Türkçe baþlýklar için buraya bakýnýz
by Martin Kramer
A hero of French letters took sides with a passion.
Prisoner of Hate:
Jean Genet and PalestineCommentary
On the morning of 19 September 1982, the French writer Jean Genet visited the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila near Beirut. Two nights earlier, Israel had permitted its Lebanese allies to enter the surrounded camp, and they had massacred its Palestinian inhabitants. A walk through Shatila, wrote Genet, “resembled a game of hopscotch. . . . A photograph doesn’t show the flies nor the thick white smell of death. Neither does it show how you must jump over the bodies as you walk along from one corpse to the next.”1
Shatila inspired Genet to one last self-invention. He had been a thief and prisoner, then a world-famous novelist and dramatist. Now he would be reborn as a witness for the Palestinians. Prisoner of Love, his book-length memoir of the Palestinian fedayeen, appeared a month after his death in 1986.2 This was the first new writing Genet had produced in years, rekindling an interest in his life and work. Edmund White’s masterful biography more than satisfies that interest.3Whatever White’s intent, he has reminded us that Genet, rather than embodying some collective disorder of his time, acted largely upon his own disorder. White thus finally breaks the spell of Jean-Paul Sartre’s long-winded speculation, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (1952). That book, which canonized Genet at the age of forty-two, purported to be an “existential psychoanalysis,” based on Sartre’s lengthy conversations with his subject: an abandoned child, vagabond thief, army deserter, and homosexual prostitute who wrote five remarkable books in prison that swept him to the summit of French letters. But as Sartre himself acknowledged, Genet practiced certain economies when it came to self-revelatory truth, and so White relentlessly seeks out corroboration. Many of the documents, it turns out, refuse to corroborate.
White first shows how thoroughly Genet’s own version of his childhood—drawn in sharp lines of poverty and abuse—was a myth, an affectation given credibility by Sartre. Born in Paris in 1910, Genet had been abandoned by his unwed mother and made a ward of the state. But the carpenter’s family entrusted with his care gave Genet ample attention and affection. Raised in a farming village, he was not made to work, prospered in school, had plenty of books, and scored high on examinations. Contrary to his later claim, he did not have to steal to survive. (“You couldn’t call them thefts,” recalls one classmate. “He took some pennies from his mother to buy sweets, all kids do that.”)
The effect of these first chapters is to suggest that Genet largely fabricated a grim childhood to fit his chosen persona as renegade. Precocious and rebellious, the dandified Genet refused, as he put it, “to become an accountant or a petty official.” And so he escaped from every apprenticeship, opting to become a petty thief. This eventually landed him in the notorious reform penitentiary at Mettray, a society of male outcasts governed by a counter-code of homosexuality, theft, and betrayal which Genet would later celebrate.
After stints of military service and desertions, Genet crossed Europe as a vagabond, and finally returned to Paris where he resumed his career of petty thievery and shoplifting, specializing in rare books. (“He may have been a thug,” writes White, “but he was a highly literary one.”) In the 1940s he was often in prison, where he wrote the novels and poems, beginning with Our Lady of the Flowers, which brought him to the attention of Jean Cocteau and the leading literary lights of Paris. They lobbied to save him from the life sentence of a repeat offender, and with the benefit of a pardon he settled into the role of the barely domesticated bad boy of French letters.
Genet’s “resolute aestheticism” is an acquired taste. His arresting language consistently displays genius, an achievement all the more astonishing in an author who left school at the age of twelve. The themes celebrated in his work—theft, murder, homosexual eroticism—have the usual appeal of that which is deemed “scandalous.” The frequent lack of narrative coherence adds a pastiche of the absurd. White briefly considers each of Genet’s works, but only to set them afloat on a river of detail about Genet’s couplings and uncouplings, both intellectual and physical. This is dense biography—no bedroom door left unopened, no literary liaison left unexplored to its furthest implication.
From this mass of detail, though, White discerns a striking pattern. Genet invested himselfcompletely in a succession of lovers and friends. He shared out his advances and royalties almost as soon as they were paid, setting up his favorites with houses while he lived in cheap hotels near train stations. But so many of Genet’s intimates ended badly, often by their own hand, that even Genet began to wonder whether he cast a malevolent spell. That he could infect others with a particularly virulent nihilism would soon be demonstrated on the larger canvas of politics.
Panthers and Palestine
In wartime Paris, when Genet first appeared on the literary scene, he practiced an indifference to politics. He said and wrote nothing political, and took both a German soldier and a member of the Resistance as lovers. In 1952, Genet informed Sartre that “in politics nothing new can be contributed by a homosexual,” since the significance of homosexuality was “a refusal to continue the world.” He often repudiated political readings of his plays, maintaining that they occupied “a domain where morality is replaced by the aesthetics of the stage.”
But the favorable reception of Genet’s work owed a great deal to changes in the political weather. This is particularly true of his best-known plays, The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Screens, all written during the 1950s. Through allusions to democracy’s corruption, racial oppression, and colonial domination, they tapped the growing self-doubt of France, Europe and America. That The Blacks ran Off Broadway for almost four years beginning in 1961 (with James Earl Jones in a leading role) can only be understood in the context of the rise of the civil-rights movement. And even if The Screens was, in White’s judgment, “more in praise of unregenerate individualism than of third-world nationalism,” it could only be read as an indictment of the war in Algeria, and could only be staged in France fours years after de Gaulle pulled out of the war. Even then, angry demonstrators disrupted performances.
When his literary inspiration was finally exhausted, Genet sought in politics a fulfillment that had eluded him in art. His books, he declared, were “part of a dream, a daydream. And since I outlived this dream, this daydream, I had to take action in order to achieve a sort of fullness of life.” But which action, and for whom? White observes that Genet thought politics “must be a purge of anger and not a reconciliation of differences.” That could only mean violence. But although Genet claimed to detest France, he found no “fullness” in its own purges of anger. (He showed up at the Sorbonne during the 1968 student uprising, but refused to address the crowd.)Abroad, however, conflicts seemed to embody the stylized contrast of black (men) against white (men) he had dramatized on the stage. “I wish I were Black,” he told the American novelist William Burroughs after he visited Chicago to write up the Democratic Convention in 1968. “I want to feel what they feel.” The fact that Genet spoke no passable English or Arabic only enhanced the aesthetic charge of the two causes he finally adopted: the Black Panthers and the Palestinians.
Genet’s affair with the Black Panthers brought him briefly again to America in 1970. He visited some fifteen campuses, lecturing in support of imprisoned Panther Bobby Seale and rubbing shoulders with such radical celebrities as Angela Davis, Jane Fonda, and Allen Ginsburg. For a while, writing on behalf of the Panthers filled his void: “Literature, as I practiced it formerly, was gratuitous. Today it is in the service of a cause. It is against America.” But Genet was never thoroughly taken by the Panthers, who were not the rigorous revolutionaries of his fantasy. Even before they broke up, Genet began his search anew; it now took him to an ungoverned corner of the kingdom of Jordan.
Genet’s sensuality had long been stimulated by the Arab world, beginning with his service as a soldier in Syria and Morocco. But it was the dramatic pose of the Palestinians that moved him to action. Genet described himself as “enthralled” by the Palestinian hijacking of civilian airliners to Jordan in August and (“Black”) September, 1970; a month later, he was with the fedayeen in northern Jordan, at the invitation of Yasir Arafat. The appeal of armed youths bordered on the erotic:The first two fedayeen were so handsome I was surprised at myself for not feeling any desire for them. And it was the same the more Palestinian soldiers I met, decked with guns, in leopard-spotted uniforms and red berets tilted over their eyes, each not merely a transfiguration but also a materialization of my fantasies.
Genet had found his redemption. He repeatedly returned to Jordan, logging some six months in the remote camps of the fedayeen. Genet freely described his bond with the Palestinians as an “irrational affinity,” resting “on an emotional—perhaps intuitive, sensual—attraction; I am French, but I defend the Palestinians wholeheartedly and automatically. They are in the right because I love them.”
Unfortunately for the Palestinians, Genet never developed their defense much beyond this. He detested King Husayn, who made war against the Palestinian fedayeen in 1970. But did his passion confer more rightness on his Arabs than the lifetime devotion of, say, Glubb Pasha, British adviser to the king, who had commanded and lived among Jordan’s bedouin troops? “I went to the Arab countries in 1920 as an ordinary regimental officer in the British Army,” wrote Glubb. “I stayed there for thirty-six years because I loved them.”4 Nor was Glubb alone. There are shelves of similarly enamored writing on armed Arabs in the hills and deserts east of the Jordan, beginning with T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It is still possible to read these texts as art, but no one thinks to trust them, and Genet’s Prisoner of Love is no exception.
The Judgment of Israel
Genet did not love the Jews. Sartre wrote that Genet “played” at being an anti-Semite: “When he’s cornered, he announces that he ‘could never sleep with a Jew’. Israel can rest at peace.” Sartre offered this explanation: “Since Genet wants his lovers to be executioners, he should never be sodomized by a victim. What repels Genet in Jews is that he finds himself in their situation.” But like so much of Sartre on Genet, this speculation completely misses the mark. Genet thoroughly eroticized those other victims of French racism, North African Arabs; an Algerian high wire artist named Abdallah became his most enduring love. And he later would perceive the Jews as particularly ruthless executioners.
White stays closer to the evidence, but cannot decide. In his introduction to Prisoner of Love, White claimed that Genet, while anti-Zionist, was not anti-Semitic. Genet saw Israelis as “master manipulators of the media as well as of brainwashing techniques, but his objections are political, not racist. He attacks Israeli policies, not ‘Jewish traits’ (the very phrase is racist).”5 In researching this biography, however, White did speak to Jews who heard Genet make offensive remarks, and this has persuaded him to pronounce the question of Genet’s anti-Semitism “an open one.” Still, in Genet’s defense, White avers that Genet never published a single anti-Semitic word, and that he was tied by friendship to several Jews.
But Genet’s off-hand remarks and friendships are beside the point. For Genet, Jews represented the living affirmation of morality over aestheticism. He thought himself covered by what he called a “thick black layer of Judaeo-Christian morality,” which he longed to strip away. The Palestinian struggle was very much his struggle precisely because Zionism, along with imperialism, were “the last incarnations of Judeo-Christian morality, which is itself the master of terms.” When Genet wrote that “words are terrible, and Israel is a terrifying manipulator of signs,” he meant both Israel in history and Israel the state.
