La Peste relue à l’heure du Covid-19. Comment le pessimisme de Camus aurait-il appréhendé notre après-pandémie ?

When common parlance speaks of « the march of history », it apprehends in perspective the image of a graduated ladder stretched between a point of departure and a point of arrival. In fact, it’s clear that the narrative of taught history borrows from the typical model of the telling story in the Aristotelian tradition. Cognitive dissonance thus arises whenever milestones from the past find their way onto the highway of the present, and aesthetic deviation whenever the linearity of a narrative breaks down. Camus’s La Peste is part of this double gap, on the one hand by confronting a city with the old demons of humanity – which the all-powerful medicine had, it seems, exorcised – and on the other by refusing the reassuring, good old-fashioned conclusion on the last page, leaving, on the contrary, doubt as to the death of the evil spirits. The COVID-19 pandemic took hold, triggering a veritable fever for rereading the novel, not only because of the almost premonitory coincidence between some of its notable passages and situations that have become the fundamental images of the confined world. There are also definite aesthetic choices that have had a major influence on the treatment of the material, with an original perspective that makes the text open to a number of connotative virtualities, including Camus’s profound pessimism in the face of peoples who forget viruses.