SOURCE: Gourgouris, Stathis. “A Lucid Drunkenness (Genet's Poetics of Revolution).” South Atlantic Quarterly, 97, no. 2 (spring 1998): 413-56.

[In the following essay, Gourgouris examines Genet's poetics through his widely known and embraced identity as a criminal and his later association with revolutionary groups.]

It has already become customary to infuse the end of the twentieth century with a forward-looking gaze to some abyssal, unknown, but nonetheless impending end (of “history,” of “ideology”). Repressed in the allure of this abyssal gaze is the knowledge that the end is measured by a precisely delineated historical past which shadows it completely. While rushing to peer over the other side, we forget that the ground on which we stand is continually slipping along with us. This ground is history's great shadow, animated by the twentieth century's revolutionary foundations, whether we understand them in terms of the explosive legacy of modernism in arts and letters, of microphysics in the world of science, or, most significantly (considering its lasting aesthetic power), of the 1917 proletarian revolution in Russia. Although recently bantered about as a category of nostalgia, revolution has become endemic to the twentieth century as much by virtue of historical fact as by virtue of a certain historical pride. Witness to the twentieth century's claim to be the century of revolution, of revolutionary magnitude, is the extensive refiguration of the so-called Age of Revolution (the late eighteenth century) into its immediate progenitor. Be it agent of salvation or of destruction, the presence of the Enlightenment in the twentieth century has emerged, via an extraordinary accumulation of research and contemplation, as the Ursprung of modernity.

But the matter is burdened with a peculiar subversion of standard calendrical time by history itself. Although the end of this century is now aggravated by millenarian obsessions (the most amusing manifestation in a forest of sinister visions being Washington's recent pleas for a “Millennium Bug Czar” to take the kinks of the oo out of the federal computing system), its actual meaning is indelibly marked by the event and outcome that cut across its midpoint: the Second World War. This extraordinary occurrence, obviously rooted in the century's revolutionary origins but also raising against them the formidable presence of a monster child, launched a series of events that rapidly cascaded on each other's radical signification. The new technology of mass extermination (death camps, hydrogen bomb) posed the global dilemma of “socialism or barbarism” more desperately and concretely than the slogan's revolutionary genealogy (political and aesthetic), which harked back to the century's infancy. Against the century's revolutionary foundations, global history since the late 1940s has been directed toward an ever more expansive manifestation of the epistemic power of revolution, which, as Hannah Arendt readily recognized some thirty-five years ago, has exceeded and outlived every one of its various ideological justifications.¹ Under the logic of mass extermination, the world exploded and steadily overturned the terminology of order on all fronts, identifiable in turn by a multitude of names: decolonization, national liberation, civil disobedience, anti-imperialism, youth culture, cultural revolution, antiwar movement, racial and sexual liberation, urban warfare, ecological resistance.

Probably nothing since the era of New World discovery can compare with the geographic and geopolitical upheaval that characterized the postwar era. Nor was there ever such an extensive social and cultural rearrangement as has occurred in the last fifty years. National borders and cultural boundaries have been drawn, redrawn, and erased with a stunning range of violence, analogous in fact to internal lines of sociocultural definition being challenged, destroyed, and reconstructed. In a peculiar sense, the twentieth century actually begins at its halfway point, which means it must be measured in terms of its half-life (oddly appropriate considering that one of its exclusive contributions to history is the irreversible impact of the so-called atomic age). Or, more accurately, the twentieth century begins twice: first as a categorically revolutionary era, then again as an era of annihilation. There is a double origin at work, with all the paradoxical consequences that implies. A second origin by definition cannot claim the total authority of origin as such. It can neither be nor erase the source of its significance—in this case, the mark of a social (and cultural) order authorized and often actually achieved by revolutionary action.

On the other hand, a second origin implies a weakness in the first, a literal lack of determination. By the very interruption it incurs, a second origin draws the limit space of the first, a finite space that comes about if only by virtue of establishing a sequence of numbers. In this respect, the second origin assumes a determinant force simultaneously cast backward and forward in history, which is to say that it takes over the reins of signification in all directions, for what has been and what has to be. With its revolutionary foundations thus unerasable, the twentieth century reemerged at its halfway point with all the elements of an other. The epistemic effect of World War II consists in its having inserted next to the legacy of revolution the real experience of annihilation, which was, moreover, concretely recognized as a global reality.² From that point on, revolution and annihilation, as antagonistic epistemic agents implying each other's coherence, would permeate global reality in an unprecedented way. And the twentieth century, cut in half and reconstituted as a radiating half-life, finally came to be as a disturbance of life's relation to time: the legacy of a double origin and, consequently, of the simultaneous circularity and termination that contaminates both origin and telos. What distinguishes this century is the enormous political and epistemological radiation from events that, though long concluded, remain curiously alive, feeding on a frenetically unfolding present that allegedly erases them.

To speak, therefore, of the late twentieth century as an already present condition of the future is to fail to engage its historical essence. It is not only to impose an end on a historical condition that renders all teleology problematic, but also to commit the grave error of exorcising the ambiguous presence of a determinant double past by rhetorically invoking an insubordinate late development. Often, “late twentieth century” bears an affinity to “late capitalism,” which describes the current state of a global economics (as a departure from the industrial capitalism that preceded it) whose own historical existence more or less testifies to a post-World War II phenomenon. In this respect, “late capitalism” denotes the particular economic condition of the twentieth century as such, not its alleged late phase. Thus in terms of both global history and global economics, “late twentieth century” is a shadowy term, suggesting a phantom era in mourning for a time that has not actually taken place. Any insistence on holding the “late twentieth century” in place, in order to study it beyond mere rhetorical usefulness, is frustrated by its affinity with the decaying body of time it is leaving behind: a so-called twentieth century whose origin and duration are themselves unstable notions.

In any case, no credible argument can be made against the generative role that revolution has played in the century's imaginary, whether it spans five or ten decades. One of the lessons of the twentieth century is that the symbolic universe of revolution seems bound to outlive its history. Whatever erasure was signified by countless statues of Lenin being torn down along with the Berlin Wall was matched by the recent exhumation of Che Guevara's bones that brought his disembodied symbolic presence back into history. Those who have pronounced revolution a dead word in our time are nevertheless bound to perceive the recent flurry of worldwide media reports on Che (both image and history having been recounted with relish and in detail) as one more commercial exercise in postmodern nostalgia. Such pronouncements may even serve genuine political ends, but they are predicated on maintaining a belief in politics as a domain of instrumental efficacy by repressing the knowledge of politics as a boundless arena of antagonistic imaginaries whose historical terms may be precisely documented, but whose resolution remains largely unpredictable and open to historical accident.

The epistemic significance of revolution belongs to the second domain. If revolution has any meaning at all—if those countless lives lost in its name do leave behind a demand on history that cannot be outmaneuvered—it is because revolution makes palpable, often against the grain of reality, humanity's capacity to alter its own destiny, its own understanding of itself. The revolutionary project is profoundly a matter of cognition, of gaining knowledge into self and other, often at the price of death. Perhaps this is why the degree of symbolic weight borne by the Marxist tradition in the twentieth century is matched by that of psychoanalytic theory and practice. If nothing else, the coinciding of the century's entrance into the stream of time and a theory of the human imagination's opening itself up to the world of the unconscious (i.e., the 1900 publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams) is uncannily emblematic. And although Freud's own life and testament covers the entire period before the century's definitive occurrence (in my terms), the psychoanalytic project generated a fallout of such magnitude as to become the means of detecting the parameters of this century's half-life. Certainly, Freud's last major works aspire to make psychoanalysis accountable to the work of culture itself, to lend the psychoanalytic project a broader epistemological foundation that would ultimately direct its insight into the unconscious mind toward society's drives of collective perversion, self-destructive totemism, failed sublimation.

The grand overturning of order that signifies the twentieth century in my view occurred in the most extreme terms possible—those of a death culture springing from the name of Culture, consistent with Freud's warnings in Civilization and Its Discontents, though inordinately greater than his most unconscious fears (if only because this overturning exposed the death drive of Culture as residing in the most refined folds of the European tradition). The psychoanalytic project entered the domain of “social science” at the point when the historical workings of death culture (whether the decade-long, systematic buildup of the Holocaust and the Gulag or the instant of the flash over Hiroshima) exceeded all “scientific” explanation as social phenomena. Thus, while not linked directly to the imaginary of revolution (like, say, Marxist epistemology), psychoanalysis remains central, for it engages with the knowledge of disorder and hence with humanity's prospects for dissolution and alteration. It does so despite the profound ethnographic prejudices incorporated in its legacy by virtue of Freud's extraordinary narcissistic daring in putting his own dreams and fantasies under the scope of a “scientific” inquiry with universalist aspirations. Indeed, nothing demonstrates the revolutionary potential of psychoanalysis more than the plasticity of its terminology, which has remained foregrounded in even the most radical theorizations that put the narcissistic and prejudicial fantasies of psychoanalysis into question.

And yet the actuality of revolution—the concrete sense of reality that becomes perceptible in the overwhelming dream-life of everyone who experiences a revolutionary situation—is simply beyond the cognitive realm of either Marxist or psychoanalytic epistemology in a strict sense. In its sublime turbulence and transience, the revolutionary moment consists of one's encounter with society's radical imagination: the abyssal domain from which humanity's creative/destructive capacities are unleashed, beyond logic and intention, prudence and fear—beyond the recognized limits of self. From this perspective, all (possibly profound) insights into a revolutionary situation according to Marxist or psychoanalytic categories of explication are essentially retroactive constructions. They cannot be otherwise because, in order to do justice to the radical creative/destructive imaginary inherent in a revolutionary experience, they must encounter it with the same radical capacity to create an object anew. This must literally be a poetic encounter. If the revolutionary project is a matter of cognition—in the (blank) face of annihilation and the indeterminate violence of self-alteration—then it is a matter of poetic cognition, of a synthetic and not analytic, an allusive and not demonstrable, understanding. In the final instance, societies control their destinies to the extent that they recognize the effects of their own mythopoetic production. This task is as much a matter of political action as it is a matter of a culture's capacity for self-reflection.

Let me submit these elliptical remarks as an overture to my perhaps contestable choice to address the significance of Marxism and psychoanalysis in the late twentieth century by way of a man who engaged revolutionary experience, without apology, as a fundamentally poetic experience—indeed, as a poetic project. My underlying assumption here is that a poetic sensibility is essential to any radical enterprise that seeks, without compromise, to topple a recognized order of self and other. Because a revolutionary project must mobilize, by definition, a highly inventive and unpredictable process of self-propelled othering, a radiating poetic force must always burn at the heart of such a project, even if not entirely understood, even if not (as is most often the case) entirely under control. Regardless of a given revolutionary project's particular social-historical parameters, political objectives, and ideological demands—all of which are both fundamental and outmaneuverable—a poetic praxis operates at its core, whether modern history's “professional” revolutionaries acknowledge it or not.

This is not to say that poets make revolution, let alone that poets make stalwart revolutionaries; simply invoking history's memory of Rimbaud should put the matter to rest. But it is to say, against the grain of our tendency to subject the puzzling moments of social disorder to the calming order of “scientific” analysis, that a poetic apprehension of the world should be given precedence when it comes to the (perhaps puzzling) enterprise of revolution. Marx himself, honest enough to recognize the primacy of Balzac in the enterprise of social analysis, was often given to poetic methods in his own work, of which the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte remains a superlative instance. Such poetic engagement with history signifies a necessary understanding of society's mythological nucleus behind every concrete historical action. It concerns and addresses society's mythistorical foundations, and therefore, as a matter of method and not vocation, it is not the sole privilege of poets.³ One can argue that Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment or The Possessed provides the most articulate and synthetic insight into what accounted for the eventual outbreak of the Russian Revolution or, by the same token, that Jules Michelet's grand story of the French Revolution (or of France in general) is equally animated by a spirit of inventive (poetic) understanding. Coming to terms with society's radical imagination (the creative/destructive force of self-alteration) demands that mythistorical knowledge be accessed, and it requires poetic thought, irrespective of any ongoing ideological manipulations.

