Camus | ZETEO

Frank Kermode, August 2000, photo by Charlie MacDonald

Kermode Cats Barnes Stories

May 10, 2018 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins Life is a Fiction Over a half century ago, shortly before the twentieth-century British literary critic Frank Kermode’s seminal The Sense of an Ending was published, I found myself in a debate with the campus chaplain, a priest named Joe Casey, whom I barely knew at the time. The topic—Life is a Fiction—came from me, although I don’t recall how Father Joe and I ended up on a stage in front of several hundred students. My […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: Camus, cats, fiction, life, literary theory, storytelling

A Syrian man holds lifeless body of his son, killed by Syrian Army, Aleppo, Syria, October 3, 2013, photo by Manu Brabo - AP

Sontag, Hell, Thinking, Politics

December 20, 2016 by William Eaton

To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Aleppo, Camus, Donald Trump, Freud, Goya, hell, Hillary Clinton, La Fontaine, Marx, politics, Susan Sontag, Sympathy for the Devil, war

Existentialism / Biography / Being in the World

November 29, 2016 by Walter Cummins

By Walter Cummins Review of At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell (New York: Other Press, 2016) One reason Sarah Bakewell’s The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails is such an engaging read was her decision to organize her examination of philosophy around the lives of the central thinkers, with tantalizing tidbits about their friendships and fallings out, their wives and lovers, their personal tensions over evolving and conflicting theories. But her approach […]

Categories: Review • Tags: Camus, Existentialism, France, Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre

Kamel Daoud, Algerian novelist and journalist

Names & Naming—Identity, Self-Determination, Power

August 30, 2016 by Steven A. Burr

Well just look at all the other Musas in this dive, one by one, and imagine—as I do—how they could have survived a shot fired in bright sunlight or how they managed never to cross paths with that writer of yours or, in a word, how they’ve managed to not be dead yet. — The Meursault Investigation, Kamel Daoud (translated by John Cullen) The question is not whether Lincoln [in the Gettysburg Address] truly meant “government of the people” but […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: Baltimore unrest, Camus, colonialism, Franz Fanon, identity, L’Étranger, memory, Nietzsche, racism, self-determination

On Savoring

December 1, 2014 by William Eaton

Some features of an ethics of tasting, good and bad By William Eaton [I]t is muttered that whenever any government wants to dupe the peasants, it promises the abolition of the wine tax, and as soon as it has duped the peasants, it retains or reintroduces the wine tax. In the wine tax the peasant tastes the bouquet of the government . . . [Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850] It tastes twice the price. — […]

Categories: Essay • Tags: Camus, food, France, Paris, restaurants

Reading 25 April – 1 May 2013 (ZiR)

April 25, 2013 by William Eaton

William Eaton, Zeteo Editorial Adviser [One in an ongoing series of posts. For the full series see Zeteo is Reading.] 25 April 2013 “If I were to generalize,” the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber said recently to a reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education, I would say that what we see is a university system which mitigates against creativity and any form of daring. It’s incredibly conformist and it represents itself as the opposite, and I think this kind of conformism […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: anthropology, Camus, Marx, men, Occupy Wall Street, reading, Shakespeare