In these two books, Matthew Bowker brings welcome attention to the concept of the absurd, which has largely been neglected in recent political theory and philosophy. Bowker contends that even if the absurd lacks some analytical clarity, it remains vital to an understanding of our experiences because we still face the absurd challenge: how to find “legitimate grounds for moral values without recourse to metanarratives, traditions, or absolutes” (2013, p. 8). Bowker’s treatment of the concept breathes new life into the absurd and makes an interesting contribution to the recent rethinking of Albert Camus’s ethical and political thought.

Albert Camus and the Political Philosophy of the Absurd surveys the history of the absurd, centering on Camus’s influential version. Bowker recovers the absurd for the present by bracketing its “ontological aspirations” that connect it to metaphysical claims, such as “the silence of god” (p. 1). Instead, he argues that the absurd is a practical “psychological disposition” (p. 1) in which a subject experiences feelings of ambivalence, the tension of conflicting desires. The book successfully describes the feeling of absurdity and shows that Camus’s rebellion “is a mature and creative response to the ambivalence of the absurd, that it resists both indifference and extremism, and that it seeks both a form of unity and a form of boundedness in an attempt to contain the destructive potential of the absurd” (p. 97).

Two chapters clarify the concept of the absurd. The book moves among generally interesting engagements with thinkers relevant to Camus’s use of the concept, including Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and others, such as Ecclesiastes and Samuel Beckett, whose relevance here is less clear. Continued critical confusion about Camus’s use of the absurd is a result of the multiplicity of ways in which he uses the term, making a singular analytical definition impossible. This, Bowker argues, is all for the better since the absurd should not be understood primarily as a rational concept but as an emotional one (p. 46).

To understand the “emotional material of the absurd,” Bowker turns to psychoanalysis and the concept of ambivalence (p. 64). While he uses the language of psychoanalysis throughout the argument—including “taboo,” “splitting,” and the ambivalence of unity (or merger) and boundedness (or separateness) (pp. 69, 70, 77–78)—similar categories are evident in Camus’s thinking and do not appear to require the specialized vocabulary, especially since Bowker’s interest is only in the “mechanics of ambivalence” and not any particular psychoanalytic conception of it.

Bowker’s most compelling argument—his detailed reading of absurdity in The Stranger (Chapter 5)—remains oddly detached from the argument of the rest of the book as it neither clarifies the concept of absurdity nor provides insight about Camus’s solution, rebellion. I am, however, convinced by Bowker’s claim that Meursault, contrary to many readings, is not an absurd character because he lacks the ambivalences required of the absurd. Absurdity in the novel derives from the responses of the other characters and the readers, who struggle to make sense of Meursault’s senseless actions (pp. 111–12).

Bowker then focuses on Camus’s rebellion, which is action that lives in tension and refuses the temptation to split ambivalent desires and to identify with one desire over the other (p. 151). The measure of Camus’s rebellion and his rejection of the absolutes of revolution are well known, and Bowker admirably reconstructs it here. In the final chapter, the author analyzes two of Camus’s more difficult positions—his praise of Kaliayev and the Russian assassins of 1905 and his position on Algeria. Unfortunately, in Bowker’s effort to distance himself from the implied politics of Camus’s position (p. 173), his analysis loses focus on the ambivalence and tensions that he had argued were central to Camus’s rebellion, particularly in his treatment of Camus on Algeria.

Camus argues against Algerian independence from France, favoring instead a federated solution granting Algeria partial autonomy while remaining part of France. His critics view his vision of an Algerian community composed of both the French migrants (pied noir) like himself and the Arab and Berber population as neocolonialist. Bowker adopts the terms of the critics, framing the choice in terms of independence for the “autochthonous” Algerians or neocolonialism (pp. 185, 186), explicitly rejecting Camus’s claims of a shared French and Arab Algerian experience as a “fantasy” and “colonial hallucination” (p. 183). While Bowker and others may disagree historically and politically with Camus (and there are good reasons to do so), it is not a reason to dismiss the integrity of Camus’s position. The position is a model of rebellious politics—an attempt not to fall into either indifference to suffering or extremism. He lived in the tension of an unpopular and increasingly impractical position not because his position was perfectly just but because he refused to endorse either French torture or FLN (National Liberation Front) terrorism (Algerian Chronicles, 2013, Preface).

