Genet. Paragraph, 27.2 (review)

This collection of theoretical essays on Genet's work is a compelling demonstration of that work's ambivalence towards such elucidation. A substantial essay by Derrida, 'Countersignature', takes Le Captif amoureux as its point of departure and ranges extensively and dazzlingly over Genet's work and Derrida's own. Revisiting Glas and Signéponge, he asks again what is involved in ethical terms in writing about, or 'countersigning', the work of another. Even if the intention is to affirm, betrayal, he concludes, is inescapable: 'In my "yes", in my own untranslatable, singular idiom, I must countersign the other's text without counterfeit, without imitation. It is obviously impossible' (p. 29). And Derrida's singular idiom has been particularly well rendered in this accomplished translation by the volume's editor. Hanrahan's own contribution, 'Sculpting Time', is a delicately poised reflection on the way in which, for Genet, art and particularly writing is, as she argues, 'a fixing that inscribes the fluidity it ends' (p. 46). Tom Conley's concise and persuasive reading of 'Le Secret de Rembrandt' scrutinizes the 'restive' mobility of one of Genet's most favoured words: le faste. Elizabeth Stephens's essay, though perhaps rather too condensed in places ('Genet's novels challenge the conventional understanding of the phallus as a synecdoche of a rigidly stable and self-contained corporeality'), nevertheless makes an important if familiar point about Genet's work: while his dominant male characters may in certain respects conform to traditional models of heteronormative masculinity, they do not thereby confirm them. Bénédicte Boisseron and Frieda Ekotto, in 'Genet's The Blacks: "And Why Does One Laugh at a Negro?"', argue convincingly that Genet's play, while it tries to take the audience on a journey 'into the depth of their colour consciousness', nevertheless ultimately resists stable interpretation by way of an overwhelmingly complex stratification both of layers of theatre (play, play within a play) and of colour (black actors with white masks but ones which leave some black skin and 'kinky' hair visible, and black actors with no masks in the funeral). The question in the title, appropriated from Bergson's Le Rire, is almost answered in a fascinating conclusion which moves deftly between Genet's play and a telling critique of Eminem's performance (or parody) of 'blackness'. François Bizet, in 'Bataille's Battle With Genet', offers a reappraisal of Bataille's 'unique and bewildering' rejection of Genet in what was to become the last chapter of La Littérature et le mal. Bizet draws primarily on a neglected earlier article in which Bataille springs to the defence of Haute surveillance and he is rightly taken aback by the extent to which Bataille's concept of communication in the later article has narrowed to dogmatic rigidity. This collection represents an important contribution to recent scholarship on Genet. It also provides a heartening sense of the diversity of possible relationships which theory can today entertain with the singular work.