It often stands in stark opposition to the bureaucratic state, bourgeois rationalism, and ideologies which condone “rational murder.” The silences are set in opposition to dominant discourses that justify oppression, violence, and murder in the name of “freedom” or “law and order.” In Camus’ most famous novel L’Etranger (1942) the main character, Meursault, is condemned to death: not for the murder of an Arab, but because he is silent in the face of the norms of French society and its legal system. In Camus’ creative work, silence is everywhere. Given the circumstances of his youth, it is perhaps unsurprising that his last form of political protest was a refusal to speak. Camus’ regular bouts of tuberculosis-contracted when he was 17-placed him, as he struggled for breath, in a “monastery” of “silence.” And then there were, as Camus put it, the “silenced and subjugated” Arabs whom he grew up alongside in Algeria. The poet and scholar Stephen Watson described her as a Christ-like figure in Camus’ religionless world. His mother, who was partly deaf and spoke so little that people assumed she was mute, was a mysterious figure in his life. The writer and philosopher Albert Camus grew up in a world of silences in a working class suburb in Algiers.
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