renegade seeks approval
for his beliefs through the affirmation of others. Instead of forging fragile
moments of truth and value, he seeks whatever can provide him with an
excuse or a way out of the confrontation with his own freedom and necessity
to choose. In longing for order, he sacrificed this freedom to slavery both
physical and metaphysical. He felt his choices were affirmed when he was
offended by the girls of Grenoble and when he was mutilated by the people
36
of Taghasa. In a morbid form of revolt, the renegade fought with all his might
to retain this status of slavery. He feels that at least when he was enslaved
to an absolute he knew what was right and wrong, and what was good and
evil. This provided him with an exploitive relation to knowledge and others
and an understanding of his place in a world that affirmed an order beyond
potentiality, and to an extent, responsibility.
Thus the renegade is transfixed by stories of absolute power and he
embraces his place within such relationships. He becomes an instrument to
others and they become instruments to him. They provide one another with a
feeling of necessity and timelessness beyond community and beyond limits.
It is a relentless truth that demands an enslavement and fails to provide
the foundations for revolt. The renegade becomes dumb physically and
metaphorically his tongue is cut out and his only meaningful connection
and interrelation with others comes through the medium of pain and
suffering:
Ah! the pain, the pain they cause me, their rage is good and on this
cross shaped war-saddle where they are now quartering me, pity! Im
laughing, I love the blow that nails me down crucified. (Camus, 1958a,
p. 49)
RELATIONS WON
Exile and the Kingdom ends with the The Growing Stone and it is in this
story that the hero is found. This is a hero who does not escape the nexus
of existential strangeness between exile and the kingdom but instead lives
within its contradictions in a relational and empowering manner. Such
openness is the fundamental condition that allows DArrast to win the trust
and love of those around him. This is an openness that often takes place in
silence, in darkness, and in contexts in which the socially constructed norms
and values weigh heavily upon each persons expectations.
His character is contrasted by Camuss depictions of those around him.
The judge, mayor, harbour captain and chief of police harangue those not
characterised as leading citizens and patronisingly tell DArrast what these
other groups think of him:
The Judge was proud to greet the noble engineer who was honouring
their poor village surely the poor people of Iguape would long
remember the noble engineers name and many years from now would
still mention it in their prayers. (Camus, 1958a, p. 126)
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CHAPTER 2
These officials talk for the Negroes and in doing so reproduce the
existingpersonal and social barriers to empowering relations that exist
in thevillage. DArrast revolts from these distinctions and when he is
introducedby his guide Socrates to the ships cook he immediately
forges a relationship based on the commonalities that each man shares
similarities in their recent history and similarities shared by all humankind
(pp. 135136).
In forging this relationship it becomes apparent that both the cook and
DArrast need each other and that each ones freedom and authenticity cannot
be won at the expense of the other. This is a bond that extends beyond their
immediate challenges for both have cried out in their search for meaning
and value (p. 138).
Although this entreaty was towards God, they both find at the end of their
journey that it can and should be answered by one another. This relation is
in stark contrast to that which links the leading citizens. They are men of
objectification and search out ways to humiliate and punish one another.
DArrasts refusal to enter into this form of relation leaves them both
confused and challenged. Like Meursaults complete inability to engage (in
a certain way) and thereby affirm the values of the courtroom, DArrasts
unwillingness to enter into this spirit of conformity is considered an affront
to those who live by these absolutes. More so because he is ambivalent
ratherthan hostile towards what they hold dear. He recognises strangeness
where they demand meaning.
DArrast is open to the particularity of those around him and the
moment. He is aware of how damaging the imposition of absolutes can be,
and he is physically and mentally prepared to open himself to others. Even
when asked to leave the dance on the first night, he recognises and accepts
the import of this request. He is not offended for he is part of a relation of
trust and care, and when, on the following day, DArrast realises the cook
is faltering, he rushes down to the procession, fights his way through the
crowd, takes the stone and, on streets where he is alone, proceeds to the
cooks hut. This is about entering existential strangeness for the purpose
of constructing balance between the individual and the community.
Transformation cannot be attained by oneself; in Exile it requires the
individual to strive alone and confront the most barren and alienating of
moments, alongside cognisance of common goals. Thus the others come
to meet DArrast, and in silence they celebrate the fundamental element of
revolt the confrontation with what the moment demands in the face of a
becoming, incomplete universe.
38
Thus the stone that is lifted by the ships cook provides what the growing
stone of the village cannot: the sense and the realisation of the commitment
required by one another in momentary revolt.
CONCLUSION: A PEDAGOGY OF EMPOWERING RELATIONS
A lesson we can take from the work of Camus, and specifically Exile is
an appreciation of the precariousness of the moment in the classroom that
separates empowering transformation from the objectifying gaze. According
to the characters in Exile we might see this this precariousness as something
forever changing and always imminent. A teacher may stand, question,
assess or respond in myriad ways that may immediately open the relations
that exist between students and between the students and the teacher, or may
restrict, construct and transform them so that the possibility and potentiality
of the outsider is denied.
Within the environment of community and trust, students can feel
encouraged to create and project their own unique perceptions of reality.
This is about becoming a stranger. The teacher must, if we interpret Exile
as describing pedagogical moments, provide for these through the provision
ofbalance between freedom and rigour, licence and direction.
This again is a precarious balance and it requires the teacher to appreciate
and provide for the unique environments where existential strangeness is
and might be found. The first step to such a process must be to show ones
own humility under the gaze of the absurd; perhaps brought to consciousness
through the sharing of knowledge, ignorance, experience and fragility.
Demonstrating how fragility is linked to insight, change and potentiality is
the necessary step for students to risk new perceptions and critical readings.
This engagement seems only possible for the honest teacher, willing to prise
open the existential tensions between schools knowledge and students
experience of life.
This process, if we read Exile as an educational text, seems similar to revolt.
The flight to objectivity provides the easiest forms of dissemination and
neatly bounded totalities, yet fails to provide the foundations for empowering
classroom relations. In this environment risk is not possible because trust is
not experienced, challenge is not encouraged; the interpretation of the word
and the world is already finished. Repeating the above: transformation is not
possible where fragility is not recognised, and insight is not attainable where
knowledge is presented as an entity beyond the becoming, projecting inquiry
of the student.
39
CHAPTER 2
Thus revolt in Exile is an essential component of openness within the

classroom because it keeps bringing the precariousness of the moment to the
fore, crushing the sense of the enduring and absolute. As this absolute gives
way to the strange momentary and fleeting consciousness of the failure
of meaning students and teachers might gain the sense that they are part
of a unique moment in which perceptions of reality may be tested out, re-
imagined and transformed.
Exile tells us that these sorts of ideals cannot be carried out individually.
Like Jonas, Daru and Janine, their attempts floundered not because they
failed to enter into relation with those around them but because they couldnt
stay there. The question for education is sustainability the refusal to give in,
the resistance to forces which negate lucidity. By not forging this openness
and remaining within it, others objectified them and hence, emotionally
and physically, reduced the intense experience of potentiality they had
encountered. The lesson of DArrast in contrast is the reciprocal, empathetic
and tolerant nature of his relations to others. Those close to him recognised
that it was DArrast who could project their potentiality.
This interpretation and the language used here echoes central tenets of
philosophers of education such as Dewey, Buber and Freire. I believe Camus
however adds to this body of knowledge because his characters talk to the
physical feelings of strangeness and these being the conduit for important
pedagogical moments.
The transformative path leading from these moments, as the Exile
characters portray, requires an openness that imbues the experience of trust
across the environment, and which usher in a sense of solidarity and the
desire to live and learn alongside another. Those characters who did not
embrace this empowering relation resorted to the objectification of ones
interrelations and an instrumental perception of the others knowledge, goals
and ideals. It is DArrast who has the host and guardian named Socrates
who leads him through a foreign and often alienating jungle providing the
model of openness, potentiality and solidarity. It is this kind of relationship
underpinned by trust, respect and responsibility that allows DArrast
to undertake such transforming insight and action, remaining in full
confrontation with the uniqueness of each moment and the demands placed
upon him to realise the potentiality of all.
NOTE
Aidan Curzon-Hobson (2003). Between Exile and the Kingdom: Albert Camus and
1
empowering classroom relationships. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 35(4), 367380.

With permission from the publisher, www.tandfonline.com
40
CHAPTER 3
THE OUTSIDER1
This chapter examines the educational dimensions of the stranger and the
experience of strangeness in Albert Camus The Outsider. It is adapted from
an article published in 2013 (Curzon-Hobson, 2013a). Similar to the previous
chapter, this analysis will highlight synergies between the text and concepts
and ideals found in critical educational discourses. Of particular interest
for emerging pedagogies of the outsider are the concepts of the absurd
and rebellion. The discussion here built on two influential articles by Peter
Roberts (2008a, 2008b). These articles suggested that across Camus work
we can read educational themes such as authenticity, truth, care, community
and hope.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE STRANGER
Camus goal was never to advocate one response to the question of

strangeness but to examine the experience in a way that forces the reader
to question his or her own response. This is balanced with what I believe
is a train of positive thought through his work, an ethic of sorts around the
importance of the stranger and how this disposition provides for what Camus,
perhaps implicitly, would demand of our society and education. This chapter
suggests what this positive philosophy might look like and it borrows from
Camus discussion on the stranger, the rebel and the artist suggesting that
across these is a set of themes or attitudes or behaviours that might apply
also to the teacher, the student and the learning environment. This suggested
pedagogy of the stranger or sense of strangeness and its intended disposition
(a confrontation with the absurd) gives precedence for the following traits:
the absurd
doubt
strangeness
limits
ambiguity
dialogue
41
CHAPTER 3
solidarity
creativity
diversity and hope.
Similar to the article on Exile I believe that across his fictional characters
and their conflicts, as well as inside his wider (non-fiction) prose and
personallife choices, Albert Camus examines a humanity wrestling with its
own sense of individual and communal strangeness. In all of these contexts
the work of Albert Camus has been, and will continue to be, a vehicle for
exploring the stranger as a literary or existential theme and also eliciting in
readers the real, lived experience of dislocation. While licence has been taken
here perhaps to overemphasize the positive philosophy of Albert Camus, I
believe it is in keeping with his overall intent, particularly in his later writing.
THE ABSURD
Taking our first step, we find the stranger connected to the absurd; the absurd
as the vehicle, the shadow behind the stranger, the dislocating influence
perhaps even its home. The interaction of the stranger with others leads
them, in turn, to the absurd. It is the absurd that one could argue is Albert
Camus modus operandi for creating a sense of strangeness both within his
own characters and in the experience of the reader.
Given this, the intensity to which Camus draws the reader into the absurd
is perhaps greater than any other writer. As the superb examination by Colin
Wilson (1956) demonstrates outsider literature and art often confront the
reader in a way that creates strangeness, questioning through nihilism, the
religious, the metaphysical and the existential, all of which posit a challenge
that can unsettle. These all evoke the absurd, but perhaps it is Camus that
forces the most overt and sustained confrontation. These contexts provide
for a moment when the consciousness recognises the failure of our rationales
and in turn our own minds to grasp coherently a meaning that will transcend.
Like the characters of Dostoevsky, Camus is interested in how different
minds react from this moment of awakeninghow does each character
reconcile a demand to know and an unforgiving universe?
As previous chapters have proposed; the absurd, in this sense, is
educational. It throws the individual into the moment when he or she may
recognise the gap between our sense of certainty (and therefore hope) and
what the world makes of it. Normally these two poles are in alignment and
our projects around meaning, knowledge and value achieve some leverage
inthe world. But the absurd is the moment when we gain no traction giving
42
THE OUTSIDER
rise to the feeling of strangeness. These moments can happen when faced
with the unusual or the unfamiliar, although across Camus work they most
often arise when his characters are involved in their normal day-to-day
activities.
Given this, I see at times in Camus work a concept of the absurd as
something of volatile educational potential characters who choose to face
the absurd take a step into pure reflective, disruptive energy. Some try to
find a way out, others reconcile. But for Camus characters which either
intentionally or unwillingly remain under its gaze it transforms everything.
Meursaults literal step is recorded by Camus:
And because I couldnt stand this burning feeling any longer, I moved
forward. I knew it was stupid and I wouldnt get out of the sun with one
step. But I took a step, just one step forward. And this time, without
sitting up, the Arab drew his knife and held it out towards the sun.
(Camus, 1982, p. 60)
DOUBT
So in the broadest sense, Camus characters bear witness to the absurd as

the great educator the catalyst for fundamental doubt and, in turn, lucid
reflection. Meursault reflects on this disjuncture:
I realized that Id destroyed the balance of the day and the perfect
silence of this beach where Id been happy. And I fired four more times
at a lifeless body and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. And it
was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness. (Camus,
1982, p. 59)
As broader evidence of this, stories such as The Plague and The Fall,
the plays Caligula and The Misunderstanding all hinge on moments where
the absurd, in one way or another, is made manifest. They, in turn, record
our struggle with doubt. As Camus describes, whether one turns away or
embraces, it is doubt which educates in these contexts for the bane and
the enlightenment of man (Camus, 1948, p. 297) and it is doubt created by
the absurd which both imperils and liberates our most heartfelt projects; a
form of never-ending defeat (p. 124). Whether it is in Paris, Amsterdam, a
courtroom, the church or the desert; these are all sites chosen by Camus for
the awakening to doubt.
Reading the absurd as the condition to be confronted, which I believe
suggests something educational, Camus is offering us the stranger as the
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CHAPTER 3
vehicle for this type of transforming thought and action. His body of work
is a record of ourselves and our reactions at perhaps our most profound and
important learning moments: the moments in which, in the face of the absurd,
we becomelucid of a different kind of doubt the benign indifference of
the universe (Camus, 1982, p. 117) a space where our keenest efforts are
rendered illusory. Importantly for Camus, this does not reduce our demand
for meaning and value; it just provides us with no recourse. Whether as his
characters portray we shrink from the challenge, launch into irrational or
rational escapism, embrace or turn away from the absurd, one cannot help
but find within it a capacity to unsettle and render strange that which seemed
familiar.
Strangeness in The Outsider is linked to a failing sense of solidarity.
In somecases it is others who feel this when they are near Meursault. In
Meursaults case he feels it when he is near others. His particular type
of strangeness arises when expected reactions, based on tradition and
norms, are unsettled: for Meursaults lover Marie this is experienced
when Meursaultresponds indifferently to her questions about marriage;
his managers sense of self-worth is questioned when he asks Meursault
for his thoughts on promotion to Paris; the constant bewilderment of
the magistrate; his lawyers benevolence turning to frustration, and the
chaplainsanger and eventual distaste. Each of these scenes records how
Meursaults interaction creates a sense of disjuncture in others. The reaction
of justice to his strangeness is perhaps the most extreme:
I tried to listen again because the prosecutor started talking about my
soul. He said hed peered into it and found nothing, gentlemen of the
jury. He said the truth was that I didnt have one, a soul, and that I had
no access to any humanity nor to any of the moral principles which
protect the human heart. (Camus, 1982, p. 98)
Conversely, Meursault himself experiences a strong sense of strangeness
as he becomes increasingly affected by the reactions and expectations of
those around him. He finds peculiar and detached from the processes of
the courtroom, the change in behaviour of those around him from tolerance
to cruelty, the elaborate preparation given to his trial, the passing of
time, the expectations of others; all of these leave Meursault with a sense
of contradiction that he finds sometimes unsettling, and at other times
despairing. His experience of himself as an outsider seems to come from
this sudden, changed awareness of the other. In some ways he is thrown
by them (in the existential sense) into a contradiction caught between his
44
THE OUTSIDER
own sense of indifference and the demand others are making of him. Where
he doesnt adhere or he remains indifferent he experiences himself as the
outsider:
It was at that point I noticed a row of faces in front of me. They were all
looking at me: I realized they were the jury I just had one impression:
I was in a tram and all these anonymous passengers on the opposite seat
were scrutinizing the new arrival to find his peculiarities. I know it was
a silly idea since it wasnt peculiarities they were looking for here, but
criminality. Theres not much difference though and anyway that was
the idea that came to me. (Camus, 1982, p. 81)
In this scene Meursault feels strangely aloof from the experiential moment
others are participating in. But conversely scenes are written so we can
understand how others feel around Meursault, ie from the perspective of
their sense of strangeness. He is predominantly the catalyst, the harbinger
of strangeness. He is like the rats in The Plague, the meteor in The state
of Siege, the enticing disingenuous monologue of Jean-Baptiste Clamence,
the icons of Exile and the Kingdom, and even the tremendous outpouring
of love and care in The First Man: where Camus is giving us a range of
characters that facilitate the interaction of strangeness, stepping (us) closer
to consciousness of the absurd. Interaction with Meursault has the effect of
creating existential awareness. Something about Meursault creates a feeling
of disproportion between intent and reality. Characters respond in a range of
ways, from revenge and repugnance to confusion and contradiction.
The strangeness described in The Outsider is predominantly an emotional
upheaval when the individual is increasingly conscious of a demand that
cannot be met. Strangeness is the emotional marking of this lucidity. It is the
sense that ones demand for unity, meaning and value human insurrection
according to Camus can only be a protest without outcome. The experience
of strangeness and then the yearning of a consequent demand for order is
described in The Rebel: he does not ask for life, but for reasons for living
(Camus, 1956, p. 101).
LIMITS
But what particular awareness does this sense of strangeness lead to? Taking
the cue from Chapter 1 and The Myth I believe a key idea is that of limits.
This is best embodied by Meursault in his outburst against the chaplains
demand for faith:
45
CHAPTER 3
Willing as I was, I just couldnt accept such as absolute certainty.