Genet found even the alphabet of the Jews terrifying. Driving from Damascus to Israeli-surrounded Beirut in 1982, he sees Hebrew signs—“as painful as seeing Gothic lettering in Paris during the German occupation.”Most of the letters were squat and rectangular; they read from right to left in a broken horizontal line. One or two had a crane-like plume on top: three slim pistils bearing three stigmata and waiting for the bees who’d scatter their age-old, nay primeval, pollen all over the world.6
Genet recalled first seeing these letters in childhood, carved in stone: the letters of the law, repelling a man who believed in no preexisting law, who affirmed that rules had to be invented by man, that they should be “more aesthetic than moral,” and that his own rules “are against the rules, I mean against the law.” Israel, armed with its law and its signs, seems to Genet even more terrible than the imperialism it mimed: it was “a loathsome, temporal power, colonialist in a way which few dare to imitate, having become the Definitive Judge which it owes to its longstanding curse as much as to its chosen status”7 For Genet, who had stood before many judges, Israel’s judgment represented the definitive rap, which he could only beat by assimilating himself completely to the Palestinian struggle. He often said that the Palestinians did more for him than he for them. Indeed, they exonerated him.
In return, Genet gave the Palestinians bad counsel. Since Israel could always manipulate words and signs, Genet urged the Palestinians to use violence. Genet, for his part, would teach his own countrymen and Europeans in general not to “confuse the brutality of the Israelis with the violence of the Palestinians, which in my opinion in any case is good.” In 1972, the terrorist Black September seized Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, an operation that ended in a blaze of gunfire and death. Genet blamed Israel: “This death of the Jews was desired by Israel. It was necessary that ‘all Israel should lament,’ that the ‘Israelites should cry vengeance.’”8 But to the Palestinians, he acclaimed the “perfect logic” of Black September’s decision to carry the struggle to Europe. It was another example of Genet’s drawing beloved friends to strategies of self-destruction: Israel quickly took retaliation to Europe, within months claiming the lives of two of Genet’s dearest Palestinians, PLO representatives in Paris and Rome.And in the end, Genet failed to sway European opinion. His book on the Palestinians was delayed, and when in 1977 Genet extended his distinction between bad brutality and good violence to a defense of the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, it created a furor against him across Europe. From then until his death in 1986, he remained isolated, in the close company of a few Palestinian friends and a Moroccan vagabond, his last lover.
Beirut inspired one of Genet’s last creative bursts. His “Four Hours in Shatila” displays all that was brilliant and flawed in his committed essays. The description is riveting, as the reader meanders with Genet among the bloated, blackened corpses, observing each in clinical detail. But his political speculations are blurred and skewed, and suggest no exit. Genet could convey something of Palestinian suffering, but he had no plan to alleviate it. Indeed, such suffering contributed to his own equilibrium. “I would like the world not to change so that I can be against the world,” he said. And: “The day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side. The day the Palestinians become a nation like other nations, Iwill no longer be there.”
This sentiment is still shared by many other foreign friends of the Palestinian cause. Theirs, too, is a suffocating love. Genet once called Lawrence of Arabia an imposter, whose supposed friendship toward the Arabs concealed his function as an agent of Western imperialism. But Genet, “prisoner of love,” was perhaps the more insidious imposter: an agent of Western nihilism, urging freedom for the unfree, provided they forever remain prisoners of hate.
© Martin Kramer
Notes
1. Jean Genet, “Four Hours in Shatila,” Journal of Palestine Studies 12, no. 3 (spring 1983): 4-5.
2. Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Picador, 1989).
3. Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1993).
4. Sir John Bagot Glubb, A Soldier with the Arabs (New York: Harper, 1957), 37.
5. Edmund White, “Introduction,” in Genet, Prisoner of Love, xi-xii.
6. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 269-70.
7. Genet, “Four Hours in Shatila,” 16.
8. Jean Genet, “The Palestinians,” Journal of Palestine Studies 3, no. 1 (autumn 1973): 26,----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William Haver
The Onthological Priority of Violence On several Really Smart Things About Violence In Jean Genet’s Work
Through a consideration of the later texts of Jean Genet, this paper attempts to think the consequences, for thinking, of any thought of violence or terror insofar as it exceeds its instrumentality. It proceeds through a thought of singularity, a concomitant thought of multiplicity, and a reflection on the immanence of the senses, to a thought of violence as an ontologically constitutive articulation.
1The Thought of Violence
The first really smart thing Jean Genet said regarding the ontological priority of violence, in The Thief's Journal, is this: »Too many people think, I said to myself, who don't have the right to. They have not paid for it by the kind of undertaking which makes thinking indispensable to your salvation.« (Genet 1964, 84) More than twenty years later, in conversation with Tahar Ben Jelloun, he was to say this:
Insofar as [the Left] perpetuates Judeo-Christian kinds of reasoning and morality, I find myself incapable of identifying with it; it is more idealist than political, more annoying than rational. As for Sartre, I've understood for a long time that his political thought is pseudo-thought. To my mind, what is called Sartrean thought no longer exists. His position-taking is only the hasty judgment of an intellectual too pusillanimous to confront anything but his own fantasms. (Quoted by Ben Jelloun 1992, 94-95)
Or, again, in an interview with Michèle Manceaux à propos the Black Panthers, Genet said: »The non-violent stance of the Whites belongs to a moral dilettantism. Nothing else.« (Genet 1991b, 59
The questions I am trying to approach in my current work concern the situation of thinking with regard to violence insofar as it exceeds its instrumentality, insofar as it is also something other than negativity. What is at stake for thinking when it is a question of non-instrumental, or perhaps more accurately para-instrumental, violence? Can we think
consequently when what is at stake is terror? Or must we, insofar as we think we are thinking, resign ourselves to the philosophical tragedies of aporia? Can we think terror, violence in its non- or para-instrumentality, as also something other than aporia?The thought of terror always exceeds its concept; that is, the thought of terror cannot be
deduced from any principle of modern political thought – just as neither radical evil nor the sublime can be deduced from reason or any theology; just as trauma cannot be deduced from psychoanalysis. For what still counts as reason, for theology, for psychoanalysis, the sublime, radical evil, or trauma constitute the points at which philosophy, theology, and psychoanalysis can no longer think philosophically, theologically, or psychoanalytically. Here, thinking stammers, or rather, thinking becomes nothing but a certain stammering; here, thinking can no longer think the fact as such of its thinking; here, thinking can only reflect upon itself as tragic aporia; here, thinking is sustained by no image of itself. It is in elaborating concepts of evil, the sublime, and trauma that modern thought has, sometimes in spite of itself, acknowledged the irreducibility of terror, but has necessarily been unable to think violence and terror in their irreducible positivity. And this because modern political philosophy (in what I take to be a broad sense of the term) has always aspired to a thinking experience of the political, to the subjectivity that the fact of thinking about an epistemological object called the political putatively constitutes.I proceed from the hypothesis (which I am certainly far from the first to put forward) that any consequent thinking with regard to what is at stake in terror must submit itself, perhaps impossibly, not to a thinking experience of the political, but to a political experience of thinking, a historical experience of thinking. Is this possible? And what would a political-historical experience of thinking be? Can we not do more than merely state
that thought does not cause itself, and that thinking is nevertheless unavoidable, but think from the fact of the experience of that provocation? Can we think not merely about our non-transcendence, our non-neutrality, our finitude, but from, and as, the experience of the non-transcendence, the non-neutrality, the finitude that we are? Can we think from the ontological priority of the political, from the experience of a violence that is no metaphor?I am aware that these are very fuzzy articulations of the questions. What, for example, might the term »experience« mean here? But it seems to me that any question about the
meaning of the experience of the political, of non-transcendence, non-neutrality, or terror immediately recuperates the question for philosophy, albeit under the sign of aporia; such experiences are neither meaningful nor meaningless, but precisely that which exceeds the question of meaning altogether. I proceed on the hypothesis that semantic and conceptual rigor is not the only intellectually rigorous approach to these questions. It is for this reason, and because I think he is one of the few to attempt to imagine violence in its positivity, that I take Genet to be my guide here. My itinerary goes something like this: from a thought of singularity (finitude, non-neutrality, historicity), to a thought of multiplicity (a sociality that is something other, and frankly something more, than what has long counted as public), to an »immanent« seeing which neither establishes nor conserves subjectivity in and as seeing; to a kind of »historiographical« practice as the art of disappearance, the embrace of history, the affirmation that violence as such isOn the Solitude of Things
The second really smart thing Jean Genet said regarding the ontological priority of violence consists of a constant meditation, traversing all his work, on the solitude of things. Of the hundreds of possible citations, let me select, to begin, just this, from The Thief's Journal:
[T]he mere appearance of things must have caused me that anxiety which at first was born of fear. Then the anxiety disappeared. I felt I was perceiving things with blinding lucidity. Even the most trivial of them had lost their usual meaning, and I reached the point of wondering whether it was true that one drank from a glass or put on a shoe. As I discovered the particular meaning of each thing, the idea of number deserted me. […]
I think I remember having the revelation of an absolute perception as I considered, in the state of luxurious detachment of which I have been speaking, a clothespin left behind on a line. The elegance and oddness of this familiar little object appeared before me without astonishing me. I perceived events themselves in their autonomy. The reader can imagine how dangerous such an attitude must have been in the life I was leading [as a thief], when I had to be wide-awake every minute and ran the risk of being caught if I lost sight of the usual meaning of objects. (Genet 1964, 129-130)
Commentary on this and nearly identical passages in Genet could go on forever; I will limit myself to four observations. First, that in the blinding lucidity of this seeing, things exceed their instrumentality, and to the extent that they do so, they lose their meaning (signification) as well as – but it is the same thing – their relation to other things; in this »absolute perception« (connaisance absolue, rather than any savoir), in this revelation, the disposition of things is entropic, coming to rest in the solitude of an absolute luminescence. In their singularity, things cannot be subsumed within any generality or universality; they therefore cannot be counted, and thus render the very idea of number incomprehensible (for, with Borges, Nancy, Deleuze and Guattari, and quite a number of others, we could only »count« singularities as »1, 1, 1, 1…« but then »one« could no longer be a number [for what is one without 2, 3, 4?]).
