Hazel Barnes was one of the most careful American readers of French existentialism in the twentieth century. She translated Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in 1956, a labor that shaped how generations of American students encountered Continental thought. When she turns to Camus, though, something interesting happens on the page. Her summary of The Myth of Sisyphus is partly accurate and partly an act of quiet translation in the other direction, pulling Camus toward a Sartrean humanism that Camus himself spent the last decade of his life resisting.

Continue reading → The Silence Camus Refused to Domesticate: Hazel Barnes, The Myth of Sisyphus, and the Cost of a Sympathetic Misreading