(Camus, 1982, p. 105)
For Meursault, absolutes cannot be sustained in the absurd moment. The
absurd experience might lead one (to escape) to absolutes as embodied by
the chaplain. But for those living within the absurd already, a life which is
in some ways made up of contradiction and doubt, a recourse to absolutes
is not an option. The price for the insistence on order and the giving up of
strangeness is too high:
Then, for some reason, something exploded inside me He seemed
so certain of everything, didnt he? And yet none of his certainties was
worth one hair of a womans head. (Camus, 1982, p. 115)
In fact, it is the recourse to certain types of absolutes that Meursault and
Camus rebel cannot abide by. This suggests a fundamental battle over what
counts as life:
The first and, after all, the only condition of my inquiry is to preserve
the very thing that crushes me, consequently to respect what I consider
essential in it. I have just defined it as a confrontation and unceasing
struggle. (Camus, 1995b, p. 34)
By staying in this confrontation Meursault also must live in contradiction
and ambiguity. This is the demanding, sometimes terrifying context that the
stranger lives within. He does not reject them, and perhaps does not love
them, but loves the life they give rise to. For Meursault this is expressed as
his duty.
It is this rejection of absolutes and the demand for limits and moderation
that perhaps threaten his societys sense of order the most. It could be argued
that it is his indifference to its principles rather than the opposition which his
accusers cannot condone. An opposition based on a clearly articulated, explicit
revolt seems like it would be an easier proposition for his court to understand
and hence reform (the impending parricide trial, for example, seems less
of a crime for the officials). Perhaps then Meursault is demonstrating to us
that justice requires the context of strangeness: the idiot is always innocent,
simply because of his humility. Father Paneloux, in The Plague, seems to
learn inside this doubt. Meursaults chaplain refuses:
Do you want my life to be meaningless? he cried. As far as I was
concerned, it had nothing to do with me and I told him so. But across
the table, he was already thrusting the crucifix under my nose and
exclaiming quite unreasonably, I am a Christian. I ask Him to forgive
46
THE OUTSIDER
your sins I noticed that he was calling me by my first name, but Id

had enough. (Camus, 1982, p. 68)
Meursault in this scene is demanding we restore a humility to our
knowledge and to the processes through which we apply it. He is recoiling
from a doctrine without limits. In some way this reflects Camus wider
challenge to the way knowledge is legitimated and enforced in society. One
could argue that Meursaults death penalty is part of a societys need to
correct an imbalance a disjuncture produced by the unsettling awareness
of the limitations of thought, law and moral frameworks. We can see this
reaction across Camus work in his portraits of official personnel: under the
banner of justice they will commit murder and enforce silence, showing an
indifference towards limits, preferring servitude and a unity enforced by
physical and ideological terror. Camus argues for something different:
Moderation, on the one hand, is nothing but pure tension. It smiles,
no doubt, and our Convulsionists, dedicated to elaborate apocalypses,
despise it. But its smile shines brightly at the climax of an interminable
effort: it is in itself a supplementary source of strength. (Camus, 1956,
p. 301)
AMBIGUITY
Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined, writes Camus in the The

Myth of Sisyphus (1995b, p. 12). In this sentence (perhaps in contradiction to
how we normally think about education) he exalts the path that leads to danger
through original reflection where ones place, knowledge and truth are ready
to be questioned. It leads us, as Camus describes, to a recognition that a habit
once regarded as important and necessary suddenly loses its rationale where
in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien,
a stranger (p. 13). For Camus this signals a first step to enlightenment, an
awareness of limits, a call to reason, action and to empowering relationships
with others. It is a process through which we might experience life differently;
challenging the repressive projects that once seemed untouchable, not in
the face of something greater but in revolt. Existentialism offers us this
perspective towards power: the absurd helps us recognise contradictions and
limits, and what was once hidden now becomes apparent.
I would like to call this a step into ambiguity a form of confrontation
where the absurd remains present. Camus writing warns that this type
of existential step (and total mental and physical gymnastics) is never an
easy one to take; that instead normally remain tempted by a hope that will
47
CHAPTER 3
quell both the challenge and the rise of the absurd in our consciousness.
The experience of strangeness, if we take Camus work at face value, is
not an easy place to remain, we are both tempted internally and bombarded
externally:
Eluding is the invariable game. Hope of another life one must deserve
or trickery of those who live, not for life itself, but for some great idea
that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it. (Camus,
1955a, p. 15)
The temptation to explain oneself out of ambiguity is what Meursault
is challenged to do in the courtroom. But he only experiences the same
strangeness when he is asked to recall conversations, preferences and desires
(marriage, work, white coffee, the murder, the lifeless body, the sea and sky).
He sees these instances as passing, ambiguous moments in life, beyond the
capacity of himself or the courtroom to reduce or deduce. He feels unable to
play the game expected of him:
He asked me if I had felt any grief on that day. This question really
surprised me and I thought how embarrassed Id have been if I had to
ask it. I replied though that Id rather got out of the habit of analysing
myself and that I found it difficult to answer his question. I probably
loved mother quite a lot, but that didnt mean anything Here the
lawyer interrupted me, looking very flustered The only thing I could
say for certain was that Id rather mother hadnt died. But my lawyer
didnt seem pleased. (Camus, 1982, p. 65)
And further on, becoming more lucid, Meursault reflects on the importance
of context and ambiguity over principle:
When I was first imprisoned, though, the worst thing was that I kept
thinking like a free man but there were others unhappier than I was.
Anyway it was an idea of mothers and she often used to repeat it, that
you end up getting used to everything. (Camus, 1982, p. 75)
In these passages Meursault does not want to be disruptive or resist but
in truth he cannot find an enduring meaning which can easily, definitively
explain,something or anything, once under the gaze of the absurd. Those
around him require a different outcome; they need to elude existential
ambiguity through rationality. As a result they try (and perhaps must) explain
his behaviour in accordance with the principles of the society explanations
which construct and constrain behaviour within manageable language.
But what does this society and its descriptions of the happy life mean to
48
THE OUTSIDER
the outsider? They are only experienced as a fleeting, albeit useful set of
one-dimensional pictures that do not represent the depth of his existential
experience. Likewise those who cannot feel the absurd will find it hard
to understand what the outsider sees. There is an impasse in Meursaults
courtroom.
So the constructions that are used to frame Meursaults behaviour and guilt,
fail (perhaps deliberately) to engage the ambiguity through which Meursault
lives and describes his life. More than this, as his outburst with the chaplain
demonstrates, he believes that they are axioms leading to a betrayal of life.
He becomes a shouting protestor for strange shadows. He believes without
ambiguity there is nothing left but the communiqu and the enforcement.
The two sets of shadows are at war. He finds that the courtroom is no place
for (his) sense of strangeness:
He asked me in the same weary manner whether I regretted what Id
done. I thought it over and said that, rather than true regret, I felt a kind
of annoyance. I had the impression that he didnt understand me
Anyway, the tone of the examinations gradually changed. It seemed as
if the magistrate had lost interest in me and had somehow classified my
case. (Camus, 1982, p. 69)
And before sentencing, the outsiders ambiguity is rebuffed, mocked and
despised:
The judge replied that he would be happy to have me specify the
motives which had inspired my crime. Mixing up my words a bit and
realising that I sounded ridiculous, I said quickly that it was because of
the sun. Some people laughed. My lawyer shrugged his shoulders and
immediately afterwards he was asked to speak. (Camus, 1982, p. 99)
The Outsider is a negative record of this conflict over ambiguity. Camus
is making a critical comment about the apparatus of the day: they reject the
man of today in the name of the man of the future (Camus, 1955c, p. 189).
In other works by Camus the positiveness of ambiguity is demonstrated.
Camus shows us how the heroic act comes about when we are prepared to
lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed the world (Camus,
1995b, p. 20). In ambiguity via the commitment to rebel, repressive habit and
stage-scenery disappear: The world evades us because it becomes itself
again (p.20). Camus shows us characters who have a brave consciousness
towards this, either turning deliberately to the absurd, or remaining
committed to their ambiguity their strangeness is the only thing they are
sure they know.
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CHAPTER 3
DIALOGUE
But how, against these apparatuses, are these traits of ambiguity, strangeness
and moderation sustained? Isolated in his cell, consciousness and the mental
gymnastics of Meursault might be sufficient. But I believe that Camus
advocates for the collective endeavour: dialogue and solidarity. It could be
argued that Exile and the Kingdom is Camus most detailed study in this.
In this work and The Outsider, he shows how dialogue leads his characters
to question, to look at contradiction and have ambiguity constructed. The
absurd is carried by dialogue the conversations humble our thought
constructing new limits as perceived prestige fades away. Ambiguity comes
from engaging the absurd, which itself is contained in thought turned towards
the ambivalent universe.
This dialogical encounter based on a particular concept of hope might be a
similar process to that which we find in the work of educational philosophy, in
particular the work of Paulo Freire and Martin Buber (see pervious chapter).
For these writers, as for Camus, it is only through dialogue that one can find
collective value, agreement around meaning, the instrument to challenge
truth and the vehicle for resisting the metanarrative. This is a substantial
list and we find it recurs across his body of work. In his resolution-oriented
works dialogue is the essential force behind rebellion. Without dialogue
Camus believes we are left with only the communiqu. He describes this as
a community devoid of creativity and without an effective capacity to find
a common ground in anything except the scaffold and its silence (Camus,
1956, p. 279).
Camus is signalling here (amongst other things) a societys failure to build
a community based on dialogue and its contrasting passion (and perhaps
preference) for silence and order based on fear (of taking the absurd step). He
describes this elsewhere as harming the small part of existence that can be
realised on this earth through the mutual understanding of men (Camus, 1956,
p. 283). For Camus, what is essentially lost is the opportunity for ambiguity
and creative contradiction. Dialogue cannot exist with a person who has
been reduced to servitude (p. 284). There is no space for this person to speak
within the communiqu and it is through speaking that the stranger can give
rise to the absurd and one can draw others into the absurd experience and
a communal sense of strangeness. In his fictional stories we see the absurd
functioning as this ambiguous space. It is in dialogue that his characters learn
to be humble learning that their knowledge projects are already humiliated.
In his political works dialogue sounds more Freirean, and one cannot miss
the link here to similar statements in educational literature:
50
THE OUTSIDER
Instead of the implicit and untrammelled dialogue through which we

come to recognise our similarity and consecrate our destiny, servitude
gives sway to the most terrible of silences. If injustice is bad for the
rebel, it is not because it contradicts an eternal idea of justice, but
because it perpetuates the silent hostility that separates the oppressor
from the oppressed. (p. 283)
SOLIDARITY AND HOPE
In the context of The Outsider Camus characters demonstrate how (authentic)

dialogue depends on solidarity to exist and solidarity itself reproduces the
conditions necessary for dialogue. I believe the most vivid example of this
in The Outsider is Meursaults connection with the caretaker when he visits
for his mothers funeral and then later in the courtroom when the caretaker
is called as a witness. In the initial scene, the caretaker is about to unscrew
the coffin for Meursault to see his mother when Meursault stops him. In
a context of high anxiety and fear, a simple exchange generates empathy,
compassion and acceptance:
He was just going up to the coffin when I stopped him. He said, Dont
you want to? I answered, No. He didnt say anything and I was
embarrassed because I felt I shouldnt have said that. After a moment
he looked at me and asked, Why not? but not reproachfully, just as
if he wanted to know. I said, I dont know. He began twiddling his
white moustache and then, without looking at me, he announced, I
understand. He had beautiful bright blue eyes and a reddish complexion.
He offered me a chair and then he sat down next to me. (Camus, 1982,
p. 12)
This is a quiet, committed form of solidarity, where perhaps we find the
genuine limits to freedom that need to exist for a community to retain its
capacity for doubt, lucidity and rebellion. This starts with simple compassion
based on immediate, lived needs. It is about the time and place and the
relationships needed to sustain happiness for that moment the rejection
of meaning that transcends this immediate context. Although the strangers
demand is there for unity and meaning it can only be found in the particular.
In The Outsider there are multiple scenes where the moment resonates with
meaning, highlighting the love found in the particular an opening up to the
benign indifference of the universe.
This is solidarity found in the particular. As Exile and the Kingdom
described, solidarity For Camus cannot be based on principle and he rejects
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CHAPTER 3
those principles that seek to construct an ideological and physical totality.

