[In the following essay, Howells discusses the textual interplay between the works of Hegel, Sartre, and Derrida—with Derrida attempting to refute Sartre, and both Derrida and Sartre attempting to refute Hegel.]

Ils ne savent pas qu'en fait ils décapitent, pour ainsi dire, l'hydre.

(Jacques Derrida, Glas, p. 118)

Derrida and Sartre spend much of their philosophical energy in a (vain?) attempt to decapitate the Hegelian hydra. Derrida also spends some time in occasional parricidal attacks on Sartre. Both see Hegel as a serious threat, but Sartre tends to confront it directly, through philosophical argument (albeit of a paradoxical and ‘continental’ variety), whereas Derrida's rebuttal is both more oblique and also more explicit. Both are well aware that the dialectic engulfs contradiction and recuperates any other attempt at subversion as error that will be transcended.

If one thinks what the logos means, if one gives thought to the words of the Phenomenology of Mind and the Logic, for example, there is no way out of the absolute circle. In any case that is what the discourse of the Sa [Absolute Knowledge] means. To believe one can get out of it, or attempt to, is pure verbalism: one is not thinking what one is saying, one does not realize the meaning of the words which therefore remain empty.

(Glas, p. 253)¹

If you want to burn everything, you must also consume the fire, avoid keeping it alive like a precious presence. So you must extinguish it, keep it in order to lose it (really) or lose it in order to keep it (really).

(Glas, p. 269)

How to prevent the fire in which Absolute Truth and Values are consumed from becoming, in its turn, an Absolute? How to interrupt the operation of the Aufhebung, to manipulate a negative which is more than a mere moment in an all-embracing process, how to escape the perpetual reversal entailed in any oppositional system of thought? As Derrida asks elsewhere: ‘What would be the nature of a negative which could not be transcended [relevée]?’ (Marges, p. 126). It is far from certain whether the ambiguous status of Derrida's parenthetical ‘really’ (‘vraiment’) or the vehemence of his rejection of all originary or teleological thinking can ensure his own immunity from Hegel's transformative logic. Far from certain, either, whether Sartre's assertion that ‘We must insist against Hegel that being is and that nothingness is not’² can ultimately protect his néant against the charge of hypostatization that has been levelled at it.³ As Derrida and Sartre would (or should?) be the first to admit.

Glas constitutes Derrida's most intensive study of Hegel whom he op-poses (literally) to Jean Genet. And his commentary on Genet is set up, at least in part, as a critical response to Saint Genet, comédien et martyr, Sartre's seminal study published over twenty years earlier.⁴ Direct reference to Sartre is limited to a few relatively brief passages, but the precursor text underlies much more of Glas than Derrida is perhaps prepared to acknowledge. Glas might be considered an example of what Harold Bloom would call Tessera, a work of ‘completion and antithesis’,⁵ for Derrida certainly ‘misreads’ Saint Genet, creating a most remarkable work of his own in the process. The two main accusations he levels against Sartre's reading of Genet are that it is ‘thematic’ criticism (Glas, p. 181), and that it purports to provide a ‘key’ (Glas, p. 36) to the interpretation of Genet's works. It is true that Sartre does occasionally use the terms thème and clé (studiously eschewed by Derrida who prefers foyer, question, champ, chaîne, etc.), but not in any sense that would make his account either ‘thematic’ or reductive. Sartre argues that ‘Genet is a child who has been convinced that, in his inmost depths, he is an Other than himself’ (SG [Saint Genet, comédien et martyr], p. 47; Glas, p. 37). Derrida interprets this as being no more than a rephrasing of the notion that the ego is synthetic and transcendent, in other words a universal phenomenon, not specific to Genet:

General enough to serve as an introduction to the transcendental structures of the ego, it was as efficient and undifferentiated as a passe-partout (master-key), as a universal key slipping into all the lacunae of meaning.

(Glas, p. 37)

In fact, Sartre's point is that Genet's ‘self’ is not merely transcendent like the ego of us all, it is also experienced as alienated, ‘Other than itself.’ An analogous difference is seen as constituting Genet's relations to the imaginary which he envisages not as a pis-aller to the real, but rather as a superior order because of its very unreality.