Bowker concludes his analysis of Camus on Algeria by asking (p. 186): If Camus saw his Algerian position as “both necessary and inexcusable, why did he not act more like Kaliayev and willingly sacrifice his claim to the land of Algeria to rectify an obvious injustice?” The comparison is misleading. Kaliayev believes that all murder is illegitimate, and so he sacrifices his life because he took one. There is a contained logic here: a life for a life. However, the Algerian situation is not about personal morality; it is about political community. Camus’s personal sacrifice would be meaningless, and he has no right to sacrifice the pied noir claim to the land of Algeria. If Camus is right and a hundred years of lived experience has made Algeria home also to the pied noir, then rebellion must maintain its ambivalence and refuse the temptation to choose one injustice and to rechristen it the new justice.

In this book, Bowker presents Camus’s rebellion as a promising response to the absurd that attempts “to transform the burden of inevitable guilt and responsibility into a reparative effort toward others, which involves creating and sustaining the kind of ambivalent, potential space that permits future creative, moral action, even for those whom we inevitably harm” (p. 188). In Rethinking the Politics of Absurdity, he is more critical of absurd politics. The possibility of a “reparative” absurd politics disappears and is replaced by a politics that seeks to “render loss and violence meaningless” by labeling it absurd (p. 5). Bowker argues that the refusal to understand loss or violence emerges from a fear that comprehending it implicates the subjects in the evil, endangering their desired innocence (p. 27).

Bowker develops his argument in several different cultural spaces, including everyday experience, contemporary political theory, and popular media featuring zombies and vampires. This interdisciplinary approach makes his claims about absurdity and the desire for innocence more compelling. I applaud his use of individual interviews to capture everyday experience; it is a constructive step toward a more practical political theory. He is upfront about the limitations of this qualitative data (p. 39), and accordingly, he treats it like a pilot study that aims to open avenues of further research rather than to draw conclusions.

The author makes the consequences of linking absurdity with a desire for innocence most clear when he engages contemporary political theory, represented here primarily by Judith Butler (Chapter 4). Butler’s “precarious self” preserves “open wounds” as a way of avoiding the destructiveness of autonomy (p. 64). Bowker argues that this results in a community that “would entail experiences of self-violence, meaninglessness, and ecstatic communion with suffering others” (p. 75). Such a politics forgoes the possibility of reparative action and creates a community of perpetual victims that elevates innocence over justice.

Whether or not one is convinced by the argument of this book hinges on accepting Bowker’s psychoanalytic interpretative frame. Psychoanalysis allows him to find in every claim to absurdity a desire to preserve one’s innocence by rendering what is bad incomprehensible (absurd) and, therefore, separate from the self. If the reader grants Bowker this interpretation, his analysis follows clearly and convincingly. However, it leads to some odd conclusions, such as when he must explicitly read Camus’s Just Assassins against Camus’s own insistence on the main character’s acceptance of his guilt (p. 83).

My primary issue with Rethinking the Politics of Absurdity is that it aligns absurd politics only with the desire for innocence, losing the ambivalence and “reparative” possibilities that Bowker discusses in Albert Camus and the Political Philosophy of the Absurd. Restoring ambivalence to the absurd would resolve some of the apparent problems of absurd politics. For example, the author states that absurdity disallows the “morally meaningful” (2014, p. 4), but it is not clear why moral meaning is the only way to meaningfully integrate an experience into one’s self-understanding. Without ambivalence, individuals are pushed toward dichotomous choices: the meaningful or the meaningless, the comprehensible or the incomprehensible, healing or being permanently wounded. These false choices force Bowker to employ categories that Camus explicitly rejects, such as “legitimate violence” (p. 83) and “innocent victims” (p. 95). More importantly, by restoring ambivalence, the central “choice” between the extremes of autonomy—the destructive self or the perpetual victimization of the “decentered” subject—gives way to a robust sense of self that lives in the ambivalent tensions and works to be, in Camus’s words, “neither victim nor executioner.” A decentered self can be open to the other without submitting to an invasion. If the absurd is ambivalent, it need not render something entirely meaningless. It can acknowledge that part of an experience is beyond one’s comprehension without disowning it. In the face of this partial incomprehensibility, one can “loosen one’s attachment to self-boundaries” without totally surrendering “our desire to comprehend ourselves and the world” (p. 45). To loosen is not to lose.