aesthetics; and ( 14 ) realism, in the name of efficacy (NE 186 ).^23 The list
could set the framework for an “amorality” play. Sartre has drawn on
these “values” for several of his plays.
Authenticity in an inauthentic world:Saint Genet
As if theNotebooks had never been written, Sartre responded to a
question about his depiction of negative love inBeing and Nothingness,
“Beginning withSaint GenetI changed my position a bit, and I now see
more positivity in love...I wroteSaint Genetto try to present a love that
goes beyond the sadism in which Genet is steeped and the masochism
that he suffered, as it were, in spite of himself ” (Schilpp 13 ). His 578 -
page “introduction” to the collected works of Jean Genet ( 1952 ) was seen
by some as the long-awaited ethics promised inBeing and Nothingness.^24
It certainly does treat of good and evil and, in Sartre’s view, presents
the model of as “authentic” an individual as he ever depicted.
Beauvoir notes the increasing importance that Sartre has been giving
to social conditioning in his post-war works. “What is striking about
this work is that there is scarcely an ounce of freedom ascribed to man.
You give an extreme importance to the formation of the individual, to
his conditioning.” To which he responds defensively: “The transform-
ation of Jean Genet [from unhappy child homosexual into Jean
Genet great writer, homosexual by choice and, if not happy, at least
sure of himself] is truly due to the use of his freedom. It transformed
the meaning (sens) of the world by giving it another value. It is certainly
this freedom and nothing else that was the cause of this reversal; it is
freedom choosing itself that brought about this transformation”
(Ce ́r 449 ).
(^23) Theodor Adorno remarked seventeen years before the publication of theNotebooksthat
“many of Sartre’s situations are derived from fascism and [are] true as indictments of
fascism, but not as acondition humaine’(Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York:
Continuum, 1973 ], 226 n.). While the “ethics of force” just described confirms the first part
of Adorno’s assessment, other features of Sartrean “violence” described in theNotebooksand
24 elsewhere move beyond it.
“Working fifteen hours a day on a genius of a chiseler and homosexual is enough to make a
person’s head swim. He gets under my skin and gives me hallucinations. He wakes me up in
the middle of the night. But it’s fascinating” (letter to Simone Jollivet, Jan. 2 , 1950 ,Quiet
Moments in a War, 289 ).
Saint Genet 275