Glas probably represents Derrida's most concerted attack on intentional authorial meaning and textual unity: Saint Genet also marks the point at which Sartre comes closest to abandoning his attempt to preserve the authority of the subject. Genet is pensé, parlé (thought, spoken), his words are stolen from him, he cannot use language which belongs to the bourgeois so he tries to manipulate la part du diable (‘the devil's share,’ that is, language as it escapes its user) in a refusal of communication which none the less risks being deviated in its turn. But Derrida is singularly unsympathetic to Sartre's discussion of Genet's language, dismissing as ‘vague Mallarmeism’ (Glas, p. 21) his analysis of the ‘“vibratory disappearance” of signification’ (SG, p. 564; Glas, p. 21), though the phrase is certainly no more metaphoric than Derrida's own reference to ‘the knell … [which] marks the end of meaning, sense and the signifier’ (Glas, p. 39). It is disquieting and intriguing to see Derrida resort to critical sleight of hand of a kind he would certainly castigate in others: he reduces a fascinating and lengthy discussion of a passage from Notre Dame des Fleurs which he later examines himself, to the decontextualized (and, according to Derrida, self-verifying) statement that, ‘The structure of the poetic phrase reflects very precisely the ontological structure of sainthood’ (Glas, p. 21; SG, p. 563), without giving any indication of the analysis of self-destroying signification of which Sartre's proposition forms part.

But it would be inappropriate in this context to do more than give a few pointers towards Derrida's misrepresentation of Sartre. For the ‘misreading’ is of course no accident—the extent of Derrida's familiarity with Saint Genet may be deduced from his use of the text as seminar material at the Ecole Normale⁶—and the reasons behind it will become progressively clearer. More significant, perhaps, than the direct criticisms, are the ways in which Glas may be read as an unacknowledged response to Sartre's work, whether by opposing it, striking off obliquely from it, expanding it, or even imitating it. Of course, Glas and Saint Genet remain radically different in many vitally important respects. Derrida's elaborate treatment of death or of flowers, for example, Sartre's exploration of the ‘themes’ of sainthood, evil, or the Medusa-like stare of the ‘Other’ undeniably establish the specificity of their works. And furthermore, certain similarities may be attributed not to any version of ‘influence,’ however complex, but rather to the way in which the criticism of both philosophers appears to embrace so closely the characteristics of the text under scrutiny.

Like Sartre, Derrida is uncomfortably aware of the hostility his reading would arouse in Genet, who might be amused to be called a ‘machine à draguer’ (Glas, p. 229), but who would hate to be understood, mastered, or made to serve a ‘worthwhile’ (anti-)philosophical cause. But whereas Sartre overtly betrays Genet by interpreting him and suggesting a possible ‘good use’ for his texts, Derrida hopes that his fragmentary and ‘preliminary’ study (Glas, p. 229) will obviate the risk of seeming to totalize the writer. However, he realizes that even the least pedantic comments—the least ‘hermeneutic and doctoral’ (Glas, pp. 239-40)—may still become a ‘matrix’ or a ‘grammar’ (Glas, p. 229), and that Genet would certainly not be reassured by the plea of good intentions:

He will hate me for it. … And in every case. If I support or valorise his text he will see this as a kind of approbation, or even appropriation—masterful, scholarly, paternal or maternal.

(Glas, p. 223)

Paternal or maternal—for sexual difference, its elision and inversion, forms much of the stuff of Genet's texts. It also appears as intimately if obscurely related to the vexed question of signification. Baudelaire's Thyrse, and its ‘astonishing duality’ is clearly the precursor text here, picked up by both Sartre and Derrida.

The stick is your will, upright, strong and unshakeable; the flowers are the wanderings of your fantasy around your will; they are the feminine element executing around the male its prestigious pirouettes. Straight line and arabesque, intention and expression, firmness of will, sinuosity of the Word, unity of aim, variety of means, all-powerful and indivisible amalgam of genius, what analyst will have the hateful courage to divide and separate you?⁷

Sartre's commentary on Genet's use of the image of the thyrse forms part of his discussion of pansexualism:

When it is a matter, for Genet, of marking the relations of a ‘queen’ with a male, a comparison always comes back to his pen: that of a spiral twisting around a rigid upright pole. And this image evolves to the point of becoming a sexual motif reproduced everywhere in Nature; here it is, first of all, as a spectacle:

‘The queens chat and twitter around the males who are upright, still, vertiginous, still and silent as branches.’

