Albert Camus's augury of post-truth necropolitics : reading The Plague in the twenty-first century

Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947; translated 1948) depicts interrelated medical, bureaucratic, social, ethical, and epistemological crises connected to a bubonic plague epidemic in the city of Oran, Algeria. The novel’s portrayal of these crises has ongoing relevance to contemporary society, where administrative power is wielded by the few, and post-truth skepticism of authority proliferates. The novel’s characters, who largely comprise the city’s colonial elite, are centrally involved in the “management” of the epidemic; this essay reads their actions as reflecting the deployment of necropower in a post-truth social climate. In doing so, it argues that The Plague’s implication that death has the capacity to inspire redemptive revelation for the central characters (especially the protagonist and narrator, Bernard Rieux) is, in fact, largely illusory, as they do not come to fully recognize nor reject their necropower.