It may sound paradoxical, but considering that the revolutionary legacy of the twentieth century was not fully realized until it encountered the silencing power of annihilation, this actually echoes Theodor Adorno's famous warning that poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism. The echo is negative yet in this sense consistent with Adorno's terms. In Negative Dialectics, he will revise and dramatize his thought by recognizing “the right of the tortured man to scream,” thereby attributing to poetry the defiance of all syntax. Of course, his invective against the ongoing legitimacy of lyric plenitude once annihilation has been itself legitimized remains intact. Yet, in this double conception, Adorno's thought contains the grammar of history brushing it against the grain. As history tells it, the privilege of the world of the lyric subject is annihilated, but its relation to the radical imagination is not abolished. Rather, it is reconfigured so as to open itself up to what is most radically external, beyond all syntax, to whatever does not speak. After Auschwitz comes poetry's second origin. And in this respect, next to Paul Celan stands Jean Genet.

Obviously, Genet problematizes the figure of the witness exemplified by Celan's poetics, which takes Adorno's doubt at its most literal and thus opens it up to its full extent. Genet is a quintessentially vagrant figure whose passage through the terrain of the twentieth century effects a strange amalgamated testimony to both survival and mutation. He makes for a case study in survival against all odds as well as a story of profound asociality: the trajectory of a voyage against society itself. If this figure has any consistency at all, it is as a witness to displacement and mutability—social, political, sexual, geographical. Bastard, thief, homosexual, and vagabond are Genet's avowed personae, never to be domesticated or socialized, who testify to society's disappearance. Few artists recognized so radically that their authority was first and foremost a construction by an other, conferred upon them by the enemy (social convention), but in this respect usable as a weapon for killing the authorized self along with the entire domain of values that made it possible. Countless times in countless interviews, Genet repeated that he became a writer in order to get out of prison and that his literary authority was a sham, unworthy of conversation yet useful to those who had no voice to expose the sham they were actually living. Even his “sainthood,” invented by Jean-Paul Sartre, who made him famous and therefore powerful, was something that Genet rejected and unmasked by showing the world sainthood's fundamental debilitation: he stopped writing literature for nearly thirty years. Genet was fond of simultaneously showing the real impotence of power together with its capacity for annihilation. A rare witness to the twentieth century's core antagonism between revolution and annihilation, he was all the more rare for knowing no guilt and seeking no artistic redemption.

But Genet also epitomizes the twentieth century's double life. By virtue of being abandoned to the public domain shortly after his birth in 1910, Genet became committed to a life on the margins, where subsocieties, always tenuous and artificially kept together (often with force), challenge the very legitimacy that society provides by perpetuating their institution. Orphanage, foster care, reform school, prison, the army: all defined Genet's communal experience up through adulthood—the institutional safeguards against the dangers of excess that Enlightenment society must identify, name, and circumscribe in order to control the means of producing boundaries of legality. Genet's particular trajectory through these socially constructed outsides was aggravated by his intransigent and guiltless homosexuality, which became the basis for his lifelong pursuit of an intuitive philosophical conceptualization of criminality. Genet's explicit theorization of the consubstantial nature of writer and criminal, beyond the codified romantic attributes of le poète maudit, is the key to deciphering both the glorious negation of his early work and the surrealistic affirmation of his late work, where the revolutionary replaces the criminal.

The nearly thirty-year chasm between early and late work, which not only proves insurmountable to his biographers and critics, but also explodes the category of mature work beyond recognition, suggests that Genet, like the twentieth century he so oddly shadowed, is marked by a double origin. In the first phase, essentially ending in 1949 with his official pardon by the State, we see a thief who became a master of the French language (though a school dropout at twelve) and an auteur of the first order in a process that remained utterly mysterious and incomprehensible to the very end.⁴ What is so stunning about this period is the five prose works produced in rapid succession (as well as the debut of poems in the tradition of François Villon) that scandalized the intellectual and artistic community of Paris (Cocteau and Sartre, notably) not merely by their unabashed criminal nature (the lives of prisoners, prostitutes, thieves, murderers, and queers), but by their extraordinary literariness—all the more shocking and eloquent as the voice of criminality itself.⁵ With these texts, the criminal became an author by taking command of the panoply of culture, which had condemned him to a life of crime, in order to transform that life into an object of culture: “The language I know best … is the one in which I was condemned. The tribunals pronounced my condemnation speaking French.”⁶ Genet recognized the paradoxical truth that in a society founded on the rights of man—of man sanctioned by law—the language of culture conquered territories beyond the reach of the language of law, the language of what is right. So, when he fashioned his criminal life into a work of art without shame, the underside of the law was suddenly graced with the emancipatory language of literary scandal.

Genet's legal emancipation and initial literary recognition coincided with the oddity of his proclaimed “sainthood,” which Sartre predicated on the choice of a criminal life that society had granted him. There is a certain truth to this existentialist formulation, but the secret of Genet's making himself into something already conceived by the enemy was much more theatrical than existential—a matter of maquillage, not morality. Impersonation was one of his fundamental principles; an intrinsically decentered and performative sense of self lent itself to exploiting social roles by embodying them in an externalizing gesture. This author originated in self-copying from life to “stage”—a process that exploded both the original copying mold (the process of reproduction) and the framework of exhibition. Thus did Genet the bastard/thief/homosexual/vagabond become a literary figure. But literary status entailed a new life of legality (citizenship) that made the literary enterprise difficult by making it irrelevant. Genet's achievement of the social legitimacy that art assures deprived him of the paranomic legitimacy (criminality) of writing. The result was a decade of confusion and an occasional sense of impotence during which he nevertheless sealed his extraordinary literary presence with a dynamic, if continually self-subverting, foray into the theater. This poetic outburst against and beyond the mythification of his person was the last flash of the criminal imagination against symbolic authority, the concentrated dregs of excess. But it also buried Genet deeper, under a heavier weight of legitimacy: art's legitimate subversion of social order, which he, a criminal, recognized as a glorious sham. During the 1950s, just when the twentieth century was reconstituting itself under the logic of annihilation, Genet set out to annihilate his literary persona, initially by producing a stylized meta-theater that short-circuited the aesthetic alibi of theatricality itself, then by reducing himself to the silence he thought he (and his work) deserved. He thereby denounced in no uncertain terms the fraudulent status of his legend, which produced no gravity of art but only the novelty of an illicit show, no proper readers but merely scandalized voyeurs:

I don't have readers but thousands of voyeurs who spy on me from the window that gives onto the stage of my personal life. … And I'm sickened by this interest that is awakened by the scandalous person I used to be. I wish that people would leave me alone. I want to start something entirely new. I do not want people to talk about me, nor do I want newspapers to publish things about my work. I want to be finished with this legend.⁷

Out of this explicit self-annihilation emerged another Genet: the extinguished poet who would grant his legendary name and the legitimacy of his illegitimate past life to those who criminalized themselves in the act of fashioning a revolutionary language from the social void, deterritorialized or simply groundless. The death of Abdallah, arguably Genet's dearest lover, marked the turning point, beginning with a failed act of self-annihilation (Genet's suicide attempt in 1967). The coincidental sense of personal void and radical overthrow of reality that prevailed during the late 1960s was one which Genet, existing entirely outside the bounds of his generation, could embrace with genuine clarity and passion. At this point of utter personal emptiness, of zero-degree self-reference, he achieved the selflessness required to grant one's signature to the voice of another, which culminated in his return to the authority of literature in his last work, the last remnant of his life, Un Captif amoureux. Published a month after Genet's death in 1986, it is nominally a chronicle/memoir of his voyage to an avowedly alien terrain and resurrection from self-annihilation (a revivification that began with the animating events of May '68). Genet experienced life again in the Black Panther community during a two-month period of illegal residence in the United States (spring 1970) and then in the company of Palestinian fedayeen at Jordanian camps where he made several visits over approximately fifteen months between 1970 and 1972.⁸

At first glance, Un Captif amoureux is an amalgam of memories of an eccentric involvement in two communities conceived on the basis of—and committed to—the precarious existence of revolutionary thought and action, an existence haunted by the imminence of death. This project had a deep ontological dimension, due not least to Genet's knowledge that he was dying of throat cancer. To understand the ontological stake, we need to consider the particular conditions of the text's historical genesis, namely, what made Genet return to literature after deliberately cultivating self-erasure.

While his experiences with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians profoundly affected Genet and spearheaded a long-term devotion to the political essay as the only “legitimate” mode of writing (due to its immediate use-value in the political arena),⁹ they failed to coalesce into any artistic expression, even in the limit-sense of the term, despite Genet's often agonizing desire and the copious notes he made. The turning point this time was his accidentally witnessing the immediate aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in September 1982; Quatre heures à Chatila, a celebrated piece that strips history bare with stunning lyricism and the passion of immediacy, appeared about four months after these events.¹⁰ This extraordinary experience of annihilation, dramatized by the historical accident of his presence in nearby Beirut, which brought Genet's personal wanderings into perfect coincidence with history's merciless dismantling of the limits of the personal, produced a poetic encounter with the violence of the world, his first in decades. Yet another encounter with Adorno's aporia of poetry's (or life's) possibility after Auschwitz, Genet's response to history's inarticulate pain amidst the heaps of ruined bodies in Shatila must have included responding to his own puzzlement over his daring to act as history's mythopoetic agent without succumbing to the narcissism of the poet-revolutionary.

Within two years, the long-envisioned book about his Palestinian experiences had been composed entirely from scratch—from those shards of memory that the experience of massacred life had rekindled. The palpable presence of annihilation sparked a poetic invocation of revolutionary life dormant in the cells of memory as a powerful love experience. What makes Un Captif amoureux formidable from the outset—before we even get drawn into the great mythistorical intricacies of the writing—is its being at once a work of love-affirmed life (of love for and by the world's constructed others) and a work of mourning (for the death of those named in its pages and the nameless multitude massacred in Shatila, for the death by cancer that was to finalize the trajectory of Jean Genet, the witness).¹¹

Genet's first literary publication in twenty years, affirming life and glorifying finitude in the same gesture, proved to be animated by the same explicit desire to disrupt the public's complacency that had characterized his work throughout. Against the backdrop of the voyeuristic devouring of his scandalous name, the text's force—its annihilation of the fetish “Genet”—derives from binding the authorial persona into a love encounter with otherness in the process of signifying itself, that is, in a process of revolution, itself an encounter between the historical and the mythological. Genet had become a celebrity by self-consciously cultivating the criminal persona that would animate the mythological world of his fiction; he could even be said to have fictionalized “Genet,” who then became real in his novels. He articulated this principle in describing the Thief's Journal as a work “meant to indicate what I am today, as I write it. It is not a quest of time gone by [une recherche du temps passé], but a work of art whose pretext-subtext is my former life.”¹² The obvious Proustian reference ought to resound against the split of one's life before and after fictionalization (or pre- and post-authorized existence, from the viewpoint of the criminal). Proust realized that one's life must be brought to an end if life is to be achieved in fiction or, even more, if fiction is to be given life in the most concrete sense. His fiction, therefore, became a chronicle of and memorial to this double death-and-life process, much as his corklined room became a space of self-entombment (or what would be self-imprisonment in Genet's terms) that enabled the generation of life in fiction, the birth of authorial vocation. Like Proust, to whose genius he explicitly aspired, Genet put into practice the risk of knowing language's incapacity to bring the moment of experience back to life, of language's marking, if anything, the death-moment of experience signified by what we call memory. He understood from Proust that the time of autobiography is always present-time and that this memorial service for a life long gone whose void energizes the creation of life anew is a veritable act of poiesis during which the authorial persona erases itself in being reinvented as the subject of mythical history, as legend. The Thief's Journal is probably the most explicitly Proustian of Genet's works, similarly involved in a poetic sur-vie, the legendary overstepping of life as fiction-in-the-making.

