Living together in the Absurd
Making sense when the world doesn’t make sense
Workshop
Tuesday 21 April 2026
University of Cambridge
Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics
In collaboration with
University of Heidelberg and Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Location:
Room 336, Raised Faculty Building
University of Cambridge
- Programme -
Opacity
9:30: Alex Kostova (Sofia) - ‘Neti Neti and the Limits of Sense-making. Upanisads in Camus’s Early Notes and the Ethics of Lucid Agency’
10:00: Philipp Schmidt-Boddy (Heidelberg) - ‘Beyond Worldviews? Time, Other, and the Absurd’
Finitude
10:50: Invited lecture: Colin Davis (London) - ‘Why (not) Kill? Camus, Fiction and the Death of the Other’
11:50: Marie Chabbert (Utrecht) - ‘Life Without Guarantees: Absurdity in The Age of Extinctions’
Transmission
13:50: Samuel Buchoul (Cambridge) - ‘Falling into the Text: Reading Camus, or the Pleasure of Responsibility’
14:20: Raúl Arango Pérez (Barcelona) - ‘Emerging from the Wound of the Absurd: The Autopoietic Subject and the Existential Path in Camus’
Sensibility
15:10: Anna Rémuzon (Paris) - ‘Representing the Absurd : Kafkaism and Defragmentation in Contemporary Art’
15:40: David Chandler (London) - ‘Testimony and the Pursuit of an Authentic Life’
Dwelling
16:30: Lucy Benjamin (Edinburgh) - ‘The Absurd Acquisition: A Fragment of Housing’
17:00: Final discussion
- Aims of the workshop -
This workshop aims to revisit Albert Camus’s notion of the Absurd through the lens of today’s multi-crises and multifarious challenges. According to Camus, the world we live in is absurd. While this can become manifest to us in nearly any situation, Camus is adamant that the world’s absurdity is not owing to any specific features. Rather, it is intrinsically relational and results from the unresolvable tension of two elements: the unbridgeable hiatus between a reason that seeks understanding and a world that remains strictly irrational. If it is our understanding that opens up the world for us, at the same time, the world irrevocably resists being fully grasped. The absurdity thus creates a human desire for clarity that will never see its fulfilment. The experience of the Absurd posits an existential shock that shatters any worldview and destroys all hope for a safe harbour.
But if Camus thought of the Absurd as a universal existential condition, he also acknowledged that history, and especially the modern times, provided a qualitative intensification of this experience of the Absurd. In 1945 Europe, the widening gap between hopes and reality could seem at first to threaten the very possibility of any understanding, and discourage any ambition to contribute actively to change. Eighty years later, with the acceleration of the environmental crisis, the impending return of fascism and the weakening of the social fabric under the pressure of technology and ideology, new hopes have tarnished and the experience of the Absurd is invoked from nearly all sides.
How should we act in such a world that cannot possibly make sense?
The aim of the workshop is to address this question by bringing together different perspectives from philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry on existentialism and the Absurd.
It explores how reflecting on the Absurd may disrupt and challenge contemporary debates on self, world, and others but also significantly inform approaches in social philosophy, political philosophy, ethics, and psychotherapy.
Everybody welcome. Please send us an email if you plan to participate.