Preface
Acknowledgments
1
Introduction: Experience of the Absurd
2
Logic that Reassures
The Absurdity of Existence
From Existential to Logical Absurdity
An Absurdity of Excessive Logic
Living Without an Excess of Logic
3
Disquietude that Cannot be Distilled
Maintaining a Tension of Existence
Existential Conflict
Conflict and Metaphysical Why
A Metaphysical Answer
Answers and Nostalgia for the Absolute
Camus’ Own Revolt Against Absurdity
Absurdity in the Absence of Conflict?
Conflict and the Search for Meaning
The Meaning of Nothingness
4
Politeness and Politics
Politeness: The First Degree of Justice
Loving Abstract Humanity
A Contagion of Group Think
Self-Refuting Political Thought
Utopias Which Destroy Themselves
The Longing to be Free From Pain
5
A Politicized Existentialism
Flirtation and Revulsion
Intoxicating Paradoxes at a Café
From Paradox to Moral Anarchy
Ensuing Orthodoxies of Modernism
An Aftermath of Postmodernism
6
Rise of the Bourgeois Bohemians
A Mean Between Extremes
An Extremism of $ucce$$
Sacrifice to the Ever-Pressing “They”
Bourgeois Anxiety and Existential Angst
7
Experience Defined Rationally
Contrast to an Eastern Position
Nostalgia for the Absolute
Quest for an Absolutist Epistemology
From Epistemology to Political Ideology
8
Rationalism Par Excellence
Independence of the World for Intelligibility
A Search for Intelligibility Ends in Paradox
A Paradox of the One over Many
From the Many to a Critique of Pure Reason
Reason and Absolutism in the Final Analysis
9
Need Reality Conform to Reason?
Psychological and Logical Thirst for Reality
Reality and Verbal Limitations
Limitations in terms of the Madhyamika
The Madhyamika and Misunderstanding
Misunderstanding an Eastern Existentialism
From the Existential to the Logical
Logical Consequences
Beyond the Conceptual and Linguistic
Appendix
I Interview with Catherine Camus
Appendix II A Biographical Sketch of Camus
The Sun and Poverty of Algeria
The Political Clouds over France
Paradoxes of Christianity and Marxism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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