In their singularity, things are neither individual nor particular; they are incommensurable in their entropic solitude, and thus never coalesce into what might be called a »world.« Which threatens, in an essential way, the comportments, practices, and gestures that constitute the thief's subjectivity; this seeing is not the faculty of a subject. As Genet was to tell Hubert Fichte years later à propos works of art, »I more and more lose the feeling of being ›me‹ [moi], the feeling of ›I‹ [je] as anything other than the perception of a work of art.« (Genet 1991a, 146) Finally, the solitude of things is neither a matter of astonishment nor of enchantment; this is neither enlightenment nor magical realism. And if this constitutes a fetishism, it is quite contradictorily a disenchanted fetishism (sometimes called materialism, of course).
The luminescent entropy of the solitude of things, the disenchanted fetishism of this materiality – in short, this singularity – is at once always already accomplished at the same time that it is always yet to come, and yet neither precedes nor survives its articulation. It is always a
process of disenchantment, of an approach to absolute solitude, of a tendency toward entropy, a process (which perhaps amounts to a practice) of becoming-singular, becoming-nothing-but-thing, of becoming-nontranscendent. It is a kind of k_nosis (a kind of becoming-stupid, as Ronell has recently reminded us; Ronell 2002, 178-185) in a certain abjectification, a becoming-destitute or desperate, constant themes of Genet's writing. Indeed, the quotation with which I began is preceded by a passage that is not merely existential psychology:In short, the greater my guilt in your eyes, the more whole, the more totally assumed, the greater will be my freedom. The more perfect my solitude and uniqueness. By my guilt I further gained the right to intelligence. Too many people think, I said to myself, who don't have the right to. They have not paid for it by the kind of undertaking which makes thinking indispensable to your salvation. (Genet 1964, 84)
Here, guilt is the figure of that non-transcendence, non-neutrality, which alone vouchsafes the right to think. Evil, betrayal, crime, treason, the themes of more than the novels and plays, are all becomings, all trajectories of separation, passages of dissociation, flights from relationality, acts of more than metaphysical violence. All of these negations of relation, these non-relations, these anti-relations, are themselves relations. The constitutive – creative – relation in Genet is the violence of separation. At Mettray, the reformatory where Genet spent much of his adolescence and which preoccupies him throughout Miracle of the Rose, the only relation among the inmates are violent, erotic, and
therefore social relations. And in his last, avowedly post-literary work, Prisoner of Love, he recalls attending mass at the abbey of Monserrat:Then came the famous kiss of peace: after the elevation the Abbot kissed each of the acolytes on both cheeks, and they conveyed the salutation to each of the monks sitting in the choir. Then two choristers opened the screen doors and his reverence came down among the congregation, kissing some of us. I was one of those who received a kiss, but I broke the chain of fraternity by not passing it on. (Genet 1992, 33)
This thought of violent separation in betrayal, treason, crime, k_nosis, abjection, guilt, evil, desperation, and disenchanted fetishism is a thought of becoming-thing, of entropy: in short, at once an empiricism and a materialism. And let me repeat that this violent becoming is neither the realization of a possibility (because it is always already realized), nor is it ever accomplished in any teleology; it is a becoming with neither ground nor telos, which nevertheless
happens. If this thought of singularity is important for Genet, it is because it bears with it, equiprimordially as it were, a thought of multiplicity, a thought of sociality as the infinite proliferation of differences. But I have oversimplified; things are essentially more complicated than that.Jean Genet's Bachelor Machines
So here is the third really smart thing Genet said regarding the ontological priority of violence. It takes the form of an exchange with Nigel Williams for the BBC in 1985:
NW [Nigel Williams] – You have spoken in your books of love at the Colony [the reformatory at Mettray].
G [Genet] — You said ›l'amour‹? I heard ›la mort.‹
NW — Love, I don't want to talk about death, but of love.
G — Oh, yeah. What was the question?
NW — For you, I think, love began not with the family, but with a boy…
G — No, not with a boy, with two hundred! What are you saying?!
NW — With two hundred?
G — Well, one after another, after all…
(Genet 1991c, 299)But perhaps the strongest, and certainly most succinct of Genet's meditations on the equiprimordiality (as it were) of singularity and multiplicity comes in a story he tells at least twice, once in his essay on Giacometti and again, in a somewhat more rigorous articulation, in the remarkable essay What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn Into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet. After an important introductory paragraph, which I will have to ignore here, Genet begins his anecdote:
Something which seemed to resemble decay was in the process of cankering my former view of the world. One day, while riding in a train, I experienced a revelation: as I looked at the passenger sitting opposite me, I realized that every man has the same value as every other. I did not suspect (or rather, I did, I was obscurely aware of it, for suddenly a wave of sadness welled up within me and, more or less bearable, but substantial, remained with me) that this knowledge would entail such a methodical disintegration. Behind what was visible in this man, or further – further and at the same time miraculously and distressingly close – I discovered in him (graceless body and face, ugly in certain details, even vile: dirty moustache, which in itself would have been unimportant but which was also hard and stiff, with the hairs almost horizontal above the tiny mouth, a decayed mouth; gobs which he spate between his knees on the floor of the carriage that was already filthy with cigarette stubs, paper, bits of bread, in short, the filth of a third-class carriage in those days), I discovered with a shock, as a result of the gaze that butted against mine, a kind of universal identity of all men.
No, it didn't happen so quickly, and not in that order. The fact is that my gaze butted (not crossed, butted) that of the other passenger, or rather melted into it. The man had just raised his eyes from a newspaper and quite simply turned them, no doubt unintentionally, on mine, which, in the same accidental way, were looking into his. Did he then and there, experience the same emotion and confusion as I? His gaze was not someone else's: it was my own that I was meeting in a mirror, inadvertently and in a state of solitude and self-oblivion. (Genet 1988, 10-13)
You will already have recognized something of what interests me in this anecdote: that it is a matter of decay, disintegration, decomposition, disenchantment; that the eyes of the other, far from being windows on the soul, repel and obstruct, they separate but also melt into each other in identity rather than resemblance; that therefore, for Genet as for Rancière's ignorant schoolmaster or Clastres's savages, equality is not equivalence; that what is at stake here is therefore no intersubjective recognition, no ground for any humanism; that, as Genet later says, »[n]o man was my brother: every man was myself« (Genet 1988, 22); that the absolute discrimination of abject singularity and the no less absolute non-discrimination of multiplicity are exactly the same thing. Anonymous singularity, promiscuous multiplicity, this is the logic of a disenchanted – ultimately Buddhist – cruising, a logic of the clone. It is also a kind of vagabond or nomad thievery that is more subversive than any mere affront to bourgeois property and sensibility. As Didier Eribon and Scott Durham have both seen, what is at stake in this multiplicity is a radically other sense of sociality (Eribon 2001; Durham 1998, 117-185). In what is perhaps Genet's most profoundly Spinozist moment, he writes at the end of his life of his time with the fedayeen:
A little while ago I wrote that though I shall die, nothing else will. And I must make my meaning clear. Wonder at the sight of a cornflower, at a rock, at the touch of a rough hand – all the millions of emotions of which I'm made – they won't disappear even though I shall. Other men will experience them, and they'll still be there because of them. More and more I believe I exist in order to be the terrain and proof which show other men that life consists in the uninterrupted emotions flowing through all creation. The happiness my hand knows in a boy's hair will be known by another hand, is already known. And although I shall die, that happiness will live on. ›I‹ may die, but what made that ›I‹ possible, what made possible the joy of being, will make the joy of being live on without me. (Genet 1992, 314)
Which changes nothing, except everything.
That one is at the same time singular and identical to everyone else (something rather different than a concrete universal, by the way) is not an analytic deduction or knowing; rather, it is an absolute certitude grasped in what Genet called a »sudden intuition.« The possession of this certitude does not constitute a knowledge that would certify the subjectivity of the one who knows. On the contrary, this intuition in its certainty deprives whoever intuits, by virtue of that intuiting, of the transcendence with which epistemological subjectivity presumptively endows us. It is not merely
what is intuited, but the fact of intuiting that wrecks any transcendental aspiration; this intuiting itself belongs to the work of disenchantment and becoming. Recall that the glance Genet encounters communicates nothing except identity (which is, of course, incommunicable); this seeing is at once absolute separation, or non-understanding, as well as the equally absolute irrelevance of understanding or communication for identity. Here, seeing is not the opportunity for interpretation, understanding, or judgment: seeing bypasses cognition, what you see is what you see. In the immanence of that intuition or seeing, what is seen overtakes the one who intuits or sees. The seeing is absorbed within what is seen; seeing becomes submission.What You See Is What You See
What you see is what you see. I would like to emphasize two aspects of this sensuous empiricism. The first aspect is embedded in this fourth really smart thing Jean Genet said regarding the ontological priority of violence:
Every fedayee felt free ranging over this area [the Ajloun hills] on foot or by car, never letting go of the surface. It was the surface that concerned us, and we learned its contours as we moved over them. Each fedayee's horizon was taught him by his eyes and feet. He had only to look in front of him to see where he was going, and behind him to see where he'd come from. (Genet 1992, 105)
This first seeing, this nearly empirical seeing, is first of all a practical and interested intuition of what is given; given not a priori or as essential possibility, but given in and as its utter contingency.
What is seen in practical or interested intuition is not a landscape, but hiding places, escape routes, obstacles and possibilities. It is not simply that seeing all of this is contingent, but that seeing itself belongs to contingency itself, seeing is
of contingency; this is the seeing of the glimpse rather than the gaze, illumination as fulguration rather than enlightenment. Calculation there is, but it is paradoxically an instantaneous calculation, or what is too easily termed »instinctive« calculation, a canine or feline calculation. Seeing here is not the path to transcendence; on the contrary, it is a kind of haptic seeing, where seeing becomes touch. This haptic seeing is first of all, as Genet says, a matter of surfaces – and nothing but surfaces, surfaces that are not shells that surround and protect any substantiality, but surfaces that constitute what Deleuze and Guattari called »smooth space,« a space that is not the emptiness of a plane, field, or volume, but the infinite empirical congestion of contingent being (Deleuze/Guattari 1987, 474-500; see also Ricco 2002). This is the seeing required by guerrilla warfare, as Genet says, of »that ›little war‹ in which you had to find allies in fog, damp and the height of rivers, in the rainy season, the long grass, the owl's cry, and the phases of the sun and moon« (Genet 1992, 108).Thus, this guerrilla seeing belongs to the situation or opportunity; it is essentially and thoroughly opportunistic, as Massimo De Carolis has said (1996, 37-51); that is, what is seen determines the fact of seeing; haptic seeing, guerrilla seeing, is neither an instinct nor a faculty, but an accident, an opportunity. It is, as it were, a phenomenology without the essential reflection that makes phenomenology what it presumptively is. That is, it is a situating of oneself without a cartographic or perspectival reflection, because haptic, guerrilla seeing exceeds, essentially and at every point, every possible cartography or perspectivism. And therefore is something other, something more, than the reflective subjectivity of every transcendental cartography. Haptic, guerrilla seeing never puts things in perspective. It is the very experience of non-transcendence, of non-neutrality.