Writing against the name of his prison novels, Genet understood his last work as a continuation nonetheless of the project begun with the Thief's Journal, where the reality of an already legendary existence reaches its poetic culmination in the always present tense of being read: “I refuse to live for any other end than the very one which I found to contain the first misfortune: that my life must be a legend, in other words, legible, and that the reading of it must give birth to a certain new emotion I call poetry.” The thief-become-poet here declares, “I am no longer anything, only a pretext.”¹³ Desiring to foster a poetic experience with his last work, Genet revisited his signature rhetorical figures and staging techniques (impersonation, betrayal, gesture, masquerade, transsexuality, chance), except that the autography composed here is not limited to some sort of theatrical identicide but dares the full range of a cultural mythography.¹⁴ In the end, a radical and undeconstructible difference between Genet's previous work and this one makes Un Captif amoureux a prism through which his life-work can be assessed. If Genet's life was once the self-avowed pretext for writing himself out of prison, the writing of his last work was the gift of life to Jean Genet, thief no longer, who had to steal once more—from death. (As he said himself, “I've never helped the Palestinians. They've helped me to live.”¹⁵) Un Captif amoureux was literally a matter of life for Genet, of affirming life in the knowledge of imminent death—not merely life “within” the singularity of the body, however, but life out there in the world: collective, amorphous, ephemeral.

This love of worldly life coalesced into a poetic core in the face of the dramatic finality of Shatila, when Genet realized that what had kept him alive since his suicide attempt was being held captive by a love that circumvented the usual identitary mirroring. The English translation of the title, Prisoner of Love,¹⁶ misses the multiple nuances of the French: not only a prisoner of love but also a prisoner in love, this prisoner is both captured and captivated by love. The thief who fashioned himself as scandalous poetic myth in order to extricate himself from prison and then courageously acknowledged the irrelevance of his art in a “free life” here discovers, at the point of death, a way to reassume the value and art of poetic creation by fashioning a self-determined captivity in the deterritorialized or groundless domain of society's others. What makes his discovery possible is an element that permeates all of Genet's work, not unlike a thread weaving together his double origin: the polemical attitude he never abandoned even at his most despondent, even when he abandoned literature. Indeed, that very abandonment of literature, drawn in and held to particular circumstances (never as a matter of abstract principle, ethical or aesthetic), was polemical: “I don't know why Rimbaud chose silence. I said that he had understood why he had no choice but silence. As for me, since all my books were written in prison, it seems I have written them in order to get out of prison. Outside of prison, writing had no more reason to be. My books did get me out of the slammer, but afterwards, what is there to say?” But this is not a casual matter, despite the tone. On the contrary, Genet's application to the writing of literature was total, tirelessly driven by a rare obsessional energy, yet equally meticulous, his extraordinary mastery of the literary language being a conscious stratagem: “to make sure that those whom I call ‘my torturers’ understand me.”¹⁷

If the reason for writing was to get out of prison, the purpose of writing was to address the social institution that made prison possible, not out of any desire for mercy, vindication, or even confession (as “autography” precludes the credibility of confession, for it exposes its inherent performativity). Genet succeeded in making classical French the language of scandalous matter as a polemical gesture. More than a case of the subaltern taking on the master's language, it was a gesture of simply speaking to the master in his own language, the reality of his language. It made no difference that, as Genet hastened to add, “the real torturers don't read me … they don't give a fuck,” for his aim was wider and more ambitious. When this aesthetically correct language was subjected to syntactical unpredictability, which turned the rules of logical or moral subordination inside out, the trivial and perverse was made to bear its full glory. Criminal literature would force the dominant culture to encounter its own lawless underside in its own exalted language. “Perhaps,” suggested Genet, “writing is what's left to you when you've been chased off from your given language [la parole donnée]”¹⁸—which is also to say, when you have been deprived of whatever authority enables you to give your word. The outcome, in effect, is that you become literary when you are no longer able to be credible. Discredited by reality, you cannot survive except by becoming a legend—or legible by other means.

Genet never lost that sense of being socially discredited even when he knew he had accumulated considerable artistic capital and could extend his credit to the world's disenfranchised. His nomadic existence, moving from hotel to hotel—his refusal to own property or allow himself a domestic life, a permanent home—was symptomatic of the sense of homelessness and asociality he felt he had inherited from birth. But it was also a chosen condition of “social irresponsibility” that enabled his “immediate social engagement.”¹⁹ This clearly anomalous pairing of social irresponsibility and engagement defies all ethical categorization, at least in terms of any post-Enlightenment ethics, but it is the key to understanding Genet's power. This radical provisionality (the other side of immediacy), as Edward Said has argued, characterizes Genet's words in all contexts due to “his unceasing search for the freedom of the negative identity that reduces all language to empty posturing, all action to the theatrics of a society he abhors.”²⁰ The provisional word, taking the place of the given word, discredits the discourse of promise (foundational to both Kantian ethics and bourgeois liberal politics), a position that Genet would eventually come to hold in full consciousness of its risks and consequences.

On this basis, Genet found love in the ranks of communities that were socially and politically deprived of promise or, more accurately, communities with a long history of being at the wrong end of society's promises, having been broken by promises, and, if I may indulge, robbed of a promised land. If there is a central impetus to Un Captif amoureux, a book without a center in an unprecedented sense, it would have to be Genet's desire to approach, through literary language, the imaginary terrain of a people without territory—not exactly a desire to approach the territory of the Other (as a politically correct reading of Genet would inevitably conclude) but to poetically chronicle the plenitude of the (collective) self of the Other as it arises from the experience of social groundlessness or deterritorialization. (Parenthetically, the paradoxical notion of a poetic chronicle suggests both historical account and historical invention, and it cannot be otherwise: the history of the Other cannot be written as truth, but only as poetry.) One of the first things Genet realized about the Palestinians was that their territorial dispossession had mobilized a national imaginary where none had been necessary before, a self-representation as an autonomous entity in a phantasmatic world of plenitude and poetic pleasure manifested as revolutionary force.²¹ Autonomy in the domain of fantasy—the national imaginary—is dramatically achieved without national territory. Indeed, it is the prerequisite for gaining an autonomous territory, although it guarantees neither that territorial acquisition nor any actual autonomy upon its acquisition, upon nationhood.²²

In a much-discussed passage of Un Captif amoureux, Genet describes witnessing a group of Palestinian fedayeen playing a card game with an uncanny degree of formality, with the dreary ceremony of a tennis match. In the course of his meticulous description, he refers to the Japanese ceremony of Obon, in which the dead are treated to a taste of the world of the living via an entire community's acting out their clumsy encounters with the bodily complexity of life. The ceremony culminates in tenderly mocking laughter by the living, who, with irony and affection, have briefly brought those immobile skeletal features to life. Genet then goes on casually to inform the astonished reader: “The game of cards, which only existed because of the scandalously realistic gestures of the fedayeen—they'd played at playing, without any cards, without aces or knaves, clubs or spades, kings or queens—reminded me that all the Palestinians' activities were like the Obon feast, where the only thing missing, exacting such solemnity in a smile, was whatever must not become apparent.”²³ Here, reality meets its match in a performance of the imaginary that casts lack as the vehicle of affirmation, of self-representation, without ever shadowing, in this perfect masquerade, the actuality of lack.

Genet considers this incident emblematic of the experience of dispossession and its consubstantiation with the fantasy of autonomy that doubly exemplifies the revolutionary's ghostly daily life at the border of death. There are immediate destructive consequences to such disembodying, “for to play only with gestures when your hands ought to be holding … all the symbols of power makes you feel a fraud, and brings you close to schizophrenia. Playing cards without cards every night is a kind of dry masturbation.”²⁴ The ritual magnification of territorial dispossession and deprivation of symbolic power in a conspiratorial collective show of empty gestures becomes a vacant exercise in self-reference, without pleasure, when not accompanied by any actual reversal of the real conditions of lack and dispossession—hence Genet's fundamental differentiation between the realms of art and revolution (to which we shall return). While charmed by this performance (for he values such theatrics of gesture highly), Genet also recognizes its cost—absorption into abyssal nonexistence. “The cards were neither present nor absent. For me they were like God: they didn't exist. … The end of the game was its beginning: nothing at the start and nothing at the finish. … Their gestures were in danger of becoming useless according to the law of the theater: they were substituting the rehearsal for the performance. … Absence was in their hands just as it was under their feet.”²⁵ Everything infuses such a disembodied existence, in which even the most objective materiality is absence (of land, of nation, of victory, of reception, of play, of object), a fully incorporated absence that permeates the entire horizon of life. And yet, this extraordinary image of death rehearsal preoccupies Genet because it also exemplifies, to an almost theoretic degree, the fact that a politics of dispossession and deterritorialization is a theatrical politics, specifically, a politics of impersonation.

Impersonation is a crucial principle in Genet's work, operating both as performative device and as ontological exigency. From his earliest stage of self-consciousness, he recognized that he inhabited—indeed, embodied—a falsity according to bourgeois society's standard measures of truth. Bearing the matrilineal name left the father not merely absent and unknown, but unsignified. The name of the father is a literally empty sign, not just devoid of power but a voided identification, making Genet a man without heritage, without proper law (and, of course, without property). Signified by a negative Oedipal naming, Genet bore the mother's name as his legal identity in a society that organized its laws of identity and property around the father's name.²⁶ Moreover, his already disjointed genealogy was further ruptured when the original bearer of his name promptly abandoned him to a terrifying singularity. This man without proper law, this false son, was then reborn into the law of the State, a foundling registered with the Assistance publique, and from then on consistently encumbered with false origins, a false family, a false village.

