Kill All Rebels
On Angela Nagle and Albert Camus
Angela Nagle has just launched a new podcast (along with Sean Padraig McCarthy), which I would recommend that you listen to. You can access it via Patreon here. Or else you can have access if you subscribe to her Substack here (which you definitely should do, too).
I first heard of Nagle’s work back in 2017 when I read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books about her book, Kill All Normies. That intrigued me enough to buy and read the book itself, and I have followed her work ever since. Everybody approaches new work by putting it into some relationship with what is already familiar to them, and for me when I first read Kill All Normies, what grounded the experience was how much it sat adjacent to the work of Albert Camus, especially his book, The Rebel; and so how much it also touched upon my own ongoing concerns. What I like most about Nagle’s work is that she is a true independent thinker in a time of much conformity. She is always working through a problem or an idea and trying to make sense of it without simply retreating into some predetermined set of answers. I don’t necessarily agree with everything she says or thinks – and I am sure the feeling is mutual – but she is always worth reading or listening to, if only to challenge my own intellectual complaisance.
When I heard about the new podcast project I dug out some old notes once I made about reading her early work in relation to Camus. I would have resisted pulling them together here and subjecting you, dear Readers, to them, but then I learned they have named their podcast Rocinante, stating: ‘Rocinante was the fictional steed in Don Quixote, for us a bit of gentle self-mockery and a symbol of the absurdity of trying to strive for noble outdated ideals in a cynical time but doing it anyway.’ Camus, of course, suggested in The Myth of Sisyphus that the method of Don Quixote was one of the two methods to deal with ‘all essential problems (I mean thereby those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion for living).’ And, of course, I recently wrote an essay in praise of pessimism that deployed Don Quixote as a model. So really, it was as if Nagle was baiting me to post the following comments.
1.
The work of Albert Camus is still largely misunderstood. In part this is an effect of his popular success, which prefers a simplistic, and often incorrect or distorted, image of the writer’s works, rather than engaging more directly with the complexity or subtlety of the works themselves. Camus was only too aware of this situation, writing in 1950:
A writer writes to a great extent to be read (let’s admire those who say they don’t, but not believe them). Yet more and more, in France, he writes in order to obtain that final consecration which consists of not being read. In fact, from the moment he can provide the material for a feature article in the popular press, there is every possibility that he will be known to a fairly large number of people who will never read his works because they will be content to know his name and to read what other people write about him. From that point on he will be known (and forgotten) not for what he is, but according to the image a hurried journalist has given of him. To make a name in literature, therefore, it is no longer indispensable to write books. It is enough to be thought of as having written one which the evening papers will have mentioned and which one can fall back on for the rest of one’s life.
This observation generalises, with little changing in the past seventy years; if anything, the situation has only been exacerbated by digital communications media, in which wilful misreading – which we’ve always had – has been compounded by a diminishing capacity for concentration and attention, which has, in turn, demolished any capacity to correct or argue against these initial misreadings. Camus’ description could very well apply to a contemporary writer such as Angela Nagle, especially with regards her 2017 book, Kill All Normies, as well as to various articles she has published since.
But there are more salient commonalities between these two writers, in particular, which are worth a closer examination. Nagle, in many respects, in her book, was responding to the latest iteration of an ideological gyroscope that Camus, following the Second World War, had previously tried to slow, in order to locate a more realistic, and less destructive, centre of gravity, to better ground our politics. This is a train of thought that may be worthwhile examining in more detail.
2.
Take, for example, Camus’ 1951 work, The Rebel. It was an attempt to understand the contemporary, post-War world; but in the context of a broad sweep of political, intellectual, and cultural history that had led up to and created that period – and which very much remains in the background of our current historical moment. The Rebel, in effect, offers a sort of genealogy of political rebellion: of individuals who reject the conditions within which they find themselves, and who seek out and enact alternatives for themselves and others.
