INTRODUCTION

1. See, for instance, Odette Aslan, Jean Genet (Paris: Seghers, 1973); Peter Brooks and Joseph Halpern, Genet: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1979); Richard Coe, The Theater of Jean Genet: A Casebook (New York: Grove Press, 1979); Sylvie Debevec Henning, Genet’s Ritual Play (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1981); Bettina Knapp, Jean Genet (New York: Twayne, 1968); Jean-Marie Magnan, Pour un blason de Jean Genet (Paris: Seghers, 1966); Kelly Morris, ed., Genet and Ionesco: The Theater of the Double (New York: Bantam Books, 1969); Camille Naish, A Genetic Approach to Structures in the Work of Jean Genet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); and Jeannette L. Savona, Jean Genet (New York: Grove Press, 1983).

2. Saint Genet: Comédien et martyr, vol. 1 of Oeuvres complètes de Jean Genet (Paris: Gallimard, 1953). Hereafter I cite the translation by Bernard Frechtman, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (New York: American Library, 1963).

3. Much of the early Genet scholarship seems to have been generated by Sartre’s study. Richard Coe, for instance, explains the evolution of Genet’s work, including the novels and plays, according to the recurrence of a triangular metaphysical motif, including the en soi, the pour soi, and autrui. The Vision of Jean Genet (New York: Grove Press, 1968).

Claude Bonnefoy agrees with Sartre that Genet writes about social transgression in order to show the evil in all of us. Bonnefoy echoes Sartre when he describes the movement between sense certainty and language in Genet’s symbols, insists upon the importance of Nature in Genet’s spiritualism, and explains the dialectic of sacred and profane in Genet’s existentialism. Jean Genet, (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1965).

Philip Thody, rejecting Sartre’s existential explanation of Genet’s call to crime, is nonetheless intrigued by the psychological impulse which transformed the thief into the poet and determined the development of Genet’s self-abasement into enlightened self-criticism. Jean Genet: A Study of His Novels and Plays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968).

Joseph McMahon and Lewis Cetta are exceptions to the Sartrian trend. The former views Genet’s homosexuality as the source of his creative urge and the basis for synthesizing opposite realms of experience in the formation of symbols, in The Imagination of Jean Genet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). Cetta analyzes the recurrence of Jungian themes of creation and conflict in Genet’s theater, in Profane Play, Ritual and Jean Genet: A Study of His Drama (University: University of Alabama Press, 1974).

4. For an analysis of text, theater, and film in Marguerite Duras, see Oswald, “Semiotics and/or Deconstruction: In Quest of Cinema,” Semiótica 60, nos. 3/4 (1986): 315–41.

5. In vol. 2 of Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 11–171.

6. Artaud, p. 133.

7. Derrida offers an interpretation of Artaud’s metaphysics in “La Parole Souffiée,” in L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967). Artaud seeks a universal language of the stage which transcends oppositions between body and soul, reality and representation, voice and meaning, in a movement of performance qua phenomenological event (p. 291). On the other hand, Derrida explains, when Artaud calls for pure mise-en-scène at the expense of the closure of voice and meaning in the poetic text, he reintroduces the problem of difference as a force structuring the theatrical event and challenges the very premise of metaphysical theater.

8. Quoted by Derrida in L’Ecriture et la différence, p. 276, from La Cruelle raison poétique, p. 69, my translation.

9. See Genet’s Preface to Les Bonnes (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1954), pp. 11–17.

10. Trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971).

11. Keir Elam refers to deixis as the particular characteristic of theater. The Semiotics of Theater and Drama (New York: Metheun & Co., 1980), p. 139.

12. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

13. Trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

14. Though in L’Ecriture et la différence Derrida warns against our generalizing Artaud’s call for pure mise en scène into a general poetics of discourse, in Dissemination he debates the philosophical issues at stake in precisely such a project, shifting attention from mimetic to performative aspects of poetry.

15. Artaud, p. 106.

16. L’Ecriture et la différence, p. 344.

17. Ibid., p. 343.

18. Morris, op. cit.

19. I have placed abbreviations of the titles of works after the page number of citations, in those instances where I thought some confusion might arise. Genet’s novels in French are abbreviated as follows: Notre-Dame-des-fleurs, N.D.F.; Miracle de la rose, M.R.; Pompes funèbres, P.F. The English translations are abbreviated as follows: Our Lady of the Flowers, O.L.F.; Miracle of the Rose, M.R.; and Funeral Rites, F.R. I abbreviate the titles of the theoretical works cited only when the full title of the work has been clearly referred to in the text. For example, quotations from Derrida’s La Voix et le phénomène are marked V.P., and quotations from Ricoeur’s La Métaphore vive are marked M.V.

20. Genet spent the last fifteen years or so of his life in the Middle East. He has an adopted Moroccan son and is buried in Tangiers. See “L’Homme que Genet n’a pas giflé,” an interview with Mohamed Choukri, in Jeune Afrique, no. 1335 (1986): 50–51.

I. THE SCENE OF SILENCE

1. Trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 81. Originally published as Saint Genêt: Comédien et martyr (Paris: Gallimard, 1951).

2. Jacques Derrida, La Voix et le phénomène (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1967), p. 108.

3. The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1942), p. 79.

4. “Que la perception accompagne ou non l’énoncé de perception, que la vie comme présence à soi accompagne ou non l’énoncé du Je, cela est parfaitement indifférent au fonctionnement du vouloir-dire. Ma mort est structurellement nécessaire au prononcé du Je” (V.P.; 107–8).

