Lucidity without Liberation : Sisyphus, Clamence, and the Ethics of Repetition

Lucidity without Liberation : Sisyphus, Clamence, and the Ethics of Repetition Ajay Kumar * Camus is commonly read as making lucidity the decisive response to the absurd. This paper complicates that reading by setting Sisyphus alongside Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall. Both become lucid about recurrent structures that no final act can resolve, yet their lucidity takes opposed ethical forms. Sisyphus appropriates his condition without converting consciousness into authority over others; Clamence turns confession into a repeatable technique through which he implicates his listener and reconstructs the superiority his fall had exposed. Lucidity therefore discloses recurrence without liberating the subject from it, and without determining how recurrence will be inhabited. Repetition is ethically indeterminate: it may sustain revolt, and it may stabilise domination. Camusian ethics accordingly requires more than consciousness — it requires recurrent practices of limit, solidarity and self-correction. *Research Scholar, Department of Philosophy, Veer Kunwar Singh University, Ara ICPR Fellow