But where Camus differed from his contemporaries, on both the political left and right, is that he argued that the origin – and the limits – of rebellion, are located in the act itself. Rebellion, for Camus, has both a positive and a negative aspect, inseparable from one another. Conventional views of rebellion, however, corrupting into revolution (or phantasies of revolution), are usually predicated upon artificially separating these values, and enacting the negative in the name of some delayed positive aspect to come – but which never does.
It is an idea Camus developed out of his reaction to the French purge, post-liberation, in relation to the previous years of Nazi occupation. The first articulation was given in a lecture, “The Human Crisis”, which he gave at Columbia University, in 1946, during his first visit to the United States:
‘In a world without values, in that desert of the heart in which we lived, what did our revolt really signify? It made of us men who said No. But we were at the same time men who said Yes. We said No to this world, to its essential absurdity, to the abstraction that threatened us, to the civilization of death that was being prepared for us. In saying No, we affirmed that things had gone on in this way long enough, that there was a limit to what could be brooked. But at the same time we affirmed all that lay this side of that limit, we affirmed that there was something within us which rejected the offense and which could not be endlessly humiliated.’
This positive value, which the act of rebellion affirms, became the fundamental basis of Camus’ argument in The Rebel, published five years later. ‘Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed,’ he wrote. ‘Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving?’
From this starting point, Camus then analysed and criticised contemporary revolutions – from the irrational revolution of the Nazis and Fascists, to the rational revolution of the Communists. ‘The errors of contemporary revolution are first of all explained by the ignorance or systematic misconception of that limit which seems inseparable from human nature and which rebellion reveals.’
In sum: ‘If there is no human nature, then the malleability of man is, in fact, infinite. Political realism, on this level, is nothing but unbridled romanticism, a romanticism of expediency.’ And it is this falsely presumed ‘malleability’ which provides the alibi and excuse for many ideological projects, from the right to the left, to make human beings, and the world we live in, fit some predetermined ideological mould, regardless of the consequences.
But such projects are the opposite of politics – an evasion of the political – in which we should rather act to make the social world fit the needs and limits of the human scale. To achieve this would require a politics predicated upon the value of human life – and with securing the necessities for such life – and the value of nature – and accepting the necessity of the natural world as the final limit on both the human world and its political activities.
For Camus, all such ideological projects were ultimately self-defeating: by transgressing this limit – the human and the natural – they rendered themselves illegitimate, and doomed to failure.
This was not what the intellectual class of the 1950s wanted to hear, even as the consequences of these failures were already accumulating, and as a result Camus was largely sidelined, which was difficult to do with somebody with an already large degree of international renown. It was hoped by his contemporaries that it would be enough that he be simply thought of as having written a book which the evening papers would mention and which he could quietly fall back on for the rest of his life, to be unread and otherwise no longer heard from, finally to be forgotten.
3.
In the wake of the publication of that book in 1951, and the attacks upon it from several fronts, Camus wrote a piece titled “In Defense of The Rebel”. He never published it. It was enough for him that, to his own mind, at least, he clarified his own position and overcame any doubts which the pressures of the media and his social milieu had attempted to sow. ‘The analysis of rebellion has only led me to discover,’ he wrote in that unpublished defense, ‘intrinsic to the movement of rebellion, the affirmation by the rebel himself of a limit beyond which revolt negates itself.’ Such a discovery could only be confirmed in his private life and in his public silence.
This simply repeated in precis the argument he’d laid out across the first one hundred pages of The Rebel, which attempts to show the development of a set of ideas which promoted transgression as a negative value, but which, in the process, undermined their legitimacy as a form of rebellion. Camus refers to this pre-history as ‘metaphysical rebellion’, to contrast it with ‘historical rebellion’; this latter form being when these ‘metaphysical’ ideas find their way into the actual world. In other words, for Camus, this pre-history of ‘metaphysical rebellion’ created the possibilities for the latter, ‘historical’ period. For Camus, this pre-history begins with the Marquis de Sade, then traces through the Romantics, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and, finally, the Surrealists.
It is at this point where I would argue that Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies intersects with The Rebel, with her chapter on the online politics of transgression identifying the selfsame cast of figures – from de Sade through to the Surrealists – as being used by the contemporary Alt-Right, appropriated from the counter-culture of the 1960s-70s, to justify their ideological stylings, and to negate politics, while offering little or nothing in return.