Then as a gesture:

‘All the queens imparted to their bodies a spiral movement and tried to entwine the handsome man and wrap themselves around him.’

Then as a metaphor:

‘Around some of them, more upright and solid than the others, coil clematis, ivy, nasturtiums, little pimps too, entwining.’

Finally the sexual schema flows over into perception itself: the sky in the midst of the palaces becomes ‘the column of azure that marble entwines around.’

(SG, p. 125)

Derrida takes over the metaphor to describe the way in which ‘Genet's sentences wind themselves around a direction like ivy along a truncated column’ (Glas, p. 87).⁸ Further, he imagines Genet's feeling of entrapment within Glas's critical commentary in similar terms: ‘He would already feel entwined. Like a column, in a cemetery, eaten away by ivy, a parasite arriving too late’ (Glas, p. 228).

Sartre's theoretical vocabulary remains close to that of the nineteenth-century poet: he speaks of the inseparability of ‘sense’ and ‘expression’ (SG, p. 193) even when he is remarking not on a successful act of communication but rather on its inevitable failure in the ‘infernal circle’ (SG, p. 193). Derrida, as we have seen, announces the death of ‘meaning,’ ‘sense,’ and the ‘signifier’ (Glas, p. 39), because, in part, of the (false) oppositional system on which they are based. He has argued elsewhere⁹ that his attention to the signifier does not indicate any ultimate privileging of that element of the binary and hierarchized signifier/signified opposition which he deems to be itself metaphysical, but rather forms part of the reversal phase of the deconstructive enterprise. ‘GLAS’ is primarily neither signifier nor signified, not simply the death-toll of ‘meaning’ and ‘theme’ which remain to haunt any textual analysis, nor yet merely the phonetic decomposition of language into its formal elements. Derrida's tracing of Gl through Genet's texts is intended to subvert the form/content opposition which it cannot, none the less, overthrow entirely. Hence the proliferation of puns which depend on the interplay of phonic resonance and meaning, and the neo-Cratylic etymologizing which has the effect of bestowing on the word an autonomy and personal history which appear self-destructive in the immensity of their pretensions. Glas represents Derrida's most radical attempt to date to get beyond the infernal interdependence and inevitable failure of semanticism and formalism (Glas, p. 165), empiricism and metaphysics (Glas, pp. 252-3). ‘The complicity of formalism and empiricism is confirmed yet again’ (Glas, p. 220). Sartre has made a similar point about the complicity of realism and idealism (SG, pp. 69-70). Intriguingly, but perhaps on reflection inevitably, both philosophers return the question of oppositions and their ultimate connivance and falsehood to that of sexual difference. When Sartre discusses the pederasty of Genet's texts he is not referring solely to their homosexual content, but rather to the system of inversions, illusions, and betrayal which the texts establish. ‘Poetry risks becoming treachery’ (SG, p. 206); ‘He steals a word, just one, and the reader notices that he is spoken. … Genet's poetry is the vertiginous flight of meanings towards nothingness’ (SG, pp. 560, 572). ‘He forces others to support, in his place, the false against the true, Evil against Good, Nothingness against Being’ (SG, p. 575). By a quite different route, and as part of his meditation on Hegel, Derrida comes to a similar conclusion about the relationship of difference and opposition to the sexual sphere. Infinite difference is ultimately self-negating.¹⁰ ‘Non-existent and infinite difference would thus be sexual difference as opposition. … And if it transcends [relève] difference, opposition, conceptuality itself, is homosexual’ (Glas, p. 249).

