Reading "Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr" decades after it was first published, I find myself asking, does this book hold together as a psychobiographical portrait? Personally, I have to wonder when Sartre says, "the criminal does not make beauty, he himself is raw beauty [and that] by virtue of his act he changes into what he is." Is such language only glorifying murders and wanton destruction by those who seek to take advantage of others? In addition, it seems only too convenient for the author to find approval of his existentialist philosophy in Genet's writings, which is concisely summed up when he says, "One of the chief aspects of the beautiful is the perfect appropriateness of act to essence, the subordination of becoming to being; destiny is thus perceptible and temporality is subdued to expressing only the eternal...pride requires that you retain consciousness of [your] freedom." Or when he suggests that "Beyond [the world of] instinct, the Kantian noumenal world has decided, in an intelligible world, [to act] in favor of radical evil."
I find that Sartre's text has the faults found in all French literature, from Racine to Badiou, of being overwritten and over-thought until the argument proved the reverse of the author's contentions, the subject of the text being dissolved from being assaulted by double-sided conjectures, changes of tense, reversals of meaning, and lapses of ethical-centeredness... Maybe it's my pragmatic American utilitarian approach to reading this text that is speaking now, but however much I admire Sartre's writing, I find I do not have the desire to pick up more fragments of the author than have been thrown down from my high-chair of critical reading. I simply don't approve of how he shatters his subject beyond recognition; to me that is nihilism, and so if you consider that 'looking down one's nose', I may as well admit I am guilty as charged. Indeed, I find that nothing on this scale of interpretation based on such a little examination of the text itself has been done until my essay on the relative merits of Rousseau according to Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. (Fuck the rational, I was instructed in a dream!)
Sartre's analysis leaves us asking, to what extent does the intense turmoil in the subject's consciousness, as derived from feelings of inferiority and the resultant drives to overcompensation, manifest itself as an arc that can be traced from childhood to adulthood, and ultimately take shape according to the perfect geometry of the ideal psychoanalytic situation... What seems belabored in Sartre's stylized synopsis of Genet's metaphysics changes radically as it then shifts its center of focus in the author's texts from the question of evil not only in terms of ethical intention, but of a more basic question of the existence of freedom of the will in the individual.
The homosexual male, in pretending to be a woman, Sartre tells us, consumes everything--the human world of objects and the entire culture of ideas as well as the men and women who inhabit them--in a vortex of Nonbeing where the guideposts of the ego are thrown into a process of "derealization" as all possible ego-relations are obliterated and replaced by world of appearances. This is the true pitfall one encounters by conflating the world with its surface and resulting retreat into a world of images. Such a world is contingent on aesthetics and the ideal, and the most perfect aesthetician who inhabits it, such as Sartre's version of Genet, is the true evildoer who, he says, "dreams a hate-ridden dream of universal conflagration."
"All societies," Sartre says, "castrate the maladjusted" and I find I am no exception to this sociological rule. While not a homosexual or being 'gay' in popular commercial jargon, I did experience a uncommonly powerful hetero-sex mania that made it impossible for me to find sexual equanimity until relatively late in life. I identify strongly with the phrase Sartre uses to describe Genet's notion of love as "a magical ceremony where the lover steals the loved one's being in order to incorporate it into himself." For me, it was my faith in the religiosity of sex that became my God, whereas Genet felt it necessary to profane the Host at the altar of an empty church to signalize his belief in the hollowness of the Deity. Possibly because, as Sartre reveals, he was raped while still a child, that he found himself learning the arts of thievery, and God became a half-poetic catechism in his mind for his approval he sought before creating his confessional texts of perversion, texts where he displayed his loathing of his onerous and self-accusatory "disgusting" alienation.
In his reversal of the theodicy of Leibnitz, Sartre concludes, if God wills evil, even as a test, then evil is good. Sartre proceeds to show that since he failed to find the power to kill himself outright, Genet embarks on a plan to kill himself bit by bit: "he will internalize his suicide and spread it out over his entire existence." And this can and ought to be done because "existence is no longer anything but an interminable death-agony which has been willed."
The child Genet commits crime not so much because of the evil they bring into the universe of guilt but because his crimes are the manifestation of his compulsory repetition of his original abuse. "One kills in order to kill one's self," Sartre says, and thus in experiencing this symbolic death, Genet was free to experience the joy of living and the ecstatic happiness of dying in an absolute moment of being as the Good-in-Life. Like much of Sartre's philosophical writing itself, the last thesis is not so convincing and may be said to beg the question of whether the literary works of Jean Genet have merit and interest for us. Sartre doesn't even leave me with a feeling that Genet is an authentic literary artist or if his homosexuality/criminality is to be understood as an accidental obstacle incidental to his life-history.
Still, I think this book is valuable as a meditation on the ethical etiology on the genesis of good and evil in the human metaphysical heart. In saying that one kills in order to kill oneself, Sartre does make a compelling identification between Genet and the perpetrator of crime in that he is furthering the trans-valuation of guilt and innocence and seeks to pass beyond the realm of good and evil established by Western Aristotelian-based forms of rationality and all Judaeo-Christian codes of ethics. This is accomplished definitively in Genet's writing since, just as Good depends on the external situation, Evil depends on internal reflection. After Genet, we come to recognize that the balance of power is ultimately left unchanged, because Good always existed prior to Evil and Being prior to nothingness.