A few comparisons should suffice, to make this case. Camus argued that de Sade’s ethic, born of solitude, was based on ‘the exercise of power’, following only ‘the logic of his feelings’, and succumbing to ‘the strongest instinct to be found by one condemned by the hatred of mankind to live behind prison walls: the sexual instinct.’ Nagle shows how such exercises, logic, and instinct, following de Sade, came to dominate various online message boards, associated with the Alt-Right. The solitary prison which became the dark citadels of de Sade’s phantasies being transposed to the dimly lit basements of our contemporary lost youth; albeit updated with reference to films and books, such as Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho which, Nagle states, ‘rivals de Sade in moral boundary pushing.’
Nagle references the ‘nineteenth-century Parisian avant-garde’ as also being part of this tradition of transgression. Camus also examines this movement, citing Baudelaire’s statement – “To live and die before a mirror” – as being ‘the dandy’s slogan’. If we update the image of the ‘mirror’ to refer to a person’s reflection in the screen of some personal communications device, or the endless stream of selfies that clog server farms, with the digital self being constantly projected back at them, then Camus’ analysis from seventy years ago can be easily transposed to the present; and it would not be out of place as a footnote to Nagle’s own analysis, including also her later thinking regarding our diminishing attention-spans (in an essay on her Substack called Conserving Focus). As Camus states:
‘the dandy can only play a part by setting himself up in opposition. He can only be sure of his own existence by finding it in the expression of others' faces. Other people are his mirror. A mirror that quickly becomes clouded, it is true, since human capacity for attention is limited. It must be ceaselessly stimulated, spurred on by provocation. The dandy, therefore, is always compelled to astonish. Singularity is his vocation, excess his way to perfection. Perpetually incomplete, always on the fringe of things, he compels others to create him, while denying their values. He plays at life because he is unable to live it.’
But perhaps the most salient comparison here is between the Surrealists and the “satirical performance art” of online trolls, which Nagle examines. Again, Camus’ own description of the former could be accurately transposed to Nagle’s description of the latter. ‘Absolute rebellion, total insubordination, sabotage on principle, the humor and cult of the absurd,’ Camus wrote: ‘such is the nature of surrealism, which defines itself, in its primary intent, as the incessant examination of all values.’
Camus cites, as an example, a statement made by Andre Breton:
“The simplest surrealist act consists in descending to the street with revolver in hand and shooting at random, as fast as one can, into the crowd. Whoever has not, at least once in their lives, had such a desire to make an end of the trivial system of debasement and cretinization in place has his own place marked out in the crowd, belly in line with the barrel...”
A statement, Camus claimed, ‘that Andre Breton must have regretted ever since 1933’; that is, since the beginning of the Nazi regime in Germany, which aestheticised politics, and likewise justified such irrational violence in practice. Breton had by 1951 turned to Communism – which preferred to politicise aesthetics, to much the same affect – and he took issue with Camus’ depiction of the Surrealists in The Rebel. One of those very French public quarrels ensued in the pages of otherwise little read journals.
Georges Bataille – whom Nagle refers to as perhaps ‘the most significant theorist of transgression’, whose intellectual heritage can be traced back through Nietzsche to de Sade – tried to mediate between Camus and Breton, by publishing an essay in Critique in 1951, called “The Age of Revolt.” Bataille tried to give Breton the benefit of the doubt by quoting his statement in full, and citing Breton’s caveat, that “it always goes without saying that in [his] mind the author of such an action acts in the realization that he will immediately be lynched.” As Breton also said (cited by Bataille):
“It is a question — metaphysically speaking - of a fully conscious outrage against humanity, which is of such a nature to strike out against both self and ‘other’ and which, no matter how little one might reflect on the fact, is not without affinities with Jules Lequier’s final outrage against ‘God’.”
This strategy was, arguably, counterproductive, as it simply reinforced Camus’ initial criticism against Surrealism, adding to his argument against the glorification of murder the further opprobrium of suicide. Jules Lequier, of course, famously argued in favour of suicide, and confirmed his hypothesis by committing the definitive act.
