Camus and Resistance

How is one to live authentically, to be autonomous and free in regards to the fulfillment of their respective goals and desires; Or is life, simply a matter of compromise in which the means and ends must be morally compatible in order for one to take action. During the German occupation of France and following the onslaught of World War II, these questions revived a new form of significance in the realm of moral thought. The other day I watched Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers , which recounts the Algerian struggle for national independence against the French enterprise of colonization.

The film does not evade the enacted violence on either side nor does its focus rests on a particular hero whom is intended upon being its chief representative; the movement, itself, was shown to have been shaped and executed by individuals and the multifarious ways by which they resisted and fought back. Although, the FLN (National Liberation Front) was orchestrating most of the attacks in the fifties, the film’s scene with one if its last surviving leaders Ali La Pointe and his family being physically blown up demonstrates that their lives or leadership was not the precarious foundation by which the whole movement assumedly rested upon, but there was a certain moral imperative and firm sense of solidarity interwoven into their collective identity that was not to be easily extricated. The Algerian-French writer Albert Camus, both a writer of the time during the French Resistance of Nazi Occupied France and during that of the ongoing Algerian Civil War, became preoccupied as to the moral responsibility each individual holds in these dire situations of choice and the absurd. 

There is a certain shift in the methods by which he confronts this anxiety whereas in his earlier books such as the Stranger or the Myth of Sisyphus, he focuses on solitary revolt but toward the end of this life, his resistance finds expression in human solidarity. Camus’ The Plague depicts the enemy of Totalitarianism in the guise of  a disease, something that does not take physical shape and cannot easily be distinguished; actually, it most-likely cannot be eradicated at all due to its ability to arise and accommodate itself to a wide-ranging systems of power; however, the fact that the plague disappears, does not mean the battle is over nor that all hope is to be suspended because of a potential outbreak or its reappearance. The subject’s freedom can be constituted in his or her conscious choice of resistance and solidarity.