The Threatening Other or Very Own? EU Drawbacks and the Politics of Self-Undoing

There are two ways for an intellectual to betray at present, and in both cases he betrays because he accepts a single thing - that separation between labor and culture. The first way is characteristic of bourgeois intellectuals who are willing that their privileges should be paid for by the enslavement of the workers. They often say that they are defending freedom, but they are defending first of all the privileges freedom gives to them, and to them alone. The second way is characteristic of intellectuals who think they are leftist and who, through distrust of freedom, are willing that culture, and the freedom it presupposes, should be directed, under the vain pretext of serving a future justice. In both cases the profiteers of injustice and the renegades of freedom ratify and sanction the separation of intellectual and manual labor which condemns both labor and culture to impotence. Albert Camus, speaking at Uppsala University, after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (Camus 1957)