Many years later he would declare himself “a Black in white or pink skin color, but a Black nonetheless. I do not know my family.”²⁷ A man whose lineage has been appropriated and erased like that of African slaves may recognize the contingent authority of skin color, but this isn't to imply any failure to understand that his privileged recognition by the world at large (particularly White America) was not for being White, especially given Genet's exploitation of his privileged status to support the Black Panthers. What enabled him to answer the Panthers' call without hesitation was his sense of the permeable boundaries of self as abolishing the condition of mirroring from the encounter with the Other and exposing the “mysteries” of identification. In the absence of prescribed boundaries, the encounter must be staged anew each time—a theatrical experience of the other that defined Genet's life and work. Unconstrained by pressures of identification, he could abandon himself to the Black Panther family like a child: “What did it mean, my pink and white presence among them? This: for two months I was to be David's son. I had a Black father thirty years younger than myself. … He was very careful with me, as if my weakness had somehow made me dear.”²⁸ It is impossible not to recognize in this self-amused narration the genuine pleasure of being fathered—and in the most appropriate fashion: a Black father for a child with a black past, now a world-worn man well into his sixties turning to the innocent selflessness of a thirty-year-old utopian whose experience of the world had been a strictly enforced one of the margin. Not to make too much of it, but Genet was quite conscious of the theatrical play of identities in this case, not least the particular inflection his homosexuality gave to this paternal projection onto a man who was inevitably locked into the Panthers' collective production of images of virile masculinity: David Hilliard, the party's national chief of staff, who served as Genet's personal guide. Prior to articulating this recognition of being fathered, Genet jokes about Hilliard as his mother (referring to the tender care he once gave the flu-ridden visitor)—to the great amusement of the Panthers, which prompts an astonishing passage:

They often amused themselves by mixing up the sexes and catching grammar out in sexism, but their whole block and tackle, perfectly molded, was much in evidence through their trousers. It was a long time before the sculpture was exploited. I mean as power. The Blacks' natural, though to the Whites excessive, virility was perceived as exhibitionism, but was aimed at none other than the exhibitionist profusion of White bosoms at parties given for the Panthers. … In any event, trousers were cut in an almost Florentine style, and the doctrine was expounded in an ostentatious manner. Logically enough, the Blacks had moved on from line engraving to sculpture in the round.²⁹

The earlier invocation of Hilliard as “mother,” while operating in several discursive registers, does not abolish his fatherly function; on the contrary, Genet, a resolute orphan, would seek to reconstitute the symbolic presence of both parental figures, while the Oedipal antagonism between them would be quite useless to him at this stage. (In view of Genet's noting the diffusion of sexual signifiers at play among the Panthers in their daily modes of address and self-identification, we can surmise the amusing overtones evoked by association with the exclamatory use of “mother” in Black slang.) The passage quoted above reveals Genet's astute perception of the gender-bending play in Black Panther language as arising from a masculinist confidence, a theatrical alienation-effect that tempers, in the luxury of in-house relations, the rigorous exigencies of performative virility in the White world. This sort of arguably innocent linguistic transvestism (innocent because it does not go far enough and cannot bear the full burden of its assumptions, understandably, given the social-historical conditions of its enunciation) points nonetheless to the explosive and unceasing performativity of the Black Panther community. Although Genet gives away his political preferences by slipping into naturalist terminology, he still manages to convey a sense of the plasticity of this collective language. So-called Panther rhetoric, a notorious kind of word-mongering that wreaked havoc in the discursive marketplace, was essentially an imagistic device, sharing in the general symbolic havoc that the Panthers performed with evident relish. But what Genet unveils, with delicate irony, is a discourse that has historically drawn the most formidable and inviolable lines of battle—straight lines of difference—while also pursuing internally a sensual roundness: in clichéd terms, a phallic geography aimed at the enemy that marks a terrain of borderless inclusion for its own.

The political logic behind this dichotomy was the necessity for a Black revolution to disrupt the age-old mastery over the signification of Black and White, the manifest racial antagonism of which had always been specifically sexualized. The major battlefield for the Panthers was precisely this terrain of symbolic signification, which Genet recognized right off, perhaps against the grain of the Panthers' own image as revolutionaries aspiring to speak less with their symbolic presence than with their guns. The revolutionary work was entirely theatrical: the appropriation of the master's idiom to serve the spectacular manipulation of meaning by which war is waged at the level of the image. The Panthers' campaign was particularly shocking to bourgeois America because these extravagant, otherworldly Black men with guns were a step ahead of the media age; they were too big, too excessive, for a 1970s mass-media frame designed to appropriate and neutralize challenges to the symbolic system (which was why the Panthers were more or less picked off one by one, as single targets containable only within the frame of a gun barrel). Their spectacular intervention in the more general spectacle was a tragic product of despair, heightened by the real and constant threat of death, of extinction.

Where the Panthers did succeed was in abolishing the canonic invisibility of Blackness in America. As Genet perceived, the Panthers attacked first and foremost by sight. Their major achievement was a theatrically exercised subversion of the historical invisibility of Black Americans by means of an “extravagant but elegant” self-fashioning in such concrete terms (those of dressing reality in a defining way) that their traces remain visible even today. Surely, the aesthetic legacy of “Black is Beautiful,” to which the Panthers' performance contributed radical (and thus lasting) features, was not limited to the wide acceptance of Black images of self-representation in popular culture throughout the 1970s, but is also evident in their elaborate revival during the 1990s. At the same time, however, the proliferation of those self-images signaled the disarmament and appropriation of Black radical culture—in effect, its political erasure. Genet's own theatricality enabled him to deconstruct the relation between the Panthers' semiotics of action and the symbolic field that determined their reception. A theatrical performance in the real world provides no safeguard for excess. Reality is unforgiving.³⁰

Genet's most dramatic example of reality's harshness toward the symbolic is Hilliard's reluctance to join him at Stonybrook for a lecture on behalf of the Panther cause, obliquely expressed as fear of the local landscape: “There are still too many trees.” The oddity of the comment sends Genet down a path of decipherment that goes to the heart of the Black/White divide in America, to the different conceptualizations of the world (or of the social imaginary, we could say) whose original traces are concretely and indelibly historical. For a Black “the sight of a tree revived a terror that was not quite a thing of the past, which left the mouth dry and the vocal chords impotent. … What separates us from the Blacks today is not so much the color of our skin or the type of our hair as the phantom-ridden psyche we never see except when a Black, in simultaneously humorous and secretive fashion, drops a phrase that seems to us enigmatic. It not only seems enigmatic; it is so.”³¹ The enigmatic terrain itself serves as concrete evidence of the radical historical difference marking the two sides in America's race war, with even the most seemingly innocent objects symbolically embodying this historical difference. Symbolic content leaves real traces, and real innocence is overwritten with traces of real guilt. This hard reality is precisely why the Panthers' theatricality had as real an impact as a bullet from a gun (“the Panthers can be said to have overcome through poetry”³²), but it is also why that proved to be their undoing.

The Panthers were victimized by the materiality of their own phantasms, the same phantasms that gave them their sense of radical difference and, by extension, their revolutionary fearlessness. It is a paradoxical and tragic condition, as most formidable theatrical expressions of society have been through the ages. Genet describes the Panthers as “haunted by fears and fantasies I'd never know except in ironical translation”; “haunted by negatives—‘anti’-forces—a rejection of every kind of marginality striving with an equally strong attraction to marginality and its strange ecstasies”; “haunted by the idea of death, which they translated into looting.”³³ One recalls Frantz Fanon's realization that “a Negro is forever in combat with his own image,”³⁴ that is, at some level his image, regardless of the self-fashioning, is not his own. Much of what the Black movements of the 1960s were about involved this agonizing attempt to gain mastery over the production of their own image, ultimately a task of the most radical social imagination—the revolutionary task par excellence. At the level of revolutionary signification, Malcolm's act of X-ing his name is of the same order as the National Assembly proclaiming 1792 “Year One of the Revolution” and abolishing the Christian calendar. The Panthers, however, took to this production of new self-images with such indefatigable, obsessive energy that they were outrun, outperformed, by their own invention. Driven by a reality-theater gone out of control—one which, moreover, aimed to consume the very boundaries of staging—the Panthers caved in under an overproduction of images that exceeded any capacity for self-reflection, as if propelled by an astronomical metabolism that burned the organism's cellular structure to a crisp.

Genet was particularly attuned to this annihilating force of symbols, having already witnessed it on a smaller scale in Paris during the events of May '68 amidst his genuine joy at seeing France dismantled, even briefly. Invigorated perhaps by this joyful revolutionary experience, Genet committed himself to the movement during his two-month sojourn with the Panthers (later staging various solidarity events in Paris as well) with a resolute equanimity in the face of violent confrontation that the Panthers had surely never seen in a White man before. There are two ways of accounting for this: on the basis of (1) Genet's sense of himself as a criminal, and (2) his sense of autonomy due to his uncompromising homosexuality. For the Panthers, Genet's criminality must have endowed him with a palpable credibility. Given their image of rather inflexible sexual politics, however, his homosexuality would likely have been a source of puzzlement. Yet nowhere in Genet's reflections is there the slightest hint of discomfort on either side. His homosexuality figures as unproblematically as his Whiteness, much as it did for Genet in any other context—self-evident, unworthy of discussion. Knowing Genet, there is nothing astonishing in this, nor in his uncensored descriptions of the Panthers' obvious eroticism or their poetic powers, inherent in Black culture (which from another mouth would sound alarming, to say the least). Edmund White devotes some thoughtful pages of his biography to this issue, reporting that Genet never hid his erotic desires and even danced in a pink negligee for Hilliard and other Panthers one night after taking a heavier than usual dose of Nembutal (he was a longtime regular user). The Panthers considered this impromptu performance (unusual, even for Genet) a highly theatrical expression of the flexibility of sexual identity, a position then echoed in Huey Newton's famous paper from prison, arguing for greater sensitivity to the gay and women's liberation movements and for the party's solidarity with their positions on the common ground of revolutionary action. Genet, with a characteristic lack of self-importance, considered the Panthers to have much more urgent concerns than his sexual preferences. It is worth noting, however, that the Panthers later invited him to write an article about homosexuality on their behalf, as they considered him the appropriate voice for their position.³⁵

The point is not that Genet changed the views of the Black Panthers on the nature and history of sexuality, but that his sense (and performance) of homosexuality—together with his sense of criminality—converged with the performative politics of revolutionizing identity as practiced by both the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. He repeatedly argued that his being a criminal was interwoven with his being a homosexual, and his attitude toward both was absolutely guiltless. The current activist notion of “homosexual culture” would seem absurd to Genet, for he conceived homosexual life as one of continual subversion and alienation, a criminal practice by definition. He saw his own homosexuality as the common language (or vitalizing spinal cord) that informed the criminal trajectory of his life from “bastardhood [to] treason, [to] the refusal of society and finally [to] writing, that is to say, a return to society by other means.”³⁶ As the language of criminality, homosexuality bore the unique pedagogical burden of articulating society's contradictions as well as the means of subverting society's capacity to assimilate contradictions. Homosexuality implied an existential paranomia for Genet—not merely a transgression of the law but an existence beside (and besides) the law, a kind of affirmative lawlessness: “The rules are not preexistent in [any] interrogating conscience, nor [written] on some Tablets of the Law. The rules must be invented each time. They are more aesthetic than moral, and it is because they are uncertain that one discovers them—or one invents them. The rules which guide me and that I invent are against rules, I mean against the law.”³⁷

Any serious study of Genet's sexual politics nowadays would have to come to terms with the apparent contradiction between his astonishing production of avant-garde homosexual literature beginning in the late 1940s and his resolute resistance to engaging in “gay-affirmative” politics, despite a deep generosity toward “antibourgeois” politics all over the globe. I say “apparent contradiction” because in reality there is none. Genet's resistance to the domestication of his sensibility, his militant and unmitigated commitment to articulating the negation of all identity, went hand in hand with his uncompromising homosexuality and has major implications for the discussion of identity politics today. In an extraordinary letter to Sartre (probably from about 1952, when Genet was trying to theorize for himself the irrelevance of writing literature in the context of his freedom and legality), he attempts to articulate a theory of homosexuality, including homosexual imagination in relation to social order.³⁸ Genet's basic assumption is that homosexuality develops out of the diffuse sexuality of childhood in response to the traumatic realization of death and the existential crisis that arises with adolescence. This crisis gets sublimated not as the pursuit of self-preservation by other means (chiefly biological reproduction, hence heterosexual desire), but rather as the pursuit of endless pleasure on the inevitable way to death, with desire then channeled into funereal representations—rituals of degeneration—that, insofar as they become actions in reality, cannot but provoke society's wrath. “The significance of homosexuality is a refusal to continue the world” and “to alter sexuality” by “struggling against” the world's “useless manliness.” Transvestism, Genet argues, does not involve “nostalgia about the idea of the woman one might have been, which [now] feminizes; rather, it's the bitter need to mock virility” by becoming a woman who embodies the incapacity to continue life. In pederastic love, the beloved is invested with desire because (or insofar as) he will have the fate of the lover—a certain death. “The beloved becomes the object ordained to ‘represent’ death (the lover) in life.” In this respect, the beloved becomes a double, a reproduced self and bearer of self-reproduction (without an other) who, as Genet repeats throughout this letter, is essentially sterile, hence antisocial in a fundamental sense. Insofar as this funereal imaginary does not translate into any concrete action whereby death would become actual (suicide or murder), it is activated as pure imagination, at once erotic and poetic. “The sudden refusal of the responsibility to live” breathes life into either an erotic creation of oneself (whereby “my pleasure will be endless”) or a poetic creation of this eroticism in language. “A poem is only the activity of a funeral theme. It is (definitely) its socialization, a struggle against death. The themes of life propose action and forbid the poem.” In other words, poetry obeys the same imaginary of desire as homosexuality, which is against the virility of life and society (in the straight sense of both words) and thus gains—or even generates—a life that society criminalizes and ultimately seeks to destroy. The poetic/erotic imaginary of homosexuality derives from death, but, insofar as it is actualized, provokes a lethal response from society, which then becomes an agent or bearer of death.

