What Albert Camus Teaches Us About America: David Masciotra on a Country of Strangers,

About this episode

David Masciotra discusses how contemporary America reflects the existential detachment of Albert Camus' character Meursault.

“We’ve learned how to tolerate acts of violence, acts of widespread death, disease — that other developed nations simply don’t tolerate. And that tolerance manifesting in myriad political failures — all of which go back to our refusal to maturely deal with mortality and issues of grief.” — David Masciotra Earlier this week, we talked to Ece Temelkuran about her book Nation of Strangers , a manifesto about strangers finding one another. But for the cultural critic David Masciotra , strangerdom is the problem rather than the solution. Contemporary America, he argues in his new essay A Country of Strangers , has become a place of death, despair and indifference. Masciotra takes his cue from Albert Camus’ 1942 novella The Stranger . Camus’ Meursault — the narrator of The Stranger — is a man completely detached from meaning. He attends his own mother’s funeral without feeling anything. He murders an Arab man on a beach without motive. He faces his execution with a shrug. Masciotra’s argument is that the United States has become Meursault writ large. America’s failure is existential rather than political. It is a failure to mourn — a sustained refusal to engage with death, grief, and…

People in this episode

Host: Andrew Keen

Guest: David Masciotra

Topics covered

• existentialism
• American society
• grief
• cultural criticism
• detachment
• violence

Keywords

• Albert Camus
• David Masciotra
• The Stranger
• existential failure
• American indifference
• grief
• cultural critique

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: The Stranger, A Country of Strangers

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