What you see is what you see. The second, and I think consequent, aspect of this immanent seeing is a question of witnessing. Here, then, is the fifth really smart thing Jean Genet said regarding the ontological priority of violence: »When so many things are there to be seen, just seen, there are no words to describe them.« (Genet 1992, 55) »Just seen«: Genet insisted over and again – in the first pages of Prisoner of Love, in his commentary on a Paris exhibition of photos of the Palestinians, in his essay on the massacre at Chatila, for example – on the heteronymy of seeing and understanding, on the fact that seeing does more than download a world for interpretation's hard drive; he insists on the essential stupidity of the senses (and this is also the case, by the way, when what is seen is words). And yet this just seeing, this radical empiricism, does not go unremarked; indeed, the fact that it marks the limit of the possibility of description does not thereby augur the end of description or of representation altogether. What is at stake, I want to suggest, is a certain becoming: becoming non-transcendent, becoming non-neutral
in a haptic witnessing, a guerrilla historicism. This is a going-under, what Genet calls a drowning, an art of disappearance with neither preservation nor conservation.Over and again in his texts on the Palestinians and the Black Panthers, Genet insisted upon the uncommunicable distance between the transcendence of geopolitical perspective, the neutrality of what he called Europe on the one hand, and the haptic existence of Black and Palestinian guerrillas on the other. These texts bear witness to that existence and that distance. They do not translate that existence which Genet shared for a time; rather, in saying what he has seen – dead bodies in their empirical singularity and multiplicity, just for example – he bears witness to the fact of just seeing, to the stupidity of the senses in their heterogeneity (what Lyotard, à propos the sublime, called a »negative presentation«), but
as »negative presentation« is specifically historicist; or rather, belongs to what Foucault called »political historicism,« a guerrilla historicism, the work of becoming non-transcendent, non-neutral. Genet's writing is not witness to the feeling of the post-Burkean, post-Kantian sublime, but testimony to the failure of the sublime to sustain subjectivity.
In all of Genet's political texts on the Black Panthers, the RAF, and on the Palestinians, he will offer a historical narrative, to suggest how it is things came to be the way they are. Yet these stories are in every case interrupted and fragmented by descriptive episodes, testimony to guerrilla phenomenology, testimony to catastrophe, negative presentations of what remains unrepresentable, everything that cannot be overcome and preserved in any story. These interruptions, »political historicism« on Foucault's account, constitute a work of dis-integration, dis-appearance, an affirmation, precisely, of non-transcendence, non-neutrality.
But let us not be lulled into historiographical slumber here. The work of dis-integration or dis-appearance, the affirmation of finitude and non-neutrality, are never peaceable processes or procedures; they are violent, the very fact of a violence that is never metaphorical. Nevertheless, they are not negative.
Finitude Now!
The sixth really smart thing Jean Genet said regarding the ontological priority of violence comes during a discussion with Rüdiger Wischenbart and Layla Shahid Barrada in December of 1983: »Listen,« Genet said, »the day the Palestinians become an institution, I will no longer be at their side. The day the Palestinians become a nation like any other nation, I will no longer be there.« (Genet 1991d, 282) Later in the same discussion, he worried that life in the Palestinian camps was settling into the routines, structures, and institutions of Palestinian villages before 1948, but nevertheless affirms his support, for the moment, of »la Palestine révoltée.« It is beginning with the organization of the Palestinian revolt against the conservative Arab states (King Hussein's Jordan, in particular) and against the state of Israel, that there occurred for the Palestinians what Genet called a »physical transformation«: »First, they expelled local armies (Jordanian, Lebanese, etc.) and organized themselves. From this moment, they felt they existed. Without national territory. But they existed all the same. And I think it was that, it was that, that was most important for them. To continue to feel that they exist. … But no Palestinian has a Palestinian passport. Such a thing doesn't exist.« (Genet 1991d, 291) And Genet conceived the actions of the Black Panthers to be »a poetical revolt, an ›act‹,« (Genet 1992, 149) rather than a program; and so »the Panthers' most definite achievement was to spotlight that the Blacks really existed.« (Genet1992, 42)
Clearly, violence is positive for Genet only insofar as it is non-instrumental or para-instrumental. Revolt is not revolution. Violence is positive only insofar as ends and means are identical in existence. For Genet, the Panthers and the Palestinians have no possibility for existence outside of their violence; they cannot »choose« whatever might count as non-violence, because their very existence in the world is violence. Concomitantly, the violence of existence in its positivity is never to be conflated with institutionalized brutality: should the Palestinians or the Panthers ever have a territory or state, Genet will no longer be there. In a short essay that first appeared in Le Monde in 1977, and which occasioned a major furor in the press, Genet supported the actions of the RAF precisely as a creative violence that sought the destruction of state brutality (Genet 1991e, 199-206). Not unlike Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and others before him, Genet saw the positivity of violence to belong to the practical constitution of being, in the affirmation that
is potentia rather than the affirmation of potestas; that is, in existence as the actualization of a possibility that did not exist before its actualization, and which does not survive the happening of that actualization, rather than in the brutality of institutionalized power. For Genet, the affirmation of violence as the actualized potential of existence depends not only upon its non- or para-instrumentality, but upon what one might call its »immediate finitude,« that fact that survival, continuity, institution, conservation, preservation, and salvation are quite beside the point. Genet wrote:You have to understand that the people you call terrorists know without needing to be told that they, their persons and their ideas, will only be brief flashes against a world wrapped up in its own smartness. Saint-Just was dazzling, and knew his own brightness. The Black Panthers knew their own brilliance, and that they would disappear. Baader and his friends heralded the death of the Shah of Iran. And the fedayeen, too, are tracer bullets, knowing their traces vanish in the twinkling of an eye.
I mention these truncated lives because I see in them a joy I think I also see in the final rush of Nasser's funeral, in the ever more complicated and lively transports of the hands that drummed on the coffins, in the almost joyful passage in the ›Kyrie‹ of Mozart's Requiem. (Genet 1992, 179)
The only possibility for existence is, as Genet quoted an old Palestinian woman, »to have been dangerous for a thousandth of a second.« (Genet 1992, 239)
One might argue, rather wearily perhaps, that all this is nothing more than a Romantic vitalism, which may well be true. But I think it important to bear in mind, first, that Genet only ever spoke of, and from, the place of those who have nothing left to lose, from where one has no choice and is therefore, as Janis Joplin once told us, caught up in an affirmation she called »freedom.« And, second, that this violence, in and as its »immediate finitude,« is the very edge of becoming, of metamorphosis.
It is first of all a question of borders and frontiers, the lines that separate the here from the there, the this from the that, but are themselves both the here and the there, the this and the that, and yet are neither here nor there, this nor that. Were he to have been born other than who he was, and had he a choice in the matter, Genet mused, he would have been born in Alsace-Lorraine, because »[w]hatever they may say, anyone approaching a frontier stops being a Jacobin and becomes a Machiavelli« (Genet 1992, 147); one forsakes a war of position in favor of guerrilla phenomenology. But borders and frontiers, geopolitical and metaphorical, are always the place of a decidedly non-metaphorical violence.
The figure that most forcibly expresses the violence of metamorphosis in Prisoner of Love is that of the post-op transsexual. The transsexual is the figure of the no longer male, but not yet female, but also the still male and the already female, who is absolutely fearful, but also knows »a joy close to madness,« the joy, Genet says, of the fedayeen, the kamikaze, and the Mozart Requiem as well (Genet 1992, 52-53); for Genet, the transsexual, caught up in the violence of metamorphosis, is the heroine of becoming, with an essentially uncertain destination. So too, twilight is the time of a dangerous, violent passage, a time – or rather, a space according to Genet – when »every being becomes his own shadow, and thus something other than himself. The hour of metamorphosis, when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf. The hour that comes down to us from at least as far back as the early Middle Ages, when country people believed that transformation might happen at any moment.« And thus, »[f]or me in particular, in that particular place, the expression ›between dog and wolf,‹ entre chien et loup, instead of connoting twilight, described any, perhaps all, of the moments of a fedayee's life.« (Genet 1992, 220-221)
Transition, movement, metamorphosis, with neither a goal nor an origin: this is the very openness of violence to futurity as such; without the affirmation of
that violence, the future is only an ahistorical – anti-historical – continuation of the present, or (but it is the same thing) the telos of a revolutionary project. It is perhaps for this reason that Genet repeatedly insisted that he was a vagabond, not a revolutionary. Genet might well have said of himself what he said of the fedayeen – that he is »light on the earth« (Genet 1992, 210). Forty years earlier, he had concluded Miracle of the Rose with these lines: »If I take leave of this book, I take leave of what can be related. The rest is unsayable. I say no more and walk barefoot.« (Genet 1966, 291)Zen Vampires Rule!
I, on the other hand, have a few more words. I will not pretend to have come close to saying what a political experience of thinking might be; I have only hoped today to have made any approach to that experience a bit more difficult. But I do want to say by way of conclusion that of all that Genet gives us to think regarding the ontological priority of violence, several consequences desperately need to be thought with whatever sobriety and rigor we can muster in the current situation, if the word »history« is to signify anything other than a meretricious justification for the exercise of rationalized state brutality.
First, that witnessing, historiography in the largest sense of the term, in its obsession with singularity, is not – all appearances to the contrary – the work of preservation or conservation, least of all of restoration. In its consuming attention to the infinite empirical congestion of the proper, testimony and historiography constitute a work of dis-integration, the work of a disenchanted fetishism. The work of history is the art of an infinite fragmentation, of decay, and of disappearance, the work of entropy: this I have seen, and it cannot be preserved in the museum of its concept.