And it is in their relation to Hegel that Saint Genet and Glas have most in common, for Genet serves both Sartre and Derrida as an ideal foil to Hegelian totalitarianism. But if Derrida owes much to Sartre in his choice and treatment of Genet as an opponent to Hegel, the debt is an unacknowledged irony, for Derrida has been pleased to represent Sartre as some kind of neo-Hegelian interested only in synthesis and totalization. As I have shown elsewhere,¹¹ Sartre, contrary to Derrida's assertions,¹² persistently refuses to identify being and presence, maintaining that ‘the in-itself cannot be present’ (EN [L'Etre et le néant], p. 165), and rejecting the Hegelian notion that ‘only the present is,’¹³ arguing that, precisely, ‘the present is not’ (EN, p. 168), it is néant rather than être (EN, pp. 164-5). Moreover, he anticipates Derrida's deconstruction of Husserl's Logical Investigations in La Voix et le phénomène (1967) in his analysis of the presence-to-itself of the pour-soi which he sees as a measure of its non-identity: ‘If it is present to itself, that means it is not completely itself,’ it is a ‘way of … escaping identity’ (EN, p. 119). Sartre's pour-soi is not Being in any recognizable sense of the term, it is rather the ‘nihilation of being’ (EN, p. 712). The whole argument of L'Etre et le néant is to insist ‘against Hegel that being is and nothingness is not’ (EN, p. 51). Hegel's transformation of negation into affirmation is vigorously resisted by both Sartre and Derrida in so far as it risks obliterating difference and reducing the power of the negative to negate. The negative moment of the Hegelian dialectic is precisely that: a moment which will be transcended. Hegel dissolves difference in the eventual unity of being and non-being, presence and absence. Derrida refers repeatedly to the inescapability of the Aufhebung, or speculative dialectic, referring to it as an ‘inexhaustible ruse’¹⁴ which différance sets out to elude:

If there was a definition of différance it would be precisely the limiting, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian dialectic everywhere it operates.¹⁵

Sartre's own attack on Hegel is three-pronged—through the ontology of L'Etre et le néant which maintains being and nothingness as radically distinct; through Marxism in the Critique de la raison dialectique—for Marx, according to Sartre, never tried to dissolve the reality of human initiative in the welter of historical process; and finally in L'Universel singulier where he argues that from Kierkegaard we learn that failure is a subjective reality which cannot be explained away as an objective ‘relative positivity.’¹⁶ It is through failure that human subjectivity proves inassimilable to ‘le savoir objectif.’ Derrida's response to Hegel necessarily shares a similar focus: an opposition to Hegelian ontology through différance; a reflection in Glas on Marx's Theses on Feuerbach and their attempt to come to terms with the dialectic (see pp. 222-31); and third, a discussion of the struggle by Bataille and Kierkegaard to escape Hegelian totalization through ‘a-theology’¹⁷ and a version of Christian mysticism respectively. It is the mystical valorization of failure which exercises a perverse fascination over both Sartre and Derrida (as indeed over Bataille),¹⁸ but which they feel to be ultimately untenable because, as a form of loser-wins, it risks becoming inauthentic in Sartre's terms, metaphysical in Derrida's. Kierkegaard faces the same danger as anyone tempted by negative theology: that of falling back into precisely the trap he set out to evade and transforming negation into affirmation. ‘Universal negation is equivalent to the absence of negation.’¹⁹ Furthermore, Hegel has already confronted Kierkegaard's argument in advance: absolute singularity is, by its very absoluteness, part of the universal, ultimately sacrificed and thereby preserved: ‘It is “saved” at the same time as lost as a singularity. … It … renounces its singular freedom. … “Singularity is absolute singularity, infinity, the immediate contrary of itself”’ (Glas, p. 160, quoting Hegel). Negative theology, for Sartre and Derrida, is not truly negative: both philosophers cite Eckhart to illustrate what Derrida calls ontotheology: ‘When I said that God was not a being and was above being, I was not thereby contesting his being, on the contrary I was attributing to him a higher being’ (ED, p. 398).²⁰ Their objections to negative theology are the same as their objections to Hegel: it is a sophistical reaffirmation of Being parading as negation. It also bears what they recognize to be an uncanny - but strongly resisted—resemblance to their own versions of paradoxical logic. Indeed Derrida's forceful repudiation of the similarity might be interpreted as dénégation: ‘This description of différance is not theological, not even of the most negative order of negative theology. … Différance is … irreducible to any ontological or theological … reappropriation’ (Marges, p. 6). The vehemence of his rejection of Sartre is perhaps explicable in terms of a similarly close but resisted parallel between his own attempt to undermine Being and that of existential ‘nihilism.’

