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Summary

Camus takes a Woolfian message of human limitation and solidarity – not domination and hierarchy – from his vision of nature and from his reading of Greek tragedy. Camus argues that modern European history “has put on the mask of destiny”; this history behaves as the divine or natural fatality that it claimed to supersede. Grounded in Camus’s writing on the Greeks and tragedy in his lectures, interviews, essays, and infamous dispute with Jean-Paul Sartre, this chapter explores Camus’s ethics of tragedy. Camus's ethical paradigm – cognizance of injurious power accompanied by lucid revolt – is on offer in The Plague, the lyrical short story “The Adulterous Wife,” and his unfinished novel The First Man. Finally, this chapter argues for Camus’s fierce indictment of genocidal politics in The Stranger and The Fall.

Despite medical, technological, and humanitarian advances, the criminalization of those with serious mental illness continues. This is not an isolated phenomenon. The benefits of treatment reform and innovation are difficult to maintain or sometimes outright harmful. Across time and geography, the care of those with serious mental illness tends towards maltreatment, be it criminalization or other forms of harm. We present a social history of serious mental illness, along with the idea that the treatment of serious mental illness is a Sisyphean task—perpetually pushing a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll down and start again. The history is provided as a basis for deeper reflection of treatment, and treatment reform, of those with serious mental illnesses.

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Chapter 4 - Camus’s Modernist Forms and the Ethics of Tragedy

Summary

A social history of serious mental illness

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2 results

Chapter 4 - Camus’s Modernist Forms and the Ethics of Tragedy

Summary

A social history of serious mental illness