For a long time we believed in social atomism bequeathed to us by the eighteenth
century, and it seemed to us that man was by nature a solitary entity who entered into
relations with his fellow menafterward...The truth is that “human reality” “is-in-
society” as it “is-in-the-world”; it is neither a nature nor a state: it is made.
(SG 590 )
Genet’s is an ethic of “doing” (faire) transformed from an earlier
(inauthentic) ethic of being – in the eyes of others. Yet it is immersed
in a world that renders the ideal of absolute reciprocity scarcely conceiv-
able. “It is concealed by the historical conditioning of class and race, by
nationalities, by the social hierarchy” (SG 590 – 591 ). “Concealed,” we
should note, not destroyed.
I suggested that Genet replaced Sartre’s “solitary man.” But one
might better say that he relocated it in a sociohistorical setting.
“Genet’s ‘impossible nullity,’” Sartre insists, “is solitude [not physical
isolation].” He continues: “Our solitude is the way we feel our object-
ivity for others in our subjectivity and on the occasion of failure”
(SG 592 ). Sartre would characterize artistic creativity both here and
especially in the Flaubert as “failure behavior” (conduite d’e ́chec).^30
A reiteration of “loser wins,” the creation of the work of art draws
the inhabitants of the real freely into the realm of the imaginary where
the artist rules.
How, then, are we to live this ethics that is at once necessary and
impossible? Sartre’s ethics of action “must give itself ethical norms in the
climate of nontranscendable impossibility.” Again his advice: “Choose;
that is, create,” and assume responsibility for your choices. This, he
implies, would be the temptation of “real morality, because it is beyond
Being as it is beyond Evil.” Genet “has freed himself from good and
evil...he has steadily played loser wins” (SG 571 and 574 ).
“The most extraordinary example of the whirligig of being and
appearance, of the imaginary and the real, is to be found in one of
Genet’s plays,The Maids”(SG 611 ). Sartre points out that “the truth
of the matter is that Genet wishes from the very start tostrike at the root
of the apparent”(SG 611 , emphasis his). Referring implicitly toBN,
Sartre reminds us that he has shown that “an appearance borrows its
being from being” (SG 625 ). But the imaginary may afford us a respite
(^30) SG 191 and 350 , andIFiii: 173.
Saint Genet 279