SUSAN SONTA G
read as a dark travesty on Hegel's analysis of the relations between self
and other. Sartre speaks of the works of Genet as being, each one of
them, small editions of
The Phenomenology of Mind.
Absurd as it
sounds, Sartre is correct. But it is also true that all of Sartre's writings
as well are versions, editions, commentaries, satires on Hegel's great
book. This is the bizarre point of connection between Sartre and
Genet; two more different human beings it would be hard to imagine!
In Genet, Sartre has found his ideal subject. To be sure, he has
drowned in him. Nevertheless,
Saint Genet
is a marvellous book, full of
truths about moral language and moral choice. (Take, as only one
instance, the insight that "Evil is the systematic substitution of the
abstract for the concrete.") And the analyses of Genet's narratives and
plays are consistently perceptive. On Genet's most daring book,
Funeral
Rites,
Sartre is particularly striking. And he is certainly capable of
appraisal, as well as explication, as in the entirely just comment that
"The style of
Our Lady of the Flowers,
which is a dream poem, a poem
of futility, is very slightly marred by a kind of onanistic complacency.
It does not have the spirited tone of the worlds that follow." Sartre
does say many foolish, superfluous things in
Saint Genet.
But everything
true and interesting that can be said about Genet is in this book as well.
It is also a key book for the understanding of Sartre at his best.
After
Being and Nothingness,
Sartre stood at the cross-roads. He could
move from philosophy and psychology to an ethics. The other choice
would be from philosophy and psychology to a politics, a theory of group
action and history. As everyone knows, and many deplore, Sartre has
chosen the second path; and the result is the
Critique of Dialectical
Reason,
published in 1960.
Saint Genet
is his complex gesture in the
direction he did not go.
Of all the philosophers in the Hegelian tradition (and I include
Heidegger), Sartre is the man who has understood the dialectic
between self and other in Hegel's
Phenomenology
in the most interesting
and usable fashion. But Sartre is not simply Hegel with knowledge
of the flesh, any more than he deserves to be written off as a French
disciple of Heidegger. Sartre's great book,
Being and Nothingn ess,
is
heavily indebted to the language and problems of Hegel, Husserl, and
Heidegger, to be sure. But it has a fundamentally different intention
from theirs. Sartre's work is not contemplative, but is moved by a great
psychological urgency. His pre-war novel,
Nausea,
really supplies the
key to all his work. There
is
3tated the fundamental problem of the
aisimilability of the world in its repulsive, slimy, vacuous or obtrusively
substantial thereness-the problem which moves all of Sartre's writings.
