from the demands of the real or even offer a way of living amidst the
insuperable conflicts of action and opinion that mark the real.
Bringing his analysis to a close, Sartre combines the ethical and the
political when he compares Genet to the Old Bolshevik, Nikolai
Bukharin. In the Moscow “show trials” of 1936 – 1938 , Bukharin
accepted “objective” guilt for something of which he was subjectively
(personally) innocent. In effect, he sacrificed himself (and the truth) to
the Party and its policies (assessed by another standard of truth).
Genet, in Sartre’s view, “is the Bukharin of Bourgeois society” (SG
594 ). The Just and the moral public condemn his depravity, his crimes
and the disgust his literature elicits. “But, unlike Bukharin, [Genet]
proclaims in defiance of all that he is right to be wrong.Healone
declares himself right; he knows that his testimony is inadequate and
he maintains itbecauseof its inadequacy He is proud of being rightin
the realm of the impossibleand of testifying to the impossibility of
everything” (SG 595 – 596 ). Sartre now appeals implicitly to two of
his “political morality tales” and prepares us for a third to bring to our
attention his claim that “Genet is we.” Like Hugo inDirty Hands,^31
who was executed for refusing to conform to a change in the Party
Line, and Franz inThe Condemned of Altona, who takes full responsi-
bility before future generations who will judge him (us) guilty for our
present crimes, Genet faces us with the challenge to conform to social
strictures or to forge our own path. Assuming that the future will
entangle us in “objective guilt” of one kind or another, at that point,
Sartre believes, we will have to choose: “[we] will be either Bukharin
or Genet. Bukharin or our willto be togethercarried to the point of
martyrdom; Genet or our solitude carried to the point of Passion”
(SG 599 ).
Yet he offers us hope with another option. “If there is still time to
reconcile, with a final effort, the object and the subject,” he counsels,
“we must, be itonly onceandin the realm of the imaginary...have the
courage to go to the limits of ourselves in both directions at once.”
Again, the imaginary, with all its limits, comes to the rescue – or seems to
do so. Presumably this occurs by the reading of Genet’s collected works
to whichSaint Genetserves as the introduction. But this imaginative
(^31) Jean-Paul Sartre,Dirty Hands, trans. Lionel Abel, inThree Plays(New York: Knopf, 1949
[ 1948 ]); andCondemned(Loser Winsin Great Britain).
280 Ends and Means: existential ethics