5. The notion of the subject’s division into a being-for-itself and a being-for-others, a division symbolized in the reciprocal acts of giving and responding to names, forms the cornerstone of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the subject. “What I look for in speech is the response of the other. What constitutes me as subject is my question. In order to make myself recognized by the other, I only utter what was in view of that which will be. In order to find him, I call him by a name which he has to either assume or refuse in order to respond to me” “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse,” in Ecrits I, p. 181, my translation. The game of naming entails a threat of death as the subject offers himself up as an identity for others. Ecrits I, p. 205.

When Lacan traces the origin of the speaking subject in a developmentally marked stage in the biological life of the subject, in the “mirror phase,” he differs fundamentally from Derrida, who discredits the notion of an ontological origin of being. In Derrida, the speaking subject is always and already divided in its relation to itself and this relation shapes the subject’s relation to others in language.

6. Please note that John Searle uses the words “meaning” and “expression” somewhat differently. Searle distinguishes between the “utterance meaning”—what the speaker intended by a statement—and the “sentence meaning”—what the words signify by convention. Thus in Searle the “utterance meaning” includes indication, while the “sentence meaning” resembles Husserl’s notion of “expression.” See Expression and Meaning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 31.

7. “Tout ce qui, dans mon discours, est destiné à manifester un vécu à autrui, doit passer par la médiation de la face physique. Cette médiation irréductible engage toute expression dans une opération indicative. La fonction de manifestation (kundgebende Funktion) est une fonction indicative” (V.P.; 41).

8. Trans. James Strachey (New York: Penguin, 1960), p. 71.

9. “Ce mouvement de la différance ne survient pas à un sujet transcendental. Il le produit. L’auto-affection n’est pas une modalité d’expérience caractérisant un étant qui serait déjà lui-même (autos). Elle produit le même comme rapport à soi dans la différence d’avec soi, le même comme le non-identique” (V.P.; 92).

10. “Le concept de subjectivité appartient à priori et en général à l’ordre du constitué. Cela vaut a fortiori pour l’apprésentation analogique constituant l’in-tersubjectivité. Celle-ci est inséparable de la temporalisation comme ouverture du présent à un hors-soi, à un autre présent absolu. Cet hors-de-soi du temps est son espacement: une archi-scéne. Cette scène, comme rapport d’un présent à un autre présent comme tel, c’est à dire comme représentation (Vergegenwärtigung ou Repräsentation) non dérivée, produit la structure du signe en général comme renvoi, comme être-pour-quelque-chose (für etwas sein) et en interdit radicalement la réduction. Il n’y a pas de subjectivité constituante. Et il faut déconstruire jusqu’au concept de constitution” (V.P.; 94).

11. Emile Benveniste, “Correlations of Tense in the French Verb,” in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 205–15

12. See Albert Dauzat, Les Noms de famille de France (Paris: Payot, 1945), p. 36.

13. Dauzat, p. 180.

14. Derrida defines the relation between the proper and “le propre” or cleanliness, in Artaud in “La Parole Soufflée,” in L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), p. 272.

15. In Derrida, the “innommable” is another name for the play of différance in which the speaking subject is held. La Voix et le phénomène, p. 94.

16. (Paris: Editions Gallilée, 1974), pp. 10–11. Gérard Genette discusses this function of names in Proust as well. See Mimologiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1976), pp. 315–28.

17. In “Autobiography and the Case of the Signature: Reading Derrida’s Glas,” Jane Mary Todd points out the importance of naming for the question of authorship in Genet. In Comparative Literature 38, no. 1 (1986): 1–19.

18. Genette discusses the “diegetic motivation” of figures in “Métonymie chez Proust,” in Figures III (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), pp. 45–48.

19. Derrida points out the violence of metaphysical reduction in “Violence et métaphysique,” in L’Ecriture et la différence, pp. 139–61.

20. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in vol. 7 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 155–58.

21. In Genet’s last “novel,” Un Captif amoureux, the warm relation of the mother and her son Hamza stands as an ideal of mutual devotion which illuminates the entire narration. Stripped of the irony of his youthful works, Un Captif betrays the childhood longing of Genet, an orphan. See p. 228, for example.

22. “A Case of Paranoia,” in Three Case Studies, trans. James Strachey (New York: Collier, 1976), pp. 103–86.

23. See Keir Elam, Semiotics of Theater and Drama (New York: Methuen & Co., 1980), p. 139: “It will be noted that what allows the dialogue to create an interpersonal dialectic here within the time and location of discourse is the deixis. . . What we have is not a set of propositions or descriptions but references by the speakers themselves as speakers, to their interlocutors as listener-addressees and to the spatio-temporal coordinates (the here-and-now) of the utterance by means of such deictic elements as demonstrative pronouns and spatial and temporal adverbs.”

24. As Roland Barthes says “L’auteur (matériel) d’un récit ne peut se confondre en rien avec le narrateur de ce récit; les signes du narrateur sont immanents au récit et par conséquent parfaitement accessibles à une analyse sémiologique” (p. 19). Barthes explains the difference between author and narrator in terms reminiscent of Husserl: “Qui parle (dans le récit) n’est pas qui écrit (dans la vie) et qui écrit n’est pas qui est.” “Introduction à l’analyse structurale du récit,” in Communications, no. 8 (1966): 20.

25. Bettina Knapp restates this bit of legendary information in Jean Genet (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1968), p. 23.

26. I disagree with Camille Naish, who perceives these discrepancies as figures for the doubling of narrative in Genet. A Genetic Approach to Structures in the Work of Jean Genet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 96.

27. François Rigolot, “Rhétorique du nom poétique,” Poétique, no. 28 (1976): 466–83, and Gérard Genette, Mimologiques, pp. 315–28, privilege the mimetic relation between signifier and signified in the name.

