Philosophy Program Presents

The Author as Stranger: Nietzsche and Camus

I argue that not only do Nietzsche and Camus share a sense of the world as fundamentally “strange,” but that each adopts an authorial position as stranger to the reader as well. The various strategies of concealment, evasion, and silence they employ to assure their authorial strangeness are in the service of what Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault would later call “the death of the author,” the disappearance of the author as authority over his or her own text. I argue further, however, that within this largely shared commitment, Nietzsche and Camus finally have quite different conceptions of the goals of their respective authorships and different manners of pursuing their deaths as authors. These contrasts leave us, finally, with distinct constructions of the author as stranger.

Daniel Berthold is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Bard College, where he taught from 1984–2022. He holds a BA and MA from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from Yale University. He is the author of Hegel’s Grand Synthesis, Hegel’s Theory of Madness, and The Ethics of Authorship: Communication, Seduction, and Death in Hegel and Kierkegaard, as well as articles and reviews in journals including Clio, Environmental Ethics, History and Theory, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Human Ecology Review, Idealistic Studies, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, International Philosophical Quarterly, International Studies in Philosophy, Journal of European Studies, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Ludus Vitalis, Man and World, Nous, Metaphilosophy, Modern Language Notes, Philosophy and Literature, Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, Religious Studies, Review of Metaphysics, Social Theory and Practice, and Southern Journal of Philosophy. 

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Hegeman 204A

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