Conclusion

Summary

As we come to the end of this project to think and rethink some of the key notions that populate discourses about modern society and politics – namely, freedom, law and progress – it will be helpful to recall where we began, with the apartment manager whose thinking, in the wake of his daughter’s death, had undermined him to the point where he took his own life. For Camus, as we saw, this was not just a tragic turn of events in a person’s life but reflected a basic human condition that Camus expressed, famously, in a single sentence: ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide’ (Camus 1955, 3). When it comes to matters of life and death – whether the fateful choice of the person committing suicide, or the actions of a state, or those acting on its behalf, in carrying out what it takes to be justified murder – Camus argued that no set of determinate facts could ultimately justify the lives that are taken, nor, and more importantly, could a determinate set of facts justify or ground the meaning of life itself. It is this confrontation with the limits to our justifications, our search for reasons, that becomes, for Camus, the ‘one truly serious philosophical problem’.

As we developed the implications of Camus’ insight, his undermining thought, we stressed a distinction that was crucial to Deleuze’s own philosophy. This was the distinction between what I called truth questions – ‘What is X?’ questions, where one looks to a determinate fact or state of affairs for an answer, to give us the truth of a situation – and relevance questions, the ‘how?’, ‘why?’, ‘who?’ and ‘in what case?’ questions that forever threaten to undermine the security and stability of the answers to our truth questions. In the case of the apartment manager Camus discusses, for instance, we saw that no determinate facts could end the undermining thinking he was engaged in, and this for the very reason that this thinking was motivated by problems and questions that no determinate facts could satisfy. This was why Camus saw such questions regarding life and death, questions concerning why, how, and in what cases one should live, to be the true philosophical questions.