28. “Ces quelques remarques ne sont pas seulement guidées par le souci de rappeler, après Claude Lévi-Strauss, le caractère signifiant, et non pas indiciel, du nom propre. On voudrait aussi insister sur le caractère cratyléen du nom (et du signe) chez Proust: non seulement parce que Proust voit le rapport du signifiant et du signifié comme un rapport motivé, l’un copiant l’autre et reproduisant dans sa forme matérielle l’essence signifiée de la chose (et non la chose elle-même), mais aussi parce que, pour Proust comme pour Cratyle, ‘la vertu des noms est d’enseigner.’ ” “Proust et les noms,” in Nouveaux essais critiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), p. 133.

29. Glas (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1974), p. 13.

30. Gérard Genette, for example, models the “poetic function” after the closure of signifier and signified in the linguistic sign. See “Langage poétique, poétique du langage,” in Figures II (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), pp. 49–70.

31. “Shifters, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb,” in vol. 2 of Selected Writings (The Hague: Mouton, 1971).

32. See, “Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 350–77.

33. Dauzat says, “Le prénom est surtout usité d’une part dans les relations sentimentales, de l’autre, dans la famille.” Les Noms de famille en France, p. 362.

34. In La Voix et le phénomène, Derrida speaks of the “mouvement innommable de la différance” (p. 94).

35. As Gérard Genette says, the “reader” is an instance of the fiction, as distinct from the historically constituted reader as the narrator is from the author. See “Discours du récit,” in Figures III (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), p. 265.

36. Sartre makes a similar observation about the reader. “Now, regardless of who the writer is, when the sentence starts with “I,” a confusion arises in my mind between this “I” and my own. No doubt if I saw the other person, if I saw the words come out of his mouth, I would relate his speech to his person. But I am alone in my room, and if a voice somewhere utters the words that I read, it is mine; in reading, I speak in the bottom of my throat and I feel myself speaking. At the present moment, in this room, there is only one man who says “I,” to wit, myself. Caught in the trap: since, in order to understand the sentence, I must relate the “I” to a subjectivity, it is to my own that I refer. That is the way in which a reader of novels spontaneously identifies himself with the character who is telling the story.” Saint Genet, p. 498. The problem with Sartre’s phenomenological approach is that he does not differentiate between the historically constituted reader and the “reader” as semiotic function, as trace of the other inscribed in every enunciation of “I.”

37. See, for example, Patrice Pavis, Problèmes de sémiologie théâtrale (Montréal: Les Presses de l’université de Québec, 1976), and Alessandro Serpieri et al., “Toward a Segmentation of the Dramatic Text”, in Poetics Today 2, no. 3: 163–200.

38. “Relationships of Person in the Verb,” in Problems in General Linguistics, p. 199.

II. THE DISCOURSE OF THE OTHER

1. See Kelly Morris, ed., Genet and Ionesco: The Theater of the Double (New York: Bantam Books, 1969).

2. Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), p. 79.

3. It has been argued that Bakhtin’s debate with Russian Formalism in The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1929), trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) and in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), were published under the names of colleagues, Medvedev and Volochinov, respectively, in order to assert Bakhtin’s refusal of the author’s authority over the work. It cannot be denied, however, that these subterfuges might have resulted from the pressures of official censorship, which jeopardized Bakhtin’s life and career. The publication of his doctoral thesis, Rabelais and His World (1965), trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), was delayed for some twenty years, while other important essays remained unpublished until after his death in 1975. Not only was Bakhtin temporarily exiled to Siberia, but Medvedev and Volochinov “disappeared” during the reign of terror in the Soviet Union under Stalin. See Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtine: Le Principe dialogique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981), pp. 13–26; Michael Holquist and Katerina Clark, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1984), pp. 146–70; and Marina Yaguello, trans., Introduction to Le Marxisme et la philosophie du langage (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977), pp. 9–18. It must be added that Matejka and Titunik are more reluctant than other critics to grant the authorship of Marxism to Bakhtin alone. See Introduction to Marxism.

4. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

5. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

6. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, pp. 75–103.

7. Thus Shklovsky perceived correlations between the style and composition of narrative, for example. See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism 2nd rev. ed. (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), p.75. Peter Steiner emphasizes the philosophical diversity within Russian Formalism, which would seem to resist this broad and unifying characterization. However, in the three stages of Russian Formalism he describes, referred to in the metaphors of the machine, the biological organism, and the system, the diversity rests with the kinds of relations between parts of the form rather than with the overriding concern with the closure of form and meaning. Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 9–43

8. “Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), p. 358.

9. Matejka and Titunik discuss the influence of Volochinov on the Prague School, which would explain the philosophical orientation of some of the Prague structuralists. See Introduction to Marxism. See also Jan Mukarovsky, “Structuralism and Literary Studies,” pp. 65–82, and Jindrich Honzl, “Ritual and Theater,” pp. 133–73, in Prague School Reader, ed. Peter Steiner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982).

10. See Morphology of the Folktale (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968).

11. In Figures II (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), pp. 49–70.

12. Of course, in book 3 of The Republic, Plato condemns poetry and rhetoric for deceiving the spectator with false images and for appealing to the emotions. He also claimed that the poet perverts the truth when he speaks through the mouths of characters in mimetic discourse.

13. “Frontières,” p. 56.

14. In “Catégories du récit littéraire,” Todorov examines the difficulty of classical poetics to explain the form and function of narrative discourse, pointing out that the diegetic is not automatically on the side of narrative discourse, nor is the mimetic automatically linked to character speech. To the extent that the narration of the story is conditioned by, indeed produced by, the discourse of the narrator, it is impossible to disengage mimesis from diegesis in the novel. The narrator represents himself in narrative discourse at the same time that he produces the story. Characters represent themselves in reported speech at the same time that their discourses are events occurring in the diegesis. Communications 8 (1966): 125–51.