What emerges from this improvised theoretization (beyond the sexualizing of death which feminists have theorized as a particularly male obsession) is homosexuality conceived as a bearer of nonidentity and poetic destruction. The former involves a peculiar sidestepping of the self-other determinant relation by an endless nomadic condition of impersonation, the latter a paradoxical act of altering (othering) the order of reality by elevating antisocial activities to myth. The two presuppose each other and are in effect intertwined. Genet's work consistently demonstrates that impersonation is the initial act of homosexual love, which is constituted not as a reciprocal relation with the other but as a theatrical staging of the other in oneself. To this extent all of Genet's work is theatrical in the ancient performative sense of poetic activity, as witness the fact that he considered himself a poet (when he did not call himself a thief), never a novelist, a playwright, or an intellectual, culminating in his frequent references to Un Captif amoureux as a Homeric work on the model of the Iliad. Poetry and homosexuality are ultimately linked by a mutual performativity that presupposes a radical externalization of the imaginary well beyond any identitary concerns. Homosexuality thus yields a poetics of nonidentity—in essence, a poetics against the law, or poetics of criminality—perfectly encapsulated by the two terms with which Said describes Genet's intentions in his play The Screens: “gestural impropriety” and “poetic deflagration.”³⁹ Genet's performativity is always improper and incendiary, not in the banal terms of offending bourgeois morality but in undoing the very terms of that morality, its configuration of identity. What the poet performs is always a skewed representation of the world because the world is never settled to begin with; that the world itself is in a continual process of performance is the deepest meaning of its intrinsically conflictual (i.e., political) nature.

If poetry is involved in an impersonation of the real, an attempt to transcribe history's theatricality, it is involved in the imitation of imitation (for Genet, a notion entirely free of the problematics of authenticity). An illustrative incident described in Un Captif amoureux shows Genet himself being impersonated by Mubarak, a Black Sudanese officer in the Palestinian corps who serves as an intellectual deflection of Genet's presence in the camps (as well as an implicit link to his experience with the Panthers). A larger-than-life outsider who, unlike Genet, is really on the inside, Mubarak can speak of revolution and Spinoza or of God and dance in a single phrase. Responding to a gesture made by Genet in a mocking imitation of him, Mubarak declares, “Now I'll imitate Jean imitating me,” prompting this reaction from the author:

Seeing yourself in the glass, once you realize the left is on the right, is nothing. Nothing next to seeing yourself there under the trees, without a mirror, talking and walking about, so cruelly depicted by the voice of the Sudanese, the gestures of his arms, his thighs, his neck, the movements of his whole body. … He imitated me [il me représenta] going up and down some steps of muddy earth. Thanks to him I saw before me a gigantic figure outlined against an almost black sky, descending in the distance, though nearby, a bit stooped with the weariness of age and from marching up and down hills—a march that became fabulous before me, as high as the clouds over Nablus—limping at the end of the day. The limp was simplified and exaggerated, but just like the way I walked [fidèle à ma démarche habituelle]. I realized I was looking at myself for the first time not in the so-called mirror of the psyche but through an eye or eyes that had found me out, not only hill by hill but step by step, stooped over, descending a staircase cut in stone. Everyone had seen me and reconstituted me.⁴⁰

Genet describes his experience of this performance with mixed feelings of cruelty and admiration. The staging forbids any kind of authentic or realistic representation; Mubarak imitates Jean imitating him, thereby impersonating himself through another. Genet may be the object of representation here, embodied in Mubarak's gestures, but he is not an object of reflection; he is effectively a mediating object, a pretext (as he would say on another occasion) for Mubarak's poetic performance. On the other hand, Genet does recognize himself in this mediation, but what he recognizes is a representation, a gestural poem that reconstitutes him in a fabular setting, a supernatural theater. His limp, at once “simplified” and “exaggerated,” represents through precisely this untenable simultaneity not only his way of walking but, indeed, his way of being in the world, his démarche. Although Genet notes the audience's laughter, he denies any parodic element in the performance. Mubarak's impersonation is described with the reverence accorded a theatrical interpretation (in the sense of hermēneia: dramatic presentation), which reflects on the abilities of this gigantic actor to render the elderly, limping Genet as a mythic figure (not unlike an Oedipus approaching Colonus).

Nothing in this impersonation inspires identification (the “mirror of the psyche”) by either the actor or the one acted, which may be why Genet acknowledges feeling a hint of cruelty. If there is something disturbing in the experience, it is due not to an encounter with one's deeper, perhaps even repressed, identity but to the encounter with one's image externalized beyond its identitary boundaries. It constitutes an externalization for Mubarak as well, an exorcism of one who has possessed his inner being. This possession is explained when Genet recalls what had spurred his own mocking imitation of Mubarak and led the Sudanese to improvise a Genet act for the troops: a private scene, accidentally witnessed by Genet, of Mubarak dancing near his car to a Rolling Stones song blasting out from the car stereo across the Jordanian desert, circa 1971—“barefoot and wearing only his trousers, the elderly Black, with his greying fuzzy hair, strumming at a nonexistent guitar, his right hand working where you pluck the strings, his left coming and going on an imaginary neck.”⁴¹ Mubarak never forgives this violation of a private ritual (which Genet terms “catching him dancing as if in Africa”), but for the latter it is another instance of the performative as the hyperreal (the “air-guitar” reminding him of the cardless card game). Together, these incidents amount to an object lesson on how the poetics of impersonation exceeds the boundaries of identification, which has formidable implications for both the politics of self-fashioning (including the prospects for self-alteration) and the politics of addressing (and indeed dressing) the other.⁴²

Genet describes another scene in which the operations of a poetics of impersonation are hardly innocent. Six male Israeli agents in blonde wigs, posing as three queer couples, get near enough to three PLO officers in Beirut to kill them and escape, unharmed and undiscovered. Genet handles the entire incident as a legend to be unmapped, tracing its moments of rehearsal as moments of potential transformation beyond the boundaries of the specific act. What concerns him is what happened not within the time frame of the incident as such (when they “suddenly switched from acting to action”) but within the temporal continuum interrupted by the event: the gradual process of dressing up for their parts (rehearsals for reality) and the subsequent rapid process of undressing, of reconquering the Edenic reality of their identity:

Six curly blonde wigs, a bit of red on the lips and black around the eyes, are not much to have brought such unsuspected dismay to the streets of Beirut. The inward laughter of transvestites who never ceased feeling like men may have echoed the terror of real transvestites, afraid of being found out through their prattling voices (not quite like women's) and their old gestures, though using all their efforts to disguise them. But the six curly-haired Israelis couldn't afford to forget for an instant that they were men, trained to kill and with muscles meant for fighting. The strangeness of their situation lay in the gentle feminine delicacy of their movements, and their transformation from one moment to the next into the precise gestures of murderers—not murderesses. They knew how to kiss tongue on tongue, heads on one side, and penis on penis; but all that was facile and came easily to mind. What was more difficult and took longer to learn was how to lift a hair very lightly off the beloved's brow, or flick a ladybug off his shoulder. The rehearsals, in a street in Israel, must have taken some time. The youths had to be able to arrange the fold of a scarf and give a high-pitched laugh, then whip off the glad rags and become warriors whose one object was to kill. Really kill. Not as in the last act of a play, to applause, but for real, with dead bodies. I wonder if it isn't comparatively easy and pleasant to slip into tender femininity, and hard to throw it off to commit a crime.⁴³

Literature's astonishing capacity to theorize the world to which it gives voice makes any interpretive commentary on this passage cumbersome. Genet has captured the entire terrain of speculative understanding by giving us the secret history that poses all those questions erased with such finality by the historical event. He knows that the irreversible event—the final act of killing—assures that the impersonation will exceed identification, whereby the immediate implication is that, as a result of this poetic excess, the other gets killed. (A couple of pages later, Genet warns that the Palestinians should beware of “Israel's poetry and charm.”) Yet he also knows that the success of the mission (not merely to kill but to maintain the identitary boundaries in order to kill) paradoxically presupposes a successful identification in the act of impersonation—a transvestism that creates its own reality qua transvestism—a reality convincing enough to be shared, even if only for a microsecond, by the intended victims. How, then, does this vested transvestism (transient as it is, though achieved with long and rigorous rehearsal) become derealized? How does the transvestite reality get undressed in the aftermath? Who assumes the responsibility for (re)creating the bare reality of (generic) man—the man whose identity is never in doubt? The answer must lie in the irreversible act of murder, when (self-)identity returns because the other has been annihilated. A residue remains nonetheless in the doubt toward which Genet so subtly gestures at the end of the passage: the memory of the difficulty of “undressing” at the moment of necessity, of becoming man again in order to kill—the moment that, as future anterior, will have been justifying the transvestite experience, a travesty of identity from which one cannot escape uncontaminated, whatever the historical result. This residue acts as a corrosive agent against a history that covers its tracks.

There is thus no innocence in transvestism, no possibility of divestment, as it were, even in cases where the transvestite act is a pretext for an action designed to betray it. There is no question of identifying with the other in this act of impersonation, for it entails the othering of one's own identity (even in that ephemeral, perhaps momentary, in-vestment of the other), which occupies (in the sense of Freud's Besetzung) the space of oneself and leaves on it the traces of a question. No identity survives, in this respect, for one is nothing but a potentially endless stream of appearances in a boundless shadow play instantly brought to life on different occasions, at different points in time, according to the particulars that dress the shadows with meaning and thus make it possible to identify them. The ultimate implication is that the very notion of identity (including the logic that covers up its phantom existence) is marked by a condition of transversality,⁴⁴ that is, a nomadic proliferation of (self-)images at the core that open one to a multiple and multifigured existence from which there is no escape and no return, for behind lies the void.

Such a conception of the self derails any sort of politics (or ethics) based on the other, any sort of action that presupposes an antithetical relation from which to draw conclusions of power (for the dominant) or of justice (for the dominated). This is the most crucial political implication of Genet's entire corpus, linked as it is to his most troubling articulation: the poetic evocation of betrayal. In a provocative attempt to think precisely through this obstacle, Leo Bersani recognizes in Genet, as a fundamental archē (point of departure and point of governance), the “ambitious intention of imagining a form of revolt with no citational relation whatsoever to the laws, categories, and values it would contest and, ideally, destroy.” Genet's fundamental principle of revolt ignores the dominant terms that give meaning (indeed, identity) to revolt, eschewing any attempt at opposition (even parody) in any sense that would acknowledge their existence. If Genet makes use of culture's dominant terms at all, Bersani argues, he does so in order “to exploit their potential for erasing cultural relationality itself (that is, the very precondition for subversive repositionings and defiant repetitions),”⁴⁵ thereby outmaneuvering the privileged status of transgression that enables revolt to be categorized as an ethical standard and fosters the catastrophic (for Genet) condition of (re)cementing the privilege of identity. For transgression eventually becomes an alibi for the moral upper hand, as well as an occasion to recede into the comfort of redemption, both of which, according to Genet's intransigent paranomia, constitute the most reprehensible agencies of bourgeois communal identity. Even more, the identitary ethics of transgression ensures that the memory of having once been oppressed will continue to determine one's actions after liberation, while (as Bersani argues in his reading of The Maids) genuine revolt is possible only when one's subjectivity has been truly altered and can no longer be related to (identified as) an oppressed subjectivity.

