The Humanism of Renaud Camus
An introduction to a much-misunderstood figure, or, Fundamental Ontology for the 21st Century
This is a slightly longer version of a talk I gave at the American Politics and Government Summit, organized by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in November 2024.
Since I’m writing a sympathetic essay about a controversial figure, let’s be clear about who Renaud Camus is. In a May 2022 essay for Compact, I wrote this brief biography of him:
Renaud Camus was once known as a man of the left. After being cut out of his parents’ will for revealing his homosexuality, he marched in the May 1968 protests in support of gay rights. In the 1970s, he ran in the most avant-garde circles in France. Roland Barthes wrote the preface to Camus’s quasi-autobiographical 1981 novel, Tricks, which recounted homosexual encounters in several countries. Camus coined new terms to describe the gay lifestyle. Even now, at age 75, he in many ways remains an exemplary liberal. He praises Nelson Mandela as a liberator of his people from a foreign oppressor. He mocks the “Putinolatry” of some on the European right. He deplores Jean-Marie Le Pen and denounces anti-Semitism…Camus categorically rejects violence. He mocks conspiracy theories. He abhors pseudo-scientific racism that reduces cultural and civilizational complexity to genetic factors. He criticizes rapid cultural change brought about by immigration of any kind, not Muslim immigration as such. And as a committed environmentalist who opposes population growth, he denounces efforts to boost the white birth rate. “Our culture, civilization, and people are under no menace whatsoever of demographic disappearance per se,” he said in a recent interview with me. “Indigenous Europeans or white Americans have never been so numerous in the past as they are now.” He jokes that Putin is a great president because the Russian population has declined on his watch.
My goal in writing sympathetically about Camus is to enable fair consideration and criticisms of his views. That’s only possible if we take the time to understand what he actually thinks.
If paid subscribers want to read the Compact essay and run into a paywall, please email me at nathan.pinkoski@gmail.com and I’ll send you a pdf.
In the 21st century, to be Western means to be replaceable. There’s one person who understands the full contours of that: Renaud Camus. Because of this, I believe that Camus is poised to become one of the most important political thinkers of our century.
Camus owed his initial fame to avant-garde literature. Had it not been for a single event, Camus’s thought might have been consigned to the ambiguous enclaves of postmodern literary theory. In 1999, while writing a guide for tourists for Hérault, a region in southern France, Camus noticed women in veils, gathering near a well in a small village. Mass immigration had hit rural France, and the migrants were not changing their customs to match France’s culture.
Camus does not, however, jump immediately from this observation to a general critique of mass immigration. Rather, he pauses, and asks why ‘noticing’ the effects of mass immigrations is so hard to do. There are simple, obvious answers. Political correctness; indoctrination; a libido insciendi, a conscious desire not to know or see. But we often doubt, deny, or downplay what we notice because we Westerners have long been subject to a deeper epistemic shift.
We live in an age when the authority of our perception has been replaced by scientific authority. If you want to know what light is, you can’t describe it yourself; you must talk to a physicist. If you want to know what a woman is, you’d have to ask a biologist. The real world is not what we see, hear, and feel ourselves; reality needs to be mediated by scientific authority. This epistemic shift, which Camus calls “the scientization of the experience of living,” has wide-ranging political and social implications.[1] When science becomes the authoritative standard of truth, those who speak on behalf of science become our clerics. When scientific experts speak, the public is “dispossessed of their vision, their personal experience, their judgement.” We outsource our own faculties of perception and judgment to experts, and we often prefer to live with the result because it takes away the “pain or grief” that comes with judgement.[2] We Westerners have come to accept that our perception is replaceable. Nothing is lost by this change. Perhaps we’re even better off.
This shift to scientific expertise privileges one particular form of knowledge over others. It displaces traditional modes of understanding reality, particularly music, literature, and poetry. Scientism is the antagonist of high culture. Its challenge to high culture is rendered even more powerful by the shift in class that Camus argues took place in the latter half of the 20th century.
