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‘Forgive Me Reader, for I Have Sinned’: Disponibilité and Confession in the Works of Albert Camus

ABSTRACT In this article I assess the effects of confessional writing as a philosophical and literary technique, as used by Albert Camus. Drawing on Gabriel Marcel’s concept of disponibilité, I suggest that confessional writing is used as a means of bringing about an intersubjective experience of the Other. The unmediated and vulnerable communication of this form of writing acts in place of the direct, second-person communication we experience in the real world, and the reader is thus situated in a phenomenological space where their empathetic and emotional responses are fully engaged, as if in intimate conversation. I suggest that, for Camus, the openness we experience in encountering a narrative text is of moral significance, as it encourages reflection on the suffering and inner lives of others in a way that otherwise might not be possible, and from this activity we may improve our moral acuity. In bringing together both fictionalised autobiography and philosophical confessional literature, this article endeavours to give the first ever full account of Camus’s vision of the role of life writing in relation to philosophy.