With the notion of the interdependency of mimesis and diegesis in the novel, Todorov reveals something of the complexity and specificity of narrative, while leaving aside the crucial issue of the relation between the discourses of the narrator and the discourses of characters in the story. In early Todorov, the mimetic relation between direct discourse and the speaker transcends the dialogic relation between speakers in narrative representation. Thus a quotation, direct or indirect, produces an “image” of the speaker, just as a figure of speech produces an image of the narrator in narrative discourse.

While Todorov maintains the Aristotelian distinctions between mimesis and diegesis, he, like Genette, takes for granted the ontological unity of speech and voice, thereby circumscribing a problematic of the production of the subject speaking in dialogue. Todorov adopts Benveniste’s notion of the subject as a transcendental given, as the very condition of possibility and the unifying voice of narrative. He thus overlooks the possible effects of alterity on the production of this unity in literary representation and leaves aside questions as to the relations between narrative discourse and reported speech. Early Todorov privileges instead the identification between narrating I and the reading subject (you) as the figure par excellence for relations of intersubjectivity in the novel. “Les Catégories du récit littéraire,” p. 147.

In later work Todorov not only examines the contributions of Bakhtin to the theory of the novel (Mikhail Bakhtine: Le Principe dialogique), but studies the Spanish conquest of Mexico in terms of relations between the discourse of authority and the discourse of the other. See La Conquête de l’Amérique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982).

15. In “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits,” Barthes models discourse after the linguistic structure of the sentence. In the section titled “The Language of Narrative,” he says, “If we need to give a working hypothesis to an analysis whose task is immense and materials infinite, the most reasonable approach would be to postulate a homological rapport between the sentence and discourse, to the extent that one and the same formal organization probably rules all semiotic systems, whatever might be their substances or dimensions.” Communications 8 (1966): 3, my translation.

16. Emile Benveniste discusses differences between discourse and story in terms of markings for the narrator such as verb tense, voice, and adverbs pointing to the here and now of the narrating event. “Correlations of Tense in the French Verb,” in Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 205–16.

17. Pierre Guiraud distinguishes the argot des malfaiteurs from professional and popular argots on the basis of the secrecy of the codes governing the formation of its lexicon. See L’Argot (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1958), p. 19.

18. For instance, Vidocq, the ex-convict who figures prominently in Les Misérables as Jean Valjean, and in La Comédie humaine as Vautrin, exemplifies the Romantic project of bringing to life the underworld through language, even if that meant inventing a somewhat idealized portrait of that society. See Stephen Ullman, “Some Experiments in Local Color,” in Style in the French Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 40–93.

19. The focus on dialogue as action resembles the performative utterance signailed by John Austin in How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).

20. Austin defines the constative function of discourse, as opposed to the performative function, in terms of its focus on the information communicated by the words. In How to Do Things with Words.

21. See the Preface to Les Bonnes (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1954).

22. Melanie Klein examines the combined parental figure in “Envy and Gratitude,” in vol. 3 of The Writings of Melanie Klein (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), pp. 197–98.

23. In “Les Ironies comme mentions,” Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, for example, define irony in terms of contrasts between the signification of an utterance (l’emploi) and reference to the context of discourse (la mention). In Poétique 36 (1978): 399–412.

24. “To describe his abjection he uses Racine’s language.” Histoire de la littérature d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Le Livre contemporain, 1959), p. 282.

25. La Conquête de l’Amérique.

26. See Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics”, p. 353.

27. Alphonse Juilland points out similar implications of Céline’s treatment of argot in Voyage au bout de la nuit: “D’après Céline, la crise de la littérature serait enracinée dans une certaine conception de la langue, aboutissment d’une longue évolution qui a suivi le tournant décisif pris par notre idiome lorsque le français ‘Rabelais’ s’est trouvé étouffé par le français ‘Amyot’, lorsqu’un français spontané a été remplacé par un français ‘rabougri’, un français populaire par un français précieux, un français démocratique par un français intellectuel, un français ‘gras’ par un français ‘sec’, un français ‘vivant’ par un français ‘mort’. “Les ‘Faux Amis’ du vocabulaire de Louis-Ferdinand Céline,” Stanford French Review 2, no. 3 (1978): 232–50.

28. L’Argot, p.9.

29. In The Prison House of Language, Frederic Jameson criticizes structuralism for modelling semiosis after linguistics, rather than the other way around, thus eliminating questions as to the desire of the speaking subject, questions which cannot be contained within linguistic codes, from epistemological concerns. In this regard Jameson echoes Bakhtin’s point of view. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

30. The Poems of Saint John of the Cross, trans. Robert Graves (New York: Grove Press, 1968), n. pag.

31. Navire Night (Paris: Mercure de France, 1982), n. pag.

32. Genet’s support of the Black Panthers, for example, is discussed in the political pamphlet entitled “Here and Now for Bobby Seale” (New York: Committee to Defend the Panthers, 1970); his defense of the Baader-Meinhoff gang in “Violence et brutalité,” Le Monde, 2 Sept. 1977, 1–2; and his sympathies with the Palestinian Liberation Movement in Un Captif amoureux (Gallimard: Paris, 1986).

33. Joseph McMahon is mistaken when he concludes that Riton was a defector from the Resistance. Not only is there no evidence of this in the novel, but the language Riton speaks forbids any association with the maquisards (in this novel), who speak bourgeois French. The Imagination of Jean Genet, p. 72.

34. Taking a clue from Thomas Bishop, Pirandello and the French Theater (New York: New York University Press, 1960), Edith Melcher points out the influence of Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author) on Genet in “The Pirandellism of Jean Genet,” The French Review, 39, no. 1 (1962): 32–35.

