Judging Indifference: Social Norms, Emotional Discipline, and Cultural Violence in Camus’s The Stranger

Abstract

Albert Camus’s The Stranger has long been read as a paradigmatic text of absurdist philosophy, with critical attention primarily directed toward Meursault’s emotional indifference and existential detachment. Such interpretations, however, tend to approach indifference as an individual psychological or philosophical condition, thereby overlooking the cultural mechanisms through which it is rendered socially intolerable. Drawing on perspectives from cultural studies, this article re-examines The Stranger as a narrative of cultural judgment in which emotional norms function as instruments of social regulation. The article argues that Meursault is condemned not for the act of murder itself but for his failure to conform to culturally sanctioned modes of emotional expression. Through a close reading of key episodes—including the funeral, the courtroom proceedings, and Meursault’s narrative restraint—the study demonstrates how emotional discipline operates as a form of cultural power that distinguishes the “normal” subject from the deviant one. The courtroom is thus interpreted not merely as a legal space but as a cultural theater in which moral legitimacy is publicly constructed and enforced. By foregrounding emotional normativity as a mechanism of exclusion, this study reframes Meursault’s indifference as a site where cultural authority, social conformity, and symbolic violence intersect, thereby offering a culturally grounded reinterpretation of Camus’s canonical text.