"The history of his liberation": Wherefore Existential Biography?

on Sartre's Saint Genet, writing as "the way out that one invents in desperate cases"

Sartre began Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr as an introduction to Jean Genet’s collected works. But as he reread Genet’s books, spoke with the man for days at a time, and consumed quantities of stimulants that would kill the average horse, the book grew from a brief essay into a 625-page monument. Though it has been displaced as the definitive critical statement on Genet’s corpus since its publication in 1952, Saint Genet nonetheless remains perhaps the greatest work ever published by one major writer on another—the dialectical product of Sartre’s total immersion in Genet’s work, and of Genet’s total absorption into Sartre’s thought. Neither figure proves ultimately reducible to the other, and in the end we find that the logic of their encounter is not “Sartre or Genet” nor “Sartre and Genet,” but “Sartre with Genet,” bound and unreconciled.

Each man emerged fundamentally changed by this experience of agonistic symbiosis. Sartre finally broke with his early philosophy of radical freedom as articulated in Being and Nothingness and set definitively down the Marxist path that would produce his late opus, the Critique of Dialectical Reason; Genet found it almost impossible to write after being so thoroughly seen by another writer, and was forced to transition from novels to plays, which offered new possibilities for his craft. Each found in the other the closest thing either would ever have to a friend.

Saint Genet is often called an “existential biography”—perhaps the only true and complete existential biography ever written—but it is not a biography in the usual sense. Sartre’s “research” was limited to his reading of and conversations with Genet. He reports Genet’s life as Genet tells it, though he admits on every page that his subject is one of the great liars of the twentieth-century. There are precious few facts at all about Genet’s life contained in this massive tome. That rich and varied life is in effect boiled down to a few scenes to which Sartre returns again and again, just as Genet would return to the same motifs and symbols within and across his own works. Little Jean’s unwanted birth, the moment he was first caught stealing at the age of 10 and labeled a thief, the day he was arrested and outed as a homosexual when the police find vaseline in his pockets, the day he composed his first poem and begins writing Our Lady of Flowers in prison.

We circle these moments again and again, each time activating a new significant detail which changes everything before and after. We might imagine this circling reflects the form of their conversations. It recalls also the endless repetitions of the analysand on the couch, rehashing the significance of a few flashes and scraps from childhood, some real and some imagined, to which psychoanalytic discourse always returns. Sartre justifies his method by declaring that he is not interested in “causes” at all—the specific connections between specific facts—because he does “not conceive an act as having causes. I consider myself satisfied when I have found in it not its ‘factors,’ but the general themes which it organizes; for our decisions gather into new syntheses and on new occasions the leitmotif that governs our life” (427-8). This is life as an aesthetic object of the highest order, in which causes are not traced but expressed, articulated, patterned as the interwoven leitmotifs in a Wagnerian opera.

The primal scene from which all else follows, the scene which Sartre recounts in the first pages based on a story told to him—over and over, we must assume—by Genet, is that of the first time he was named a thief, the first time he came to identify himself as a thief. An abandoned child fostered by a provincial couple, Genet learned to steal from a young age both out of innocent need and a naive ignorance of property. His thefts were at first natural, unreflecting, guiltless. But one day, “A voice declares publicly: ‘You’re a thief.’ The child is ten years old.”

“That was how it happened,” Sartre tells us, “in that or some other way… It does not matter. The important thing is that Genet lived and has not stopped reliving this period of his life as if it had lasted only an instant,” what Sartre calls a “fatal instant,” a moment of “transition that is going to determine his entire life” (17-8). The child is not only called a thief in this moment, recognized as a thief by his foster parents and their whole provincial community; he comes moreover to understand that he is a thief, that he has always been a thief, that he was born a thief and that he will die a thief. (It’s worth noting, for those keeping score, that Sartre wrote this scene almost 20 years before Louis Althusser’s famous account of interpellation.)

It will become the great project of Genet’s life not to explain away this accusation and thereby reject his identity as a thief—to critique the society that created the conditions that drove him to criminality, to analyze the psychological factors of his early life to show how his thieving was a form of “acting-out”—and in so doing to declare his innocence. Genet is not innocent. He does not want to be innocent, and he refuses any account of himself that would exonerate him for either his empirical crimes or his essential criminality. He and Sartre both conceive this early moment of accusation, exclusion, becoming-Other as a moment of salvation, because it laid the foundations for his break from the bourgeois world.

Genet will from this moment forward not only be a thief; he will be The Thief—the very image of criminality, degradation, abjection. He will pursue these images relentlessly across all of Europe, in every bar, hotel, bathroom, and prison. It will become his life’s work to contemplate that image of himself (as his characters do their own images in the mirror), and in so doing to make others see a tiny bit of him in themselves. It is Genet’s premature damnation that made him a saint.

Genet has the audacity to choose himself. His “choice” is not an act, but the concrete affirmation of an external determination. He was given a name and he will be what he has been called. He lives criminality as a “vocation”—a calling—and when he becomes a writer he will produce art on the model of crime. This is writing-as-crime not only in the legal sense, as in the eyes of the censors who want to burn his obscene books. It is writing as an act of violence against language itself: an attempt to produce a truly non-communicative speech, an onanistic refusal of communication, of recognition, of relation.

Genet does not speak to his readers; he speaks to himself as they listen, and as they mishear him again, and again, and again. Each reader is lured in to watch his performance as at a bordello, and in the process they are infected with Genet though he remains untouched by them.

The existential biography is the story of one subject’s fatal instants and determinant choices. For Sartre the philosopher of radical freedom, concrete free choices are surprisingly few and far between. If they come at all in the course of a life, they appear at the very moments when we are least equipped to make them. Genet’s great choice was not between two alternative actions but between two absolutely distinct perspectives on his life: between endless equivocation about and unqualified affirmation of what he understands to be his essential criminality. In choosing the latter, he makes a break from the bourgeois world. Genet transforms his determination into a choice, and transforms that choice into a project, the project of a life.

In the conclusion of Saint Genet, Sartre lays bare his motivations for writing. Genet the singular man disappears for a moment and becomes the ideal of singularity, the case study that proves by example that such a thing as freedom can be at all:

“I have tried to do the following: to indicate the limits of psychoanalytical interpretation and Marxist explanation to demonstrate that freedom alone can account for a person in his totality; to show this freedom at grips with destiny, crushed at first by its mischances, then turning upon them and digesting them little by little; to prove that genius is not a gift but the way out that one invents in desperate cases; to learn the choice that a writer makes of himself, of his life and of the meaning of the universe, including even the formal characteristics of his style and composition, even the structure of his images and the particularity of his tastes; to review in detail the history of his liberation.” (584)

Genet, the dialectical unity of Thief and Saint made concrete in a single life, the Existential Man of the twentieth-century, testifies to the reality of freedom by his entire life, by his act of becoming-free in every passing instant through a ongoing project faithful to a primordial choice, at once a radical abstraction and a total concrete situation. And he reminds us that to write may still be an act of desperate invention, of escape, of courage.