Genet's entire work, like his very way of life, was conducted as a great onslaught on the metaphysics of community, which for him amounted to the gravest deception of the logic of identity. His profound political generosity and commitment in the last twenty years of his life was an attempt to practice a politics that explored a different sort of association: the revolutionary collective as a society held together by the coarticulation of fantasy, not by the community of law. The prototype remained the anticommunal society of criminals, where, contrary to our romantic visions of underworld loyalty, betrayal was the safeguard against moral convention—criminal society's immediate undoing. At this level, to betray one's comrade was paradoxically to safeguard his status as a criminal—in essence, not to betray him. Not just paradox but an exemplary case of the logic of nonidentity (i.e., paradoxical only from the standpoint of identitary logic), this mode of thought and action points to an epistemological framework that is continuously othering the terms of analysis and calculation. An identity based on betrayal is entirely incalculable; it defies the means of determination. Since it can hardly be identified, it can hardly be called an identity at all. A way of being that entails continual mutation, its geographic principle is not simply nomadic but groundless.

Such groundlessness makes Genet truly puzzling—if not downright disturbing—to even the most sympathetic interpreters who seek to characterize him in the face of such acts as his stealing a painting from Giacometti's studio, from the man he considered worthier than any other he had ever encountered. But Genet's compulsion to subvert even relations of friendship—relations of the greatest value to him and so (in Bersani's terms) the value of relationality itself—evinces his paradoxical sense of loyalty to his own defiance of social order and its powers of rehabilitation and appropriation. Obsessed with evading detection from the outset of his (criminal) career, Genet consistently falsified data about himself and his life. All juridical decisions and psychiatric profiles pertaining to him should be taken as discourses contaminated a priori by the logic of the subject they profess to know objectively, as Genet took pride in fictionalizing his feats of robbery and vagabondage to the experts who judged him. Falsification as betrayal of the self in resistance to its appropriation by the purveyors of truth amounts to just another instance of impersonation—a theatrical alienation-effect staged against oneself. It means a staging of identity that reveals identity as a matter of staging; hence Genet's explicit commitment to all those who would derealize their identities and expose them as colonized sites, stages of imperialist power. In Said's disarmingly succinct terms, “Imperialism is the export of identity.”⁴⁶

Genet's “fierce antinomianism” (another Said characterization) ascribes an explicit eroticism to what becomes in fact a poetics of betrayal: “Anyone who has not known the ecstasy of betrayal [trahison] knows nothing about ecstasy at all.”⁴⁷ At one level, such ecstasy may be specifically linked to a homosexual erotics that takes exchange out of the sexual encounter and thus violates the traditionally understood self/other relation. This would be Bersani's reading, in accordance with “the antirelationality inherent in all homoness” and underpinned by Genet's undeconstructible position of utter solitude as the only possible access/way to truth, which disappears in the moment of dialogue or confession, since the disloyalty of language itself leads to truth's betrayal by the very encounter with the other, betrayal by communication.⁴⁸ And yet the passage that concludes with this erotic exaltation of betrayal sketches it as based not merely on the encounter with the other, but on the translation of the enemy (Genet's terms) such that each position becomes the other's shadow, with even their dreams being difficult to disentangle. To configure one's enemy as one's shadow hardly suggests a symbiosis, for if nothing else, there are no longer any bodies left; they have vanished in the translation, the betrayal of their own terms. The ecstasy of betrayal is literally due to being catapulted outside one's body and taking form at the point of groundlessness, of/as shadow.

In other words, Genet does dissolve the substance of relationality embodied in the self/other encounter, but he does it precisely by employing an essential gesture of othering (translation) in order to articulate a dissolution of the self/other relation in the act of betrayal. By the same token, Genet's late work demands that we amend such an exclusively homosexual discursive framing of the problem as Bersani's (which isn't to say that a homosexual imaginary is no longer at work). Genet's evocation of betrayal as ecstasy occurs at the outset of a work organized around his captivity in a love extending beyond sexual practice (including its domain of fantasy) to a kind of total love experience that allows individual bodies to retain their palpable sensuality but to remain indiscriminate and divested of specific sexual interest. Such was Genet's avowed experience of both the Palestinians and the Black Panthers, a total commitment to being captive and in love that, in such contexts, further aggravates the already disruptive notion of the ecstasy of betrayal. And betrayal of the Palestinians in particular is explicitly entertained by Genet: “The day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side. The day the Palestinians become a nation like other nations, I will no longer be there. … I think that it's there that I will betray them. They don't know.”⁴⁹ Is this the same notion of betrayal? If so, it would suggest that at the point of national institution the Palestinians would also be at the epitome of their friendship with Genet, were we to literally follow his script of originary betrayal in the criminal world. But this would cancel out the possibility of reading Genet's betrayal as directed against institutionalization itself—a foolish reading given everything to which Genet's life attests. A closer reading reveals a stunning consistency of positions, despite the second one's appearing more conventional. Just as betraying friends in the criminal world safeguards their criminal integrity, so would betraying revolutionaries at the height of their political achievement safeguard their revolutionary integrity. Institutionalization is the betrayal of revolution, for it turns revolution over to ritual, Genet says; hence only a betrayal of this betrayal could sustain the undomesticated energy that makes revolution possible. Genet's evident anarchism reveals the true epistemic co-incidence of Trotsky's famous rival phrases: revolution betrayed opens the way for permanent revolution.

In addition, however, Un Captif amoureux encapsulates a poetics of betrayal that embraces the totality of that term's various political significations and confirms the “nonrelational betrayal” of the homosexual imagination (according to Bersani) by exceeding both the homological and the heterological framework. The major question emerging with Genet's avowed love for the Panthers and the Palestinians is that of a possibly residual Orientalism at work, which would combine the traditional elements of the discourse with the various other paraphernalia that usually clutters the exoticism of revolution. Here, I believe, Genet's poetics of betrayal becomes most politically trenchant. There is no doubt that Un Captif amoureux was written as a tribute to those unexpected life sources Genet encountered when his own life had reached the void, sources whose reverberations continued to animate him when the actual void of death had locked onto him. The love for the Other (to be blunt, perhaps even vulgar, for the sake of the issue's seriousness) was total, genuine, selfless, and without guilt. Yet Genet's stance over the last twenty years of his life against all those irrevocably other suggests that “to betray them is not to abandon them exactly, but to retain for himself the right not to belong, not to be accountable, not to be tied down,” as Said notes, in a unique critical recognition of betrayal in Genet as an act that abolishes the possibility of “going native,” of laying claim to the other's territory even out of genuine love for the other.⁵⁰ Such betrayal ensures that one's love for the other is not actually an unconscious and veiled love of oneself against the other.

The complete picture is paradoxical at the core: betrayal as both translating the terms of your enemy/other to the point of mutually entangled dreams and refusing to take the terms of your friend/other as your own to the extent of becoming one and the same. The two sides of the paradox reveal the deep-seated ambivalence of translation itself, an epistemic ambivalence that makes it, in the last instance, practically untenable. What Genet himself adds to this string of ambivalent figures, whose transversal logic organizes his poetic and political imaginary, is the figure of the transsexual:

As the old sex fades and, he hopes, finally drops off useless, he'll be possessed of a joy close to madness when he refers to himself as “she” instead of “he,” and realizes that grammar also has divided into two, and the feminine half has turned a somersault so that it applies to him, whereas the other half used to be forced on him. The transition to the non-hairy part must be both delightful and terrible. … “Farewell to half of me—I die to myself.” To leave behind the hated but familiar masculine ways is like forsaking the world and going into the monastery or a leper house. To quit the world of trousers for the world of the brassière is a kind of death, expected but feared. And isn't it also comparable to suicide with choirs singing the “Tuba mirum”? … A transsexual is a sort of monster and hero combined.⁵¹

Genet latches onto the figure of the transsexual in the context of discussing the hero's odd epistemological status: boundless joy of life in the face of death's certainty and imminence. The initial cause of reflection is the experience of listening to Mozart's Requiem in a Beirut hotel room (hence the reference in the passage above), which he describes as an apotheosis of ambivalence, the lament for death colliding with its life-giving glorification in a heroic encounter that wrests from death the joy of life. This same life-and-death play operates at the foundations of the transsexual experience—for Genet, a bona fide heroic position in our strictly gendered identitarian world. The transsexual betrays the identity of sex itself, taking “sexual identity” to the very limit of the notion, as real as the world and yet beyond the world: “Escape from the world at last! Changing sex doesn't consist merely in subjecting one's body to a few surgical adjustments: it means teaching the whole world, forcing upon it a change of syntax. … (The adjectives describing you ought henceforth be feminine.) Your still unadjusted right hand will move to hide an erection no longer possible.”⁵² The transsexual embodies a history of permanent translation from one to an other, poised between two deaths: the bones of one identity exhumed and translated into the ossuary of the other, and so on, an infinite palindrome wherein the literal and the allegorical are put into mutual question. Such transversal logic characterizes both betrayal and transsexuality and consists in a permanent externalization of self, making of oneself a gift to the other, yet a gift of a self that vanishes; neither penetrating nor swallowed by the other, the identity of both giver and receiver is rendered null and void.⁵³

The request by the Palestinian fighters that after Genet's death his bones be distributed among them and scattered over the Dead Sea bears the full symbolic weight of his own project of infinite externalization, the translation of his words and bones alike. His non-identitarian understanding enables him to perceive and describe the evanescence of life in a revolutionary situation, a twilight existence (entre chien et loup) the sheer space-time ambivalence of which endows it with an always imminent capacity for metamorphosis. Un Captif amoureux is rife with references to the Palestinians' ghostly existence, a condition forged from both the reality of death in their daily lives and the imaginary vision that gave reality to their project, but also reinforced by Genet's phantasmic presence among them—by the uncanny reality of Jean Genet, the famous French author who chose to share their moment in history without the slightest hint of self-interest.

