Introduction

Philosophically, The Rebel is Camus's most important book. Although it is much maligned and frequently ignored, the fact that Camus spent more time writing it than any other book, combined with the fact that we find in the essay the most detailed articulation, indeed the culmination, of many of the ideas we have examined in previous chapters, justifies a more careful scrutiny than it usually receives. Such scrutiny is given further justification, I believe, precisely by the degree and extent of the critical hostility the essay engendered among Camus's contemporaries.

Contrary, perhaps, to our expectations, and certainly contrary to some of the relevant scholarship, what is to be found at the beginning of The Rebel is a reassertion of the fact of the absurd, as described in The Myth of Sisyphus. Although Camus does assert at the beginning of The Rebel that “the absurd, considered as a rule of life is… contradictory”, that the absurd is a “point of departure, a criticism brought to life – the equivalent, in the plane of existence, of systematic doubt”, as we have already seen, this awareness was already present in The Myth of Sisyphus, where “the absurd, hitherto taken as a conclusion, is considered…as a starting point” (R: 9, 8, 10; E: 418, 417, 419; MS: 10; E: 97). Clearly, Camus, like other “great explorers in the realm of absurdity”, had early on “rejected the complacencies of absurdism in order to accept its exigencies” (R: 9; E: 418).