Enforced by an abstract sense of justice the ambiguity of the world (and
hence potential for moments of solidarity) remain hidden. And Camus
characters illustrate that positive ambiguity is a far more complicated thing
to construct and sustain in contrast to everyday justice. Meursault embodies
this method, unwilling to judge according to the principle:
On my way upstairs, in the dark, I bumped into old Salamano, my next
door neighbour. He had his dog with him. They have been together for
eight years he beats the dog and swears at it. Then they both stop
on the pavement and swear at each other, the dog in terror, the man in
hatred Its been going on like that for eight years. Celeste always
says, Its dreadful, but in fact you can never tell. (Camus, 1982, p. 32)
This demand for ambiguity, an unwillingness to judge according to
principle, are key themes of the stranger. Difference and lack of justification
are the terrible consequences of absurd freedom. This disposition of the
stranger unsettles those who live by principle. In the context of Meursaults
promotion his boss is left bewildered:
I replied that you could never change your life, that in any case one life
was as good as another and that I wasnt at all dissatisfied with mine
here. He looked upset Id rather not have upset him, but I couldnt
see any reason for changing my life I very soon realised that none of
it really mattered. (Camus, 1982, p. 44)
For Camuss characters choice cannot be made on principle alone. It
is only through solidarity and consequent dialogue that meaning is found
and this, in turn, is where abstract principles can be mediated or at least
subjected to the lived reality of the community. These are the spaces where
our terrible freedom to construct meaning is recognized (and demanded
of us). Without this sense of solidarity and space, Camus argues that
servitude, falsehood and terror will dominate, each of which are the cause
of silence between man, obscuring them from one another (Camus, 1956,
p. 284).
In the context of rebellion, it is explained by Camus like this. Again, one
might see the synergies with established educational thought:
Rebellion itself only aspires to the relative and can only promise an
assured dignity coupled with a relative justice. It supposes a limit at
which the community of man is established. Its universe is the universe
of relative values. (Camus, 1956, p. 291)
52
THE OUTSIDER
CREATIVITY
Creativity has a special place in Camus argument for the dialogical, critical
encounter. Creativity, of sorts, makes Meursault a stranger:
The hero of the book is condemned because he doesnt play the game.
In this sense, he is an outsider to the society he lives, wandering on the
fringe, on the outskirts of life, solitary and sensual But, contrary
to appearances, Meursault doesnt want to make life simpler. He says
what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately
feelsthreatened. (Camus, 1982, p. 119)
Looking at creativity across other works by Camus, he describes it as the
heat of battle embodying the incessant movement of contradiction (Camus,
1956, p. 283). Camus advocates aspects of the artistic tradition to enlighten
and unsettle, leading us back to the origins of rebellion (p. 258).
Painting for Camus in particular lends itself to forging creative space in
which dialogue and community might evolve. In this art form he believes
one can find a record of the unique, the specific, the opportunity to record
the shop floor, the worker in the street and the poverty of a room. This is
the subject content that Camus argues is the most appropriate context for
art interpreting the stranger. It records dialogue and ambiguity, and in doing
so demands of its viewers a dislocation of sorts in defence of the particular
rather than the abstract. Its value is that it is a highly ambiguous and perhaps
dislocating activity giving rise to the absurd: art realizes without apparent
effort the reconciliation of the unique with the universal of which Hegel
dreamed (Camus, 1956, p. 256). In this sense art does no favours for the
absolute, it cannot support a totalising principle. The tightrope of the stranger
and Meursault resonates here:
To create beauty, he must simultaneously reject reality and exalt certain
of its aspects art disputes reality but does not hide from it. (Camus,
1956, p. 258)
Reading and writing too has potential for rebellion because it holds the
promise of fundamental questioning and the dislocation of certainty (see,
forexample, his commentary on Kafka and hope in the appendix to The
Mythof Sisyphus). More than other forms of creativity, Camus believes
that the novel is the first to be repressed through the totalitarian revolution.
For this reason it stands out historically as an important icon of revolt or
repression. The reader of the novel, the painter or poet can be outsiders
questioning unity, and exercising choice. Like an educator:
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CHAPTER 3
By the treatment that the artist imposes on reality he declares the

intensity of his rejection. (Camus, 1956, p. 268)
Hence, could it be that education, like art and creativity in general, is the
mediating process where lived experience is elevated for the stranger? For
the stranger life only becomes sensible-knowable-real when it is connected
to art:
Real literary creation uses reality and only reality with all its warmth and
its blood, its passion and its outcries. By doing this it adds something
that transfigures reality. (Camus, 1956, p. 269)
DIVERSITY AND HOPE
This is perhaps the most complex theme across the work of Albert Camus.
Similar to the characteristics discussed above, diversity and hope are a
source of challenge for Camus against the totalitarian approaches found in
the political and social apparatus of society:
So for me Meursault is not a reject, but a poor and naked man, in love
with the sun which leaves no shadows So one wouldnt be far wrong
in seeing The Outsider as the story of a man who, without any heroic
pretensions agrees to die for the truth. (Camus, 1982, p. 119)
This signals a humility in relation to hope, a call to humble arms against
totalising ideals and in particular the end of history. Hope in particular
is seen by Camus (although often only explicitly discussed in the negative
sense of nostalgia) as the conduit for moderation, care and love. Remaining
in the face or confrontation with the absurd:
The wondrous peace of this sleeping summer flooded into me So
close to death, mother must have felt liberated and ready to live her life
again. No one, no one at all had any right to cry over her. And I too felt
ready to live my life again I realized that Id been happy, and that
Iwas still happy. (Camus, 1982, p. 117)
Hope in this sense is a demand and openness for the absurd and the
stranger. As above, this is not the same concept of hope that Camus targets
asinauthentic a form of bad faith. It is instead a hope for a diversity that
comes with the sensation of strangeness, inherent within an interaction
withothers and the shadowing of individual thought and action. This
is a disposition that is unwilling to relinquish ambiguity and therefore,
deliberately, lives in diversity:
54
THE OUTSIDER
To work and create for nothing, to sculpture in clay, to know that ones
creation has no future, to see ones work destroyed in a day while being
aware that, fundamentally, this has no more importance than building
for centuriesthis is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions.
Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand
and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator.
(Camus, 1956, p. 103)
This quote reflects strongly some of the enduring and more recent themes
in educational philosophy. It reflects the humility found in the stranger and
the conscious rejection of ones ability to grasp and construct a totality.
This suggests a sense of oneself constantly in change, an existential (and
postmodern) state of becoming rather than arrival. It brings to mind Camus
attack on those who usurp the ambiguity of meaning and history to fulfil
their need for absolutes:
Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity. And diversity is
the home of art Thus I ask of absurd creation what I required from
thought revolt, freedom, and diversity. (Camus, 1995b, p. 107)
Camus explains this hope for diversity using language such as utter
futilityand lost causes. The entire story of Sisyphus signifying nothing
demands that the efforts of the stranger should be exerted towards
accomplishing nothing (p. 108). This is not nihilism but a warning that
meaning must be found, for the stranger, somewhere different. The stranger
has no easy recourse to the world he sees around him. His characters must
both refuse nihilism and accept the indifference that others (and the universe)
shows towards them. Against this backdrop they try and make sense of
theirlives:
The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks and
this fate is no less absurd [than that of Sisyphus]. But it is tragic only
at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian
of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his
wretched condition; it is what he thinks of during his descent. The
lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his
victory. (p. 109)
The question is whether this type of lucidity has a place in education.
Can an educator transform, knowing the futility of the effort, learners
understanding of ones self in the world, questioning the conditions
under which we live yet demanding the limits which we cannot exceed.
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CHAPTER 3
In confronting the absurd in this way, by learning as a stranger, educators

and students might be considered Camusean-type rebels as they explore
diversity and the fundamental questioning across the existential, political
and metaphysical.
CONCLUSION
I began this chapter wondering whether there was a place for Camus stranger
in education and reflecting on The Outsider for hints as to what this might
look like. Meursault shows us clearly the contradictions and the perils of the
stranger in society.
But by highlighting this and by drawing on some of Camus positive
philosophy, would it be possible now to state that, given the summary, we
can start to trace a coherent set of characteristics: that across the concepts of
the stranger, the rebel and the artist, there is a picture of what Camus would
demand of the teacher, the student and the learning environment? All of these
characteristics reflect the importance of certain traits of the stranger and the
sense of strangeness. They mirror Camuss positive reflections on his own
education in The First Man and have synergies with influential educational
philosophy.
The stranger would certainly be at the heart of this picture; creative
and strong in the face of doubt, lucidity, ambiguity and contradiction. The
strangers demand would be for confrontation with the world as seen by
others, for a pedagogy based on limits and moderation, underpinned by a
lucidity of the absurd. Given this, does it not fit what many demand already
of education: that in the face of overwhelming odds and unknowability we
find moments of fundamental yet (humiliated) insight:
The absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the
idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad
wondering little voices of the earth rise up. (Camus, 1956, p. 110)
NOTE
This chapter is based on the earlier published journal article: Aidan Curzon-Hobson
1
(2013). Confronting the absurd: An educational reading of Camus The stranger.

Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45(4), 461474. With permission from the publisher,
www.tandfonline.com
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THE REBEL1
The purpose of writing this article, published in 2014 was to make a case
for The Rebel as an important educational text. Discussing The Rebel in this
way for the first time, the goal was to try and demonstrate that the work
could have a unique contribution; in particular there might be a number of
similarities between Camus and educational thinkers relating to the goals,
pedagogy and the meaning of education.
This article repeated many of the statements from the two previous
publications on Exile and Outsider. The additional value was giving an
educational context/reading of The Rebel as a work, and giving this word
as Camus described it new educational connotations. The Rebel has been
noted as Camus most underexplored text so by investigating these synergies
for the first time, this article aimed to demonstrate another dimension to the
work and potential relevance for educational theory and practice. These are
similar goals which underpinned writing on The Plague and The Fall.
INTRODUCTION
The question for Camus across all his work was how to address the ethical
impasse lucidity of the absurd gave rise to. Davis (2007) suggests that
much of Camus work is the record and illustration of this struggle and the
provisional solutions of solidarity and dialogue. Kamber sees this as the
primary, enduring conflict for philosophers of the absurd (2002, p. 52).
Camus saw in revolt an effective and authentic response to this conflict.
Although revolt is in the by-line for The Rebel (Camus, 1956) it
was certainly not the first time this word was used by Camus. The Rebel
continuedthe exploration of what he considered an authentic response was to
the absurd and in particular the moral indifference and nihilism it embodied
(Carroll, 2007). The Rebel was his most systematic response:
Even as I was writing The Myth of Sisyphus I was thinking about the
essay on revolt that I would write later on, in which I would attempt,
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after having described the different aspects of the feeling of the absurd,
to describe the different attitudes of the man in revolt. (Camus, 1968,
p. 56)
BACKGROUND AND THE CRITIQUE OF THE REBEL
As Chapter 1 notes there is growing interest in the relationships between

the absurd and education. The specific question in this chapter is whether
revolt can be considered an authentic (and useful) concept for pedagogy.
The first step in answering this is to explore whether there are issues that
might discredit the application of The Rebel as an entire work to the
context of educational philosophy. The argument made here is that the work
remains valid if we understand it as continuing Camus absurd theme and his
exploration of authentic responses across different social and philosophical
contexts. Even if we agree with the major critique of The Rebel in that its
principles are not sufficient for action in the milieu of political violence and
the question of contemporary terror and revolution, I do not believe this
discounts the validity of the principles themselves, and the value of exploring
these in further contexts such as teaching and learning.
Up to The Rebel the question of revolt and the absurd is considered only
at the individual level Caligula, Cherea, Don Juan, the Actor, the Conquer,
and Sisyphus himself. The Rebel I believe continues the same exploration
(of meaningful response taking the absurd as our starting point) but the
significant departure for Camus was the examination of what counts as
legitimate collective action. As the previous chapters signal the importance
of the collective can be interpreted from earlier works but at face value they
were stories about individual endeavour. The collective can be be found in
Camus journalistic and political activity prior to The Rebel but again, not
so much in his formal, published writing. Foley (2008) notes that Letters to
a German Friend sees the first explicit (and sustained) shift from I to we
and Camus evolving his writing to change the individual revolt of Sisyphus
into a new, collective struggle. This corresponds with the widely accepted
shift of Camus writing from the absurd to revolt (Todd, 2000).
It was the validity of Camus explanations of revolt as a collective process
(and in the political sphere) that seems to have been criticized the most
following the publication of The Rebel; that although his writing (and the
concept of revolt) had previously offered worthwhile insights into individual
experiences, the concept applied to the collective, real struggle against
oppression, failed to address the fundamental issues of class conflict and
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THE REBEL
answers needed around the legitimacy of violence (Aronson, 2004). In these

contexts his critics accused him and his work for trying to escape history
(deBeauvoir, 1968; Sartre, 1952; Jeanson, 1952). He was accused of failing
to take sides, taking the wrong side, and being an idealist who had ignored
the class struggle (Sprintzen & van den Hoven, 2004).
The same criticism but to a lesser extent had been levelled at The Plague
published in 1947 (Dunn, 1994) and his own activity through the Algerian
conflict (Cruise OBrien, 1970). His critics argued that this type of revolt
could not overcome or serve as answers to the level of violence and resistance
that had taken place across Europe and was now taking hold in North Africa
and Indo China (Lottman, 1979). Leading up to and at the time of publication
of The Rebel Camus had been criticised as a theorist and labeled a pacifist
(Santoni, 2003), increasingly seen as impartial and unaffiliated (Judt, 1998).
His critics saw his method as unworkable and he was accused of having a
lack of political realism and hiding in morality (McCarthy, 1982).
It mattered little that Camus from 1937 to 1955 had undertaken a range
of political acts: he had edited Combat including the series of articles
Neither Victims nor Executioners, briefly been part of the Communist
Party, contributed to the left-wing newspaper in Algeria Alger Republican,
published the highly political Letters to a German Friend, contributed to the
Communist Les Lettres Francaises, and spoke publically for and against the
post-war purge in France. But his critics pointed to these as examples of
the same failure: he was accused, not so much for taking the wrong side,
but that he did not commit enough to one side. His involvement in the
Algerian conflict was publically criticised on these grounds; in particular
a disparagingattack on his leadership of the Civilian Truce, his appeals for
clemency on both sides and his physical absence from Algeria throughout
the conflict.
Camus became very critical of what he found in Sartre and others (such as
Merleau-Ponty) as the absolutism of post-war France; he refused to condone
massacres on either side of the Algerian conflict and he publically criticised
Sartre and others linked to Les Temps Modernes in the positions they took
regards civilian violence, colonialism, Marxism and class oppression
(Parker, 1966). The public debate following Jeansons 1952 review of The
Rebel reinforced these differences. It ended with Sartre suggesting Camus
had become the victim of a bleak immoderation (Sartre, 1952).
But in contrast to this, it has been argued that Camus writing and life-
choices came to demonstrate rather than a denial or escape a positive
position that his philosophy of the absurd had always been working towards;
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balance and solidarity through dialogue and the rejection of simplification

