Objects of abjection: the animation of difference in Jean Genet's novels - French author

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1998 by John Plotz

It also presents the most sophisticated Marxist case for considering an object free of its systematic attachments:

It is only infatuation (with the object contemplated), the unjust disregard for the claims of every existing thing, that does justice to what exists. . . . The existent's one-sidedness is comprehended as its being, and reconciled. (76)

Adorno's praise for the "sabbath eyes . . . that save in their object something of the calm of the day of its creation"(76) is beautiful. But it is also influenced, indeed fatally compromised, by the existentialism that he elsewhere denounces. To speak of toy trains climbing free of the exchange-value system and its compulsions is to posit that the linguistic system, and the taxonomic ordering of the world, are cognate with a system of political oppression - a system from which escape is possible.(7) Similarly, in most modernist writing, there remains an assumption that objects are able somehow to gain "freedom" from systematic classification, just as the autonomous human in existentialist accounts is said to rise clear of an obligatory world to gain a life in the moment of choice. In such accounts, the negative space from which the moment of decision emerges - the systematic flatness from which a three-dimensional animate object springs erect - is either ignored or (systematically) trivialized to the point of nonexistence.

Genet is no Bourdieu: He has no desire to reduce the object's seeming movement toward freedom to merely another gesture within a system that turns all deviations into "conditioned and conditional freedom... remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty" (95). But neither does Genet lapse into a pure worship of the object's freedom. Rather, his work achieves the sort of inversion that allows objects to emerge into a more-than-systematic life even as they reenter systematic flatness. His novels enact what could never be directly addressed in strictly philosophical writing: both the desire of an object to climb free of its system and, simultaneously, the striking affirmation of the language-system's guiding principle of "difference" implied by such "climbing-clear" - in the moment of turning from the system, the strongest possible affirmation of the system.

Genet deconstructs the false opposition between the system's flatness and the "erection" of objects striving to break free. He both allows that escape and analyses the conditions of the object's return. In his four closely related novels (or novel/memoirs), The Thief's Journal (TJ), Our Lady of the Flowers (OLF), Miracle of the Roses (MR), and Funeral Rites (FR), we can uncover a tangled, repetitive but highly revealing coming-to-grips with the peculiarities of the inanimate made live. Three objects surface time and again in his works: Penises, roses, and tubes of Vaseline help him to complete a brilliant anatomy of the disruptions that occur as objects attempt to claim a transcendent free-standing life for themselves.(8)

AGGLUTINATED BY "DIFFERANCE"