ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that Albert Camus’s post-World War II novella The Fall narrates a bridge of complicity between medicine and law, implicat­ing both professions in the Nazi formulation of race. Rather than reading the work as a broadly construed allegory of the Holocaust, it situates Camus’s text within the framework of the Nuremberg trials and their judgment of perpetrators in professional rather than in wide-ranging moral terms The essay concludes by examining Camus's use of the sub­junctive, which posits juridical force as the act of imagining alternatives to the past, and using these alternative scenarios as a basis for judgment.