BCDU (2014) – absurdo

(BCDU BCDU CASSIN, Barbara (ed). Dictionary of Untranslatables. Princenton: Princeton University Press, 2014 )

The absurd, as a sensation of the absence of meaning, is also something experienced ( see ERLEBEN ). Defined by Albert Camus Camus
Albert Camus ALBERT CAMUS (1913-1960) as the “mystery and strangeness of the world,” it belongs to the French vocabulary of existentialism, which we have explored in its German source ( see DASEIN ). It is an ontological affect broadly described in the works of Schelling Schelling
Friedrich Schelling FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH SCHELLING (1775-1854) , Kierkegaard Kierkegaard SØREN AABYE KIERKEGAARD (1813-1855) , Freud Freud Sigmund Freud , and Heidegger ( see ANXIETY and, more generally, MALAISE ) in connection with “facticity” ( see TATSACHE, Box 1 ).

In a specific, positive way, the three components of the absurd—logical, linguistic, and existential—are at work in the French word esprit; “nonsense” refers to a specific form of humor related in English to “wit” and in German to Witz ( see NONSENSE, WITTICISM ).