Albert Jack now turns his attention to the mysteries that have haunted us throughout history. Albert Jack's Ten Minute Mysteries
...The temptation to resort to violence runs like a thread through Albert Camus works, & can be viewed as an additional key to understanding his literary productions & philosophical writings. His short life & intellectual attitudes were almost all connected with brutality & cruel circumstance. At the age of one he lost his father, who was killed as a soldier of the French army at the outbreak of the First World War. He passed his childhood & youth in colonial Algeria, no doubt experiencing degrees of inhumanity of that difficult period; & in his first years in conquered France he was editor of an underground newspaper that opposed the Nazi occupation. In the years following the Liberation, he denounced the Bolshevist tyranny & was witness to the dirty war between the land of his birth & his country of living, France. Camus preoccupation with violence was expressed in all facets of his work as a philosopher, as a political thinker, as an author, as a man of the theatre, as a journalist, as an intellectual, & especially as a man doomed to live in an absurd world of hangmen & victims, binders & bound, sacrificers & sacrificed, crucifiers & crucified. Three main metaphors of western culture can assist in understanding Camus thinking about violence: the bound Prometheus, a hero of Greek mythology; the sacrifice of Isaac, one of the chief dramas of Jewish monotheism; & the crucifixion of Jesus, the founding event of Christianity. The bound, the sacrificed & the crucified represent three perspectives through which David Ohana examines the place of ideological violence & its limits in the works of Albert Camus.