He was perfectly aware of the power of this condition, a power marked, like everything else, by profound ambivalence. On the one hand, the Palestinians drew a great, mythological power from their shadowy existence such that “the very real State of Israel finds itself shadowed by a ghostly survival,” in the sense that all permanence is haunted by the durability of evanescence, by what can reappear from the void and overcome (sur-vie) the permanence of any existence. Indeed, the phrase in French is even more revealing. “L'État bien réel d'Israël se connaît doublé d'une survie fantomatique” suggests that Israel, insofar as it has achieved the hard reality of institutionalization, is now open to a sort of cinematic dubbing in another language that splits (doubles) its national-imaginary institution.⁵⁴ On the other hand, Genet wonders whether his own ghostly status as witness (tainted all the more by his chronicle's formal affinity with death) may drag the Palestinians into a stream of shadowy existence, retroactively animated by a ventriloquist, a puppet master, a “shadow-showman.” This would involve a certain materiality of death in the very act of animation, since shadow-theater figures realize a palpable representation of death, a death dressed as life (travestied) by the ubiquitous but invisible puppeteer who dares to speak their many voices. Genet's long reflection, as the book draws to a close, on his task as shadow master (a task he equates with the animation—not the fulfillment—of prophecy) dwells on the necessary betrayal of history for the sake of mythistorical creation: “The transformations of a fact into words, signs, and series of words and signs become other facts that can never reconstitute the original that generated my transcription.” This inadvertent betrayal of facts (Genet's terms) is the inevitable result of an encounter between the poetic imagination and the mythological inventory of society, an encounter between two dreamworlds that coincide within one another:

What I recount may well be what I experienced, but it was different in that the disparateness of my own existence had merged into the continuity of Palestinian life, though still leaving me with traces, glimpses of, sometimes severances from, my former life. … Sometimes I wonder whether I didn't live that life especially so that I might arrange its episodes in the same seeming disorder as the images in a dream. All these words to say, this is my Palestinian revolution, recited in my own chosen order. … Trying to think the revolution is like waking up and trying to see the logic in a dream. There is no point, in the middle of a drought, in inventing the necessary gestures for crossing the river when the bridge has been swept away.⁵⁵

Genet's poetics of disappearance, converging with his portrayal of revolutionary existence,⁵⁶ suggests that for every act of erasure in history—the revolutionary moment par excellence—another concrete historical manifestation is generated; historical eclipse and poetic naming are intertwined. Genet says at one point that “eclipse is a word full of meaning,” and that meaning, literally sliding right over any attempt to shed permanent light on it, eclipses representation. What hovers behind this sort of obsessive metaphorizing is Genet's unequivocal position on the relationship between art and revolution or, if you will, between the dreamworlds of poetic imagination and of social-historical creation. In both realms, a palpable dream logic is at work, the common root of humanity's capacity to imagine new forms, to alter its self-conception and thus its destiny in the world. And although both dreamworlds are real, “we know that one can act on [one's own poetic] dreams in a practically unlimited fashion. One cannot act on the real in an unlimited fashion. A different discipline is needed, which is not a grammatical discipline.”⁵⁷

These impermeable limits of the real forbid the artist's delusion of being master of historical creation. Even the greatest innovations in art, Genet argues repeatedly, do not precede but follow events of historical transformation, for “no genuine revolutionary action can be based on precedents; revolutionary actions have the freshness of the beginning of the world.”⁵⁸ In this respect, the artist is no revolutionary and should resist any narcissistic fantasy that he might be, for in revolution the integrity of one's body is at stake, in art one's reputation.⁵⁹ This reconfiguration of narcissism is one of the main tasks undertaken in Un Captif amoureux, where Genet might be said to recuperate his consistently failed sublimation in life by enacting a sublimation beyond the exercise of personal poetic fantasy—the writing of a daydream, as he often characterized his early work—so as to produce a writing suited to the revolutionary imaginary and the peculiar sublimation that it involves.

At the same time, Genet has learned history's lesson well: revolutions are ephemeral entities and, once institutionalized, turn against the artists and intellectuals who supported them with antithetical energy. This is inevitable and indeed desirable, for it ensures that art will never submit to the instrumental demands of revolution, just as revolution will never depend on art for realization. Art and revolution may enter into an alliance determined by the same historical contingency that coordinates their antithetical relation. Genet identifies two strains in artistic work between which “there must be no question of preference. On the one hand there is the work which serves the revolution; this is constructive in the sense that it destroys bourgeois values. Then there is another kind of artistic work, essentially violent and inflammatory, in the sense that it refuses to submit to any value or to any authority. It disputes even the existence of man.” Because revolution demands attention to practical matters, Genet goes on to argue, the revolutionary capacity of art (its second strain) is useless, perhaps even detrimental, which is why so many artists have met with their destruction before revolutionary tribunals. But by virtue of the same anarchist nature, art pursues revolution against its ensuing domestication. Genet concludes that “it is the duty of revolution to encourage its adversaries: works of art. This is because artistic work, which is the product of the struggle of the artist in isolation, tends to contemplation, which, in the long run, may turn into the destruction of all values, bourgeois or otherwise, and their replacement by something else that will more and more come to resemble what we call freedom. … Finally, the definition of a work of art could be the following: an object that is really of no use.”⁶⁰

Literature is of no use in a conventional sense because it is a protean entity that can never be pinned down except as “a barricade to hide the void” of reality, as Genet tentatively describes Un Captif amoureux. Yet in this process of dissimulation, of one sentence overwriting the space of another and all consistently overwriting the blank page of reality, the poetic imagination registers its own void, the void that enables radical self-alteration, creation ex nihilo. In this respect literature, as a specifically mythographic enterprise, manifests the void of history instead of erasing it. Un Captif amoureux begins with an exemplary meditation on the paradoxical transparency of written signs, which may not give meaning to (which is also to say, erase) the blankness of the page that embodies history. The legibility of history, Genet implies, may be due less to its being written than to its being read, with reading understood not as an interpretive task (reading between the lines) but as an act of poetic invention, of writing against the already written: “Reading between the lines is a level art; reading between the words a precipitous one. … Another way of putting it: the space between the words contains more reality than the time it takes to read them.”⁶¹ The political implications of this poetics of history are immediately apparent to Genet. Disavowing his famous 1970s comment that “the Blacks were the characters on the white page of America,” he makes the writing of this book a demonstration that revolutionary history manifests itself by having died on the page, as if the blood from its numberless anonymous deaths has seeped through all the cracks and become not signs and margins, black ink and blank spaces, but sheer texture:

The black words on the white American page are sometimes crossed out or erased. The best disappear, but it's they that give form to the poem, or rather the poem of the poem. If the Whites are the page, the Blacks are the writing that conveys a meaning—not of the page, or not of the page alone. The abundance of Whites is what the writing is set down on, and it forms the margin too. But the poem is composed by the absent Blacks—the dead, if you like—the nameless absent Blacks who wrote the poem whose meaning escapes me but not its reality. Let the absence of invisibility of the Blacks we call dead be well understood. They are still active. Radioactive.⁶²

Here, the meaning of poetry may be entirely elusive to anyone not residing inside it, not dead and nameless to history along with it. The poem's reality, however, the palpable sense of the poetic imagination (society's imaginary) bleeding through the textures of the real, is perfectly comprehensible. This applies not only to the Blacks in White America but to the Palestinians occupied by the Zionist dream, or perhaps more accurately, as Genet himself might have put it, the Palestinians participating unwittingly in another's dream, one in which they come to be the blank shadows as the dream space is invoked as tabula rasa and written over with a new, naturalized ancestry.⁶³ Genet's radical skepticism cannot but drive him to interrogate his presence among both the Panthers and the Palestinians as “the dreamer inside a dream, a factor of unreality in both movements, the European saying to a dream, ‘You are a dream—don't wake the sleeper!’”⁶⁴ Nevertheless, trusting that the blood reality of history's poem will permeate all the signs and blankness, he can close with daring: “This last page of my book is transparent.”

Such trust in the human capacity to alter (other) itself without limit and without guarantee as to enable someone of Genet's meticulous antinomianism to conclude by subscribing to a transparency of the real speaks of an extraordinary lucidity. I daresay this lucidity comes from an intoxicating love of life and a total equanimity before mortality, precisely as Genet perceived the Homeric universe, exemplified not by the modernist Odysseus but by the tragic Achilles, whose short poetic life, beyond ritual and sacrament, became the mythistorical model for all the characters in Un Captif amoureux. What made such lucidity possible was the total absence of any transcendental desires and anxieties in Genet's life and work—a consistency and a passion that have to be rare. Genet's poetic and political imaginary is pagan through and through. It is terribly misguided to call him “a mystical atheist,” as Edmund White has done on several occasions; even Genet's most ostentatious sketches of Catholic fantasies are pagan elaborations, not unlike those stunning depictions of hell in Italian Renaissance painting. An atheist, he says, is hardly dangerous, for he approaches the underside of Christian moralism, while “paganism puts the unbeliever back amid the so-called ‘mists of time,’ when God didn't yet exist. A sort of intoxication and magnanimity allows a pagan to approach everything, himself included, with equal respect and without undue humility.”⁶⁵ This sort of intoxication is hardly “the destructive, panicked drunkenness” that all revolution eventually ritualizes (as potlatch); it is rather, as Cornelius Castoriadis put it, the “lucid drunkenness” of society's poetic praxis, of what establishes the freedom to create and explore new forms of social life.⁶⁶ This capacity is infinite, though limited by death, precisely because it does not limit the reality of death by means of some transcendental afterlife. Having dedramatized death, as he was fond of saying, Genet brought his mortality to full realization while correcting the final proofs of Un Captif amoureux and beginning to draft its unrealized sequel.

Notes

1. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York, 1963).

2. The Second World War, a truly global affair, was the first of a kind that the Great War, despite its ambitious label, never was—testifying instead, like much else that surrounded it, to a still-prevailing nineteenth-century order that had exceeded its strict temporal limits. That the Great War essentially brought about the death of this order, as Proust demonstrates inimitably, does not mean that it instituted a new order as such. The historical puzzlement over the interwar period, particularly evident in political and cultural history, points to the suspended nature of an epoch that did not know what to make of its failed revolutionary legacy.

3. Mythistorēma is Greek for the novel, or fiction more generally. My use of it here extends the term's literal meaning to cover the intersection between the myths societies create (and recreate incessantly) to represent themselves and their others and the historical contingencies of myth's generation. Myth is always contemporary, though given readily to transhistorical narratives. To speak of society's “mythistorical foundations” is thus to speak of a continually shifting ground—which, like the course of a river, is explicable yet unpredictable—since history and the social imagination are both limited by their event yet infinite in their project.

4. William Burroughs quoted Genet as having said, “There was the French language and there was me. I put myself inside the other, then the work was done”; see Edmund White, Genet, a Biography (New York, 1993), 510. We will return to the conceptualization revealed in this phrasing, including its unavoidable sexual staging.

5. Jean Genet, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs (Monte Carlo, 1944); Miracle de la rose (Lyon, 1946); Querelle de Brest (Paris, 1946); Pompes funèbres (Paris, 1948); Poèmes (Paris, 1948); Journal du voleur (Paris, 1949).

6. Jean Genet, “Entretien avec Hubert Fichte” (December 1975), in L'ennemi déclaré: Textes et entretiens, ed. Albert Dichy, Vol. 6 of Oeuvres complètes de Jean Genet (Paris, 1991), 141-76; quotation from 165.

7. Interview with Saadalah Wannous from the 1970s published in Al Karmil (in Arabic) in 1986; quoted in translation by White, Genet, 347.

8. See Jean Genet, Un Captif amoureux (Paris, 1986); all page references given in subsequent notes are to the 1986 folio/paperback edition published by Gallimard. See also Jean Genet, “Affirmation of Existence through Rebellion,” Journal of Palestine Studies 16 (1987): 64-84, where he says, “The books I wrote previously were all part of a dream, of 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” (67).

9. The political articles, speeches, and interviews posthumously collected in L'ennemi déclaré must be read in juxtaposition with Un Captif amoureux, for it is as if these two volumes are each other's shadow, as if bringing the enemy out into the open finally allowed Genet to return to an imprisoned condition (the experience of love), which made art again possible.

10. Jean Genet, “Quatre heures à Chatila” (1982), in Dichy, ed., L'ennemi déclaré, 241-64.

11. On the consubstantial nature of massacre and cancer as catalytic for the realization of Un Captif amoureux, see also Patrice Bougon, “Politique et autobiographie,” Magazine littéraire (September 1993): 67-70, esp. 68.

12. Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York, 1964 [1949]), 71.