Once more we can see the bitter fruit of this in the contemporary online world, where the sentiment of Breton’s statement is taken more literally, if half-ironically, and replicated endlessly in less articulate posts, memes, and comments. But also we have seen it spill over into reality, with various real world shootings, massacres, and suicides, which have been traced back to these various message boards and online culture, which encourage and applaud such behaviour.
This, of course, was also outlined at length in Kill All Normies. For example, in 4chan’s valorisation of suicide, echoes of Breton remain. As Nagle states:
‘The forum’s preoccupation with suicide, which became used as a verb to ‘an hero’, often takes the form of painful expressions of anonymous users’ desire to commit suicide themselves, and at the same time it mocks suicide victims and those who express sympathy with the victims. Forum users come to the most arguably unsympathetic place imaginable to tell others of their suicidal fantasies anonymously, where they will probably be half-jokingly told to do it. They thus reject the perceived sentimentality of the mainstream media’s suicide spectacles and instead remake it as their own dark spectacle, in which pity is replaced by cruelty. And yet, because both the act of suicide and the displays of insensitivity toward suicide victims are perceived as forms of transgression, both found a home within this strangely internally coherent online world.’
Following Bataille, joining the two definitive acts together – murder-suicide – has since become commonplace.
4.
The Rebel came out in 1951; Camus died in 1960. So he didn’t live to see the Generation of ’68 in France or the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s across the West. This is where Nagle’s book is of value, picking up where Camus’ analysis ends. In doing so she makes two related observations which address the situation of post-1950s transgressive styles, but which otherwise complement and extend Camus’ argument into the present moment.
First, she argues that transgression works both ways, referring to, for example, ‘the ideologically flexible, politically fungible, morally neutral nature of transgression as a style, which can characterize misogyny just as easily as it can sexual liberation.’ And second, that the ‘culture of transgression they have produced liberates their conscience from having to take seriously the potential human cost of breaking the taboo against racial politics that has held since WWII.’ Here Nagle is taking the example of gender and racial politics, respectively, but these points generalise across all political and social issues of our day, and extend to all sides of the ideological spectrum, who each use the selfsame tools of transgression, and associated distancing justifications, to undermine the values of their political opponents; often without realising how this, at the same time, undermines the (supposed) values of their own position.
These points are implicit in Camus’ overall argument, but have only become more overt in our culture in the decades since, becoming explicit in Nagle’s argument, and are in large part facilitated by the developments in communications media generally, and social media, in particular. Ideologies, historically never well grounded in reality, have become even less so over time – in part we are simply repeating images and tropes from the past, in order to avoid the current reality rather than trying to actually comprehend the present moment – while at the same time, by being increasingly online, separated more and more from the friction and accountability of physical reality, such ideologies have even fewer grounded moments in order to correct or falsify one claim from another. ‘More and more does contemporary man interpose between himself and nature an abstract and complicated machine which thrusts him into solitude,’ Camus said in 1946. ‘In short, we no longer die, love, or kill except by proxy.’
To these two observation that Nagle makes, we can add a third, from Camus. And that is, ultimately, transgression can lead only to conformity, to banality, and the maintaining of the status quo. ‘Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual history. It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity. And so it explains the twentieth century.’ It was in resisting the pressure to conform that Camus raised the ire of his contemporaries; the repetition of this pattern in the present day also affected Nagle.
This pattern explains also much of the twenty-first century, which only continues to prove Camus’ central point, describing the online world as the ultimate proxy for politics: ‘Prometheus ends in Onan.’
Or, as we say here in Australia: wankers.
If you appreciate reading this newsletter, and you want it to continue, and you would like to support independent scholarship and criticism, then please consider doing one of two things, or both: consider signing up to this newsletter for free (or updating to a paid subscription)(preferably the latter as it will allow me to write this newsletter more frequently, and pay for whiskey and books).
And please share this newsletter far and wide, to attract more readers, and possibly more paying subscribers, to ensure that it continues.