Shabbat Reading: Caligula by Albert Camus

#whatireadovershabbat Albert Camus, Caligula, translated by Ryan Bloom (1944, rev. 1958; Vintage, 2023)

Camus is the thinker of the absurd. That’s well known. But his absurd isn’t ours. We tend to forget that his was shaped by the fight against Nazism, Stalinism, and colonialism.

Caligula is a drama not just of the absurd but the political absurd. One of the vital lessons of Scipio and Cherea, of Caligula himself, is that if life is meaningless, that fact must be confronted taking into account one’s time and place. Reading the play, you realize that a moral realism most of us today lack subtly girds Camus’s art, even as he questions everything.