35. In A Genetic Approach to Structures in the Work of Jean Genet, Camille Naish performs a structuralist analysis of the genesis of Genet’s work, by pointing out dualities in Genet’s early poems which evolve into his entire oeuvre. Among the dualities Naish mentions are thematic oppositions and ambivalences, and the creation of “frames” within the narrative which double the narration itself. The “frame” theory includes the doubling of the narrator into a voice speaking within the secondary fiction and a voice speaking from outside of it. Naish’s analysis of dualities in Genet fails to account for the dialogic interaction of voices in narrative discourse which contributes to Genet’s esthetic of dissimulation and role-playing. Naish therefore fails to distinguish Genet’s use of the double from the figure of the double as it appears in authors such as Proust. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).

36. Martin Esslin uses this analogy regarding Genet’s theater. “Genet—A Hall of Mirrors,” in The Theater of the Absurd (New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1962), pp. 140–67.

37. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, pp. 106–37. Moreover, in the notion of dialogism, Bakhtin suggests means for theorizing about the merging of text, theater, and film in contemporary artistic production, along the lines of the speaking subject’s inscription in representation.

38. Un Captif Amoureux (1986), the work Genet completed in his final years, resembles less a novel than an autobiographical reflexion upon his experiences with the Black Panthers and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

39. Preface to Les Bonnes, p. 13.

III. SEMIOSIS AS PERFORMANCE

1. MacMahon says, “If he had any literary cousin it would be Proust. . . . What gives the comparison a reasonable basis is the similarity between the benefits Genet derives from his memories and those Proust discovered in his.” The Imagination of Jean Genet. (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 63.

2. We must review with caution the various interpretations of Proust which privilege synthesis over the more difficult aspects of his style. In his close reading of Proust in Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man insists upon the intrusion of conflict and dissymetry into Proustian metaphors, which goes against the grain of the apparent synesthesia holding together disparate elements of the discourse. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp.57–78.

3. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975).

4. Paul de Man points out that the tripartite structure of metaphor, including the literal meaning, the figurative usage, and the proper sense, is often obscured in English usage, as the proper sense, over time, replaces the literal sense of a word. If someone says, for instance, that an examination was a “real killer,” we focus immediately on the meaning that the exam was “difficult,” without fearing for our lives. Allegories of Reading, p. 65. De Man does not discuss how the tripartite structure of metaphor includes a movement between the semantic and semiotic planes of discourse.

5. Ricoeur (op. cit., p. 41) points out the importance of “making visible” in Aristotle’s Rhetoric.

6. In Figures III (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), p. 60.

7. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986) p. 1.

8. Benveniste describes these two levels of discourse in “La Forme et le sens dans le langage,” in Langage, Actes du XIIIe Congrès des sociétés de philosophie de langue française (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1966), pp. 29–40.

9. “Two Aspects of Language, Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” recently published in a second edition, under the title “The Linguistic Problem of Aphasia.” In Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1980), pp. 69–96.

10. While Jakobson devotes an important essay to the nature of “shifters,” indices such as the pronoun “I” whose reference shifts in the course of a dialogue, he does not consider the implications of this problem for poetic discourse. “Shifters, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb,” in Selected Writings (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 130–35.

Charles Sanders Peirce, who set the tone of current semiotic theories, including the work of Umberto Eco, defines index as “a sign, or representation, which refers to its object not so much because of any similarity or analogy with it, nor because it is associated with general characters which that object happens to possess, as because it is in dynamical (including spatial) connection both with the individual object, on the one hand, and with the senses or memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign, on the other hand.” Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), p. 107.

11. Though John Searle describes metaphor as a “special case of the general problem of explaining how speaker’s meaning and sentence or word meaning [the conventional meaning of words] come apart” in literal discourse, he does not show the relationship between the performative function and the constative function. The performative function foregrounds the conventions invoked in a speech act (a promise, a threat, etc.). The constative function shapes the meaning of rhetorical figures, derived as they are from manipulations of the conventional meanings of words. Expression and Meaning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 77.

12. How to Do Things with Words, p. 115.

13. One is reminded of Eco’s claim that a sign is anything which can be used to lie. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 58.

14. See Benveniste’s definition of reference in “La Forme et le sens dans le langage,” p. 37.

15. “Métonymie chez Proust.”

16. See Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language, Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.”

17. Christian Metz distinguishes between relations of contiguity in figures and in discourse by separating metonymy (and synecdoche) from syntactic alignment, but does not discuss indexation. While syntax defines the formal ordering of elements of discourse in the syntagm, indices define uncodified relations between the meaning and reference of discourse. See “Rhetoric and Linguistics: Roman Jakobson’s Contribution,” in The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 174–82.

18. “Pour une reformulation du concept de signe iconique,” Communications, no. 29 (1978): 146–48.

19. For Ricoeur, “The ‘to see as’ [’le voir comme’] is a factor revealed by the act of reading, to the very extent that the latter is ‘the mode under which the imaginary is realized’ . . . the ‘to see as’ is the intuitive relation which holds together the meaning and the image.” Op. cit., p. 268, my translation.

20. Genette’s notion of the “poétique du langage,” for instance, privileges the “rapport actif entre signifiant et signifié.” “Proust et le langage indirect,” in Figures II (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), p. 233. This idea is also implicit in his “Langage poétique, poétique du langage,” in op. cit., pp. 123–54.

21. Even Proust’s “diegetically motivated metaphors,” though inspired by a reference to the setting of the narration, do not point to the physical presence of the comparing term in the diegesis but create an atmosphere or semantic world which the reader must imagine for himself. In Proust movement in space is subordinated to the coherence of a mood or sensation. See Genette, “Proust et le langage indirect.”

22. Camille Naish discusses the “circular effect” of this figure without elaborating on the indexical function of comme and pareil. A Genetic Approach to the Work of Jean Genet (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 70.