Second, and therefore, there is no such thing as violence or terror in the abstract generality of the concept; the words or concepts of violence and terror denote that impossibility of abstraction. This is of course the aporetic case with all singularities; what I have been trying to say, however, is that singularity
as such is violence, and that violence is never anything other than singular and incomparable, at the same time that it is multiple and ontologically promiscuous.
Third, in other words, violence is the constitutive relation. Which means that violence is the first relation, and that violence constitutes relationality as such. Relation is violence. There is no outside of violence. That being said, however, I would emphasize that it is possible nevertheless to substitute a caress for a murder. When Genet was asked why he had never committed murder, he replied, »probably because I wrote my books« (Genet 1991a, 160). In any case, if we cannot think the ontologically constitutive nature of violence, we cannot possibly think the desperation of those for whom, by force of historical, existential circumstance, relation can
only be expressed in what is called terror. Such desperation is not, or at least not merely, a psychological condition.Fourth, Herakleitos was right: violence causes thinking. Violence is not merely given
to thought as an object or aporia, but is the very possibility of thinking. Were peace, or the One, primordial, we would never have occasion to think. Thinking is bound to the violence of an original multiplicity; thinking is one articulation of that violent multiplicity. Thinking is not merely a weapon, and to the extent that it does not think its thinking, to the extent that thinking thinks without reflecting upon its thinking – that is to say, insofar as thinking is the work of Zen vampires – thinking is violent. What is at stake here is not merely a question of disagreement or the différend, but an essential interruption of our constitutive existential comportments, the risk of madness, physical anguish, and death.Fifth, the fact that thinking is bound to an original ontological violence forces us to acknowledge, I think, that there are no good guys, no innocents, in our histories. The good is not a historical concept, for there is no thought of the good, even as the »undeconstructibility of justice,« that does not bring with it at least the possibility of a transcendental, presumptively non-violent, subjectivity. We – however that »we« is construed – are not necessarily on the side of the good, nor even necessarily on the side of an aporetic thought of the good. As long as morality, whatever its sophistications, is the touchstone of thought, we are not yet thinking. It seems to me that we have yet seriously to think the consequences of this
for thinking. Let me hasten to add, if only parenthetically, that this does not mean we cannot take sides, for we have always already taken sides; the problem – the historical, political problem – is not which side to take (the liberal version of the problem), but to invent sides we are not yet able to imagine. For the problem today is not which politics to profess, but to bring the very possibility of the political into being, a possibility which neither precedes nor survives its happening. The anti-war demonstrations, in and as their interestedness, are thereby attempts to make the political happen, not merely in the face of a particular regime, but an entire liberal disposition (or dispositif) that has no other purpose than to obviate the possibility of the political altogether.What, finally, Genet gives us to think – as if we could avoid the thought these days – is this: that our histories will have no happy endings. I do not mean to suggest here that existing critiques of the happy ending, or of teleologies in general, are somehow insufficient. Nor do I mean to suggest, with Sorel, that pessimism is the only possibility for thinking. What I do mean to say is that hope and despair, like good and evil, are not historical or political concepts, because they necessarily assume the possibility of making sense; the are predicated on the assumption that the world
can make sense. But that possibility, today, is not self-evident, and to the extent we might assume that self-evidence, we are not yet thinking. I will stop here.
Bibliography
§
Tahar Ben Jelloun: »Jean Genet avec les Palestiniennes«. In: Jérôme Hankins (ed.) (1992): Genet à Chatila. Paris: Solin.§
Massimo De Carolis (1996): »Toward a Phenomenology of Opportunism«. Trans. by Michael Turits. In: Paolo Virno / Michael Hardt (eds.): Radical Thought in Italy. A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.§
Gilles Deleuze / Félix Guattari (1987): A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.§
Scott Durham (1998): Phantom Communities. The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.§
Didier Eribon (2001): Une morale du minoritaire. Variations sur un thème de Jean Genet. Paris: Fayard.§
Jean Genet (1964): The Thief's Journal. Trans. by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Grove Press.§
— (1966): Miracle of the Rose. Trans. by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Grove Press.§
— (1988): What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn Into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet. Trans. by Bernard Frechtman. Madras and New York: Hanuman Books.§
— (1991a): »Entretien avec Hubert Fichte«. In: L'Ennemi déclaré. Textes et entretiens. Ed. par Albert Dichy. Paris: Gallimard.§
— (1991b): »Entretien avec Michèle Manceaux«. In: L'Ennemi déclaré. Textes et entretiens. Ed. par Albert Dichy. Paris: Gallimard.§
— (1991c): »Entretien avec Nigel Williams«. In: L'Ennemi déclaré. Textes et entretiens. Ed. par Albert Dichy. Paris: Gallimard.§
— (1991d): »Entretien avec Rüdiger Wischenbart et Layla Shahid Barrada«. In: L'Ennemi déclaré. Textes et entretiens. Ed. par Albert Dichy. Paris: Gallimard.§
— (1991e): »Violence et brutalité«. In: L'Ennemi déclaré. Textes et entretiens. Ed. par Albert Dichy. Paris: Gallimard.§
— (1992): Prisoner of Love. Trans. by Barbara Bray. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press / University Press of New England.§
John Paul Ricco (2002): The Logic of the Lure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.§
Avital Ronell (2002): Stupidity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Notes
This text was first delivered as a lecture at the invitation of the Department of East Asian Studies and the Center for the Study of Genders and Sexuality at New York University on 10 March 2003. I have not revised the text in the light of subsequent events. A further meditation might well begin with a consideration of an uncannily prescient passage from Deleuze and Guattari: »Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging. We have watched the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction story; we have seen it assign as its objective a peace still more terrifying than fascist death; we have seen it maintain or instigate the most terrible of local wars as parts of itself; we have seen it set its sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but the ›unspecified enemy‹; we have seen it put its counterguerrilla elements into place, so that it can be caught by surprise once, but not twice.« (Deleuze/Guattari 1987, 422)
Author
William Haver (*1947) is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, USA. He received his B.A. in History in 1981 from the State University of New York at Buffalo, his M.A. in History in 1982 and his Ph.D. in History in 1987, both from the University of Chicago. His research interests are Japanese history, East Asia, contemporary theory, queer studies, and AIDS. His current work, in philosophy and comparative literature as well as in history, continues to center upon the irrecusable exigencies of the AIDS pandemic, the status of and prospects for queer thought and culture, and twentieth century Japanese intellectual history. He tries to think about the status, practices, and thought of those whom social science can only conceptualize in a merely negative relation to cultural production: homosexuals, prostitutes, drug addicts, the homeless, the ›Lumpenproletariat‹. Among his numerous publications is the book The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS (1996).
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Introduction
In his books and plays, Jean Genet (1910-1986) – the author, playwright, philosopher, criminal and homosexual – depicted criminality as a factor whose existence depends on society. He described himself as a criminal, and saw himself as such throughout his entire life, despite the fact that he became an author whose work even today is taught in high schools (in France, England, Italy, and elsewhere) and in universities. The great philosopher Jean Paul Sartre described Genet as the dean of doomed playwrights, and as someone whom society labeled as "bad" and thus turned into a criminal.
In this article, we will attempt to posit a new thesis. We argue that Genet was not pushed by society into a life of crime and not labeled even when he committed crimes. Rather, we believe that he chose to be a criminal. Reviewing his personal history, we see Genet as a person whose positive "preparatory ground" gave him a great "personal strength" that allowed him to place society into the dock. It seems to us, after reviewing the various events in his life, that Genet developed a negative orientation towards conformist society and the fact that it treated him like an object instead of as a person who should be consulted and whose wishes are to be respected to the greatest extent possible. The social system treated him according to predetermined policies, on an administrative basis rather than a humanistic one. Genet, we believe, took this extreme condescension negatively. He developed a negative orientation towards the various social systems as well as those who carried out their policies, and thus created for himself a negative attitude towards society in general.
The welfare system uprooted him from his home in the village. It did not allow him to continue his schooling, despite the fact that he excelled in his studies, and instead pushed him in the direction of learning a trade which he did not desire. He never adapted to the demands of the system and from hereon we find a contrarian attachment to the direction of the deviant, the other, and the criminal.
We believe that using his otherness and his criminality, Genet protested against what he felt were the society’s crimes against himself and those like him, those whom at the time were called "Children of Paris". These were children who were placed with foster families after having been abandoned by their parents and whose lives were ruled by the strict laws of the revenue and welfare system. Genet developed a negative orientation towards society and interpreted all acts of society directed towards him in a negative way. He felt betrayed by a society which did not reward him for excellence in his studies and for being a good child, a dutiful child, a child who acted according to the norms of family and society. It was difficult for him to accept the traumatic facts of life, that he had been abandoned by his biological mother; that the foster mother, who loved him so dearly, passed away; and that his studies did not continue beyond six years of schooling.
As a young boy, Genet rebelled against what he felt were society’s betrayal of him through deviant behavior which intensified with time until it bordered on the criminal. He felt that society had cast him out, even though he had done no wrong. Society had limited his opportunity for self-fulfillment and effected violent changes in his life that he objected to, all in an arbitrary and inhumane fashion. Subsequently, he rejected the norms and rules of conventional society and sought out a different type of social bond.
His transfer to a criminal institution due to his transgressive behavior strengthened his negative orientation towards the world and subsequently provided him the opportunity to choose the criminal world as his own. He learned to be a criminal at this same institution in Mettray. He ceased to view himself as a member of conformist society, and he held this view until the end of his days. His criminal activities lasted 18 years (from 1926-1944), and during this time period he spent 44 months and 16 days in jail on and off. His reputation as an author came when Sartre became his champion, and turned him into a writer and playwright in high demand. Subsequently he gained not only success but also a solid financial position.
Having established these facts, we will try to solidify our thesis claiming that social labeling was not the factor that turned Genet into a criminal, but rather it was a personal choice, based on the circumstances of his life, to turn to a life of crime.
Genet’s Birth
Genet was born on December 19, 1910 to Camille Gabriel Genet, following a complicated pregnancy. His mother was admitted to Tarnier hospital in Paris on October 31st, 48 days before she gave birth. She was hospitalized due to complications. After the birth, they remained in hospital for 11 more days before being released on December 30, 1910. Genet was born an illegitimate child. He remained in the custody of his 22-year-old mother for seven months and nine days. On July 28, 1911, she turned him over to the Authority for the Welfare of Abandoned Children in Paris at the Hospice des Enfants Assistes located at 74 Rue D’Enfert, Rochereau, Paris. According to a French law from June 27, 1904, children who were handed over to the Welfare Authority were placed with foster families living in the countryside.