Every culture has a referent social class; culture relies on a particular social class to create and transmit it. France’s classics in music, literature, and poetry were first written and handed down by the aristocracy. However, it was the 19th century bourgeoisie that turned this relatively insular culture into a public one, building museums, concert halls, and opera houses. Moreover, the bourgeoisie invented and promulgated national education to transmit this culture to the next generation. This educational system focused on elite education and touted its capacity to raise provincials to the highest levels of society. It was democratic; it reached millions. Yet it sought excellence, virtue, resilience, and manliness, strengthening and defending the cultural inheritance.
However, democracy—Camus means equality—burst the bounds of politics and law. It began to change society. With the onset of what Camus calls “hyperdemocracy,” the educational preoccupations of the bourgeois were denigrated as elitist and anti-democratic. The focus on excellence became a scandal. A new culture emerged, shaped by the new social class that replaced the old. This new referent class is the petty bourgeoisie; their revolution, Camus contends, is the revolution of May 1968. Petty bourgeois culture is pop culture. Cartoons and detective stories replace literature; music means pop music, which also passes for poetry. The new culture was embarrassed by its connection to the old. It cut that connection and pushed the representatives of the old bourgeois culture aside. It is a culture of eradication, a cancel culture in the full sense of the term. This culture extends far beyond censorship to denigrate the past and those who try to transmit it. Its goal is to remove our memory of the past. Downstream of this transformation, we come to believe that our educated class is replaceable. And since this class produced our culture, it also means that we believe our culture is replaceable. Nothing is lost by the change. Perhaps we’re even better off.
This is the phenomenon that Camus has called at various points the Great Deculturation, Decivilization, or the Little Replacement.
We can now begin to understand how those veiled Muslims ended up in rural France. The French, along with other Westerners, stopped seeing their own culture as something excellent, something worth protecting and transmitting. It could be substituted out for something novel. If culture is replaceable, and if nothing is lost in the change, then the imposition of new cultures upon the old—and new peoples upon the old who bring new cultures—poses no danger. The old way of life, the old culture and the old people, are all expendable. Indeed, replacing them might even make us better off. Nations, entire peoples, are replaceable.
By losing the capacity to perceive their own cultural excellence, Westerners lost the capacity to perceive how mass immigration would displace their own cultures and peoples. Mass immigration isn’t the work of a cabal, but of a cultural shift within the West that made mass immigration appear possible and desirable. The Little Replacement created the conditions for the Great Replacement.
And that, Camus argues, is the world we have lived in since this process took off in the 1970s. Our peoples are being replaced.
Camus is not a prophet, but rather someone who chronicles this transformation. This in itself would be a notable achievement, but Camus takes us deeper than chronology of our epoch. He wants us to grasp its full philosophical import. So far we’ve noted epistemic change, class change, and cultural change. We’ve drawn attention to demographic change, the substitution of one people for another. But this doesn’t fully explain how we got here; to do that, we need to understand the anthropological change that has taken place.
The doctrines of multiculturalism have us think that where there was once one culture and one people, there can now be many cultures, but still one people. You can add (and subtract) cultures from a people over time; this, multiculturalists argue, is simply Western history. We’ve always been a diverse society, and mass immigration from the global south is just another stage of it. The next step is to argue that the idea of a European culture, European civilization, or indeed the idea of Western civilization itself relies on constructs. Western civilization isn’t real. Those who believe that it is mask their racist beliefs, rooted in white supremacy. The need to fight racism lends an urgency to attacking anyone who tries to provide a more substantive definition of European culture, European civilization, or Western civilization. Camus spots that the moral language underwriting multiculturalism—antiracism—requires us to deconstruct incessantly our definitions of culture, people, nation, and civilization, always questioning their reality. At the same time, antiracism demands that we accelerate the change of people and culture, which makes the old reality seem more and more fantastical. “Antiracism is the process of finishing off European civilization,” quips Camus.[3]
But the real problem here is much deeper than debates about how we define the French culture or the French people, or Western civilization writ large. If you think cultures can be added to and subtracted from human populations over time, without changing anything substantial about their communities, then what do you think human beings actually are? Camus has the answer: resources.
To resolve the tension between many cultures and one people, the presupposition of multiculturalism is that a people is not defined by a shared culture, but as a productive material unit. People are defined not by culture, but by economic output.