(Foley, 2008). While this might not have been effective (in the eyes of his
critics) in the context of war and political oppression, it does not discount the
principles themselves. In 1958 Camus wrote, to describe his silence over
Algeria:
To justify himself, each relies on the others crime. When violence
answers violence in a growing frenzy that makes the simple language
of reason impossible, the role of the intellectual cannot be, as we read
every day, to excuse from a distance one of the violences and condemn
the other. (Camus, 1960, p. 116)
Camus saw limits as necessary for solidarity, solidarity necessary for
dialogue and dialogue and the moderation of it a key part of rebellion.
Not just in politics but ANY context where the absurd is encountered and
protagonists are faced with the choices of nihilism and idealism. Perhaps
more so at the individual rather than the collective level and where the
problem to address is not political violence but individual choice. Read in
this way, the fact that revolt was considered a flawed response in politics and
history does not seem to discount the value of translating its principles to
other contexts where the absurd is found.
This raises the question of why this application has not already happened
foreducation and perhaps other contexts; why has The Rebel been excluded
from the teaching and learning libraries. The answer to this relates to the
intensityand the publicity of the criticism the work received. This certainly
tainted the perceived validity of the book and made writers wary of its
application; it does not enjoy a safe status and utilising it continues, perhaps,
to be seen as a risk. But it seems a way forward is to reposition The Rebel and
reclaim some highly valuable insights found in the work, becoming evident
when applied to new contexts. The suggestion here is that we can both accept
the critique of, and see validity in, the work. To find value we do not need
to counter the criticism, defend the work in its entirety nor in its original
context. I believe we can agree with the criticism and still find (and defend)
the principles if offers us. Especially if we can connect it with Camus wider,
more respected tradition.
I am proposing that the principle that Camus argued for in The Rebel,
the principle that seems to transcend the critique, centres on the importance
and archaeology of revolt as a form of critical consciousness: that revolt
offers society (and perhaps the educational context) a new way of seeing
and acting collectively. Specifically revolt is an awareness which looks
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THE REBEL
educational; the place where the individual can see, perhaps for the first time,
something in himself that is common to all. This is what he demands and
fights for. It is a movement from servitude to authenticity. This awareness is
not instantaneous; it is an unsettling awareness of the new.
In The Rebel Camus explores what these feelings mean for collective
action: he conceived of revolt as the sense that a collective line had been
crossed. Revolt at a personal level is the decision to take a new place in
response to this newly recognised limit about identifying a personal sense
of self with the collective:
We see that the affirmation implicit in every act of rebellion is extended
to something that transcends the individual in so far as it withdraws
him from his supposed solitude and provides him with a reason to act.
(Camus, 1956, p. 16)
This is the moment when The Rebel experiences a different type of freedom.
It reflects a sense of solidarity and a commitment to limits and moderation.
It is freedom shared:
Moderation is not the opposite of rebellion. Rebellion in itself is
moderation, and it demands, defends, and re-creates it throughout
history and its eternal disturbances. (p. 301)
For Camus it is dialogue which promises the careful balance required
between solidarity and the communiqu.
AUTHENTIC REVOLT AND EDUCATION
Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is

profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always
be defended. (Camus, 1956, p. 19)
The previous chapter continued the argument for the importance of dialogue
as part of the deliberate movement from objectification. This connects
Camus and a prevailing theme in educational debate, in particular, students
needing to take their place in regards what is being taught; that they take a
place in how they engage knowledge, that they become a peer or contributor
to knowledge as a historical process, that they become a subject or creator
of knowledge, that they identify in themselves something which they find in
common with society, that they both learn and act.
This sense of taking ones place appears regularly through the academic,
social justice and vocational paradigms of education. This is the central theme
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in Greenes article where she cites The Plague to illustrate this demand,
perhaps even a burden on those responsible for the step:
Self-awareness, self-discovery, self-actualization: These are often made
to seem affairs of feeling, mainly, or of intuition. Teachers are asked to
heighten their sensitivity, to tap the affective dimension of their lives, to
trust, to love. Of course it is important to reach out, to feel, to experience
love and concern. But I believe that, if teachers are truly to be present
to themselves and to others, they need to exert effort in overcoming the
weariness Camus describeda weariness all teachers, at some level,
recognize. I believe that, for teachers as well as plague-fighters, health,
integrity, purity, and the rest must be consciously chosen. So must
interest and good faith. (Greene, 1978)
This about the learner becoming connected to a newly understood
commongoal. It is a revolt against a perception of their world where potential
had been assigned without consent. The Rebel and learner have much in
common here:
From the moment that The Rebel finds his voiceeven though he says
nothing but nohe begins to desire and to judge. Awareness, no
matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion:
the sudden dazzling perception that there is something in man with
which he can identify himself, even if only for a moment. (Camus,
1956, p. 14)
Seminal works on education and its link to the reproduction of relationships
of power have signalled the importance of teaching and learning where the
individual and collective are interdependent. Learning as empowerment
is not an individual, isolated activity; knowledge and action must contain
an awareness of, or must be mediated by, the communities it is part of.
This literature has guided much of how we view the differences between
liberating and repressive approaches to education (Althusser, 1971; Apple,
1985; Freire, 1972).
For Camus rebels these traits reflect a particular attitude towards meaning
and action. The Rebel demands in the face of ideological certainty the
confrontation with the absurd, the fragility of knowledge and the importance
of doubt. Felman (1995) has explored this idea (the positive relationship
between crisis and enlightening education) in the context of The Plague:
Camus choice of the physician as the privileged narrator and the
designated witness might suggest that the capacity to witness and the
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THE REBEL
act of bearing witness in themselves embody some remedial quality and

belong already, in obscure ways, to the healing process. (p. 16)
Greene, again referencing The Plague makes a similar comment in terms
of the consciousness of the young people in that they had an intimation of
mortality, of injustice that has to be struggled against, of silences that have to
be acknowledged and at once overcome (Greene, 1997, p. 4).
Rejection of this silence, of the objectification of the self, leads the rebel
to protest. He has new lucidity of his rightful place in the world. Again this
has parallels with educational literature. It is not a rebellion demanding total
freedom; it is a rebellion where doubt shifts language to find a sense of
humility this has synergies to what Freire describes as a pedagogy of hope
(1994). Revolt includes a collective consciousness of freedom:
Far from demanding general independence, the rebel wants it to be
recognised that freedom has its limits everywhere that a human
being is foundthe limit being precisely that human beings power
to rebel. He humiliates no one. The freedom he claims, he claims
for all; the freedom he refuses, he forbids everyone to enjoy. (Camus,
1956, p.284)
I believe the conditions Camus describes for this authentic beginning
mirror our general understanding of positive educational environments.
Some recent studies on Camus (outside the context of The Rebel) have noted
these synergies, for example the relevance of dialogue and critical reflection
(Sprague, 1996). Hjorth (2003) takes a novel look at this in light of The
Myth of Sisyphus. He conceives of a teaching and learning process based on
Sisyphean entrepreneurship. Eaton (1990) also takes on a similar reflection
using Sisyphus as a metaphor for the context of art education. These analyses
promote learning where a student is forced to consider the world critically,
to take a stand, to act on behalf of others, to use his or her freedom for the
public good or egalitarian purposes.
Like the rebel under a lucid gaze and a form of love and compassion they
suggest a Camusean student encouraged to demand that certain things be
different not then brought about through violence but through care. He
or she is charged with the responsibility to make collective change and to
use their education to challenge those inequalities and the injustices done,
rejecting any appeal to the absolute. In The Rebel this might be described as
education which takes a first step towards dialogue and the uncovering of
silence; as a point of departure and the equivalent, in the plane of existence,
of systematic doubt (Camus, 1956, p. 10). Revolt seems to take place in
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the tensions of choice and freedom. Camus description of this would sound
familiar to educationalists:
The rebel is a man who is on the point of accepting or rejecting the
sacred and determined on laying claim to a human situation in which
all the answers are human. From this moment every question, every
word is an act of rebellion. (p. 21)
These types of descriptions suggest postmodern perspectives on
knowledge, where a freedom exists forcing the learner (and the rebel) to
formulate answers in reasonable terms: where our learning environment
forces us to face the freedom we have to make meaning and hence determine
what counts as value and knowledge. In some ways Camus reflections on
his own education in The First Man (1994) suggests he saw the importance
of this (Lang, 1998). We see this freedom to choose but also recognise that
our choices can never be absolute in terms of how we might defend them
and also in terms of how the world will acquiesce to them. This type of
learning environment demands us to take a stand in partnership:
Rebellion itself only aspires to the relative and can only promise an
assured dignity coupled with relative justice. It supposes a limit at
which the community of man is established. Its universe is the universe
of relative values. (Camus, 1956, p. 290)
Education can live within this paradigm. It seems to have a number of
conditions that are necessary for the initial steps into rebellion both positive
and negative. In the positive sense there are examples of the spirit of revolt:
education has always been charged with providing society the freedom to
learn anew, it creates through knowledge and pedagogy increasing self-
awareness, it is founded on the hope and a capacity for transforming our
self-understanding, it has an egalitarian role, it has been seen as the means
for equality of opportunity, it can act as a critic and conscience of society.
On the negative side it is often built on the antithesis of revolt: it can risk
indoctrination, constrain experience and reality of freedom, it constructs
sense of identity, it can humiliate, it embodies the meritocratic myth, it is a
system that can reproduce inequality.
EDUCATION AND FAILED REBELLION
It is the latter examples which we now focus on. Previous chapters suggest
education can be a site of revolt. But the spectre of absolutism is never
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THE REBEL
far away in any educational setting. Teaching, learning and educational

policy, like revolution demanding totality, they too have a history that is
littered with hegemony, violence, ignorance, servitude: an endeavour
where everythinginheaven and on earth would be stabilized. Education
has this impulse and comes to prefer certainty, the technocratic method and
a comforting lack of difference when the disciplines are policed and we
lose the initial intent of learning. Using the imagery of The Rebel this is
when rebellion has lost its sense of humility and turns to a particular form of
ideology, largely fuelled by the need to order and control. This quote could
be equally applicable to the lost moment for both rebellion and education:
While even the collective history of a movement of rebellion is always
that of a fruitless struggle with facts, of an obscure protest which
involves neither method nor reasons, a revolution is an attempt to shape
actions to ideas, to fit the world into a theoretic frame. That is why
rebellion kills men while revolution destroys both men and principles.
(Camus, 1956, p. 106)
In educational terms this is the domination of one discourse; the swapping
of one metanarrative for another, and the consequent theoretical and real
violence enacted to enforce this ideology and outlaw all others:
When neither reason nor the free expression of individual opinion
succeeds in systematically establishing unity, it must be decided to
suppress all alien elements. Thus the guillotine becomes a logician
whose function is refutation. (Camus, 1956, p. 126)
This is not just rebellion that has seen this terror, metaphorically
educationcontinues to play its part in enforcing what counts as value, what
counts as knowledge, and what counts as a legitimate sense of self. What
might have started in hope and discovery becomes a system designed for the
repression of opposition. This is the reproduction of frameworks without a
space for the essential step into doubt and the absurd.
Like rebellion turned to revolution it becomes the very antithesis of what
it fought for. The threat to its survival increases its appetite for ideological
violence. For Camus what is lost is the stepping off point; the absurd demands
of us that we look for the actions that can be authentically drawn from it
(Camus, 1960, p. 59). The temptation is to turn away from this doubt into
absolutism: then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime
and murder if necessary (p. 25). Rather than remaining faithful to the absurd
and ambiguity inherent within existential freedom, the rebellion turns to
revolution an overarching discourse that silences:
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Every act of rebellion expresses nostalgia for innocence and an appeal

to the essence of being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and
assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder
and violence. (Camus, 1956, p. 105)
This quote, in a metaphorical sense, might reflect the tension for teachers
and learners as they balance the radical with the certainty and compliance
required across a whole range of educational moments (policy, planning,
pedagogy, assessment). An excellent reading on this is offered by Conrad
(1981) who uses the Myth of Sisyphus as a metaphor to examine how high
school students and teachers find meaning in their work and in their learning.
He asks a similar question to that which Camus poses; is it possible to find
meaning in the absurd, within the context of alienation that is the assembly
line of secondary education. On whose side is the practice of teachers, once
filled with hope and passion to instil the critical spirit, now reduced to a
transaction denying the raison dtre of the initial movement. Both rebellion
and education seem to share the risks involved in this slide. It is the banking
form of education in the name of something greater:
During the last century, man cast off the fetters of religion. Hardly was
he free, however, when he created new and utterly intolerable chains.
Virtue dies but is born again, more exacting than ever. It preaches an
ear-splitting sermon on charity to all comers. (Camus, 1956, p. 280)
Another analysis of this tension in the context of Camus is provided
by Andrew Gibbons and Richard Heraud (2007). The context for this
commentary is the teachers revolt against the system they find themselves
in:
It has been suggested above that the educator has a responsibility to
revolt and to revolt, in particular, against the culture of enterprise for
the purpose of unchaining the creative student. This revolt occurs in the
climate of the absurd. In a sense, the weather condition necessary for
the educator, as helmsperson, is a stiff breeze to blow away the mists
of reason, and open up the possibility of having some fun, some irony,
some risky business and achieving this radical-critical break. (p. 9)
Extending on this what would the spirit of revolt find but also reject in
educational contexts? The list would be extensive. It would reject educations
reliance on abstract principles for action, a pre-determined purpose of
learning, a defined end to the purpose of knowledge justifying any means
to achieve it, the metanarrative, an individualistic focus at the expense of
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THE REBEL
a collective approach to knowledge and learning, the communique in the

place of dialogue, choice that purports total freedom, the self subjected to
history, objectification in the name of totality. What is rejected reflects an
ethic in common for both the rebel and the goals of the critical educator,
both demanding that diversity is heard, without which neither rebellion nor
genuine education can survive:
Dialogue and personal relations have been replaced by propaganda
or polemic, which are two kinds of monologue. Abstraction, which
belongs to the world of power and calculation, has replaced the real
passions, which are in the domain of the flesh and of the irrational.
(Camus, 1956, p. 240)
TEACHING
The question is the extent to which teaching cannot avoid abstraction. Can
an individual teacher make choices which resist the communique? Revolt
and teaching demand an existential choice, as Roberts (2008b) notes in
his discussion of The Guest: Teaching and learning are ethical activities,
where judgments about what and whom to favour must be made across the
educational lifespan.
I think there are two parts to this. In my mind there is no doubt that the
teacher embodies important characteristics of the rebel. But teachers are
also, as above, one of the most effective tools in reproducing discourse and
behaviour that is the antithesis of rebellion.
This balance might always exist. The question is whether we should raise
the profile of the debate and whether Albert Camus can help us do this. If
so, the debate is whether the teacher should be considered a rebel, and if so,
what does this look like, what are the implications for pedagogy, to what
extent might it be happening already. In other words, does the act of teaching
provide the essential starting point or space that allows for revolt to remain
alive? Is this an underpinning responsibility of the teacher? In many ways
this is a similar question asked by Gotz (Gotz, 1987, 1995; Shalem, 1999;
Standish, 1995).
These discussions showed Camusean revolt is already part of practice.
Sagi (2002) points directly to similarities between Buber and Camus in how
they both viewed human history and the shaping of the human spirit (p. 8),
Schutz (1964) notes that the teaching profession always been the site for the
most radical protests created through a relational encounter the mutual
tuning-in relationship and Morris (1961) argues that existential principles
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must inform teaching practice in order to prepare learners for critique and
doubt. Camus rebel seems committed to the same path:
Every rebel, solely by the movement that sets him in opposition to
the oppressor, therefore pleads for life, undertakes to struggle against
servitude, falsehood and terror, and affirms in a flash, that these three
afflictions are the cause of silence between men, that they obscure them
from one another and prevent them from rediscovering themselves in
the only value that can save them from nihilism the long complicity
of men at grips with their destiny. (Camus, 1956, p. 284)
Or perhaps, are there similarities between a philosophy of rebellion and a
philosophy of teaching:
If rebellion could found a philosophy it would be a philosophy of
limits,of calculated ignorance, and of risk. (p. 289)
And finally, is there not something about the sacrifice of teaching that
resonates with the intent of rebellion. Is not the same generosity found in
rebellion also found in the teaching process:
This insane generosity is the generosity of rebellionreal generosity
toward the future lies in giving all to the present. Rebellion proves in
this way that it is the very movement of life and that it cannot be denied
without renouncing life. Its purest outburst, on each occasion, gives
birth to existence. (p. 304)
These types of statements are scattered through The Rebel. And when one
reads the book, especially the closing passages, it is at times like reading a
handbook on critical pedagogy. The Rebel (metaphorically at times) seems
to exude a number of the key considerations that postmodern narratives
demand of the teacher, especially in terms of self-awareness and diversity.
Ayers (1989) signals this best when he refers to Camus in discussing the
responsibility of the teacher to:
stay alive to the possibilities and attuned to what has yet to be achieved
in terms of freedom, justice, understanding, and beauty. (p. 1)
CONCLUSION
What then is the relationship between these key aspects of rebellion and
the teaching process and the role of the teacher as it stands today? While
teachingmay be imperilled it may still be societys richest resource to
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THE REBEL
maintain the space for revolt. Teaching and Camusean revolt, in the context
of the absurd, seem closely connected:
Rebellion is, in fact, much more than a pursuit of a claim, in the
strongest sense of the wordon the contrary, it breaks the seal and
allows the whole being to come into play. It liberates stagnant waters
and turns them into a raging torrent. The fountainhead of rebellion
is the principle of superabundant activity and energy. (Camus, 1956,
p.17)
This language takes Camus rebellion to a point I believe has the greatest
synergy with education, and teaching in particular. What these links might
now offer is hard to tell and what we can make of them as concise, relevant
additions to educational philosophy is unknown. But the intent of Albert
Camus through all his writings was to educate and challenge. I believe the
concept of the rebel, also has this potential. And while the rebel is a generally
negative term in education, there still seems potential for it to occupy an
influential space metaphorically and in practice.
NOTE
1
(2014). Extending the contribution of Albert Camus to educational thought: An analysis

