Albert Camus Radio Eric Berg

Peter Francev: ‘Gushing Over Nature, or Janine’s Sexual Exhibitionism’


Abstract: For the past few years, I have been interested in the topic of Albert Camus and empathy
and, rightfully so, as I am currently writing a monograph on the subject, it makes sense that I would
be interested in such a subject. However, for as long as I have been formally and informally studying
Camus (which is surpassing 25 years), I have always been plagued (no pun intended) by the seemingly
hard-lined interpretation that the protagonist of one of Camus’s most recognizable short stories ‘The
Adulterous Woman’, Janine has been largely contextualized as an unhappily married woman to her
husband Marcel and has an ‘affair’ of sorts that is anything but sexual. In this paper, I plan to quickly
examine what previous scholars have said about Janine, her mental state of mind and her supposedly
adulterous actions, before I offer what seems to me a rather conventional and entirely plausible reading
and interpretation of the short story, including Janine’s indeed adulterous actions. And this is not to
say that Janine cannot be linked to previous Camusian characters who are both female and aware of
their sexuality, namely Marie from The Stranger.

In this episode I review the December 2022 publication of States of Plague: Reading Camus in a Pandemic by Alice Kaplan and Laura Marris, published by The University of Chicago Press. 

Enjoy!

A review of a book that is very hard to find: Albert Camus and the Men of Stone from 1971. It is a series of illuminating interviews of men who worked with Camus as coy editors, editors, printers, and typesetters.

Enjoy! 

A review by Dr. Berg of a new (2022) important book for the English reading audience. 34 lectures and speeches written by Camus on many important topics.

Enjoy! 

A fascinating look into how academic scholarship is advanced. This session is a recording of the question and answer session where the scholars that just presented their work to some of the top Camus scholars in the world defend their views. Enjoy! 

Whilst there is no mention of the empathy or ethics of Edith Stein in the fiction and non-fiction of Albert Camus, one can easily surmise that Camus, being a part of the Parisian café scene during the years leading up to, including and beyond the second world war, would have encountered some discussions of Stein’s thought through Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, prior to his falling out with both men. It is then the purpose of this paper to set out and accomplish several things: firstly, I would like to provide a very brief introduction to the empathy of Stein; secondly, I should like to offer readers a concise summary of Stein’s principle text on empathy (On the Problem of Empathy)1; finally, I would like to offer an exposition and an analysis of Stein’s concept of empathy, from a phenomenological perspective, whilst keeping in mind Camus’s philosophy of the absurd as posited in The Myth of Sisyphus.