A Rebel's Toolkit
Part 1: Absurdist Common Sense
You might have noticed that the work of Albert Camus has recently made a sort of resurgence. Gal Beckerman from The Atlantic recently published an essay titled “Be Like Sisyphus: How to embrace hopeful pessimism in a moment of despair.” On TikTok, the hashtag #albertcamus received 400 million views in 2024. On Facebook, the memorial account for Albert Camus, managed by Les Rencontres Méditerranéennes, has attracted 1.8 million followers. The group "Camus et ses idées," established in 2021, has grown to over 150,000 members. On Instagram, more than 550,000 posts have utilized the #albertcamus hashtag. Quinta Jurecic, who also writes for The Atlantic, in a recent interview cites The Rebel as an important book to revisit:
“The Rebel” is a book where [Camus] really tries to put into practice what his philosophy means. The argument that he’s making is essentially that the nature of human existence is to be searching for meaning in a universe that refuses to give you any — and we have to walk on that tightrope of wanting things to have meaning and knowing that we won’t receive that from any kind of external force. It’s something that I have come back to again and again.
The period we are currently living is constantly compared with post-Weimar Germany, but there is also a zeitgeist overlap with the early postwar period, almost as if we were so certain (and hopeless) about where we are heading that we are already resurfacing the nihilism of that period, with Camus being one of the most resorted-to authors. His resurgence started early, back in 2020 with the Covid pandemic, when The Plague became the perfect metaphor of that moment (even more so than Jonathan Swift’s Journal of the Year of the Plague, because Camus used the story as a metaphor of modern totalitarianism).
Camus’s thought also implicit in how we speak about U.S. politics. I thought about that when last week a fired USAID worker, Kirk Wallace Johnson, said in an interview: “
President Barack Obama always loved to quote Martin Luther King that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. Every time he said it, I would wince a little bit. It’s the kind of quote that I think Americans gobble up because we can look at all of the shameful parts of our history and say, “Yeah, we had slavery. All right, we had Jim Crow. But hey, it’s getting better.”
“The arc is always bending toward justice” — it’s BS. The arc of the moral universe does not have any natural direction. It has no shape. It’s not an arc. I don’t think there is such a thing as the moral universe.
Johnson makes a sadly compelling argument. The sheer absurdity, brutality and cruelty that we are enduring in this moment – first a tragedy and then a farce in the inversion that Slavoj Žižek suggests— is terrifying and numbing. The attack on truth has now become an attack on common sense. Contrary to what religion promises, today’s zeitgeist tends to embrace the Existentialist’s perspective: nothing is warranted in this world: no justice, no harmony, no equality. The world is nothing but what we make it to be. In The Rebel, taking a Cartesian approach, Camus zeroes in on the fact that in this deep distrust we have of everything the only thing that feels real is our awareness and rejection of it all:
“I proclaim that I believe in nothing, and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation: I must at least believe in my protest. The first and only evidence that is supplied to me within terms of the absurdist experience is rebellion… deprived of all knowledge, incited to murder, or to consent to murder, all I have at my disposal is this single piece of evidence, which is only reaffirmed by the anguish I suffer: rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition. But its blind impulse is to demand order in the midst of chaos, and unity in the very heart of the ephemeral. It protests, it demands, it insists that the outrage be brought to an end, and all what has up to now been built upon shifting sands should henceforth be founded on rock.”
I hope I am not misinterpreted as suggesting that we should go back to embracing 1950s philosophy and become something akin to Neo-Beat poets hanging out in downtown coffee shops in New York City’s West Village (where I currently teach). Instead, I think we can draw helpful guidelines from that period to understand how in that period the recognition of the absurdity of existence did not merely result in a nihilist attitude about the world. As a socially engaged artist I am very much aware of the fact that the concept itself stems from Sartre’s 1947 What is Literature?, even though the aims of socially engaged art in how they intend to activate reality and erase the line between the artwork and everyday life are different from how art of that period still saw art as a representation and critique of politics, not art as a political act per se. What I find useful is exploring the question how absurdism and rebellion in art can look like today, in 2025, as well as the notion that they are humanist endeavors (as Sartre once also try to argue they were) and not merely solipsistic, normative and egocentric trips, as feminist philosophers (de Beauvoir, Irigaray and, later, bel hooks and Judith Butler) showed in their critiques around authenticity, self-creation, gender, societal norms, and patriarchy.
Like many after the election, I was experiencing a period of nihilism. Last month, at a private meeting with artists and curators precisely to discuss a way forward for artists and arts organization amidst this climate, I said that I felt that alternativity is dying. I said it earnestly, thinking of how art institutions are quickly retrenching into self-censorship, the art market is becoming more conservative, and the courage for experimentation and daring is disappearing. Almost immediately I was swiftly rebuked by my friend the artist Caroline Woolard, who completely disagreed with me. Many artists are doing radical and experimental work right now, she said, it is just not being recognized. She is right.
I asked her to list a series of artist projects that offer new models of solidarity and rethinking of cultural production models. The examples she gave include Mil Mundos Books, a multilingual coop bookstore and community center offering books on Black, Latinx and indigenous heritage; Public Assistants, an interdisciplinary mutual aid space for QTBIPOC supporting skill-share, mutual aid, design and even fashion; Pickles and Concrete, self-described as “an ongoing experimental time-negotiating kitchen laboratory that contrasts two human attempts to alter the flow of time.” And the Ujima Boston Project, an organization focused in creating a cooperative business, arts and investment ecosystem for communities of color.
I later reflected on how these local projects, which really exist all over the country and all over the world, are reminders of how protest and activism, art and critique are more impactful when they are not merely critical or oppositional (which is an old postmodern instinct), but also propositive.
In his introduction to The Rebel, Camus writes:
“Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation.”
This new field of investigation is decidedly not, and cannot be, a dead end. It is, and it has to be, forward-looking, world-changing and world-building, as the aforementioned projects exemplify. They are small rebellions that reclaim common sense, the other term that has been hijacked by MAGA’s culture wars. Absurdism, in this sense, becomes a form of wisdom— and an act of resistance.