*Update on my dad: We’re setting aside the clinical trails for now. They’re two hours away, in Santa Monica, for one. More importantly, we don’t even know if he’ll get accepted for one of two potential trials. Thirdly, even if he did get taken there’s only a 30% ‘positive response rate,’ which we aren’t even totally clear around the precise meaning of. (As in: What does that response actually look like?) And so, our oncologist is in agreement that the new plan is immediate radiation of the lung; and continued oral chemo for the brain. We feel good about this quick action; movement. It’s the sitting and waiting while his lung tumor grows that’s scary. So anyway: This is a positive shift. We’ll see. I’ll keep you updated.
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In other news: I was scrolling through my various iPhone note pad collections from over the years, acquired a la my voracious reading. I found and was intrigued by my notes on Albert Camus’ The Rebel. He’s writing here mostly about political and individual rebellion. I find the notes intriguing. It makes me want to reread the thin, potent volume. It’s also appropriate since I’m rereading Crime and Punishment.
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NOTES ON THE REBEL
CAMUS ‘The Rebel’
“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 that what has up to now been built upon shifting sands should henceforth be founded on rock. Its preoccupation is to transform. But to transform is to act, and to act will be, tomorrow, to kill, and it still does not know whether murder is legitimate. Rebellion engenders exactly the actions it is asked to legitimate. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that rebellion find its reasons within itself, since it cannot find them elsewhere. It must consent to examine itself in order to learn how to act.”
Rebellion transcends the individual (solidarity)
The acquisition of values and self awareness
Rebellion is not egotistic but for the common good, risking (psych; figurative; literal) death
‘Resentment is highly colored by envy’
Sacred/traditional/graceful societies vs The West (opposite)
‘In order to exist: Man must rebel.’
The point of rebellion is to search for values beyond religious values
Rene Descart (altered): ‘I rebel...therefore we exist.’
WOKE vs FarRight: “If men cannot refer to a common value, recognized by all as existing in each one, then man is incomprehensible to man.” (The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt).
“The rebel defies more than he denies. Originally, at least, he does not suppress God; he merely talks to Him as an equal.”
But it is not a polite dialogue. It is a polemic animated by the desire to conquer. The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn. His insurrection against his condition becomes an unlimited campaign against the heavens for the purpose of bringing back a captive king who will first be dethroned and finally condemned to death. Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. It progresses from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary. When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.”
Prometheus
Ancient Greeks believed in moderation. And Nature.
Negation; absurdity;
First rebel: Cain from Old Testament (first recorded murder...myth)
Nature versus God
Criminal divinity
Sade: a man in prison of rebellion
Cain: the first rebel; first murderer
Notes on Rebellion
if you haven't already read it, check out "Speaking Out". It's a collection of Camus's lectures and speeches from '37-'58. I recently found it on the used shelf at the local library, an excellent find.
Thank-you very m. You could make it in academia with that synopsis. Two things to thank-you. 3. His notebooks were beautifully published and are available from shiit Indiana libraries. 2. Pick him for your book you will carry in your memory 451 style. Because the whole argument he sets down flows so that you could tell it over three nights. And one, that he granulated things down to human behaviors, r? He surely read James and Pierce. He wants to give vignettes of good behavior but philosophically demur abstains from describing a rebel behavior. What is not obvious about that is that Beaudrillard in those 20 dollar Versos goes all the way to literature prescribing behavior. Like Jean says when looking for something donot look in the same place twice. Camus might have ventured into this kind of charming if not for what 47 ? 43 did he explode the car.