Of Camus and Rebels
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088220969720 |
| Subject Matter | Roundtable on Patrick Hayden |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088220969720
Journal of International Political Theory
2021, Vol. 17(1) 18 –19
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088220969720
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Of Camus and Rebels
Chamsy el-Ojeili
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Each sentence, every theme, all of the stops taken and the emphases made, his beautiful
little book on Camus (Hayden, 2016) feels to me like a rich guide to Patrick as a scholar
and as a person.
Camus’s The Rebel was a point of enthusiastic discussion when Patrick and I first met,
at one of those dreadful New Staff induction sessions, in 2003. We immediately hit it off,
in part, through a shared embarrassed discomfort with, and distaste for, this dimension of
organisational life – ice-breaking games, sessions on ‘infotaining teaching’, intimations
of the role that the cult of efficiency and abstraction would play even in university life
– but also around a surprising common affection for Wilhelm Reich. It was the highlight
of the first weeks of my academic career – just weird and delightful to be discussing mad
stuff like character armouring, the function of the orgasm, and the orgone accumulator in
this ridiculous setting.
We subsequently worked together on a number of book projects and regularly met up
to chat about intellectual, sporting, and everyday life matters. Our shared deep fondness
for the thin red line of libertarian socialism, those who lost – there in Camus, but also in
Arendt, another thinker close to Patrick’s heart – was, I think, an important point of trust
and connection for us, and this quiet affinity is one I think runs through Patrick’s work,
from Deleuze to cosmopolitanism.
It’s there in the same way in the Camus book, as the steady, unobtrusive moral and
political heartbeat of the work. And, in his treatment of Camus, more generally, Patrick
is there – a gentle, sometimes withering, affection for human folly, a conscientious but
never grandstanding insistence on limits, and a modest, stubborn defiance about injustice
and micro-fascisms. In all of these ways, Patrick has been something of a Camusian
angel on my shoulder, calmly checking my more totalising tendencies, my Jacobin temp-
tations, and my salvationist, progressivist sensibilities, as well as my long, winding sen-
tences and maximalist punctuation – in short, my excesses, abstraction, and lack of
measure.
Corresponding author:
Chamsy el-Ojeili, School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington 6012,
New Zealand.
Email: chamsy.el-ojeili@vuw.ac.nz
969720IPT0010.1177/1755088220969720Journal of International Political Theoryel-Ojeili
research-article2021
Roundtable on Patrick Hayden
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