Moreover, it is not simply Kierkegaard whom Hegel has subsumed in advance. As Derrida points out, any ‘misreading’ of Hegel—including necessarily Sartre's and his own—is always already inscribed within Absolute Knowledge if it does not fall by the way-side ‘as a remainder’ (Glas, p. 259). Hegel has confounded both Sartre and Derrida by enclosing them within the sceptic's perennial dilemma. For if Sartre denies the possibility of absolute, objective truth,²¹ and Derrida its desirability, as philosophers (of whatever sort), they are caught in the paradox of necessarily appearing to espouse in practice the truth-claims they are in theory rejecting. This perhaps in part explains their fascination with Genet who seems to slip out of the all-embracing hands of the recuperative dialectician precisely because he has no interest in Hegel, absolute knowledge, or even truth, and refuses to enter the debate except in a parodic mode. For he is evidently familiar with the paradoxes and inversions of negative theology and its Hegelian resonances:

To want to be nothing is a phrase one often hears. It is Christian. Should we understand by it that man seeks to lose, to allow to be dissolved, that which in some fashion gives him a banal singularity, that which gives him his opacity, so that, the day of his death, he may present to God a pure transparency, not even iridescent? I don't know and I don't care.²²

Genet may not care but Sartre and Derrida certainly do. And this is the nub of their shared anxiety about ‘betraying’ the arch-traitor; and perhaps also part of the explanation of their tendency to ‘idealize’ him by accepting his own self-portrait as villain; for Sartre appears to recognize a degree of authenticity in the simple ethical inversions he condemned five years earlier in his study of Baudelaire, and Derrida writes with unconcealed admiration of Genet's choice to follow a path of danger, terrorism, and revolution (Glas, p. 45). Both Sartre and Derrida may use Genet to try to get outside Hegelian totality through loss, failure, fragmentation, or some kind of ‘remainder’, but it is clear that he has not (really) failed in the eyes of either of them. Genet's technique of inverting hierarchized oppositions—the most evident, perhaps, those of hetero- and homosexuality, good and evil, real and imaginary, original and copy, fidelity and treachery,²³ communication and non-communication, truth and lies—fascinates Sartre by its unconventional, paradoxical, anti-bourgeois nature, and Derrida, one might surmise, by its proximity to the reversal phase of deconstruction. In theory, Genet does not go far enough for either philosopher, he remains stuck at the level of inversion, but in practice he perhaps goes further than either, especially as this lack of interest in either synthesis or truth saves him from falling back (or forwards) into either seriousness or metaphysics. His use as a foil to Hegel lies then not so much in a duplication of the Kierkegaardian project, but rather in the way he lends himself to both the Sartrean and the Derridian enterprises: to undermine the overweening Truth-claims of the totalizing dialectic. Derrida focuses primarily on its telos, Absolute Knowledge, le Savoir Absolu, le Sa (Sa is, of course, also the abbreviation for the signifiant [signifier] and thus an ironically (in)appropriate way of expressing what would certainly fit the label of Transcendental Signified); Sartre on its process: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It is this pattern of negation and recuperation that Sartre uses to parody Hegel, for if Genet appears to mimic a dialectical mode of procedure, it is only to undermine it in a sequence of spiralling tourniquets which never come to rest in synthesis or totalization. Sartre sets Genet's shot-silk textual and sexual contradictions up against the totalitarian clarity of Hegel's Logic, for they lead only to a dizzying repetition of the same self-destroying reversals.

The dialectical progression … curves round to become a circular movement.

(SG, p. 171)

A work of Genet's, like Hegel's phenomenology, is a consciousness which sinks down into appearances, discovers itself at the peak of its alienation, recovers itself and relegates things to the rank of its objects.

(SG, p. 145)

Sartre describes Genet derealizing himself in the realm of appearances, in a celebration of falsehood and the imaginary, in a defiance of God and his ‘goods’:

Nothing on earth belongs to this waking dreamer except lies, falsity and imitations. He is the lord of pretences, con tricks and trompe-l'oeil. Wherever objects appear as what they are not, do not appear as what they are, he is king. Fake king, king of fakes. And what is a fake, but the counterfeiting of being?

(SG, p. 402)

But Genet only imagines his bad taste, it is anti-humanist, an inversion of ‘real’ bad taste: ‘For Genet a taste for the false becomes false bad taste’ (SG, p. 406). In Derrida's account, similarly, Genet's preference for the ersatz, for galalith over marble (Glas, pp. 140, 225) is seen as a form of studied inversion related to the pattern of loser-wins: ‘The worst is the best, but you must not get it wrong, the worst is not the least good … You need to be a connoisseur of fakes’ (Glas, p. 226).

