If nihilism is murder, what then? Camus’ distinctive conception of nihilism & its overcoming

This paper proposes that Albert Camus is a distinctive thinker of nihilism, whose unique contribution to debates around nihilism has been widely under-valued. We position his thinking of nihilism in contrast to four previous predominant uses of this contested, often polemical term (epistemological, reactionary, theological, Nietzschean), which we start by examining in part 1. Part 2 reconstructs Camus’ account of the absurd in his earlier works, showing the proximity and differences of his celebrate account of this notion from the four preceding senses of nihilism’s meaning. Part 3 shows that, after 1944, Camus’ upheld that nihilism is defined by its contempt for human life licensing deceit, enslavement, and murder. Part 4 then highlights the distance between Camus’ distinctive understanding of nihilism and Nietzsche’s, by critiquing Samantha Novello’s recent attempt to closely align the French and German thinkers and underscoring Camus’ distinctive contribution to the understanding of Western nihilism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.