Genet was given a number (192.102) by the Welfare Authority and from that moment left the custody of his mother and became the custody of the state. He was examined by the Health Authority and the examining physician, a Dr. Variot, noted that he was in good health.
On July 29, 1911 he was transferred to an agency which located a foster family for the baby. He was examined by a physician, Dr. Courtois, who also noted that his health was good except for a hernia which required treatment. That day, a foster family was chosen for Jean Genet. Mme. Eugenie Regnier and her husband, Charles, from the village of Alligny-en-Morvan served as his foster parents. The village was located far from Paris, in Nord Est du Masif Central. It was a mountainous area, rich in green pastures and forests but its ground was not fertile. In this village and its environs during this time (1911) there were 772 children under the age of 13 who had been placed with foster families. The area had a good reputation for foster families, and a third of the abandoned children in France were sent there. This was an honorable way to enhance the revenue and welfare of the families. The government gave the foster family a monthly stipend from the government, and in return the family was responsible for the upbringing and education of the child. The system of foster parenting was under strict government control and inspection. When a boy reached the age of 13, he would be moved from the custody of the foster family to the custody of a patron whose job it was to prepare the child for agricultural work. A girl reaching the age of 13 would be transferred from the family to the care of a lady of the house.
*The facts are based on a study of many years, following the findings of Dichy and Fouche (1988)
There she would learn to be a housekeeper (Bonne a Tout Faire). As adults, these children would serve as much-needed working hands in this agricultural area.
The agricultural settlement that Jean Genet grew up in had a population of 1650 residents at the time. Alligny en Morvan was a small village in this large region. The children in the foster families kept their biological surnames, and thus the schoolteachers were able to differentiate between them and the children of the local families. In addition, one could differentiate between the children based on the clothes they wore. The children in foster families wore special clothes provided by the authorities. Generally speaking, as adults most of these children would intermarry or marry one of the children from the same area. The foster children were viewed as desirable by the people in the area. They represented a "reserve force" for the inhabitants and also served as working hands who knew the place. The locals considered children as part of their community.
The Family of Charles et Eugenie Regnier
Genet’s foster family received him on July 30, 1911. He was brought to them by the ceremonial manager of the Social Welfare Administration in the regional capitol of Saulieu. Nine years earlier, this same dignitary had brought the Regnier family a girl named Lucie Wirtz for adoption. The Regnier family took care of her with great love.
This girl was already nine years old and in a few short years was destined to move to a different family who would train her to become a housekeeper. She would have pleasant memories of the Regnier family as well as the brother, Genet, who joined them. She recalled that the infant Genet arrived on a Sunday. "He was so thin, so small, so beautiful." These recollections were made when she was 88 years old. At the time they received Genet, the foster parents were already 50 years old. The patriarch of the family was a carpenter, not a farmer as he would be described by Genet and Sartre. He did, however, have one cow, and some chickens and rabbits for the use of the family – as did a many of the inhabitants – but not much more than that. His carpentry shop was beneath the house, which was located not far from the offices of the village council. The Regnier family had no property and no income from any stipend whatsoever save for the money it received for being a foster family. Its income came from the handiwork of the family patriarch, along with a tobacco shop run by his wife. The store was also located in their house, and thus both of the couple worked from their home. The Regnier family succeeded in making a living from hard work and industry in the carpentry shop, the tobacco shop, the small green field it had, and from the cow, chickens, and rabbits. Along with this, the matriarch of the family baked her own bread and cooked food she had earned from her the couple’s own hard work of the couple and from their garden. In addition, as aforementioned, they received a government stipend for fostering two children.
The Regniers had a good reputation in their village of Alligny. They were considered a united and dignified couple. They were honest people, described by Lucie Wirtz, who grew up in their foster care, as her real parents. She continued to visit their home and saw them as her true parents. Interestingly, even Genet in the handwritten manuscript of his "Diary of a Thief" notes that they were "good people", good-hearted or brave-hearted (de tres Braves Gens; it appears in the manuscript of his diary on page 122 but the statement has been struck from the printed version). This statement of Genet’s is important, since he rarely had kind words about other people, especially not in his adulthood.
The matriarch of the family, Eugenie, was born on January 16,1857 in Alligny en Morvan. She and her parents were all natives of the area (Originaires). Unable to find work in the region, she moved to Paris where she found a position as a maid (Domestique) at the home of a Belgian spinster at 119 Rue Grenelle. She received from her mistress a room (Loge) above the house for her use. At this time she met her future husband, Charles Regnier, who came from Morvandelle. She married him and some time afterwards gave birth to a daughter, Berthe. Later, following the death of the lady of the house, she convinced her husband to return to her parents’ home in Morvan where her second and last child, Georges, was born on May 24, 1893. Her foster daughter describes her mother as a happy, energetic woman who kept a tight rein on the household. She taught her children values, about obeying religious decrees which were sacred in her eyes, and to act in an enlightened and respectable manner. The members of her household, including both biological and non-biological children, made sure to attend Sunday prayers as well as the religious lessons given by the priest, Abbe Charrault, every Thursday afternoon. In 1982, Genet described himself as someone who received a Catholic education. "J’ai eu une enfance …Catholique."
His foster mother, Eugenie, loved and cared for him with motherly devotion. She would call him mon Jean, "my Jean". His sister, who was also a foster child in the Regnier family, says that the mother always protected him, sometimes "with the fierceness of a lioness", when he would fight with his friends. He was actually given preferential treatment by the matriarch of the family. His childhood friend Joseph Bruley tells that Genet suffered an emotional crisis when his foster mother Eugenie died on April 4, 1922, when he was only 11 years old. It is surprising that Genet does not pay this mother who cared for him with such love for over a decade, more respect.
The father, Charles, was born in Moux, a commune near Alligny on May16, 1865. Following his military service, which he spent in the region of Paris, and following his marriage to Eugenie, whom he loved and respected greatly, he returned, as aforementioned, to Alligny en Morvan at her insistence. At the end of his military service he worked as carpenter around Paris and succeeded in amassing some savings, as did his wife, who was a housekeeper. Thus they were able to afford a large house in Alligny. At the bottom level of this house he set up his carpentry shop and his wife set aside a room in the house for the tobacco shop.
Charles was a straight-edged man, an accomplished carpenter who was hailed by members of the community as a "man of conscience." They gave him the nickname "Champion". He was assisted in his carpentry shop by his son as well as by an apprentice worker. He built up a reputation in the area because of the quality of his furniture; the local villagers preferred the caskets that he built to all others. Genet was given his own corner in father Charles’ carpentry shop, something which he was very proud of.
Charles was a quiet, easygoing man. He did not speak much and gave the four children in his household, even when they grew older, freedom to do what they wanted in his carpentry shop. He loved them, did not scold them, and gave them a great degree of freedom. At home he was also always calm and pleasant. The foster daughter, Lucie Wirtz, testifies that she never saw or heard him angry, nor scold anyone for anything: "Durant toute mon enfance, Je ne l'ai pas entendu une fois crier ou se mettre en colere"
He was a pleasant man, and the members of his household, as well as the members of the community, enjoyed his company. He was tall, which also added a degree of dignity. In contrast to his devout wife, he preferred the café to the church on Sundays. The death of his wife in 1922 was a blow for him, but he continued to run the household pleasantly and calmly as in the days when his wife was alive. In 1930, his only son, Georges, left the house to seek his fortunes in Paris. Charles was left alone in the large and empty house, with his daughter Berthe, who lived in the same village, taking care of him. He passed away on July 16, 1939.
Genet the Child
10 days after his arrival in the village (on September 10, 1911), the baby was baptized in the local church by the local priest, Abbe Charrault, who served the community between the years 1907 and 1929. This priest was also responsible for Genet’s religious education during his childhood in Alligny en Morvan. At the occasion of the baptism, the child was given a godfather and godmother. The chosen godmother was Lucie, his "sister", who was older than him by nine years and who was a foster child with him in the Regnier family. The chosen godfather was a relative of the father who lived in Paris. These relatives would occasionally come to visit the Regnier family. They became very attached to the child Genet and saw themselves as responsible for him. The institution of godparents was very widespread in France. The godparent would accept responsibility for the child and was responsible for him, along with the parents.
Genet grew up in a large house in the center of the settlement. It was one of the most beautiful houses in the village. The house had a large courtyard and a gate. The courtyard contained the family bakery and access to his mother’s tobacco shop. On the other side of the house, in the back, there was a vegetable garden which was well-tended by the mother. The yard was surrounded by a nice wall made up of gray bricks. The house was furnished respectably. The walls were decorated with pictures, and it served the members of the household well. The house was the closest one to the school, and Genet needed only minutes to get to class. Genet was proud of his parents’ house and he describes it in his book as "the house with the slate roof," (Ardoise). He claims that only his house and the church had slate roofs, something he was very proud of. His house provided him with a sense of security. From comments made later on in his life, which underwent the reconstruction of memory (that is to say they weren’t necessarily accurate) there is a sense of exaggeration in the positive direction.
The First World War, which lasted from 1914 to 1918, shocked the world, including the Genet’s village. Most of the men in the village and the neighboring settlements were conscripted to fight the war during these years. As a result, the young Genet grew up in a house surrounded primarily by women. In 1916, when he was six years old, he was accepted into the first grade. In his writings, he gives his first grade teacher the nickname Fee, "Fairy". His school, which was for boys only, had three classes in each of which between 40 and 50 students studied. During wartime, the three classes were combined into two, one for smaller pupils and the other for older ones. Genet received special treatment from the headmaster of the school, who lived above the school – which, as aforementioned, was near Genet’s house – and whose wife was Genet’s teacher. The headmaster gave him private lessons to augment the meager amount they were taught in school during these difficult years of the World War I.
At the end of the war in 1918, Genet knew how to read and write. One could not necessarily say the same of his schoolmates, most of whom trailed behind him because of the difficulties of wartime. His foster sister, who was also his godmother, describes Genet as a bookworm, "with his nose constantly burrowed in a book." His classmates remember Genet as a quiet, calm, and shy student. At home he is described as a master of his domain, who loved to play with his dolls and baptize (Baptheme) them, along with his other toys or dogs and cats. He also liked to conduct burial services for dead birds. His foster parents gave him a great deal of freedom,(une grande liberte). One of Genet’s neighbors says he had a golden childhood. He was like a little king.
