appear in theCritiqueto resolve seemingly intransigent dichotomies,
and an increased role for the imagination in ethical and political contexts.
For these reasons, Saint Genet brings to term many established
“existentialist” concepts even as it opens the door to dialectical and
praxis-oriented conditions and comprehension.
The spiral or the whirligig (Tourniquet)In a letter to Simone Jollivet (“Toulouse”), Sartre avows: “All that
I know is I would like to construct an ethics in which Evil is an integral
part of Good.”^27 He sees two dialectics at work in the young Genet’s
attempt to overcome his original alienation: the familiar alternative of
(inauthentic) being (in the eyes of others) in opposition to (authentic)
doing (nonthetic self-consciousness of his ability to act otherwise).
“The two dialectics that control his inner life run counter to each other,
they jam, and finally they get twisted and whirl about idly” (SG 329 ).
And yet, Genet wills their (impossible) unity. What results, on Sartre’s
reading, is a hellish merry-go-round of alternatives taken to their
extremes in the adolescent Genet’s life: the Hero and the Saint, the
Criminal and the Traitor, the active and the passive homosexual, the
evil of consciousness and the consciousness of evil. “In short, thesis
and antithesis represent two moments of freedom. But these two
segments, instead of merging in a harmonious synthesis (to deny the
falsein orderto affirm the true, to destroyin orderto build), remain
mutilated and abstract and perpetuate their opposition” (SG 338 ).
Sartre is offering us a glimpse into an existential psychoanalysis that
has yet to find its “cure.”
Perhaps the resolution of this vicious circle will reveal itself in “the
last contradiction: Dream and Reality.” As Sartre did withNauseaand
will repeat in his autobiography and his other biographies, he is testing
the “salvific” power of the imaginary. In the context of the prodigious
power of the negative, he interprets the “choice” of the imaginary as the
“derealization” of himself in the poetic, “because it unfolds both in the
dimension of the real and in that of the dream” (SG 351 ). He has yet to
link this dichotomy with Absolute Evil or its magical transformation into
(^27) Quiet Moments, Aug. 16 , 1949. He had begun work onSaint Genetthe previous year.
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