ofThe Rebel. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(10), 10981110. With permission
from the publisher, www.tandfonline.com
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THE FALL1
This article was written in 2015. It was written from a different perspective
than the previous articles on Camus (Exile, Outsider, Rebel). These three
articles tried to make an argument for reading Camus from an educational
perspective. They were about connecting concepts from educational literature
and Camus. It was about making a robust case that Camus had lessons for
education.
The article on The Fall and the consequent chapter on The Plague are
different. These were reflections on how might practitioners interpret
or care for the absurd experience and what exactly might this look like in
educational contexts. If the initial step was about trying to justify that Camus
belonged in educational discourses, then this next step was a more confident
(or specific) one. Rather than bombarding readers with another comparison
between wide-ranging concepts, it was about trying to narrow down for
educators what the experience and practice looked like. I chose The Fall for
this purpose because of the little ease. The article used, as an original device,
the imagery of the little ease to explore the feelings of absurd anxiety in
education. This seemed to give a practical and much more physical motif for
progressing some of the abstract statements made about The Rebel.
The little ease hosts only one type of existential strangeness. But it might
be similar to others. The argument here is that the absurd has a strong link
with the little ease, The Fall and Clamence because (I believe) it was the
contemplation of the absurdity of his life (that specific contemplation of
longing) that fractured Clamences sense of well-being. Therefore the
Camusean sense of the absurd is used here because of its (complicated)
links to the broader work of Camus and how I have interpreted the character
of Clamence. But I have intentionally used a range of terms to describe
educational strangeness and it is recognised the words used here are not
interchangeable and have quite different and deep philosophical traditions.
As in previous chapters I ask for some licence on the basis that there is
enough in common across these concepts that allows them to be included for
this specific context and point; the conversation on educative strangeness.
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It is intentional that we keep the concept of existential strangeness broad

enough, at this stage, so we can include the widest range of literary and
philosophical interpretations.
INTRODUCTION
When The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus, 1955a) describes those who live in the
rarefied air of the absurd (p. 86) Camus uses the word fidelity. This signals
a recognition of both defeat and the demand for struggle. This suggests a
humility. Education can be said to have this characteristic; it is constantly
in service to the new and yet understands these come with limits. And these
limits are overcome as education develops the mind to see differently and
change the world we live in. This type of education has fidelity to the absurd
because of its cognisance of both aspiration and failure: it is aware of its useful
potential to help make sense of the world, and yet it understands this requires
disjuncture from what has come before. It promises the Sisyphean climb and
return. Education does this consciously and deliberately. Education, in some
ways, is therefore absurd. Or at least, from time to time it finds itself in the
rarefied air.
THE STRANGER AND ITS PLACE IN EDUCATIONAL THEORY
The little ease, as described in The Fall offers us a compelling insight into,
and description of, the mind and body grappling with the absurd. The little
ease had not been used this way before and this chapter explores parallels
between the little ease and a wide range of experiences, structures and
pressures, language and practices in education. This is for the purpose of
better understanding (and seeing) the absurd in educational contexts, and
exploring how we should care for it, in particular the feelings associated with
it. This remains a pragmatic as well as a philosophical question.
As previous chapters have indicated there exists, thanks to a recent re-
focus, a coherent argument that the Camusean absurd and experiences of
existential strangeness should be of more interest to education. This body of
work, has asked a number of questions about the relationship between the
absurd, experience of existential strangeness and education contexts. These
questions include:
How is the absurd experienced in education?
To what extent is the absurd cared for and deliberately engaged?
When does the absurd or experiences of strangeness arise?
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How does education contribute to this?

What are the risks of strangeness in education?
At the heart of this inquiry, and what is at stake, is the question of whether
we should be doing more to understand and then deliver to the absurd and
experience of strangeness in educational contexts.
This chapter adds the character of Jean-Baptiste Clamence to the
conversation in an original way; as a portrait for better understanding the
personal experience of the absurd within an educational context. The valueof
doing this is to unpack in further detail the psychological nature of the mind
grappling with existential strangeness, potentially as insight for those who
want to care more for the absurd within their own contexts, and perhaps also
as a cautionary tale.
As with previous chapters, before turning to the strangeness of Clamence,
a short summary of existing literature is useful specific to educational
questions found in The Fall. This is included to understand how specifically
The Fall, Clamence and the little ease complements the current conversation.
Peter Roberts (2008a) has written one of very few articles dedicated
to the story and the context of education. He provides a summary of The
Fall in terms of Camus development of revolt, the rebel and the historical
background of the work. His paper celebrates The Falls difficulties,
arguing that in the complexities and ambiguities of the novel lie educational
opportunities (p. 875). He also summarises the critical literature that The
Fall has given rise to. Of particular interest here are the similarities and
parallels between Clamences story and concepts, practices and tensions we
find in education. He notes Clamence identifies himself as a teacher, that
his classroom is Mexico City (p. 882) that he has taken up this role as a
vocation, and that his pedagogy has traits akin (deliberately or not) to what
we find in educational contexts. Roberts suggests that Camus has much to
offer philosophers of education.
Roberts, analysing The First Man by Camus notes that his fiction explores
dilemmas of a kind experienced by many teachers in schools and other
pedagogical settings (Roberts, 2013e, p. 1186). Elsewhere Roberts suggests
tensions played out in the work of Camus can mirror those exhibited in
pedagogical institutions such as schools (Roberts, 2013d, p. 1133). In
particular it is forms of misunderstanding that can provide lessons for
communication in education and the need for careful attention to the Other
(p. 1133).
Andrew Gibbons (2013a) also draws parallels between the experiences
of the stranger and those potentially found in the classroom; where the
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interplayof time and happiness are confusing (p. 1097) and where
strangeness allows one to search for a child-like thing that resists the
destructiveness of schooling and the business of knowledge (p. 1102). In
a similar vein Richard Heraud (2013) observes the place of strangeness
in education and the importance of understanding and investigating the
phenomenon: the situation of the teacher and the student is inevitably an
absurd one (p. 1130).
As signalled in Chapter 1 the experience (and potentially the importance)
of strangeness in education has attracted concerted attention by this group
of writers. A set of articles dedicated to this theme was published in 2013
edited by Peter Roberts (2013a). He describes strangeness as a valuable and
enduring trait in education: education is arguably meant to make people feel
uncomfortable and an encounter with strangeness is one way of facilitating
this (Roberts, 2013b, p. 356). He sees potential for this occurring through
engagement with outsider texts. Rosa Gomez signals education and the
stranger as having the potential for community, mutuality and connectivity
and yet also having the potential to make us strangers to ourselves and to
each other (2013, p. 360). She argues strangeness offers education a new
level of dialogical engagement with others, a commitment to personal
experience and a commitment to uncertainty of risk (p. 363). She argues for
strangeness on this dialogical and epistemological basis. For Rozas Gomez,
in the context of a discussion regarding Freire and concepts of knowledge,
it is strangeness that offers an important opportunity towards the educative
goal of humanisation. She is looking for a form of engagement which can
fundamentally challenge polemics.
In speaking of Camus explicitly James Marshall notes the writers work
asresistance to the polemicist:
Camus does not provide explicit arguments against unbridled power
instead he pursues it in ways that provide a counter argument to such
practices and behaviour. His argument is not an illustration of an
abstract philosophical idea but presents directly, and in a different form
from traditional philosophy, the ideas of nihilism and unbridled power.
(Marshall, 2008, p. 392)
Recognising and engaging strangeness in educational contexts through
textor personal contribution may be a useful counter (and perhaps
complement) to dominant discourses. However the pedagogy of this is
harder to understand:
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it is not easy to stay open to the disorientation or madness of the Other,

nortoones own; in the case of other people perhaps this is because
their own disorientation or alienation reminds us too much of our own.
(Smith, 2013, p. 373)
Liston (2008) describes educating for strangeness: emotion,
contemplation, and struggle needed to be revived as a part of these intellectual
and educational endeavours. It seemed a necessary first step (p. 387). Delpit
(2008) describes creating the space for strangeness as painful because it
means turning yourself inside out, giving up your own sense of who you are,
and being willing to see yourself in the unflattering light of anothers angry
gaze (p. 297). Carr (2015) describes the trouble of educating for this type
of emotion as not being able to know in advance what we ought to feel (fear,
pity, love, loathe) in any given set of circumstances (p. 144).
Roberts (2013e) analyses The First Man in light of similar contrasts:
The first man is a semi-autobiographical account of learning and
transformation, but it is, like so many other stories of its kind, one
sustained by complex tensions: between the comfort of the familiar
and the promise of the new; between possibility and despair; between
resistance and acceptance. (p. 1175)
This idea has been developed by others. Burgh and Thornton (2015)
present the most recent of these interpretations. From the philosophy of
Camus they develop educational guidelines for teachers to facilitate the
education of lucidindividuals (p. 3). This article advocates for a certain
type of teacher thatcan act as both Socratic gadfly and stingray to engage
students in questioning and to transform the classroom into a community of
inquiry (p.11). They argue for a pairing of existing educational strategies
with the absurd. They propose that absurdity can be thought of as the
phenomenological awareness of genuine doubt (p. 11).
Their position is that strangeness, managed in a certain way and balanced
within existing pedagogical frameworks, has a new potential to empower the
learning space. An idea they cite from Weddington (2007) who talks of an
education characterised by perpetual suicide (p. 125). The imagery is one
where the educator is represented by Sisyphus, lucid of both the promise
and absurdity of action. Weddington writes of a form of suicide in education
whose engine room is consciousness of the absurd, allowing human beings
to rid themselves of old selves or identities and be transformed through
interaction with others (p. 125). This method envisions the absurd as a
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door opening for the purpose of hope (p. 121). Weddington sums up the
educative context:
I argue for a rhythmic churning of tension and release, concern
and complicity, suspension and resolution, lucidity and suicide as
constituting a self-perpetuating form of education. (p. 122)
The value of this space for strangeness is the focus for Nesta Devine
(2013)in her interpretation of how and why Bronte positions Jane Eyre
and Lucy Snowe in awkward spaces; where strangeness allows them to
fundamentally question their lives, and their subsequent willingness to
continue to do so. Devine believes that Bronte, to some extent, is asking us
to consider the value of strangeness as a reflective space, and how teachers
might grapple with their own foreignness in their classrooms (p. 383).
Of the many descriptions of stranger and strangeness coming from this
monograph, Schwieler (2013) is perhaps the best:
A characteristic of all these genres (the Bildungsroman, literature as
proverbs, and initiation stories) is that the protagonist is faced with the
unknown, the foreign and strange. He or she is often even a stranger to
him or herself and finds him or herself in a situation where he or she is
faced with strangers The challenge for the protagonist is to turn the
strange into the known, to become at home with him or herself and his
or her environment. It is thus a question of becoming other than what
one is. (p. 412)
In the same publication Freeman-Moir (2013) investigates strangeness via
the servant character in Canne al vento:
The pairing of close by and far invites, for a reader of the novel,
additional pairings through which traces of the servants estrangement
can be refracted: for example, greeted and shunned; needed and
dismissed; invited and rejected; welcomed and disregarded; remembered
and forgotten. (p. 422)
The servant motif (perhaps similar to teacher) raises questions about
how we as practitioners care for those individuals and those systems that
make us feel a stranger. Ruyu Hung in the same publication goes a long
way to unpack this complicated question for education and uses Kafka to
illustrate the complexity and perhaps incapacity of human emotions to cater
for strangeness. The care required for strangeness might be at odds with our
educational traditions (p. 436). Hung suggests that strangeness is (normally)
exiled because it contradicts the concepts, language and expectations of
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identity we need and assume for most of our sensible projects including the
educational process. By contrast the absurd attracts no equity.
Chapter 1 referenced Denton who was the first to suggest how things
couldbe different. In advocating education as an existential space where
one could play out the desperate encounter between human inquiry and
the silence of the universe (1964, p. 100) he sought to challenge concepts
of student and inquiry. Explored by Maxine Greene through her concept of
wide awakeness, Greene like Denton interpreted the absurd and existential
anxiety as positive spaces for education in which imagination and self-
reflection could flourish for the sake of gaining perspective on personal
life and remaking the social domain (Greene, 1973). Greene thought it
was imagination (via the strangers space) that could awaken, disclose
the ordinarily unseen, unheard and unexpected (Greene, 2000, p. 27). The
purpose of which is for the educator to create a space where, for example, a
child could decide consciously on freedom and becoming (Greene, 1967,
p.72). Greene focused on how the arts might allow for existential experiences
and spaces, in turn freeing the imagination:
people laugh at me because I use the term wide-awakeness so much,
but I think of the arts as heightening peoples awareness of what it is to
be in the world. (Greene, 2000, p. 124)
Greene believed in the need for education to defamiliarise. She argued
that this was the necessary antidote to students sense of meaningless and
boredom in the classroom. She explains it in ways that have synergies with
Camus absurd creation and revolt. To explain this process, in an interview
late in her life she recalls in a Camusean-type quote:
I have a very good view of Central Park from my apartment windows
and its possible that I could get so familiar with that that I never see
it, but I refuse that. I keep trying to sort of defamiliarize what I see.
(Greene, 2014, p. 124)
THE EXPERIENCE OF LITTLE EASE
Admit that today you feel less pleased with yourself than you felt
five days ago? (Camus, 2006, p. 103)
Defamiliarising is a good stepping off point between the existing
literature and the concept of little ease. This is because the little ease is the
experienceofdefamiliarisation for Clamence (although in saying this there
is some intentional ambiguity around where Camus says the feeling comes
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from sometimes it is from a physical experience, sometimes relational,

