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

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1998 by John Plotz

If this way of figuring separation as agglutination works as a philosophical insight, the accomplishment rests on the way Genet has managed to bridge a different sort of systematic difference: He has posed - or resolved - a philosophical problem aesthetically. The tangible qualities of the objects that become Genet's focus are represented aesthetically in the moments of soft haziness that exactly figure a dilemma - or perhaps a solution - founded on differance. That is, Genet has discovered through the work of art a way to represent objects that climb clear of their merely systematic difference, as well as a way to represent the dangers and the allures of that claim to ultimate thing-in-itselfness. But he has also found a way to represent their necessary failure as a contradictory affirmation both of the object's successful separation from the world and of that gloriously coming object's simultaneous relapse into a system of meaning, which always leaves around the residual edges of the resealed cut these glowing hazy traces (call them genealogy, or even history) - the lucid obscurity, the legible illegibility of the system's continued difference within and from itself.

AESTHETIC RADICALISM, POLITICAL EVIL

The aesthetic and philosophical accomplishments of Genet's work have deeper implications than appear at first glance. The embrace of abjection - of humilitation that is also attachment to the power that spurns one - is the site of both escape from and reunion with the language game. But we ought also ask under what conditions the "abjection" and the "glorious superfluity" that Genet praises so highly can come into being. Power, in fact, appeals to Genet not only when it is debased, but whenever it is deployed.

The abjection or humiliation that power undergoes in Genet's novels is above all a sign of power's splendid excess, the realization that power has power to waste, and can afford to undergo humiliation. How does that realization about the politics of Genet's aesthetics reflect back on Genet's model of hazy differance and reintegration?

Genet's praise of abjection valorizes abasement, but at the same time it glamorizes the condition of having an elevation from which to fall. The moments of greatest abjection in Genet come through encounters with "real" - which is to say politically valorized and institutionally supported - objects. The prosecuting policemen who surround the tube of Vaseline are handsome, the prison guards are beautiful, the Nazis are well armed and tragically arrogant: Of their guns, their uniforms, their badges, the same thing can be said. These objects - just like the systematically animate objects that stand for humiliation and evanescence - are able to stand apart, to cut themselves aloof. The gun of an errant Nazi or the badge of a policeman getting a blowjob from a thief is memorable because its splendor, its uselessness, lies all on the periphery of its "real" identity. Because it is marginal and yet the property of a "real" system (a powerful state), the policeman's penis gets to erect itself everywhere, at both boundary and center. The only caveat is that its glorious, its useless erection, is visible only at a boundary state between two entities. The penis of the strong man lowering himself to gay sex is both part of the armor of the strong and the point of entry of the weak: It must lie between, even as it rises above.