"Il a vraiment eu une petite enfance doree…" "Il etait comme un petit roi".
Genet and his Schoolmates
By age 10, Genet was a good pupil and was considered to be one of the five outstanding students in his class. His teachers would read his essays to the class. The young Genet was a shy and introverted student who hurried home at the end of the school day. Generally, he would not have friends around to his house, and did not visit others. He did not fight with others, did not like sports like the others. He hated violent games and always preferred to be alone in his corner.
His childhood friend, Joseph Bruley, argues that Genet never had any close friends. He was a lone wolf, a unique child who ultimately preferred the company of girls and women. When he did play with others, he preferred to play with girls. (Jean Genet – "Diary of a Thief" , Les Temps Modernes 10, 1946. P. 41). Genet had a friend, Andree Cortet, with whom he loved drawing dresses, exchanging recipes, and baking cakes.
A quarter of Genet’s classmates were like him, children who had been placed with foster families by the authorities. This shared fate helped many of them form bonds of sympathy or mutual aid. Some of these children were lucky, like Genet who was handed over to the custody of a relatively established family; others were sent to very poor families and experienced hunger and deprivation. One of Genet’s friends, Louis Cullaffroy, who was not lucky like Genet, remembers him as someone who gave him support, sympathy, and protection.
The First Theft –A Symbol of Something Else
Sartre believes that Genet performed his first theft when he reached the age of 10, which is to say in 1920-1921.
In "Diary of a Thief" (p. 41), Genet himself describes his lust for stealing. Even as a small boy, Genet writes, he would steal from his foster parents. By the time he was 10 Genet claims that he was able to steal from the people he loved without feeling any remorse, despite the fact that he knew they were poor.
It is reasonable to assume that Genet’s stealing represents deep emotional issues, and we should not view his unusual behavior in a simple manner.
He also stole at school – pencils, rulers, and even books. Louis Cullaffroy, says, "When something disappeared from class, we knew we would find it at Jean Genet’s." He also stole money from his foster mother’s cash drawer in her tobacco shop. He would buy sweets and share them with his friends. Two of his friends, Felix Roncin and Marc Kouschner claimed that he always had money in his pocket. In the village, they knew to "watch out" for this child who would regularly take things which did not belong to him. Because of his family’s standing, as well as the sympathy he was given at school and in the church, no one complained about him, either to the police or even to the welfare authorities who supervised the foster children. Contrary to Sartre’s claims, Genet was never evicted from the village for his thefts, nor was he sent by the authorities to a juvenile correctional institution.
On April 4, 1922 Genet’s foster mother passed away. He continued to live in the same house, and was now cared for by his foster sister, Berthe, and her husband, Antonin Renault, who lived in the house and also cared for the widower father, Charles.
The sister, his foster mother’s biological daughter, was a good mother to Genet, albeit a less authoritarian one. In addition, she had recently given birth and Genet was forced to share her affections with the baby. Berthe’s husband was a good man, but stricter than Berthe’s father. And Genet did not care for his authority.
It is important to note that in the last two years Genet spent in the house at Morvan following the death of his foster mother he ceased stealing completely. There is no record at all that this transgressive behavior continued. At the onset of puberty, Genet began developing a separate sense of self. These two years, without his foster mother to protect him, were different than what had come before. But even so he was happy.
Genet’s Communion
Three months after the death of his foster mother, on June 4, 1922, a public celebration was held to mark Genet’s communion. Abbe Charrault, the priest who had baptized Genet, led the service and the prayers with all the requisite pomp and circumstance. It was seen as a good affair. Among other things, guests received a picture of Jesus with the motto Ego Sum Panus Vivus, "I am the bread of life". Underneath the picture was inscribed the Genet’s name: Jean Marcel Genet (which was misspelled as "Genest"). The priest respected Genet and always treated him with warmth and affection, and even let him participate in the church choir.
Genet and Primary School
As aforementioned, Genet was one of the best students in his class. Later, between the fourth and sixth grades, he turned from a good pupil into a brilliant and successful one. Most of his friends who were in foster care were pushed into studying a trade due to their intellectual limitations. Not Genet, who continued to climb higher and higher towards a primary school diploma, the highly valued Certificat D’etudes which few managed to attain. His teacher was proud of him, encouraged him, and gave him special attention.
During this time, Genet began to be more sociable and even to stand out in a group. His self-confidence increased, to the point of occasional arrogance. At times he became bitter, and even protested, when he learned that the foster children were being exploited by their foster families. He defended them and even spurred them not to be passive in the face of their exploitations.
He showed great development physically as well, which also added to his self-confidence. A Dr. Courtouis, in a medical examination performed on December 9, 1923 when Genet was 13, notes:
State of health: Very good
Height: 1.56
Temperament: Good
Constitution: Good/Strong
Dental examination: Good condition
Diploma
On June 30, 1923, a government car came to collect the candidates for final examinations. In the village of Alligny there were three primary schools; from these, only five students qualified for taking the final exams, and Genet was one of them. He was the only one of the five who was in foster care. On July 15, 1923, 15 days after the test, the results arrived and showed that Genet had passed them successfully. Genet’s success brought with it monetary prizes for his foster family, his teacher, and for Genet himself. The prizes were awarded by the authorities.
And with this, Genet finished his education. The government was not responsible for providing him any more schooling. It neither encouraged him to continue his studies nor supported him any further in his education. The six years of studies were a treasure that would serve Genet for the rest of his life. With the help of this treasure he became a national and even international author.
Genet’s Relationship with the Opposite Sex
There are various theories about Genet’s homosexuality. What do we know about his ties with members of the opposite sex?
For many years, the French segregated male and female education. There were separate schools for boys and girls. Despite this, boys and girls could meet at clubs, at church, and in the streets in nearby neighborhoods and especially in the villages.
In the last years of his studies, Genet had a girlfriend named Solange Comte, whom he greatly adored. She was his junior by only 15 days. She lived far from Alligny, in a settlement called Chevenon, but she would spend her summers at her grandparents’ home near Genet.
Solange was a quiet, pleasant girl. Everyone remembers their walks through the village. Her father was a teacher. Her mother, a Modiste, died young at age 33. Everyone remembered the mother’s beauty and pleasant nature.
Solange and Genet had a close friendship. They often walked together through the fields. They would climb the hills towards the boulders rising higher and higher. In two of his works, Notre Dame des Fleures and Les Bonnes, Genet mentions Solange and in one of his books even calls her Comtesse Solange, "The Countess Solange". We do not know if Genet continued his relationship with Solagne after he left Alligny. We do know that Solange contracted a severe respiratory disease and died at age 19. Genet knew other girls. He was a favorite of the female friends and acquaintances in his childhood, something which is reflected in his various literary works.
As an adult, he declared himself a homosexual. It appears to us that he also made a decision based on the reality in which he lived. He chose a path of which denied responsibility for anyone else and his homosexuality enabled him to do this. He chose the homosexual life, which lacked commitment and emotional ties. Throughout his adult life he was never involved emotionally with anyone and never maintained any ties over long periods. In his sole television interview, conducted by the BBC towards the end of his life, he declared that all his relationships with girls were superficial, temporary, and passing. He said the same about his connection with boys. When asked directly with how many men he had had homosexual relationships, he answered "with hundreds … with thousands." Had he ever had a stable personal relationship before? His answer was negative. As an adult, he declared himself to be a homosexual. His sexual relationships, like his personal relationships, served a need and were not a means for strengthening his feelings of sensitivity.
The separation vector was the dominant vector in Genet’s life and he tended to obscure the basic unifying vector that most people have.
In his last years, he lived alone in an apartment hotel in Morocco. He was financially well off and in this, according to him, he found peace.
The end of the war and the return of the men
The eight-year-old Genet saw the war end men return home. We do not know how Genet reacted to the return of peace and quietude to the village which came with war’s end.
Genet, according to his godmother, his sister in the foster family, Lucie Wirtz, never understood why his biological mother abandoned him and refused to raise him like other mothers. His foster mother loved him and took good care of him, a fact which only strengthened the question that loomed in his mind: "I am a good boy. I study well. Everybody loves me. So why did my biological mother abandon me?"
He never knew and possibly never bothered to find out the truth. France kept very precise administrative records and he could have found out the facts had he bothered to do so. We easily discovered that on July 28, 1911 he was placed in foster care by his mother and up until that point lived with her mother at 1 Rue Barocca, Paris. He was born at the Tarnier clinic in Paris on December 19, 1910 at 19:45. His mother’s name was Camille Gabrielle and she registered his name, Jean, in Paris in the VI Arrondissement.
The mother was a housekeeper who became pregnant by one of her employers. For the few months that she had the child, she took good care of him. But it appears that she ran out of strength and means and so decided to give her son away to foster care or adoption. All the medical documents testify that she cared for her son with great dedication, and it was the harsh reality of life that forced her to part with him.
A positive preparatory ground
We argue that Genet had an infancy filled with love, and a comfortable childhood in general which was filled with affection, support, recognition, and a sense of accomplishment.
The death of his foster mother was undoubtedly traumatic for him. However, he had had many good years of successes, love, and recognition. We argue that Genet’s "preparatory ground" created positive molecular memories. The positive experiences in infancy and childhood provided him with a strong spirit. The feelings and experiences of a person are a result of his environment, especially in the tender years. The feelings that arise in him as a result of the circumstances of his environment are extremely important.
The young Genet had significant memories which were stored in his brain cells. They remained as memories at the molecular level, generally subconscious but which helped foster in him a sense of power and strength. In the case of negative experience, the sense fostered inside was one of powerlessness. These "mental tapes" accompanied him throughout his life. As far as we know, we have billions of nerve cells which contain primarily positive and/or negative memories. A person’s perception is holistic. We perceive and inscribe in our memories and in our molecular (chemical) memories every detail we get from our various senses: sight, smell, space, and other various and sundry feelings.
These memories do not necessarily form in us a distinct awareness. But they do form an internal sense which can strengthen or weaken our sense of self. If a memory is awakened in us for whatever reason, we will experience it with all its different feelings. We experience the feelings and emotions we had during the original event being remembered. Memories of the past, if awakened, are not reconstructions of the event, but rather a re-enactment of the incidents as they occurred originally.