23. Herbert Read emphasizes the geometric, fragmentary, and kinesthetic priorities of Cubism. A Concise History of Modern Painting (New York: Praeger Press, 1968), pp. 67–104.

24. Ricoeur quotes Genette in La Métaphore vive, p. 189.

25. Genette makes a similar analogy between the objet trouvé, such as a real oyster shell placed on the canvas in a modern painting, and reported speech, in “Frontières du récit,” Figures II, p. 54. Genette employs this analogy in order to describe the tautological relation between reported speech and its object, while I am referring to the indexical relation between an element of the diegesis and an event external to the diegesis.

26. Op. cit., p. 170.

27. Sartre suggests that Genet’s literary “hallucinations” mirror hallucinations Genet experienced in his personal life. Saint Genet, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: New American Library, 1963), pp. 340–41. This biographical insight does not explain why authors like Nerval, who also hallucinated in real life, created literary “hallucinations” of quite a different sort.

28. Genet takes up this figure again in the film Un Chant d’amour, in a sequence which cuts between a prison cell and a romantic countryside.

29. Théophile Gauthier, for example, says that Genet’s notion of poetry as a criminal act links him with surrealism. Surréalisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 328. Camille Naish (op. cit., pp. 122–26) compares the random ordering of events in Pompes funèbres with the narrative structure of Breton’s Nadja. Jeannette Savona also associates Genet’s style of theater with surrealists such as Alfred Jarry. Jean Genet (New York: Grove Press, 1983), pp. 14–15.

30. Inez Hedges describes this aspect of surrealist metaphors in terms of the destruction and creation of semantic frames which the reader creates in order to make sense of the discourse. Through metaphorical “frame breaking” and “frame making,” “man can evade the cage of language that imprisons him.” “Surrealist Metaphor,” Poetics Today 4, no. 2 (1983): 275–95.

31. Manifestes du surréalisme, Collection Idées (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).

32. For an extended discussion of the dialectic of sexual difference, see Luce Irigaray, “La Tache aveugle d’un vieux rêve de symétrie,” in Speculum, de l’autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974), pp.7–162.

33. See Laura Oswald, “Figure/Discourse: Configurations of Desire in Un Chien Andalou,” Semiotica 33, nos. 1/2 (1981): 105–22.

34. Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. James Hutton (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1982), pp. 45–49.

35. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” trans. F. C. T. Moore, New Literary History 6, no. 1 (1974): 5–74.

36. This poem is so important to the overall meaning and structure of Miracle de la rose that I will copy it as it appeared in the Marc Barbézat, L’Arbalète edition of 1946.

37. Une Histoire de la littérature d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Le Livre contemporain, 1959), p. 284. John Leonard, reviewing the English translation of Pompes funèbres for the New York Times, seems to dismiss any threat to American values posed by Genet: “Funeral Rites is exemplary in its noxiousness. . . . It is actually (1) an exercise in cannibalism and necrophilia; (2) the proclamation of an esthetic of fascism; (3) a masturbatory fantasy that should shame Portnoy all the way to Sweden for an organ transplant; (4) an outrageous bore.” “Portrait of the Artist as Narcissistic Hitler.” Rev. of Funeral Rites, by Jean Genet, New York Times, 19 June 1969, p. 43.

38. Saint Genet, p. 305. Sartre also describes an “indexical” function of Genet’s poetry as the participation between the “natural meaning” of words (their sounds and rhythms) and the things they refer to in the real world (pp. 302–9). Sartre’s analysis of Genet’s poetry is problematic, since poetry can only participate in the world of “things” to the extent that its structure is severed from the reference of discourse. Reference to “les choses” can participate in “le sens” only to the extent that the reference points to the verse itself as a “thing,” a “mot-chose,” a thing signifying “nothing” in Sartre’s analysis.

39. In “The Double Session,” Derrida uses the mime-play as a model for that aspect of poetry which transcends the relation between form and meaning and shapes the subject’s performance of poetic discourse. Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 175–226.

40. Genet, writing to Jacques Pauvert, the editor of Les Bonnes, has said, “Déjà ému par la morne tristesse d’un théâtre qui reflète trop exactement le monde visible, les actions des hommes, et non les Dieux, je tâchai d’obtenir un décalage qui, permettant un ton déclamatoire porterait le théâtre sur le théâtre.” Preface to Les Bonnes (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1954), p. 13. “Already moved by the dire sadness of a theater which reflects too exactly the visible world, the actions of men, and not the Gods, I tried to obtain a distance which, permitting a declamatory tone, would bring theater to bear on theater” (my translation).

41. See, for instance, “Invitation au voyage” or “Parfum exotique” from Les Fleurs du mal (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964), pp. 77, 52.

42. “Le Théâtre et son double,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 40–57.

IV. THE PERVERSION OF I/EYE IN UN CHANT D’AMOUR

1. “Film Performance,” in Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 126–27.

2. In The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 1–87.

3. “Le Stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je,” in Ecrits I (Paris: Editions Points, 1966), pp. 89–97.

4. “Film Performance,” p. 118.

5. Le Cinéma expérimental (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1974), p. 35.

6. “Obscene Ruling Upheld,” San Francisco Examiner, 25 October 1966, 16.

7. Jean-Louis Baudry develops this idea in “Le Dispositif,” in Communications, no. 23 (1975), 56-72.

8. Op. cit.

9. Jonas Mekas, “Un Chant d’amour,” in Film Comment 2, no. 1 (1964): 28. Anaïs Nin, rev. of Un Chant d’amour, by Jean Genet. Los Angeles Free Press, 24 December 1965, p. 5.

10. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in vol. 7 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953), pp. 156–57.