also from the personal and the private, seclusion and community). If we
accept that education hosts the young mind dealing with the absurd, and to
some extent it might even (or should) scaffold or construct the experience
for positive benefit, then what exactly does that experience look like and feel
like for the individual. And importantly how might we care for it.
The little ease is one of the central motifs for Clamence as he reflects
on his existential journey. It is a concept not used in any of Camus other
writings, and the timing of using it in The Fall is significant. Clamence does
not describe the little ease as a single apparatus in society, instead it belongs to
multiple institutions and groups. It produces awkwardness by manufacturing
deliberately the consciousness of ambiguity. Clamence describes the impact
of the little ease as one often starting from minor, distracted reflections but
which over time returns and forces him to see things, including himself quite
differently. His location in little ease has over time led to a life of duplicity.
The use of an apparatus (the little ease) in The Fall gives us some new
insights about Camus outsider: how an individual (his or her existential
experience) might be held within a particular reality, the sense that one
is placed into the experience, that we can be bound or held within the
experience (by others and our own sense of self and world, or by rules and
discipline). The imagery also accentuates a physical place, the physicality
of the absurd, and that that awareness can operate as a sentence implying
we are placed there for correction or through it we find correction. It is for
the purpose of long-term, sustained change through critical self-reflection,
mediating and moderating behaviour, disciplining both body and mind. In
short, it is educational.
For Clamence the little ease provides his habitat once he becomes aware
of disjuncture. Clamence talks of how these feelings have haunted his
journey. He knows there is no real escape from little ease (p. 85) and in
his particular society the little ease is never far behind. Clamence knows
from his own experience that consciousness of the little ease comes from
both the judgements we exercise upon ourselves, and from the judgements
of others upon us. Utilising both of these, Clamence teaches his students
into the little ease. His starting context appears to be the absurd: Clamence
offers a consciousness of freedom and meaning making that he knows for
most people will be too heavy a burden to bear. He knows that his students
will turn away from this freedom in the same way that on the bridges of
Paris I too learned I was afraid. His response was to seek out the comforts
of slavery and in turn teach others how they too can be nestling and
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reconciled in the little ease. Eventually finding we are all in the same
boat (p. 87).
He sees this disjuncture as his vocation he practises every night with
vile result. Clamence records the most efficient way to create, through
alcohol and the skies of Amsterdam, the hazy disjuncture in others. Clamence
knows this project will not provide him a definitive escape from lucidity,
consciousness of the absurd, the judgement of others. He has already explored
this escape in alcohol, sex and Quixotism. He understands that outright
oppression does not work either if one tries to judge from the pulpit it
will eventually blow right back in your face (p. 86). So he has settled on
the pedagogy of the little ease; this affords him a momentary reprieve before
thelaughter breaks out again.
He finds out for himself that the most effective apparatus for subjection
are those which first offer solidarity, but which then seek out and manipulate
vulnerability. So in order for Clamence to get his subjects to hold up their
own mirror, he first must comfort and nurture them. He does this by asking
them to listen sympathetically to his own self-accusation. But this is an act of
duplicity. His method is to take the features he finds they have in common
and then build up a portrait of everyone and no one so that imperceptibly,
his speech slips from I to we (p. 87). Clamence is now ready: I incite
you to judge yourself (p. 88). His subjects now find themselves in a new
physical and emotional place. This is the little ease: the state described by
Clamence as the waiting room (p. 52).
Clamence describes from personal experience different groups in society
that carry out this task. Clamence notes the constructors of little ease include
atheists, Christians, masters, law makers, the courts, perhaps even our friends
on their August holidays. Clamence describes his fight, truce and eventual
alliance. A truce forged when he discovers his own (and others) willingness,
even desire, to both judge and be judged. It becomes an obsession:
I cannot do without it, or deprive myself of those moments when one
of them collapses, helped by alcohol, and starts to beat his breast
then I grow, my dearest fellow, I am on the mountain top with the plain
stretching out before my eyes. What intoxication to feel that one is God
the Father, handing out definitive testimonials of bad character and
behaviour. (p. 89)
Clamence believes he has become stuck in the little ease. He is aware
of his condition. He describes his ego at odds with, yet cognisant of, the
absurd, grappling with something fundamental and demanding resolution. In
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the absence of formerly accepted and safe sense-making limits, but still with
a desire to know, behaviour transitions. For Clamence the transition began
with the fracturing of his most exalted, invested and secure foundation:
his ego. He hears laughter (and imagines he is being laughed at) because
his inauthenticity was revealed. He failed to act in accordance to the self-
portrait he had presented to society. He found he was too scared to help,
and he was afraid of death. In the dead of night when it seemed nobody
(but subsequently it felt like everybody) was watching the scene play out,
Clamence the professional and public figure failed to live up to his brand.
Hearing laughter and seeing reminders of that moment accentuate an
increasing sense of suspicion towards himself. Clamence starts to experience
the little ease: the laughter Clamence experiences on the bridge gives him a
fundamentally difference experience of freedom.
Reflection on this experience starts to destroy the ideals of freedom which
he thought he had lived by. On second look he starts to see (or is made
to see) that he might not have lived the life of authenticity which he had
imagined. This awakening, a physical and emotional shift leads to strange
sorts of cramp (p. 10). In direct reference to the medieval Little Ease he
finds he has to start living diagonally. He believes innocence would be the
stretching of ones limbs. He describes a strange tension between promise
and constriction.
Before this interruption, his first step towards the fall, Clamence is able
to enjoy a form of naivety; he describes this as a sense of self-satisfaction,
on the heights, the satisfaction of being right, the joy of self-esteem, keeping
on ones feet and moving forward (p. 13). He describes his existence as
cohering with life, its creatures and its gifts naturally coming to him (p. 19).
There is no sign of cramp here, he feels he has a place in the universe that
he both deserves and was marked out for him. These descriptions resonate
with some of the characters in Exile and how they see their existential place
in society, family universe.
But after the laughter sneaks up on Clamence he starts to see his previous
and current life differently, he starts to interpret his history differently.
His first consciousness of criticism hits hard. The experience of negative
judgement from others leads him to reflect on himself in a different light.
The little ease teaches him to hear different voices and he describes himself
as starting to learn what he had unlearned; a journey where he comes to
believe and then adopt new knowledge of himself, a different understanding
of himself in the world, his potential and his limits. In becoming aware and
then subjecting himself to the laughter he is (educating himself) and being
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educated in new forms of self-understanding. This increasing state of little

ease seems to take him into disquiet: my memory came backor rather
I went back to it and found the memories that were waiting for me. For
Clamence, this movement away from naivety sees him settled in little ease
(p. 90). He can no longer find his emotional and physical home: in short my
dream had not withstood the test of reality (p. 34).
Clamence describes this as the worst of torments. He would prefer slavery
to the arbitrariness of this new found alienation. The little ease he describes
provides no certainty: you are neither condemned nor free. He finds his
relationships became subtly off key, he experiences disharmonies and
disorder and this new found void makes him feel vulnerable. He begins
to perceive there was something in him to be judged (p. 49).
My interpretation is that Clamence, once alerted saw the construction of
little ease everywhere the family, court, cafes. In these contexts there were
no extenuating circumstances (p. 69), everyone was judged and categorised
accordingly. And while the former Clamence might have celebrated this,
from the habitat of the little ease Clamence finds the rules increasingly
unclear. This new sensation of ambiguity leads to even stronger demands
for immutable meaning. Clamences stories of Du Guesclin and the man at
Buchenwald are stories of this strangeness:
A person who obeys a law is not afraid of judgement: it restores him
to a system in which he believes. But the greatest of human torments
is to be judged without a law. Yet this is the torment in which we find
ourselves. (p. 73)
Like Meursault, the torment for Clamence is an absurd one; he is
cognisant of the need for order and hence judgement, but knows that, under
the gaze of the absurd, the foundations of meaning which he thought
were attached to these judgements are now rendered meaningless. But even
knowing this, he still has the responsibility for choice. Interestingly this
makes Clamence and Meursault even more committed. It is the Outsider
which takes this responsibility more seriously than others. Once glimpsed
the absurd can make choice a ridiculous affair but all the more personal. In
his own life Clamence had lived convinced that his professional and public
projects had a measure of meaning one which made him feel comforted,
and of importance. On learning this might not be the case he stumbles. He
now experiences judgement (and meaning) under the unforgiving haze of
ambiguity and fragility; the context he experiences for the first time when he
hears laughter on the Seine. Like Du Guesclin his response is to demand at
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all costs a new, different type of certainty. He knows that if he bleeds a little
all would be lost (p. 48).
This searching and the feelings underneath this lead to Clamence
reconciled in little ease. Clamence knows he cannot escape the laughter
even when he crushes it momentarily. The reminders return him to an
ever-greater awareness of how he has chosen, how we has made use of his
freedom: at the end of every freedom there is a sentence (p. 83). Clamence
found that the glorious life was over but so too were the ragings and
convulsions. He concludes: I had to live in little ease (p. 83).
EDUCATION AND THE LITTLE EASE
alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before the judges, and alone
to make up your mind. (p. 83)
Clamence declares that he now came to adopt an awkward position and
live diagonally. He says he did this without protest. Viewing his new life
through the lens of little ease, he feels he has little appeal. At first he tries
to declare his innocence or at least find special circumstances so he alone is
exempt. He does this in a range of ways including an appeal to God. But in
the end he sees his own protests and allegiances as just one great laundering
operation. He recognises that we are still all dunces, all punished (p. 70).
He ends by facing his apparent condition: lets spit on one another and
off we go to the little ease! Its a question of who spits first, thats all. So
Clamence sees in reality, and perhaps also for the benefit of his performance,
that no one is capable of escaping. Even Christ himself: the sad thing is he
left us alone, to carry on whatever happens, even when we are nestling in
little ease (p. 71).
Clamence then describes how he experiences judgment from within the
little ease. He feels left alone in the dock before the judges (p. 83). He
learns that friends and acquaintances have an appetite for judgement, now
turned in on him: the circle that had formed around me was broken and they
were lined up in a single row, as if in a courtroom. This awareness (real or
imagined) transforms him:
yes, there they were, as before, but they were laughing. Or rather it
seemed to me that each of those I met was looking at me with a hidden
smile. (p. 49)
This leads Clamence to pursue his own repressive pedagogy of little ease
in which the first task was to hand out definitive testimonials of bad
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character and bad behaviour. He knows that he is just like them, that
were all in the same boat (p. 87) but it becomes the simple matter of who
can subjugate the fastest. In extending judgement to everyone, including
himself, he accepts duplicity instead of bewailing it. He finds comfort in
duplicity and it becomes characteristic of his pedagogy: lve settled in it
and thats where Ive found the comfort that Id been searching for all my
life (p. 88).
I have argued that education, by its very nature, can bring the absurd
to our consciousness; tempting us into its world by the demand to know
and make sense, and yet humbling us through the journey itself. It breaks
down what it built with us in the first instance. This might be a sense of
self or how we understand the world. Because of this disjuncture the risk
is always within education for producing an absurd unease. To be educated
requires a personal step to challenge and change how we individually see the
world, our projects and practice. This personal overcoming is for most an
unsettling, existential experience because it will contain the process of doubt
and physical change, sometimes manifesting itself into stronger feelings of
ambiguity and awkwardness.
Clamences description of the little ease appears useful for understanding
these tensions in education. The purposes and function of the little ease in
The Fall seem to translate well as an educational symbol: one is placed
within the mechanism by others, it is for the purpose of self-reflection, it
arises feelings of guilt or inauthenticity, and it can lead to self-accusation.
It also allows some discourses to be more dominant than others, it ensures
difference is alienated, it allows the status quo to feel less uncomfortable
around that which is odd, it can be utilised for power and politics. The portrait
of Clamence in little ease is one of a loss of identity, sense of space, pressure
to conform, challenge of values, and ambiguity of meaning.
While the experience of little ease can be unpacked, as well as its apparent
synergies with education, it is harder to identify the extent to which education
constructs the experience, deliberately or not. Perhaps like pestilence in The
Plague the absurd lives in education but might not always be present, at
hand, experienced. Confrontation with the absurd, like the plague bacillus
requires a number of factors for it to rise up (Camus, 1948, p. 297). This
makes it a complicated ailment and opportunity to engage. Perhaps this is
why the little ease is such an interesting device for excavating the positive
and negative of existential strangeness and pedagogies around this. It offers
us a more accessible symbol to plot the behaviour of absurd disjuncture.
The pathology as described by Clamence provides a physical and emotional
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litmus test for practitioners. In summary, the little ease gives us another way
of exploring absurd disjuncture.
One parallel question could be why, in our current climate of heightening
awareness of the care required for learners and diversity, there hasnt been
a consistent effort to understand these types of feelings. Why has there been
a reluctance to care and name, and train, for the physical and emotional
states linked to little ease, existential strangeness, and absurd reasoning or
creation. The wider stranger literature implicitly suggests this state of mind
and body is an important and enduring characteristic of education. It seems
education might not be meeting this obligation or perhaps hasnt understood
the opportunity adequately.
But a re-reading of the little ease might help in this regard. It seems to
connect well to the imagery of educative strangeness. The detailed treatment
it receives in The Fall, through the character of Clamence, is perhaps our
best accompaniment for understanding strangeness in Camus work (in terms
of the feeling and its genesis). Interpreting the little ease as an educational
metaphor makes The Fall a richer text for the educational reader. And by
including the little ease in the stranger-education discourse we may get
another description of the experience and perhaps a better insight into how
best to care for it.
NOTE
1
(2016). The experience of strangeness in education: Camus, Jean-Baptiste Clamence and

the little ease. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 19 (online). With permission from the
publisher, www.tandfonline.com
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THE PLAGUE
INTRODUCTION
This chapter reflects on The Plague by Albert Camus (1948) and lessons for
education. Similar to The Rebel this novel hasnt been engaged in significant
depth as an educational text. But there seems some potential in doing do. In
this chapter I use the rise and treatment of plague in Oran as a metaphor for
describing the challenge of the absurd to the education system. This parallels
the previous chapter but with a focus at a systems level. What follows is an
account of the absurd as plague: the suggestion that the absurd in education
is bacillus-like, and consciousness of it by policy-makers and practitioners
provides for the bane and enlightening of men (Camus, 1948, p. 297).
Using this metaphor I believe can help us better understand what we need to
do if we accept the absurd is real.
This discussion starts (as others have done) by a brief summary of the
literature relevant to the plague, Camus, and education. Metaphor and
allegory is an established, legitimate way of interpreting this work. Camus
plague has been interpreted (and at times received criticism) as occupation,
totalitarianism, the capacity for evil. It has been used as an allegory to explain
ideological and physical tyranny the question of authenticity in the face
of existential terror. The way The Plague is written seems to intentionally
encourage these types of comparisons; lending itself to applications in new
contexts for the purpose of critique. This chapter hopefully extends the
practice. I believe the plague in Oran, read in a certain way, connects with and
complements the previous chapters interpretations of how the absurd might
live within education and how this apparatus currently treats the plagues
emergence and affects. This chapter also refers to a range of writers who
talk about plague but come from different work and community contexts,
and academic disciplines. It is useful to draw literally and figuratively on
observations from these wider groups and how they have applied themes and
the imagery of plague into their own practice.
This includes a set of interesting, recent commentaries, some written in
the context of the recent outbreak of Ebola in Africa, that connect plague,
The Plague and problems facing modern societies today, including issues
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relevant to education. These provocations ask how we should act when