The transformation of humanity into resources is the process of 20th century managerialism or Taylorianism. Managerialism is more than just a set of methods to boost production in the workplace or standardize machinery; it’s a mode of encountering reality, and has its own anthropology and fundamental ontology. Managers see the world in terms of resources to be utilized, what Martin Heidegger calls “standing-reserve.” Workers are taught to perceive themselves in the same way, which makes them more compliant, easier to administer, and easier to replace. Men are treated and arranged as machines. In Camus’s vocabulary, they are “undifferentiated human matter.”
This is Camus’ richest argument. In the 19th century, democracy began to break the bounds of politics and redefined our social, cultural, and moral order. It produced homo democraticus (or perhaps homo americanus), who perceives the world through the lens of equality, which is to say sameness. By the 20th century, this hyperdemocracy made us ashamed of excellence and ashamed of our inheritance. Tocqueville foresaw all that, but something else was happening alongside this. Management broke the bounds of industry and redefined our very social, cultural, and moral order. And this has come with a silent but startling anthropological change. It produced what we might call globo homo economicus, who perceives the world through the lens of replacism.[4]
For Camus, the Great Replacement—mass immigration—may be the political issue of our times, but it is not the issue. The issue is the managerial, mechanical, technological revolution that substitutes us out for machines. We have learned that our humanity is replaceable.
So as Camus puts it in the Appeal of Colombey:
“A specter is haunting Europe and the world. It is replacism, the tendency to replace everything with its normalized, standardized, interchangeable double: the original by its copy, the authentic by its imitation, the true by the false, mothers by surrogate mothers, culture by leisure activities and entertainment, knowledge by diplomas, the countryside and city by the universal suburb, the native by the non- native, Europe by Africa, men by women, men and women by robots, peoples by other peoples, humanity by a savage, undifferentiated, standardized, infinitely interchangeable posthumanity.”[5]
As this passage indicates, Camus grasps the full implications of technological change and raises the urgent question of the human place in that revolutionary upheaval. Replacism demands everything to be reordered into standing-reserve. Limits and borders interfere with that. Openness—destroying borders and limits—is managerialism’s moral imperative. The borderless ontology of replacism affects the large—nations, whole peoples. But it also affects the small—the human body. In the borderless ontology of replacism, the human body itself becomes a resource. Indeed, the imperative to commodify the human body drives the whole project of replacism. In Camus’s argument, the Great Replacement is a “sort of surrogacy implemented at the scale of the whole planet.”[6] Why does he say this?
Ultimately, to understand replacism requires us to go beyond observing demographic displacement, important though that is. We need to examine the changes replacism brings at the most intimate human level: in the complex dynamic of dependence that develops between a pregnant mother and her unborn child.
Surrogacy eviscerates that dynamic. In gestational surrogacy, women’s bodies are contracted out to a third party in order to produce a child, according to the stipulations of the contract. The goal of the contract is to sever all the connections that develop between the surrogate mother and growing child. For the contract to work, the surrogate mother must be replaced by the adoptive mother, which is to say, the consumer. The perversity of surrogacy lies not just in the commodification of the mother’s body, or the contractual, consumer relationship at work here. Surrogacy takes something ineffably valuable—human life—and turns that into the product of a contract. The child himself becomes a consumer good, to be produced, bought, and sold by adults. And the relationship that the child develops with his mother, in utero—his dependence on her, his knowledge of her voice and warmth and smell—is severed by contractual obligation. Surrogacy is replacism at is apogee; it takes the most essential, organic, intimate form of love there is and sells it. That’s what it does with all our relationships. If mothers are dispensable—if we are to think that a newborn is not wronged by what happens in surrogacy, that the relationship he has with his mother can be discarded without loss—then all our loves are dispensable. All relationships, all our most precious loves from the familial to the national, are replaceable.
Once the human body is reduced to the dynamic of producer, consumer, and product, then the emotional, psychological, and physiological attachments pregnancy produces between the surrogate mother and gestating child become devoid of significance. At best, they are distractions from achieving the terms of the contract; at worst they are obstacles that prevent the parties from realizing the terms of the contract. In any case, the ideal is for the parties to complete the contract, then move on to the next gestational exchange. One should act as if one were free of incarnate attachments, as if one were an artificial womb or robot. So as Camus rightly sees, surrogacy points toward a new posthuman type. The ideal human body is turned into placeless, sexless, interchangeable flesh. Our bodies are replaceable.