11. Metz’s definition of the “régime scopique” as “la distance gardée, la garde elle-même,” loses something in Ben Brewster’s translation of “garde” as “the keeping (of distance).” The French suggests the notion of distancing as a defense mechanism which underlies erotic displacement in all voyeurism. See “The Imaginary Signifier,” p. 61, and the original French version, “Le Signifiant imaginaire,” Communications, no. 23 (1976): 44.

12. Christian Metz, “The Fiction Film and Its Spectator,” in The Imaginary Signifier, pp. 99-147, and Jean-Louis Baudry, “Le Dispositif.”

13. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 9-16.

14. “Le Dispositif,” p. 68.

15. “The Imaginary Signifier,” pp. 46–49.

16. “Pour une reformulation du concept de signe iconique,” Communications, no. 29 (1978): 141–42.

17. “The Imaginary Signifier,” p. 57; “Le Signifiant imaginaire,” p. 41.

18. Jacques Lacan discusses this division both in “Le Stade du miroir” and in “Fonction de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse,” in Ecrits I, pp. 111–208.

19. See Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in vol. 14 of The Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1917), pp. 243–58.

20. “On Identification,” in vol. 3 of The Writings of Melanie Klein (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), p. 52.

21. “The Imaginary Signifier,” p. 51.

22. “The Imaginary Signifier,” pp. 9–10.

23. Freud and Klein offer different explanations for the origins of castration anxiety. For Freud, it results from the recognition that the mother lacks a penis and the fear that she has been castrated. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 195. For Klein, castration anxiety results from the fantasy of a persecuting dual parental figure, i.e., fear of the father’s penis inside the mother’s body. “Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict,” in vol. 1 of The Writings of Melanie Klein (London: Hogarth, 1975), pp. 186–98.

24. “Difference,” Screen 19, no. 3 (1978): 88.

25. “Fetishism,” in vol. 22 of The Standard Edition, pp. 149-51.

26. See Heath, “On Suture,” in Questions of Cinema, p. 86.

27. See Heath, “Difference,” p. 87.

28. This argument runs through the first part of Luce Irigaray’s Speculum, de l’autre femme, entitled “La Tache aveugle d’un vieux rêve de symétrie” (Paris: Minuit, 1974), pp. 9–162.

29. “Relations of Person in the Verb,” in Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 200, and “The Nature of Pronouns,” in Problems, p. 218.

30. On the notions of primary and secondary identification, see “The Imaginary Signifier,” pp. 45-57.

31. For a detailed discussion of the effects of subject-address and cinematic point of view, see Edward Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narrative and Subjectivity in Classical Film (New York: Mouton, 1984).

32. Julia Kristeva describes this kind of disturbance of subjectivity in Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. In La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974), pp. 315–35.

33. Bruce Kawin calls “first-person cinema” those instances in which we view the story from the point of view of characters in the story. Mindscreen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

34. “Sur la théorie classique du cinéma: A propos des travaux de Jean Mitry,” in Essais sur la signification au cinéma (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972), p. 43, and “The Imaginary Signifier,” pp. 50–51.

35. “The Imaginary Signifier,” p. 55.

36. “The Imaginary Signifier,” p. 96.

37. “Un Chant d’amour,” Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 264 (1976): 60, my translation.

38. “Le Signifiant imaginaire,” p. 44, my translation.

39. “Imagenations,” in Film Culture, no. 32 (1964): 18.

40. Quoted by André Bazin in “Theatre and Cinema,” in What Is Cinema?, p. 92.

41. Genet and Ionesco: The Theatre of the Double, ed. Kelly Morris (New York: Bantam, 1969).

42. Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre et son double, in vol. 4 of Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 58.

43. See André Bazin, “Theatre and Cinema,” p. 95.

44. According to Peter Brooks, Genet was working on another film project in the 1970s, which so far has not come to fruition. Genet: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1979), p. 6.

V. PASSION: BETWEEN TEXT AND PERFORMANCE

1. “A Note on the Esthetics of Film,” in Structure, Sign, and Function. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 179. For more on Mukarovsky, see Jiri Veltrusky, “Jan Mukarovsky’s Structural Poetics and Esthetics,” Poetics Today 2, no. I (1981): 117–59.

2. See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism 2nd rev. ed. (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), p. 190.

3. “Man and Object in the Theater,” in Prague School Reader, ed. and trans. Paul L. Garvin (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1964), p. 83.

4. Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963.)

5. See for instance, Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976).

6. Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1971).

7. (Paris: Larousse, 1971).

8. Metz, 1981, pt. 2.

9. Prolegomena, p. 79.

10. “The Current State of the History of Theater,” in Structure, Sign, and Function (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 201.

11. “The Prague School Theory of Theater,” Poetics Today 2, no. 3 (1981): 225–37.

12. “Correlations of Tense in the French Verb,” in Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 195-204.

13. “Relationships of Person in the Verb,” in Problems in General Linguistics, p. 199.

14. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).

15. “Signature, Event, Context,” trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, Glyph, no. 1 (1977): 172-97.

16. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp.7, 58.

17. Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 350-77.

18. Alessandro Serpieri et al., “Toward a Segmentation of the Dramatic Text,” Poetics Today 2, no. 3 (1981): 163-200.

19. “Logic as Semiotic,” in Philosophical Writings of Charles Sanders peirce (New York: Dover Press, 1955), pp. 98–119.

20. “Subjectivity in Language,” in Problems in General Linguistics, pp. 223-30.

21. Serpieri et al., p. 169.

22. This kind of model shapes Anne Ubersfeld’s interpretation of the space of theater in Lire le théâtre (Paris: Editions sociales, 1982; 1st ed., 1977). She says “L’univers scénique spatialisé est construit pour être signe” (p. 151). “Ainsi l’espace scénique peut-il être la transposition d’une poétique textuelle. Tout le travail propre de la mise en scène consiste à trouver les équivalents spatiaux des grandes figures de rhétorique, et d’abord la métaphore et la métonymie” (p. 161).