faced with plague (metaphorical and real). They reinforce the sense that The
Plague still has much to offer the imaginative reader, and the legitimacy of
using the novel as a metaphor to make critical commentary (see for example
Hopkins, 2013; Srinagar, 2016; Vanborre, 2012; Vulliamy, 2015).
PLAGUE AND EDUCATION
This chapter focuses on a particular theme in The Plague: the way in which
Oran as a system deals with the disease, and specifically Orans capacity
and willingness towards existential lucidity and how this changes during
and post plague. The officials are perhaps of most interest to us. They are
part of a system which purports to manage and organise the town in the face
of bacillus but over time they find plague doesnt conform. It is plagues
ambivalence to their rules, which at times the officials fear more than the
sickness itself. Their fear is that plague will unsettle their unconscious
society, bringing with it the awareness that some things, from time to time,
obey principles that dont care for their rules. In a time of normality, it is
the institutions and bureaucrats which can demonstrate agency. But a time
of plague (metaphorical absurd awareness) the invested status, hierarchy
and faith radically shifts. Its a question of how to respond. In this way The
Plague sums up many of the tensions discussed throughout the previous
chapters.
Taking the lead from Camus himself (1979, p. 220) who asks that The
Plague be read on a number of levels I suggest here that the story offers
us one further insight, building on previous chapters, into how we can
interpret educations interaction with the absurd: that the absurd poses a risk
for education comparative to the risk that the plague poses for the meaning-
making institutions of Oran, specifically the faith that people have in them to
deliver (and continue to explain) the normal way of life.
Read this way The Plague represents a struggle against the absurd and
the moments when the fact of the absurd requires one to choose between
complicity with it and resistance against it (Foley, 2008, p. 52). Oran, largely
because it leads an unexamined life, finds plague unsettles its faith in those
systems charged with meaning-making. Citizens become suspicious of their
citys continuing ability to explain how the world does and should operate,
their place within it, the question of limits, what counts and what doesnt.
Oran like education must find its way in a world that seemingly and quite
suddenly now includes its (apparent) antithesis and antihero.
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THE PLAGUE
All of Orans institutions have something significant to lose by plague. All

of them were ill-prepared to acknowledge the phenomenon, and in turn they
are not prepared to adequately deal with the physical and epistemological
consequences of plague. They are faced with the question of how to act.
Camus repeats this lesson throughout the novel (McKinlay, 2009): that an
authentic response does not make one a hero instead one is compelled to
step into this space when faced by the absurd (evil/plague/occupation). The
narrator of The Plague describes how very few are able to do this in Oran.
The frameworks they have inherited are designed for a time without real
or symbolic plague. They are for the purpose of providing and partnering
with meaning (existential, political, and religious). Describing how officials
respond to plague is an important aspect of the narrators voice the character
of Rieux and for interpreting what type of critique/commentary we can take
from the work.
Linda Graham, drawing on Foucault provides an extended analysis of
the relationship between plague and choice. She investigates the mastery
techniques in the face of plague:
Foucault (1975) discusses plague control as a historical event intrinsic
to the development of the modern disciplinary society and the
strategic control of human multiplicities, not through the techniques of
banishment and forced exclusion, but through a forced and ever more
strange inclusionFor Foucault, the experience of plague is a vital
moment in the development of new techniques of power and ways of
thinking about the social world. (Graham, 2007, p. 200)
Camus captures this strange inclusion well; everything needed to mean
something in Oran, even if that meaning went unexamined. We see elsewhere
in the work of Camus this type of imagery. Gibbons (2013b) draws a parallel
between Meursault and bacillus:
The idiosyncrasy of his resistance is arguably determined by the way
in which he resists through his docility, passivity or general apathy but
rather than this being to judge can we see it in the behaviour of the
plague towards the characteristics of identity, soul and meaning in the
city. (p. 1113)
Experience of plague lays this bare. It creates a difficult lucidity for Oran
and its citizens and officials. Recalling what Camus says about Meursault
inthe preface to The Stranger: the officials of Oran (such as the Prefect)
say more than what is true, Rieux and others refuse to lie. The question
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Camus asks, as he does in most of his work: how should one act in the face
of plague? Typically Camus paints a range of responses to this question. He
shows how some, instead of entering into ambiguity fought each other, at
a meta-level, to own the meaning of plague. But he also shows others who
struggle to combat plague at the physical and individual level. He describes
others who sought to take advantage of plague, and others who accepted
plague, with hope but without revolt. Camus, through Rieux the narrator,
is offering us a narrative on how different people deal with existential
surprise:
Rieux remarks here that humans are ill equipped to deal with such
surprises, and that the stupidity of pestilence, and war, is often
overlooked on account of the capacity of individuals to fail to think
beyond themselves. (Gibbons, 2013c, p. 1152)
Camus shows us those apparatus in Orans society that refuse to
acknowledge the lessons of plague. These are the groups that knew what
the narrator of The Plague did: that men rarely change. These groups had
too much pride in, and too much at stake to jeopardise, their enlightenment
projects. Rather than immediately addressing plague on the level of individual
suffering they knew that a measure of anything could be tolerated by the
populace when treated through technocratic and bureaucratic language a
system albeit broken was still a system. This way of seeing and living with
plague are juxtaposed with those who knew what had to be done and simply
and humbly committed (Camus, 1948, p. 297).
Bacillus confronts us with the basic equivalence of individual points of
view facing the same absurd (Camus, 1965, p. 24). The question of response
echoes the question of suicide in The Myth: how to act, as an educator, when
the absurd makes meaning-making an outsider. In Oran, at these moments,
there is an incongruous importance placed on naming plague while people
are dying (Gibbons, 2013c, p. 1153). The question is what Oran does and
does not do in the face of plague: to what extent and in what ways are they
able to overcome what is brought forth.
To answer this Camus presents the authorities of Oran as having an attitude
of turning away; living without recognition and for the detriment of their
citizens. Before lucidity Oran lived simply (where everyone was bored).
There is no consciousness of their condition: perhaps it isnt plague itself
that surprises them mostit is the experience of the strange and the outsider
arriving, unannounced into their lives. Then in turn, their own experience of
becoming an outsider.
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THE PLAGUE
PLAGUE AND EXILE
The sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational
longing to hark back to the past or else speed up the march of time, and
those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire. (Camus, 1948, p. 67)
This quote about the emotional experience of plague has synergies with the
little ease of the previous chapter. In Oran the consequences for each character
is different; they are each studies in how one responds to the absurd. For
example, the officials of Oran take an inordinate amount of time to recognise
plague. They are taken aback, almost insulted, demanding negotiation with
the intrusion. The problem was the obscenity of it arriving without invitation:
this sudden deprivation befalling people who were completely unprepared
for it (p. 63). The narrator describes the officials as having taken something
for granted.
But having named plague Officials seek to close the town a recognition
that something was at risk; perhaps that meaning-making was imperilled
both in their own town and those beyond. The official class believe naming
is something worth preserving and tragically they cling to this type of control
to stave off a more sdevastating conclusion. Closing the town, referencing
Foucault above, is their first attempt to encircle and destroy what threatened
to destroy their way of living. However, bacillus is ambivalent and that is why
exile is the specific motif/emotion used by Camus. The narrator describes the
first feelings of exile, between one another inside the city and between those
inside and beyond.
What ailed the citizens and terrified the officials who experienced exile,
was how the absurd now affected memory:
they came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles,
which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose
and thus there was always something missing in their lives. (p. 69)
For some in the town the displacement of memory sees them commit
to one another and the battle against plague. Exile constructs a new form
of solidarity; it now commands them to do your job as it should be done
(p.39). The question for these people is not what to do but when to start
doing it. The narrator suggests those characters who undertook this way of
life during plague were probably like this already: they were not taken by
surprise, they seemed oriented to the absurdity of (any) situation, perhaps
they had already seen forms of plague. In some way there was an existing
lucidity in this group. Others react differently.
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This is the typical Camusean plot line. He wants to bring the absurd into
focus as something that is always present and how systems and apparatus
(as well as individuals) turn towards or away from it. For some in Oran
plague brings back to consciousness what they had already known and
since forgotten. Like the laughter heard by Clamence in The Fall, Camus is
capturing the moment, sometimes impossible to foresee, when one becomes
conscious of the absurd, jolting us from naivet to consciousness. This is
metaphorical plague and the emerging consciousness of the consequences.
Camus describes in detail the moment when Orans citizens recognise they
are without the least warning, hopelessly cut off and prevented from seeing
each other again, or even communicating with each other (p. 64).
Exile now means there is not enough time to take individual cases of
hardship into account (p. 64). Consideration of the uniqueness of existence
is described as impossible. At a time of plague, as at the time of absurd
experience there is a similar, startling revelation: there is, on the face of it,
no special cases. This is the antithesis of life to date: a way of life where
every citizen is considered special and apparatus are designed around the
unique individual. Citizens are suddenly aware that plague doesnt live in
this world; it is an outsider. Facing this recognition each reacts differently.
One consequence in Oran is that people who were close but now apart were
reduced to hunting for tokens for their past communion (p. 64). This is
the imagery of searching, desperate, nostalgic; something to make what we
thought was special stand out. The absurd, like bacillus renders the landscape
flat.
The experience of living with one eye on the absurd is now something
all citizens of Oran are forced to do. The main impact is on the individual
sense of meaning-making. This is a new world of contradictions where the
value of things, normally imbued with agreed, human meaning, become
suddenly ambiguous. Life as they now know it becomes impervious to their
projections. There is nothing transcending which the citizens can reach out
to. Camus illustrates this by recording some of the surreal, grotesque and
bizarre actions of other plague cities through history. In Oran the value of
ordinary existence changes too.
Consciousness of plague, and lucidity of the absurd, is a psychological
and physical upheaval for a habitat that had lived a tranquilised experience:
At Oran, as elsewhere, for lack of time and thinking, people have to
loveeach other without knowing much about itall that was to be
conveyed was the banality of the towns appearance and of life in it.
(p. 3)
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THE PLAGUE
The change for some becomes too heavy to bare and they turn to physical
suicide. Plague brings with it a new existential backdrop and with it different
rules around judgement and it is the fact they are meted out with no sense
of necessity that causes the greatest existential disjuncture. Consciousness
of this, the rules of plague, mean a new experience of mortality. It has a
Roquentin-like impact on many. Rieux the narrator explains that citizens
needed something of substance, even the tedious production of a book,
to avoid the repugnance they suddenly felt towards an existence without
significance. The character of Grand like Roquentin long for a time when
their books would be behind them and a little of its light would fall over
their past. This would produce some sense of history and in this way their life
would be attached to something rather than nothing. If it could be attached to
an artefact it would gain purchase against the absurd.
EDUCATION AND EXILE
To the extent that this confrontation is both inevitable and unalleviated,

