Guilty Professions: Specters of Sameness in Camus's The Fall

Abstract

This chapter argues that Albert Camus's post-World War II novella The Fall narrates a bridge of complicity between medicine and law, implicating both professions in the Nazi formulation of race. Rather than reading the work as a broadly construed allegory of the Holocaust, it situates Camus's text within the framework of the Nuremberg trials and their judgment of perpetrators in professional rather than in wide-ranging moral terms. The essay concludes by examining Camus's use of the subjunctive, which posits juridical force as the act of imagining alternatives to the past, and using these alternative scenarios as a basis for judgment.

Citation

Reichman, R. (2005), "Guilty Professions: Specters of Sameness in Camus's The Fall", Anderson, M. (Ed.) Toward a Critique of Guilt: Perspectives from Law and the Humanities (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 36), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 31-50. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(05)36003-0