Absolute Good, but the emergence of Beauty, and his subsequent
commitment to the world of poetry and theater, enables him, as it will
Flaubert, to draw the public into his realm, beyond the commonplace
alternatives of good and evil, to the aesthetic sphere where creative
freedom rules. Acknowledging that “the imaginary corrodes praxis”
(SG 352 , 418 ), Sartre’s Genet realizes that
the derealization of the real was an attempt at synthesis, he wanted to unify his
realism and his power to dream. The synthesis has failed: why not attempt the
inverse operation, why notrealize the imaginary?...To realize the imaginary means
to include the imaginary in realitywhile preserving its imaginary nature; it means
unifying, within the same project, his realistic intention and his derealizing
intention.
(SG 418 )
This is precisely how Sartre described the work of art inThe Imaginary.^28
Genet has moved from aestheticism to art, from gesture to act. “This pure
freedom of the artist no longer knows either Good or Evil, or rather,
it now makes of them only the object of its art: Genet has liberated
himself ” (SG 422 ).^29
Genet as a model of authenticityIt is clear that Sartre admires Jean Genet, not despite his playing
the role of antithesis to entrenched bourgeois morality but because
of it. Genet’s logic of “loser wins” pushes the envelope of the thought
and behavior of the “just” and “reasonable” man beyond the limit.
His Nietzschean inversion of received values opens the door for moral
creativity in anticipation of the “Dialectical” ethics yet to be conceived.
Hislearningtosay“we”(SG 403 ) opens a field of “generosity” that
fosters and is fostered by the social dimension of Genet’s later life.
In this, he replaces the model of the mythical “solitary individual”
of Sartre’s school days and early writings. With the mature Genet,
Sartre avows:
(^28) Imaginary, “The Work of Art,” 188 – 194.
(^29) “He has sincerely attempted to liquidateallethics, that of anarchists as well as others,
because every ethic implies humanism and humanism is the bugbear of this outcast who has
been relegated to the inhuman” (SG 245 ).
278 Ends and Means: existential ethics