Penfield (1952) a brain surgeon at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, published an important work that sheds light on the workings of the brain the area of consciousness. He stimulated the brain by stimulating the lobes with a low-current electrode. The subjects were given local anesthetic and could thus cooperate with the surgeon. The brain was mapped into regions with reference being stimulated. Penfield found that memories remain inscribed completely, even if the person has no ability to recall the event. The brain works as a tape recorder, which records every significant event from the fetal stage through the rest of one’s life. Memory storage is a physical-chemical process. The recorded facts become molecular structures. The memories recorded in these molecular structures are a real-subject reflection of that which is recorded. The molecular inscription happens only with those things that the person experienced personally and these are the forces which shape us. Each one of us carries inside of ourselves, in our memory tapes, a picture of our lives. Our present and future lives are driven by the pictures of our lives which we carry within us. The will and the intellect are, according to Bergson’s philosophical outlook (Brooks, 1977, p. 11) only a surface phenomenon, whereas the deeper phenomenon are the instinct and the imagination. These have the power to control a person, and their origins are in the same "preparatory ground", which contains the molecular memories which move us.
In his configurative approach to social deviance, Shoham (1980) argues that the chances that an average person will be labeled as a deviant grow in direct proportion to his deviant behavior; but the deviance becomes a social fact only when the behavior of the person or the group is labeled as deviant by society’s supervisory authorities. According to Shoham’s configuration model, social deviance arises from the combination of deviant behavior itself and its being labeled as such by society. In this model, the deviant behavior is a preparatory factor expressed in terms of probabilities; the process of categorization is the identifying power that defines the social attitude towards the deviance, and thus society’s actions towards it (p. 135).
We propose then to add to Shoam’s configurative model, a double link, a person with the strength to resist being labeled, who can thus neutralize the social labeling directed against him.
Genet the Defier
Genet, the man who defied, accused and judged society in his plays, his books, and his statements was the model for some of Sartre’s ideas and he was the basis for the categorization rule (1962, 1963, 1980) of Becker, Kitzos, Kay Erickson, Shohan, and others. Sartre and others held up Genet as society’s scapegoat, as someone who was labeled negatively in order that society could through him achieve its goals. The creation of a "bad boy" is necessary in order to set up a "good boy" in contrast to this. The conformist world, which seeks social anchors, creates the rules and through them it locates offenders and fights them in order to attain a normative world. In Genet’s view, the dialectic between the criminal and the conformist world is eternal, and no resolution of the conflict is possible without the conformist world being willing to accept the offenders; in the criminal world it (the conformist world) is the variable.
Genet, like the founders of Categorization Theory, believed that society created him as a criminal to serve its needs. His role is to be a criminal and he accepted these orders from society willingly and to the extreme.
He saw himself as an illegitimate child who was abandoned by his birth mother and handed over to a bureaucratized social system which by its nature, he believed, was aloof and devoid of altruistic motives. Society looks for means in order to fulfill its selfish aims. Society is functional and self-interested and seeks to extend its control in order to fulfill its goals. By categorization, Genet argued, society defines roles for its members, who will all serve society and let it attain the goals set by those who lead it.
Society sets up a stereotyped version of reality and forces the individuals in it to submit to its decrees. Society wields great power. It can crush its most creative artists using bear hugs, the various awards and citations – the Oscar ("the curse of the Oscar"), the Nobel ("Nobel’s noose"), and the rest of the awards – which delude the artist and fill him with anxiety. This paralyzes the artist and by doing so allows society to manage his life and place him in a rut that it has defined for him.
Society, in its conventionalization and its economic and social power, forces the creative person, the artist, to run from his true self, from realizing his unique mission, and forces him to merge into the stream it has designated for him.
Shoham (2004) calls this the Jonah Syndrome.
Material success, which is awarded by society, harms the dialectical energy which is at the core of creativity. The creative artist is stricken by anxiety, which blocks his continued creativity as he fears of losing all the benefits (recognition, financing, social caresses) that society provides him. Society’s bear hug strangles the rebellious artist and if he does not submit to society’s will then he is categorized by society as "insane", as someone whose soul is not well. In that case, he can choose between the open road, suicide, or commitment to an asylum.
Sartre published his work "Saint Genet", which led to the strengthening of Genet’s reputation and to his (Genet’s) release from prison. (President Coty pardoned him). It also dried up Genet’s well of creativity for five years. The public recognition of Albert Camus’s works deprived him of the dialectical tension that was so crucial for his work. The great Van Gogh lost his mind due to, among other things, the opposite problem, lack of recognition of his greatness and his works of darkness.
The Prophet Mohammed was recognized as a prophet in Medina but not in Mecca, the city where he lived for many years. "No prophet is accepted in his own town." Mohammed’s closeness to Mecca created rejection and scorn for him. Society has the power to bring close and strangle or to push away and shame.
Genet grew up, we believe, in a well-tended, protective, and loving environment. Because of singular incidents of the death of his foster mother; because of his inability to understand the circumstances of his life – despite being in his own mind a good boy, his biological mother abandoned him in his infancy; according to Sartre he "escaped" and got on the train without buying a ticket. He was caught and turned over to the authorities who put him in a home for juvenile offenders and his foster father did not come to find him.
Genet reads a new map of the world and he interprets it according to new experiences. He came to the conclusion that society did not want him. Society rejects and disappoints him. He rejects it and turns, both consciously and unconsciously, into what he thinks he should be. He "chooses" the nonconformist way as his way of life. He clashes with society and finds his way into the criminal world, which he prefers to society’s treachery.
Genet used his skills in order to succeed in the criminal world that he chose. As his clashes with conformist society increased, he styled his personality in the opposite direction from conformist society. He expelled all conformity directed at him. He loved to hate what he once was.
Genet enjoyed a positive "preparatory ground" which strengthened him and gave him strong experiences. He was able to stand up to conformist society’s conventionalization and point a finger at it, accusing it of being hypocritical, uncaring, evil, exploitative, and of alienating all real values. He hated himself, his nationalism, and his country so much that he hoped for the victory of the Nazis over France and when they conquered Paris, he was pleased.
A Positive Preparatory Ground
Testimonials about Genet from his foster sister and his childhood friends
Lucie Wirtz, Genet’s foster sister who was 10 years older than he, remembers the day Genet arrived in their shared home clearly. It was on a Sunday. After church services, M. Roclore, the director of the agency responsible for transferring children to foster families, arrived holding the baby Genet. At the gate to the house, the baby was handed to his foster mother. She tells that her mother was afraid at first because Genet was so small for his age. But he was so beautiful that she accepted him.
Lucie Wirtz has many happy memories of her foster parents and the loyal care they gave her and Genet. She continued to visit the family even after she was transferred, as was customary in France, to a new home to lean the trade of a housekeeper in charge of the household (Bonne a tout faire). In an interesting statement, Wirtz says that the Regnier family was "the family around. I lived with them from age two until age 13. They loved me and I loved them. Later, as an adult, even when I discovered who my biological parents were, I continued to regard the Regniers as my true family since they were my parents…As long as they were alive I continued to visit them and felt that they were my real parents." She added that, "My father, M. Regnier, was my good father. I never saw a better or nicer man than he. I never heard him say an angry word. He always treated us with love, pleasantness, and a respectful attitude. He was always calm and quiet. He spoke little and did much. With his craft, he was an artist and he worked constantly.
"My mother, Mme. Regnier, was an active woman, full of life, active, dynamic, and, despite all this, a good mother. She was very religious, not like her husband who on Sundays preferred to go to the café instead of attending the village church with the rest of us. She came to church with us on Thursdays as well, so that she could go to religious classes and pray with the priest."
Lucie called Genet by the pet name Jeannot, and he shared a room with her. When, at age 13, she was transferred to a new foster family, the room became his alone. It was a room which was not too big, and which had a window with a view of the garden. He would decorate the walls with pictures. In the room there was a writing desk and a chair in addition to the bed. The house generally was furnished simply, as you find in a village, but in good taste. There were also some expensive items of furniture, but not many." She tells that at age 13 the authorities transferred her to another village, a few kilometers from the Regnier house. However, each time she came to the village she would visit her parents, that is to say the Regnier family. She would always see Jeannot with his nose in a book that he borrowed from the library. He was beautiful, calm, and loved living in the big house.
She says that on one of the occasions she came to visit her family she found the nine-year-old Jean alone in the house. She felt he had something he wanted to talk to her about. She told him he could speak freely, and he then surprised her by saying: "There’s something I don’t understand and that is, why did my mother abandon me?" In her words, Genet was anguished. He often asked her questions, including personal questions about herself – why did her parents abandon her? She tried very hard to explain to him that things are sometimes difficult and hard to understand, and that you must accept this as a fact of life. But Genet was unwilling to accept this. He continued to declare that this kind of behavior was forbidden and should not be allowed to happen!
When his sister was asked whether Genet was a thief, she answered in the negative. Perhaps in his youth he stole some sweets, but no more than that. After 1920, she heard that Genet was in prison. This surprised her greatly, as it did Berthe, the biological daughter of the Regniers who took care of Genet after Mme. Regnier’s death.
Later she saw Genet’s picture in the newspaper. There was an article on Genet the writer and on one of his plays which was being performed in a Parisian theatre called the Odeon. Wirtz got dressed up and went to see the play. At the end of the performance she asked to see Genet and was told that he had left the day before. She claims that from the moment he left the village, she never saw him again. She also claims that she neither knows where he lives, nor the city he resides in, nor his address. She was not able to track him down and regretted that Genet never bothered to find or meet with her.
Another version can be found in the words of Marie-Louise Robert, who rented a room in Genet’s house between the years 1913 and 1921. The Regniers, as mentioned, had a large house, and between the years 1913-21 they rented a part of it to the Robert family. Their daughter, Marie-Louise was roughly Genet’s age (she was born in 1909, while he was born in 1910) and remembers fondly the eight years they lived in the same house.
During the First World War, she remembers that all the men were gone, save for Genet’s father who worked long hours in the carpentry shop. She describes him as a calm, good-hearted man with a wonderful temperament who buoyed everyone around him with his good spirits. Along with Genet and with her brother Gabriel, they spent a lot of time playing in the carpentry shop, and the good father allowed them to do or make whatever they desired. She describes Genet’s life as "ideal". "He was a prince," who lived like the ki