that we are always going to be disappointed with the world, then it
would seem that Nagel might be correct in suggesting that we ought
to embrace the sense of absurdity rather than resisting or fighting it.
(Gordon, 2016, p. 594)
Exiled education is learning which no longer delivers on its promise: we
are exiled from action that is purposeful. This has two dimensions if we
use the metaphor of plague. The first is that education is exiled from the
world it seeks to describe, and secondly and perhaps as a result, individuals
themselves are exiled from education. In exile we feel our paradigms
are no longer explaining to the same extent, or at least in the same way,
the contexts we live within. Consequently we experience an exile from
meaning-making; potentially the feeling of little ease. For some this might
produce an ambivalence towards forms of knowing, types of knowledge,
the commitment to a principle or the institutions which demand them. Now
forced outside these apparatus suddenly appear strange. The question is how
to react at these times.
The Plague explores this reaction; the response to recapture (nostalgia),
to search anew (revolt), or to subjugate. These are the natural responses of
citizens of Oran. Camus describes the continuum, all of which end in the
same way:
Always a moment came when we had to face the fact that no trains
were coming in. And then we realised that the separation was destined
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to continue, we had no choice but to come to terms with the days ahead.
(Camus, 1948, p. 67)
The experience of plague renders time differently. We find some of the
citizens of Oran becoming hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and
cheated of the future (p. 69). The narrator sees this group living in a middle
course whereby they forced themselves to exist between the highs and lows.
This group became the prey of time that drifted through life rather than
lived (p. 68). And so under the vast indifference of the sky these groups
were no longer able to rely on any of their absolutes. The narrator says they
felt abandoned, most likely by the world they had known and with whom
they believed they had had some sort of contract with. This contract for
generosity had been interrupted and it is replaced by subjection to the little
ease. A new order is required whether it be administered by others or self-
medicated. Even if the contract for meaning is now with things such as the
weather or watching cats or planning futile escapes or Grands production of
a meaningless text this absurd subservience is for some Oran citizens
better than living with the absurd ambivalence that plague has brought
(p.71).
Camus is careful to show that exile does not necessarily lead to nihilism.
Exile separates us from the emotional connections we had to something;
but it is a feeling rather than a condition. For some characters faced with
plague their response is to try and reconcile feelings of absurdity. This
seems an attempt to construct the plague or objectify the plague. They
use the plague to reinforce their existing, existential place, such as Father
Panelouxwho initially uses plague to retain his sense of place, his world
view and his institution. Paneloux preaches a form of philosophical suicide;
the renunciation of the self to the will of God (Foley, 2008, p. 53).
Other characters in The Plague that choose this path are the bureaucrats
such as M.Othon (magistrate) and the Prefect. The refusing initially to
consider plague as an absurd phenomenon, mainly because their frameworks
and horizons of language do not permit such a scenario: Presiding as judge
over the people of the town requires that [M. Othon] seem unmoved by the
events around him (Gibbons, 2013c, p. 1155). For Othon bacillus must exist
within (or be brought under control of) a paradigm; it must have a meaning
that accommodates his sensibilities. Othon like Paneloux learns the absurd
has no care for his project: the plague eats into this painstakingly crafted
family organism (Gibbons, 2013c, p. 1155). But he wants to hold onto a
belief that there are still lessons to be learned from the plague, albeit lessons
that fit the Oran as it previously existed. At least that would connect his
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THE PLAGUE
former life to the present (in his eyes). Other characters tell us something
different, including Rieuxs (perhaps) slightly mad Spanish patient:
The Spaniard explains to Tarrou that his seclusion and his passing of
time are his response to the absurdity of life. (Gibbons, 2013d, p. 1165)
The final sections of the book refer to how plague will be remembered
by the general community, and the fading memory of the lessons of plague
for many. For some the sanctity of institutions is what must be saved and
savoured at all cost. Plague is resolved as a deformity of a world external to
us, not as the fundamental lesson about the world we are part of. In telling
Rambert that he cannot leave the city a clerk says to him: Oh, I know its an
absurd situation, but were all involved in it, and weve got to accept it as it
is (p. 82). What the clerk was offering Rambert was a truce that he accepts
what the rules are by which he is allowed to consider and connect with
plague. The concept of rules and compromises, so comfortable in normal
life must remain, even when the absurd is named. The narrator paints a
frightening picture of this Ralston-Saul unconscious civilisation. Rieux calls
it a colony: a society where consciousness is managed through instruction,
transmission, and the communique. The alternative is too frightening to
consider for some.
The last pages of the book give an insight into how the city will deal with
life and questions of meaning post-plague. The first we meet is Rieuxs old
fellow asthma patient. He is one of those who was not taken by surprise
when plague broke out. He lived open to the absurdity of life. Perhaps not
embodied as bacillus but it seems he had seen enough of life to know what
plague would bring and what it would not. He saw in plague something he
saw everywhere. He knew that plague was part of life itself, not separate to
him:
All those folk are saying, It was plague. Weve had plague here.
Youd almost think they expected to be given medals for it. But what
does that mean plague? Just life, no more than that. (p. 295)
Rieux himself remains conscious and committed to the fight against
plague, in whatever form it might take. He knows that it will lie dormant
in Oran and other cities like Oran and he knows that others will have to
respond like he did in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless
onslaughts. Rieux believes that plague does not change people and that his
city will again grow too proud of their knowledge. But he accepts this as
both a strength and innocence and he is reinvigorated having witnessed
that at the time of pestilence there were more things to admire in men
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than to despise (p. 297). Like Camus he does not accuse anyone of failing
lucidity. He chooses to celebrate authentic revolt as doing what needed to be
done, at a time of injustice and outrage. His revolt is one of refusing to bow
down (p. 297). Other characters have a less noble end. Cottard for example
knows the absurd, faces it, but does so with a lonely heart (p. 291). He
finishes the story where he began: beyond exploitation he is uncertain what
to do with this reality. The journalist Tarrou sees in plague (and the absurd
responses of others) the opportunity for peace, however hard to achieve, but
which seemed to [him] the only desirable thing on earth (p. 287). Gibbons
(2013d) notes that Tarrou concludes that the plague is our only teacher,
and in addition that to be human is to have the plague (p. 1163). Tarrou
refuses to explain plague with reference to anything that is beyond and
above the human individual. Tarrou knows that there had been no answer
and survivors seem to have asked for the one thing that depended on them
solely (p. 289). Rieux also acknowledges solidarity and compassion: it
was only right that those whose desires are limited to man and his humble
yet formidable love, should enter, if only now and again, into their reward
(p.299).
But Rieux as narrator suggests apparatus are less likely to respond in this
way; they quickly rediscover their pride. Or at least they are embedded within
systems which do not operate on the level of individual experience. Those
who manage such systems in Oran seem cognisant of what is at stake and
what they stand to lose. They might have (perhaps like education) a level of
lucidity but they refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming fragility under the
gaze of plague. In some way their story is similar to the Prefects they each
refuse to acknowledge their limits (and limitations). They do not understand
the extent to which they too had been hopelessly cut off from those they
serve: they do not accept they share the habitat of the absurd.
Camus describes this state of mind elsewhere in his parallel work to The
Plague; the play State of Siege. This play focuses on characters who have
the most to lose from plague/siege/the absurd. These are the rulers of Cadiz
whowill do anything to maintain their collective authority in the face of a
public suddenly aware of a freedom, which had always been there, but was
now no longer hidden by their habitat. As the townsfolk rush to create a
new habitat (one which now includes the absurd) the rulers, their rules, and
their pleas for unity become outsiders. The unity they spoke of, a comforting
habitat for one time, is shown to be nothing more than totalitarianism
undersiege. It lacks consciousness. They appeal at the onset of siege to the
comforts of naivet:
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THE PLAGUE
These are the Governors orders. Let each of you withdraw from hence
and return to his work. Good governments are governments under
which nothing happens. Thus it is the Governors will that nothing shall
happen here, so that his government will remain ambivalent as it has
always been. (Camus, 1958b, p. 141)
ORAN AS AN EDUCATION SYSTEM
In the end there is no reason for bacillus in Oran and many of its citizens
learned little from the experience of exile. Those who had learned something
quickly forgot; perhaps that is why bacillus makes the promise to return.
But what exactly is the plague-absurd supposed to teach Oran. One
answer is nothing; the absurd like plague is indifferent it would be ego
again that thought plague was for us. However a lack of purpose doesnt
mean existential lessons cannot be learned. For Rieux plague undermined
the relationships which provided for meaning: it wounded the relationships
citizens had to those institutions giving them beliefs, cultural practices,
laws, and a sense of sanctity. The insight/lessons for this group are drastic,
delivering the experience of deprivation, an exile which teaches nothing, our
words drained of any meaning (p. 65).
Are there similar consequences for education facing metaphorical
plaguesuggested here as consciousness of the absurd. Does the existence
of plague render everything in education meaningless:
Do we then stop examining our lives because we have suddenly
discovered that such examination is pointless? Camus would not say
Do not learn! or Do not know thyself! The absurdity of the search for
knowledge that is believed, mistakenly, to lead to happiness does not
translate into a resistance to learning. (Gibbons, 2013a, p. 1101)
Maxine Greene (1972) includes in her article for peace education a set of
references to The Plague. She echoes the provocation above: how to act in
the face of injustice and what we can hold onto. She asks educators to be
consciously vigilant and constructs a metaphor for plague as power which
distances, is careless and abstracts (p. 133). Her response is an education
which empowers young people to recognise particular situations and take
action in light of what they hold dear (Greene, 1972, p. 155). But Oran
cannot, like the arms race which Greene is referencing, see past its own
horizon. When we are first introduced to Oran it seems there is already this
malaise in the city (Gibbons, 2013d, p. 1163). It refuses to recognise that it
had already promised something to plague itself and cities just like it had
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a history of plague but had chosen to not confront this evil as something real
and present (in some form). Oran chose to live with a different consciousness
of itself; a turning away of sorts. Greene makes a similar observation of
an education that prefers habits and does not take action against the absurd
situations of her time:
That is what represents the plague to me; and the kinds of calculations
that account for it are precisely like those that maintain apartheid on
this planet and teenage unemployment and starvation in the wealthiest
cities, that demean women and blacks and even children, that ignore or
regulate the jobless and the hungry and the poor. (p. 135)
In the absence of lucidity, something that Oran could have learned from
books, its inhabitants also chose habits. Habits in education might be
similar. Orans citizens had the vigilance necessary to maintain a habitat that
was restful and where after a while, you go complacently to sleep (p. 3).
There are hints that Camus is willing to excuse Oran for not keeping one eye
on the absurd. But it would be unlikely that he would excuse education in the
same way as a concept and practice it is not entitled to be restful. The body
of Camus work suggests the raison detre of education would be critical
creativity. Oran, perhaps like a classroom the teacher and learner retain
a measure of responsibility towards that which imperils it a Rieux-like
commitment to see and act: There lay certitude; there, in the daily round
(p. 39).
Comparing Rieux and the teacher has potential here: in his daily round
Rieux knew that all he could do was what lay in front of him and he could
not deny the reality of what he experienced nor could he choose not to act.
It is an interesting parallel between Rieux and the teacher, where the latter
might not be prepared to perform the daily round in a way that engages all,
including the existential dimensions of students life. The educational habitat
might encourage a daily round where a fundamental ingredient to wellness is
ignored. Perhaps in the teachers daily round the absurd is ignored.
THE HABITAT OF STRANGENESS
Camus (beyond The Plague) talks of the experience of the absurd being
moments found on trams and our encounters with strangers and the strange.
He talks about these as occasional and rare. His descriptions of strangeness
are linked to experience in the physical realm. The experience of strangeness
today has however shifted dramatically specifically the digital realm. He
could not have envisaged the bombardment of plague which has transpired
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THE PLAGUE
through the digital realm; this is a new universe where the experience of
strangeness and consequently the absurd is ready at hand. Bacillus is not
quietly living in linen chests. Technologies of democratisation mean young
people must now struggle with constant stories and images of futility, hate,
paralysis and evil. It has become a way of life metaphorically and literally;
ever-present. Strangeness is now our condition because of the number
of available habitats. We can now get lost or be made to feel lost almost
anywhere. Writers from different (educational) fields have explored what this
means: Zaroff and lessons for training doctors (2010); Mayis and principles
of education (2012); Pignatelli and teaching practice (2010); Zeledon and
moral education (2013); Srinager (2016) in the context of Kashmir and
the provision and policy of education. They all ask the similar question of
education (and its managers) in the context of plague, perhaps best summed
up and originated by Maxine Greene in her 1974 article Resisting Plague
Pedagogies of Thoughtfulness and Imagination:
Pondering all this and wondering what it means to take ourselves
more seriously, I turn after some years to Albert Camus novel,
THE PLAGUE, which has taken on a new importance for me. It is not
because the disease becomes a metaphor for what is happening around
us and, in my judgment, having an effect on teachers in the schools. It is
rather the denials and the self-involvement that, for me, are represented
by the metaphor and call on us in education to take ourselves and our
condition more seriously. (p. 1)
How can we then justify (or tolerate) education if it continues to turn away
from what could be argued is fast becoming the fundamental characteristic
of existence exposure to the strange and the unfamiliar. It looks to me
that education in front of the absurd does not seem to know how to live like
Rieux. It looks more like Oran living unconsciously; the Prefect holding onto
rationality and technocracy for the purpose of social inoculation.
Education therefore, like Oran, would do well to understood that bacillus
never dies or disappears for good, it may lie dormant for years, it may bide
its time, it may imperil our joy (Camus, 1948, p. 297). Bacillus is never far
away; and if the metaphor has any validity it teaches us that education like
Oran, for its own bane and enlightening, must stop denying, and now sleep
lightly, keeping one eye on, and turning consciousness towards, the absurd.
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CONCLUDING REMARKS
ALBERT CAMUS AND EDUCATION
Mentioned in the Preface, I said this monograph comes from a curiosity.

Iwas wondering what the pragmatic consequences would be for educators
ifwe agreed on three things:
that the absurd in some form is real in education and present now, and
we know what type of questions, worries, processes, reactions make up
this experience for the young mind, and
we care about the type of educational and educator engagement this state
of mind and body needs.
My curiosity in these themes started as a conceptual one, but has turned
to the pragmatic: what does education have in common with the absurd, and
what does this mean for learning, knowledge and the role of the teacher.
I was always optimistic that Camus would give us critical and important
waysof responding to this provocation.
Or at least I knew that a pedagogy would emerge if we were permitted
to take the broadest interpretations of these works. This is the great thing
about using literature to explore educational questions. Literature lends itself
to interpretation and also it deals in subject matter that educational texts do
not. Given our subject matter was the absurd and the stranger there was
little guidance to be found outside literature and the arts. So reflections on
a pedagogy of the outsider had to turn to literature. And I believe Albert
Camus read holistically has given us a great start.
So I think advocating for an education mindful of the absurd should remain
a legitimate part of the education tradition. Unpacking what the pedagogy of
the outsider might look like is a practical step towards making the absurd
more visible. Describing in this monograph how the absurd feels is meant to
support practitioners who want to explore this experience in their contexts
and do something about it. But perhaps at this stage explore is overly
simplistic. There isnt currently a road map to show education where the
absurd and the existential stranger lives in education. Practitioners might
therefore need to do some excavating first as part of their exploring.
But there is also evidence that aspects of a pedagogy of the outsider are
similar to what has been happening in education for some time. The practice
has always, to different measures, operated at the edges whether this is in
99
CONCLUDING REMARKS
the personal context, or the professions, vocations, societies or community.

Practitioners looking for the outsider and the ailment and opportunities of the
absurd might need to look at things differently that what they currently do but
certainly this will not displace what is already happening in their contexts.
Education will continue in its innumerable forms. As will the absurd. The
tension between the two is that education normally demands a beginning and
an end and its activity is what lies between these moments. It normally offers
a journey from a to b and the assumption is that b is more desirable thana.
What lies between is educations job to define, order, transition, manage and
manipulate. If the job is well done then desired outcomes are achieved.
The feeling and experiences of the stranger and the absurd are unlikely to
conform to this type of pedagogy or process. Education can never own the
absurd and it is unlikely to successfully mediate and moderate the absurd.
The absurd belongs to something far greater than anything education can
reduce, compartmentalise, describe or teach. It is not normal knowledge it
is by definition a way of seeing and experiencing the world which the minds
grasp cannot hold onto. Education will have the same challenge. The absurd
wont conform because it remains ambivalent.
In this way the absurd wont come to education education will have to go
to it. For this reason education can only ever be a tourist. And if it wants to go
to the absurd, the stranger and the outsider, it will need to be equipped with
radically different goals, practice, principles and language. It will also have
to get comfortable with losing and lost causes; a pedagogy that approaches
the outsider needs to start and finish at very different places.
I believe the characters and commentary of Albert Camus show us this
juxtaposition: the life of action that allows one to step into the absurd
and the one that does not. This type of trip is a challenge for any education
context that looks to own and order rather than simply pass through and
experience. The same is often said for the tourist.
But in saying this I hope the provocations here connect with real
practice, and although this text bombards the reader with an extraordinary
range of concepts, many of which are open to interpretation and should be
contested, Ihope amongst these you found time to reflect and enjoy. Camus
himself, across his body of work, challenges the reader with diversity:
he blends difficulttheoretical depth with brutal, matter-of-fact staging,
heuses fluctuating tones between evangelism, warning, advocacy, and the
aspirational, he will jump between neutral and authoritarian messaging, and
he seems to delight in the sympathetic treatment of his fallen and heroic
characters. But amongst all this I believe we can read a consistent message
100
CONCLUDING REMARKS
about how we might live with consciousness of the absurd and the experience
of existential strangeness. Ihave attempted to apply and these with reference
to practices and process we call educational. And in turn to an emerging
pedagogy of the stranger. Ihope taking this position, and the nature of the
interpretation is authentic to the work and life of Albert Camus.
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Solidarity and Hope 51

I am still yet to have my first conversation within an academic development

strangeness as an important characteristic of postmodern education. It is

THE PEDAGOGY OF ALBERT CAMUS

a comprehensive story of the relationship between Camus and educational

USING CAMUS FOR EDUCATIONAL REFLECTION

concepts/moments/tensions in each of the texts (both literal references and

The Myth of Sisyphus

concept in education at either a practical or philosophical level. This will also

Exile and the Kingdom

is educative. The stranger embodies qualities we want in our educated, and

monologue, gives us Camus deepest exploration of an individuals feeling

shows us the consequences for consciousness if we fail to take the absurd

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

THE BROAD AND ENDURING APPEAL OF THE CAMUSEAN ABSURD

Albert Camus absurd continues to capture the imagination of a diverse

THE EMERGING EDUCATIONAL INTEREST

There continues a corresponding rise in interest within educational circles.

these analyses to contemporary debates about existentialism and teaching.

THE PREDOMINANT THEME: THE ABSURD AND PEDAGOGY

The above, diverse investigations have given us a range of perspectives and

play still implicitly reveals important Camusean themes. In reviewing the

intersubjective communication, and on human relationships. The

Camus exemplified existential dialogue: he attended to existence on its

THE IMAGERY OF SISYPHUS AND EDUCATION

teachers continue to make positive impact and therefore retain an important

EDUCATION AND SISYPHUS

to commit ourselves to noble ends even though we never reach them.

The language of absurdity can sit uneasily alongside typical educational

of thefutility of ones efforts. Although critical, The Myth advocates the

The feeling of exile is central to most conversations to date on education

In the Cruise OBrien translated 1955 publication of The Myth, Penguin

Is education, or should education, or can education be absurd? In turn can the

Thus, suicide provides an avenue for escaping an unreasonable and

denies the efficacy of suicide, for it requires giving up the absurd

for unity or what I know of the impossibility of reducing this world to a

that the absurd is educational and that education is absurd.

EXILE AND THE KINGDOM1

LOOKING BACK AT THIS ARTICLE

THE PRECIPICE BETWEEN EXILE AND THE KINGDOM

the potentiality of these relations is re-cognised and augmented. Whereas

EMPOWERING RELATIONS, REVOLT AND MARTIN BUBER

encourage the choice of others. Revolt therefore became the movement

ALMOST AUTHENTIC CHARACTERS ON THE PRECIPICE

It is in Exile and the Kingdom (perhaps closely followed by The Plague)

Camus describes his own feelings of revolt, first experienced in Florence,

is specifically educational. Daru in The Guest is a teacher who lives and

given the way it is described by Camus, forces the reader to recognise

POSSIBILITIES ANNIHILATED A PREFERENCE FOR SLAVERY

This unwillingness to enter into an openness with others is a form of life

CONCLUSION: A PEDAGOGY OF EMPOWERING RELATIONS

Thus revolt in Exile is an essential component of openness within the

empowering classroom relationships. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 35(4), 367380.

LOOKING BACK AT THIS ARTICLE

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE STRANGER

Camus goal was never to advocate one response to the question of

Solidarity and Hope 51