Genet's preference for the fake subverts the hierarchy of original/copy, but stops short of the kind of radical contesting of origin to be found in Derrida or Deleuze²⁴ and which has become a topos of contemporary thought. For Genet, toc still takes its value by opposition to the ‘real.’²⁵

In his study of the Aufhebung, Jean-Luc Nancy cites Ernest Hello: ‘Pride, Satan and Hegel give the same cry: Being and Nothingness are identical.’²⁶ The assimilation of Hegel and Satan throws light on the reasons underlying Genet's ‘misappropriation’ of the dialectic: ‘We have left behind the aporias of Being only to fall into those of Non-Being’ (SG, p. 173). ‘For the Being of Evil is at once the Being of Non-Being and the Non-Being of Being’ (SG, p. 177).

Genet provides a non-serious opponent to Hegel, for his obscene practical demonstrations of dialectical reversal cast the lofty abstract philosophical theorizing in a comic mode. Sartre's examples are treachery: ‘For treachery is not a return to the Good: it is Evil doing evil to itself; two negations do not make an affirmation: they are lost, coiled one with the other, in the demented night of the no’ (SG, pp. 195-6). And sodomy: Genet's admiration for the homosexual who takes the active role is undermined in a parody of the transformative dialectic which is also a form of self-parody:

The Tough-Guy is, to speak like Hegel, Evil transformed into the absolute-subject.

(SG, p. 135)

‘It was a little later … that he understood that his cry, that evening, had been wrong: “A male who screws another male is a double male.”’ A male who screws another is not a double male: he's a female who doesn't realize it.

(SG, p. 152)

It is this means of undermining any pretension to a stable truth by a series of reversals which refuses to privilege even its own position, that Derrida has focused on in his choice of initial text for Glas, Ce qui est resté d'un Rembrandt déchiré en petits carrés bien réguliers, et foutu aux chiottes²⁷ in which Genet proceeds by an ostentatious rejection of definitive conclusions:

To want to be nothing is a phrase one often hears. It is Christian: Should we understand that man seeks to lose … ? I don't know and I don't care. … It goes without saying that everything I have just said only has any importance if one accepts that everything was more or less false. … And it goes without saying that the entire works of Rembrandt have a meaning—at least for me—only if I know that what I have just written was wrong.

(Rembrandt, pp. 22, 25, 28)

The Rembrandt text, published in 1967, is clearly full of parodic allusions to the (Hegelian/)Sartrean notion of the universal singular, and verbal echoes of La Nausée and Les Mots:

A whole man, made of all men and who is worth all of them and whom anyone is worth.

(Les Mots, p. 214)²⁸

I had the revelation that every man is worth every other. … I was incapable of saying how I passed from the realization that every man is like every other to the idea that every man is all other men.

(Rembrandt, pp. 21, 26)

It also, one may assume, gives Derrida the idea of juxtaposing two contrasting but interrelated columns of text, a technique he used previously in Marges (1972). The textual interplay between Hegel, Genet, Sartre, and Derrida would be too complex even to start to unravel.²⁹Glas is precisely not Derrida's attempt to totalize Hegel, Sartre, and Genet. It is intentionally fragmentary and open-ended, but no more than any other writer can he control the meaning and reception of his own text. Glas escapes Derrida in at least two ways: precisely because it appears to master the texts he is decomposing, juxtaposing, and deconstructing; and ironically and perhaps more seriously, by in fact constituting the unreadable text he seems to have set out to attempt. As Derrida admits, ‘il bande double’ (Glas, p. 77), he wants to have it both ways, but above all to be irrecuperable. He approaches Genet in a way which is explicitly intended to alienate ‘the archeologists, philosophers, hermeneuts, semioticians, semanticians, psychoanalysts, rhetoricians, poeticians, perhaps even all readers who still believe in literature or in anything’ (Glas, p. 50). If Glas is unreadable but not irrecuperable, Derrida has surely failed (really) on all scores.

