BOOKS
445
Being and Nothingness
is an attempt to develop a language to cope
with, to record the gestures of a consciousness tormented by disgust.
This disgust, this experience of the superfluity of things and of moral
values, is simultaneously a psychological crisis and a metaphysical
problem.
Sartre's solution is nothing if not impertinent. Corresponding to
the primitive rite of anthropophagy, the eating of human beings, is
the philosophical rite of cosmophagy, the eating of the world. The
hallmark of the philosophical tradition to which Sartre is heir starts
with consciousness as the sole given. Sartre's solution to the anguish
of consciousness confronted by the brute reality of things is cosmophagy,
the devouring of the world by consciousness. More exactly, consciousness
is understood as both world-constituting and world-devouring. All rela–
tions--especially, in the most brilliant passages in
Being and Nothingness,
the erotic-are analyzed as gestures of consciousness, appropriations of
the other in the interminable self-definition of the self.
In
Being and Nothingness,
Sartre reveals himself as a psychologist
of the first rank-worthy to rank with Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and
Freud. And the chief interest of the Baudelaire essay is in the acuteness
and originality of his insights into Baudelaire's psychology, as revealed
in his poems, journals, and letters. What makes
Saint Genet
even more
interesting than the Baudelaire essay (though, at the same time, more
unmanageable as well) is that, through thinking about Genet, Sartre has
gone beyond the notion of action as a mode of psychological self–
conservation. Through Genet, Sartre has glimpsed something of the
autonomy of the aesthetic. More exactly, he has understood the con–
nection between the aesthetic dimension and freedom, long ago and
beautifully argued by Kant. The artist who is the subject of
Saint Genet
is not psychologized away. Genet's works are interpreted in terms of a
saving ritual, a ceremony of consciousness. That this ceremony is,
au fond,
onanistic, is curiously apt. According to European philosophy
since Descartes, world-creating has been the principal activity of con–
sciousness. It's perhaps only just that world-creating be seen now as
world-procreating, as masturbation.
Sartre correctly describes Genet's most spiritually ambitious book,
Funeral Rites,
as "a tremendous effort of transubstantiation." Genet
relates how he transformed the whole world into the corpse of his
dead lover, Jean Decarnin, and this young corpse into his own penis.
"The Marquis de Sade dreamt of extinguishing the fires of Etna with
his sperm," Sartre observes. "Genet's arrogant madness goes further:
he jerks off the Universe." Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all