The final transformation is a transformation in the way we are governed. The world of “economism, financialization, Davos, and davocracy” requires administration by “Great Financiers, banks, multinationals, robots, business, Big Tech.”[7] Setting up this administrative system divides those who wield power from those who do not. Those who wield power are the managers. For many critics of capitalism or neoliberalism, we are moving into a world where the managers are equivalent to the old aristocrats or feudal overlords. But this misses two features that distinguish the new order from the medieval world. First, with managerialism, we are not talking about rule by a class of aristoi, of leaders who create, defend, and transmit high culture. That’s gone. After the Great Deculturation, the Davos set transmits the global culture of eradication; they transmit an anti-culture. So Camus describes the managers as Davocrats. They are focused on extending managerialism further and deeper, destroying all the communities, ecologies, and relationships that get in the way of seeing the world as standing reserve. As the transhumanist Yuval Noah Harari puts it, the Davocrats want to keep encouraging each other to give up meaning in exchange for power.[8] Second, the Davocrats have no sense of benevolent noblesse oblige toward those whom they manage. The powerless are purged of their humanity.
In this society, self-government is a contradiction in terms. The human material exists to be managed. The light of the regimes that were once the pride and joy of the West, those cities on the hill—constitutional republics, liberal democracies—fade out. They recede into our fading, denigrated memory, just as the absolute monarchies did before them. Faced with the creep of Davocracy, we learn that our governments are replaceable.
Under Davocracy, Camus likens the world to a human park. It may have many showy displays, but human beings are the commodity. They are part of the material and instruments that make up the spectacle. Yet not everyone can be put to use at all times. Some will not be bought; some will lose their usefulness. Those who are left out are perceived as abandoned inventory. The losers of globalization, of multiculturalism, of antiracism, of mass migration. The men condemned to live without meaningful work. The women who must live in fear of walking at dusk, accepting an increased probability of becoming a statistic. The surrogate babies abandoned or killed when those who contracted them into life change their minds. The excess embryos discarded after IVF.
This is the worldview that rules over us and shapes who we are. We Westerners have acquiesced to inhumanity. And this recalls some of the claims made in the ambiguous enclaves of postmodern literary theory. One of the claims is that the experience of colonization is not so much about brute force, but about acquiring a mindset of inferiority. This is how colonization is effective. That’s an insight worth bearing in mind today, as we, like Camus, try to confront this system.
Westerners must task themselves with getting rid of their bad shepherds, their ersatz educators, their occupiers, and the mediocre managers—Davocrats—who collaborate with the occupiers. But more importantly, we must bring an end to the lens of inferiority through which we have come to regard ourselves. We must resist the anthropology that reduces our humanity to a commodity of flesh, an anthropology that hollows out our interiority, an ontology that will not permit that interiority to have any substantial existence. Our task is not to preserve or defend the West. If Camus is right, we are way past that point. Our task is to decolonize the West.
[1] Renaud Camus, “The Word ‘Race’,” in The Deep Murmur, translated by Ethan Rundell (Vauban Books, 2024), 21.
[2] Renaud Camus, Dépossession, (Paris: La Nouvelle Librairie, 2022) 67.
[3] “Elegy for Enoch Powell,” in The Deep Murmur, 8.
[4] As Mary Harrington observes in her own incisive essay series on Camus, the transition from homo democraticus/americanus to globo homo economicus is not just a transformation from democracy to managerialism, but also a transformation from the American republic to the global American empire, the empire of moral managerialism. See especially “Nomos of the Airport,” https://www.maryharrington.co.uk/p/camus-part-2-nomos-of-the-airport
[5] Renaud Camus, “Appeal of Colombey,” in Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings, edited by Louis Betty (Vauban Books, 2023), 201.
[6] “Appeal of Colombey,” 201.
[7] “Elegy for Enoch Powell,” 5.
[8] Mary Harrington makes this connection between Camus’ interpretation of the world and the transhumanist dark lord. See https://www.maryharrington.co.uk/p/camus-part-2-nomos-of-the-airport.
Thanks for posting this. The whole panel was great Saturday.