But when all else fails, magic comes into its own. If Sartre and Derrida are confounded, like Hercules, in their attempt to behead the Hegelian hydra, Genet perhaps succeeds like Iolaus who decapitated it with fire not sword, by dint of lateral prestidigitation: ‘Since that kind of operation could not succeed through dialectics, I had recourse to magic’ (Glas, p. 276, quoting Genet). And like all good conjurors, Genet's final trick is to vanish into thin air, taking with him the magic carpet on which his left-wing philosophical admirers had been standing: the so-called révolté who had abandoned literature, published posthumously one last work denying the very title of revolutionary which had earned him such unlikely reverence. Un captif amoureux³⁰ describes revolution as a game—the result of dreams which cannot be lived out (CA, [Un captif amoureux] pp. 142, 227, 312); his own involvement in the Palestinian struggle as purely artistic and poetic (CA, pp. 16, 455), the war as comédie (CA, p. 202). Genet uses the autobiographical mode to meditate on marginality (CA, pp. 203, 350), simulation (CA, p. 206), derealization (CA, pp. 206, 421), commitment, language, and writing (CA, pp. 279, 346, 372, 401). Has the tourniquet twisted its final spiral? Should we decide that Genet's ‘mémoires’ ratify the theories of Sartre and Derrida or parody them in their turn? Like the philosophers, the critic is left empty-handed.

Notes

1. Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris, Editions Galilée, 1974).

2. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Etre et le néant (Paris, Gallimard, 1943). Henceforth (EN).

3. See Robert Champigny, Stages on Sartre's Way (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1959).

4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (Paris, Gallimard, 1951). Henceforth (SG).

5. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (London, Oxford, and New York, Oxford University Press, 1973).

6. See my ‘Derrida l'insoumis,’ Le Nouvel Observateur, 9 September 1983, pp. 62-7.

7. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Spleen de Paris,’ in Oeuvres complètes (Paris, Edition de la Pléiade, 1961), p. 285.

8. See also Derrida, Glas, 1974, p. 35.

9. Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1972), p. 110. Henceforth (P).

10. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1967), p. 191.

11. See my ‘Sartre and Derrida: qui perd gagne,’ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 13, 1982, pp. 26-34.

12. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Les Fins de l'homme,’ in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972). Henceforth (M).

13. G. F. W. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. 1, ed. and trans. M.-J. Petry (London, Allen & Unwin, 1970), section 259, p. 235.

14. (M), p. 339.

15. (P), p. 55.

16. Jean Paul Sartre, ‘L'Universel singulier,’ in Situations IX (Paris, Gallimard, 1972), p. 166. See also Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris, Gallimard, 1960), p. 103: ‘The conflict between Hegel and Kierkegaard finds its resolution in the fact that man is neither signified nor signifier, but both signified-signifier and signifying-signified.’

17. See Jacques Derrida, L'Ecriture et la différance, ‘Points Edition’ (Paris, Seuil, 1967), chapter 9.

18. ibid., pp. 399-400.

19. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘L'Engagement de Mallarmé,’ Obliques 18-19, numéro spécial, Sartre, ed. M. Sicard, p. 94. See also Glas, p. 225: ‘The critique (of a logic) which reproduces in itself (the logic of) what it criticizes will always be … an idealist gesture.’

20. See also (SG), p. 229, note 1.

21. See, for example, Situations IX, p. 148, and Critique de la raison dialectique, p. 741.

22. Jean Genet, ‘Ce qui est resté d'un Rembrandt,’ in Oeuvres complètes, vol. IV (Paris, Gallimard, 1968).

23. Echoes of this inversion are to be found towards the end of Sartre's Les Mots (Paris, Gallimard, 1964).

24. See, for example, Gilles Deleuze, ‘Platon et le simulacre’ and ‘Klossowski ou les corps-langage,’ in Logique du sens (Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1969).

25. See also Saint Genet, pp. 209-10.

26. Jean-Luc Nancy, La Remarque spéculative: un bon mot d'Hegel (Paris, Editions Galilée, 1973), p. 33.

27. Genet, Ce qui est resté d'un Rembrandt, 1968.

28. Sartre, Les Mots, 1964, p. 214.

29. For an uneven but occasionally brilliant study of Glas which attempts to enter into its textual web rather than unravel it, see, of course, Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).

30. Genet, Un captif amoureux (Paris, Gallimard, 1986).