23. “Comment s’éffectue la transposition d’une énonciation verbale en une énonciation iconique.” “Sémiologie de la langue,” Semiotica 1, no. 2 (1969): 129. My translation in English appears in the text.

24. “L’élément proprement sémiologique du théâtre consiste dans le fait que ce corps humain n’est plus une chose parmi les choses, parce que quelqu’un le montre, en le détachant du contexte des événements réels, et le constitue comme signe, constituant en même temps comme signifiants les mouvements que ce corps accomplit et l’espace dans lequel ces mouvements s’inscrivent.” “Paramètres de la sémiologie théâtrale,” in Sémiologie de la représentation, ed. André Helbo (Brussels: Editions complexe, 1975), p. 35. My translation appears in the text.

25. Prolegomena to a Theory of Language.

26. Problèmes de sémiologie théatrale (Montréal: Les Presses de l’université de Québec, 1976), p. 3.

27. “From One Identity to Another,” in Desire in Language, trans. Leon Roudiez (ed.), Thomas Gora, and Alice Jardine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 124–77.

28. Trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

29. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).

30. Jeannette Savona rejects a deconstructive reading of Genet, modelling a sociological interpretation of the plays after Michel Foucault’s discussion, in Surveiller et punir, of the role of surveillance in the structure of modern prisons. While Foucault is a likely frame of reference for interpreting the prison motif in Genet’s work, especially as one traces the role of the look in structuring subject-address in Genet’s film and plays, Savona reduces the philosophical richness of Foucault to formal oppositions between dominator and dominated in the fiction. She overlooks the question of performance in Genet as an ongoing struggle to transcend the structures of domination. “Théâtre et univers carcéral: Jean Genet et Michel Foucault,” in French Forum 10, no. 2 (1985): 201–14. Savona is at her best when she describes the recurrence of themes and structures in Genet’s work. See Jean Genet (New York: Grove Press, 1984).

31. Dissemination, p. 175.

32. Odette Asian discusses “Genet, His Actors and Directors” in Genet: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Peter Brooks and Joseph Halpern (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979), pp. 146–55. Recently Jonathan Kalb states that Genet’s scripts lend themselves to a wide spectrum of interpretations, but he criticizes Joanne Akalaitis for changing the tone and structure of Le Balcon beyond recognition in order to express her own political and esthetic claims. “Whose Text Is It Anyway? The Balcony at A. R. T.,” Theater 17 (1986): 97–99.

33. Saint Genet, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 81.

34. Sylvie Debevec Henning describes Genet’s plays in terms of the satanic, sacrificial mass described by René Girard in La Violence et le sacré. Unlike the Christian striving for totalization or oneness in the Mass, the pagan ritual exposes the community to the regular destruction of social categories and relations. While Girard views this violence as a threat to the social order, Henning views it as a regenerating force in Genet’s work. Genet’s Ritual Play (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1981), p. 4.

35. In vol. 3 of Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 174 –90.

36. Vol. 3 of Oeuvres complètes, p. 182.

37. Dissemination.

38. Ironically, Anne Ubersfeld describes a similar kind of “deconstruction” of the unity of place in Racine’s Phèdre. Characters are neither “here” nor “there,” but in a kind of tragic limbo traced in ambiguous indications for the space of the action. While Ubersfeld offers convincing insights into the style of mise-en-scène most apt to represent the tragic void in Racine’s play, she does not claim that Racine in any way threatened the “canons of classical representation” dictating styles of mise-en-scène in his time. “The Space of Phèdre,” Poetics Today 2, no. 3 (1981): 201-10.

39. See for example, Kelly Morris, ed., Genet and Ionesco: The Theater of the Double (New York: Bantam Books, 1963), and Martin Esslin, “Jean Genet—A Hall of Mirrors,” in The Theater of the Absurd (New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1962), pp. 140–67.

40. This theme runs through La Chambre claire by Roland Barthes (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).

41. “Correlations of Tense in the French Verb,” in Problems in General Linguistics, pp. 205–16.

42. “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies, no. 48 (1975): 73–117.

43. See for example, the Introduction to Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970), n. pag.; “Here and Now for Bobby Seale” (New York: Committee to Defend the Panthers, 1970); “Violence et brutalité,” Le Monde, 2 Sept. 1977, 1–2; and “Quatre heures à Chatila,” La Revue d’études palestiniennes, no. 6 (1983): 4–19.

44. Le Théâtre et son double, in vol. 4 of Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 106–53. Derrida says that the theater of cruelty, “c’est la vie elle-même en ce qu’elle a d’irreprésentable” (“is life itself in its aspect as unrepresentable,” my translation). L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), p. 343.

45. See Les Nègres, p. 15.

CONCLUSION

1. RoseLee Goldberg surveys trends in performance art in Performance Art: Live Art, 1909 to the Present (New York: Harry Abrams, 1979).

2. From Scheduler’s inaugural “T. D. S. Comment,” as new editor of the Drama Review no. 1 (1986): 6.

3. See p. 41, 63, 116, 209, 210, 217–22, 331, 343.

4. See for instance, René de Cessaty, “Rêve d’une révolution,” La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 464 (1986): 5; Tahar Ben Jelloun, “Le Testament de Jean Genet,” Jeune Afrique, no. 1328 (1986): 60,. M. F. Otavj, rev. of Un Captif amoureux, by Jean Genet. Europe: Revue littéraire mensuelle 64, no. 691–92: 219–20; and Bernard Séchène, “L’Athéologie de Jean Genet,” Infini, no. 17 (1987): 102–28.