13. Ibid., 119.

14. Autography is David Lloyd's term, his way of distinguishing Genet's practice of eradicating the source of subjectivity (narrating and narrated) from autobiography, which retains it intact; see “Genet's Genealogy: European Minorities and the Ends of the Canon,” in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd (Oxford, 1990), 369-93, esp. 384. I would contest, however, Lloyd's differentiation between Genet and Proust in these terms. Their differences are many (language, style, representation of homosexuality, etc.), but their points of departure coincide.

15. In an unpublished note quoted by White, Genet, 523.

16. Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray (Middletown, CT, 1992 [1986]).

17. Jean Genet, “Entretien avec Bertrand Poirot-Delpech” (January 1982), in Dichy, ed., L'ennemi déclaré, 227-41; quotations from 230. Of course, “the torturers” are all those representatives of dominant bourgeois morality who were Genet's preferred readers, not “homosexuals and writers,” but rather “Catholic bankers, or … policemen or concierges” (quoted in White, Genet, 207).

18. Jean Genet, “Entretien avec Antoine Bourseiller” (summer 1981), in Dichy, ed., L'ennemi déclaré, 217-26; quotation from 226.

19. Genet, “Entretien avec Fichte,” 142.

20. Edward Said, “On Jean Genet's Late Works,” Grant Street 36 (1990): 27-42; quotation from 32.

21. See Jean Genet, “The Palestinians,” trans. Meric Dobson, Journal of Palestine Studies 3 (1973): 3-34: “The Palestinians became conscious of themselves as an autonomous nation … only when the nation was deprived of its territory. … The Palestinian nation, unable to remain in a land where it might, indeed, have lost its flavour, is obliged to find in fantasy rules which it observes rigorously as a means of saving itself from fading away in dreams and idealism. … This independence, this peculiar autonomy, it owes to its revolutionary spirit” (5).

22. For a detailed discussion of national fantasy and the national imaginary, see Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, 1996), esp. 10-46. My use of “the imaginary” here, as in Dream Nation, has little to do with the specular narcissistic figuration of otherness that most Lacanian criticism (Slavoj Žižek's being a notable exception) associates with the term, often ignoring Lacan's own rearticulation in his R.S.I. Séminaire (Paris, 1975). It refers, rather, to the magma of radical significations by which society conceptualizes, identifies, and institutes itself (often as other) in conjunction with history's particular demands, as developed in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis; see, especially, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, MA, 1987 [1975]).

23. Genet, Un Captif amoureux, 47; Prisoner of Love, 25; translation modified.

24. Prisoner of Love, 28; Un Captif amoureux, 52.

25. Un Captif amoureux, 178-79; Prisoner of Love, 107-8; translation modified.

26. His matrilineal name was all the more important because it signified another singular aspect of Genet's life: his mother was the only woman with whom he ever had intimate contact. In an unpublished manuscript from around 1973, Genet describes himself as being “strong from never having passed through a woman except at the moment of birth, when I was still blind, mute, and doubtless drowned” (quoted in White, Genet, 517). The whole ensemble of psychic antagonisms entailed here explains the symbolic prominence of Hamza and his mother in Un Captif amoureux, which concludes with an allusion to this pair as a pietà figure that constitutes the book's principle. This issue has been widely and interestingly discussed, but I want to avail myself of Genet's own theatrical principles to dedramatize this pretext figure and leave it in the wings here, unstaged and undiscussed.

27. Genet, “Entretien avec Fichte,” 149.

28. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 261; Un Captif amoureux, 427.

29. Un Captif amoureux, 426; Prisoner of Love, 260; translation modified.

30. “If the Panthers acted, they didn't do so on stage. … It would be wrong to expect that an ideal curtain could be brought down on their performances. Excess in display, in words and in attitude, swept the Panthers to ever new and greater excess” (Un Captif amoureux, 141; Prisoner of Love, 85; translation modified). See Gisèle Child-Olmsted, “Black on White: Language and Revolution in Genet's Political Writings,” L'Esprit créateur 35 (1995): 61-69.

31. Genet, Un Captif amoureux, 69; Prisoner of Love, 46; translation modified. In an earlier work, Genet had made the same point from the opposite angle: “White hatred in America is such that I wonder whether every White man in this country, when he plants a tree, does not see Negroes hanging from its branches”; “Introduction à Les Frères de Soledad” (1970), in Dichy, ed., L'ennemi déclaré, 63-70; quotation from 69.

32. Genet, “Les Frères,” 69.

33. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 259; Un Captif amoureux, 424.

34. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York, 1967 [1952]), 194.

35. For an insightful discussion and framing of this issue, see White, Genet, 526-31.

36. Jean Genet, “Interview with Madeleine Gobeil” (January 1964), in The Selected Writings of Jean Genet, ed. Edmund White (New York, 1993), 447-60; quotation from 457.

37. Genet, “Entretien avec Bourseiller” (notes de travail), 398. For a detailed discussion of paranomia, see Stathis Gourgouris, “Enlightenment and Paranomia,” in Violence, Identity and Self-Determination, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford, 1997), 119-49.

38. See White, Genet, 383-86.

39. Said, “Genet's Late Works,” 36. See also Genet's image of the symbiotic coincidence of poetic inspiration and poetic history as two matches that, ignited together, become one in their simultaneous immolation (Prisoner of Love, 318; Un Captif amoureux, 520).

40. Genet, Un Captif amoureux, 348-49; Prisoner of Love, 211-12; translation modified.

41. Prisoner of Love, 212; Un Captif amoureux, 349.

42. For an exceptional argument concerning this same disruption of the impersonation/identification equation in Fanon's work—a resourceful feminist critique that also elicits the most revolutionary aspects of his psychoanalytic figuring of sexuality and colonialism—see Diana Fuss, “Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification,” diacritics 24 (1994): 20-42. (Parenthetically, many aspects of Fanon's and Genet's work can be aligned as well as juxtaposed, in addition to their common endowment of assimilationist prefaces by Sartre, particularly in the intersecting domains of violence and poetry, sexuality and revolution.)

43. Genet, Un Captif amoureux, 266-67; Prisoner of Love, 160-61; translation modified.

44. The term, from Félix Guattari, Psychanalyse et transversalité (Paris, 1972), is also specifically applied to Genet by Guattari in “Genet retrouvé,” in Cartographies schizoanalytiques (Paris, 1981), 269-90, esp. 276.

45. Leo Bersani, “The Gay Outlaw,” diacritics 24 (1994): 5-18; quotations from 5 and 6.

46. Said, “Genet's Late Works,” 38.

47. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 59; Un Captif amoureux, 101. Trahison applies to a range of related notions in English (betrayal, treachery, treason) and is also linked, by root, to translation (as in the famous Italian phrase tradittore traduttore). For Genet, the term is epistemically informed by a great deal of active power, an askesis at the level of life itself. See Paule Thévenin, “La trahison comme ascèse,” Magazine littéraire (September 1993): 35-36.

48. Bersani, “Gay Outlaw,” 10. See also Genet, “Entretien avec Fichte,” 176; and “Affirmation of Existence through Rebellion,” 78. Bersani goes on to say that solitude is “not a betrayal defined by its opposition to loyalty. It is betrayal of that opposition, a betrayal opposed to nothing because it consists merely in a movement out of everything” (“Gay Outlaw,” 12).

49. Genet, “Affirmation of Existence through Rebellion,” 77.

50. Said, “Genet's Late Works,” 33.

51. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 52-53; Un Captif amoureux, 90-91. Note the impossibility of adequately rendering in English the rich interplay of gendered pronouns in the French:

    surtout à mesure que le sexe ancien se fanera, espérant qu'il tombât, définitivement inutilisable, une joie proche peut-être de la démence quand, parlant de soi il ne dira plus “il” mais “elle,” comprenant alors que la grammaire aussi se partage en deux et que, tournant sur elle-même, une moitié s'applique à lui, la féminine, alors qu'on imposait l'autre du langage. Le passage de l'une à la moitié non velue doit être délicieux et terrible. … “Adieu chère moitié, je meurs à moi-même. …” Quitter la démarche virile abhorrée mais connue, c'est laisser le monde pour le carmel ou la léproserie, quitter l'univers du pantalon pour celui du soutien-gorge, c'est l'équivalent de la mort attendue mais redoutée et n'est-ce pas comparable au suicide afin que les choeurs y chantent le Tuba mirum? Le transsexuel sera donc un monstre et un héros.

52. Prisoner of Love, 150; Un Captif amoureux, 249-50. The mistranslation here (resulting in the parenthetical phrase) is quite inventive, given the quandary of genderless English: “Enfin être hors du monde! Changer de sexe ne consiste pas seulement à subir sur le corps quelques corrections chirurgicales, c'est enseigner au monde entier, afin qu'il vous désigne, un obligatoire détournement syntaxique … et vous en resterez pantois car je ne connais pas de féminin à ce mot; encore mal éduquée votre main droite se portera là afin de dissimuler une érection impossible puisqu'il ne vous restera plus de quoi bander.”

53. Genet's view of transsexuality clearly proceeds from an exclusively male imagination; the ambivalence begins with the turning of a “he” into a “she” and not the other way around. In a psychoanalytic sense, however, this is not a real issue because, for one thing, the transsexual exemplifies the epistemic dissociation between sex and gender and thus renders the masculinist schema of self/other irrelevant. More importantly, no matter which way the sexual translation goes, it is always, according to Catherine Millot, “the woman as Name-of-the-Father [that] marks the limit to the mortifying exigency of the Other”; Horsexe: Essay on Transsexuality, trans. Kenneth Hylton (Brooklyn, 1990 [1983]), 59.

54. Genet, Un Captif amoureux, 496; Prisoner of Love, 304.

55. Un Captif amoureux, 504-5; Prisoner of Love, 308-9; translation modified.

56. As Scott Durham observes, “Genet feels compelled to include the subject's disappearance in the portrait itself. It is as if the content of the portrait were momentarily invaded by the photographic negative which will henceforth be its only ground”; “Genet's Shadow Theatre: Memory and Utopian Fantasy in Un Captif amoureux,” L'Esprit créateur 35 (1995): 50-59; quotation from 55. See also Guattari, “Genet retrouvé,” 274; and Patrice Bougon, “Le cliché, la métaphore et la digression,” L'Esprit créateur 35 (1995): 70-77.

57. Genet, “Affirmation of Resistance through Rebellion,” 72.

58. Jean Genet, “Entretien avec Michèle Manceaux” (May 1970), in Dichy, ed., L'ennemi déclaré, 55-62; quotation from 57.

59. See Genet, “Entretien avec Fichte,” 147.

60. Genet, “The Palestinians,” 32-33. In this impassioned argument for the irreducibility of both art and revolution in the course of their mutual, undeconstructible antagonism, Genet sounds much like Adorno, despite their obvious differences in manner. Said alone has recognized this rather peculiar but convincing affinity, which deserves some serious elaboration; see “Genet's Late Works,” 39-40.

61. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 3; Un Captif amoureux, 11-12.

62. Un Captif amoureux, 358; Prisoner of Love, 218; translation modified.

63. This point is elaborated in an exemplary way, fully commensurate with Genet's (down to the very terminology of dreams and naturalized spaces) by Uri Eisenzweig in “An Imaginary Territory: The Problematic of Space in Zionist Discourse,” trans. Debra Bendel, Dialectical Anthropology 5 (1981): 261-85.

64. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 149; Un Captif amoureux, 248.

65. Prisoner of Love, 35; Un Captif amoureux, 62.

66. Cornelius Castoriadis, “Culture in a Democratic Society,” in The Castoriadis Reader, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Oxford, 1997), 338-48; quotation from 345. See also Genet, “Entretien avec Fichte,” 162.

This essay is dedicated to Edward Said.

Translations from the French are mine unless otherwise indicated.