Jean Genet and Subaltern Socialities by Kadji Amin Department of Romance Studies Duke ...

356 Pages·2009·1.87 MB·English

Agencies of Abjection: Jean Genet and Subaltern Socialities

by

Kadji Amin

Department of Romance Studies
Duke University

Date:_______________________
Approved:

___________________________
Marc Schachter, Co-Supervisor

___________________________
Michèle Longino, Co-Supervisor

___________________________
Robyn Wiegman

___________________________
Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy in the Department of
Romance Studies in the Graduate School
of Duke University

2009
ABSTRACT

Agencies of Abjection: Jean Genet and Subaltern Socialities

by

Kadji Amin

Department of Romance Studies
Duke University

Date:_______________________
Approved:

___________________________
Marc Schachter, Co-Supervisor

___________________________
Michèle Longino, Co-Supervisor

___________________________
Robyn Wiegman

___________________________
Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián

An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of
Romance Studies in the Graduate School
of Duke University

2009
Copyright by
Kadji Amin
2009
Abstract

This dissertation explores the concept of agential abjection through Jean Genet’s
involvement with and writings about the struggles of disenfranchised and pathologized
peoples. Following Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler has argued that modern subjectivity
requires the production of a domain of abjected beings denied subjecthood and forced to
live "unlivable" lives. "Agencies of Abjection" brings these feminist theories of abjection
to bear on multiple coordinates of social difference by exploring forms of abjection
linked to sexuality, criminality, colonialism, and racialization. Situating Genet within an
archive that includes the writings of former inmates of penal colonies, Francophone
intellectuals, and Black Panther Party members, I analyze both the historical forces that
produce abjection and the collective forms of agency that emerge from subaltern social
forms. I find that the abjected are often able to elaborate impure, perverse, and
contingent forms of agency from within the very institutions and discourses that would
deny them subjecthood.
"Agencies of Abjection" carefully situates Genet's writing within the discursive
fields in which it intervenes, including that of the memoirs and testimonies of former
inmates of the boys' penal colonies, of Francophone decolonizing poets and intellectuals,
and of Black Panther prison writings. This method illuminates subaltern genealogies of
thought on the problems of abjection, subjection, and subaltern agency so central to
Genet's writing. By charting the twists and turns between Genet's writing and that of
other subaltern writers of abjection, "Agencies of Abjection" reads Genet as a thinker
continually involved in a process of exchange, intervention, borrowing, and revision
iv
concerning the specific histories and experiences of social abjection.
v
Contents
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv
Introduction. .................................................................................................................................. 1
1. Jeux de vérité, Jeux de virilité .................................................................................................... 32
1.1 The Queer Effects of Normalization ............................................................................ 35
1.2 “Truth Games” ................................................................................................................ 45
1.3 Children of Cain ................................................................................................................ 48
1.4 Danan’s Press Campaign ............................................................................................... 55
1.5 Historians and the Ideally “Ordinary” Witness ......................................................... 61
1.5.1 Henri Gaillac and the "Testimony of Pupil 6.199" ................................................ 63
1.5.2 Raoul Léger's Memoirs of an Inmate ......................................................................... 67
1.6 The Memoir ..................................................................................................................... 76
1.6.1 The High Walls ............................................................................................................ 78
1.6.2 Saint-Florent-Life ......................................................................................................... 89
1.7 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 100
2. Agencies of Abjection ........................................................................................................... 102
2.1 Spectral Mourning and Carceral Masculinities ........................................................ 109
2.1.1 Pederastic Education ............................................................................................... 111
2.1.2 Melancholia’s Genders ........................................................................................... 127
2.1.3 Spectral Mourning ................................................................................................... 131
2.2 The Ascesis of the Abject ............................................................................................. 138
2.2.1 Gay Pride or Queer Ascesis? .................................................................................. 141
2.2.2 Asceses of Abjection ................................................................................................ 147
2.2.3 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 166
vi
3. Acting Out Racial Melancholia ........................................................................................... 171
3.1 Racial Melancholia ....................................................................................................... 177
3.2 Towards an Anti-Colonial Genealogy of Melancholia ............................................ 182
3.3 Towards an Alternative Historiography of Négritude ........................................... 186
3.4 The Melancholic Object of Whiteness ........................................................................ 196
3.5 Négritude; or Assuming Black Melancholy ............................................................. 216
3.6 The Futures of Melancholia......................................................................................... 231
3.7 Performance Notes ....................................................................................................... 240
3.8 The Harlem Classical Theater ..................................................................................... 250
3.9 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 257
4. Dazzling Images, Buried Histories ..................................................................................... 259
4.1 Dazzling Images ........................................................................................................... 271
4.1.1 The Career of a Stereotype ..................................................................................... 271
4.1.2 A Cultural Politics of the Gendered Image .......................................................... 280
4.1.3 Image and Ground I ................................................................................................ 284
4.1.4 Image and Ground II .............................................................................................. 288
4.1.5 Image and Ground III ............................................................................................. 294
4.1.6 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 298
4.2 Buried Histories ............................................................................................................ 300
4.2.1 Politicizing Lumpen Culture ................................................................................... 303
4.2.2 Prison Ascesis and Carceral Liberty ..................................................................... 308
4.2.3 “A penal institution and a colonized situation” ................................................. 316
4.2.4 “The Carceral Archipelago of Empire” ................................................................ 321
4.2.5 “The Language of the Wall” .................................................................................. 326
vii
4.2.6 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 334
References .................................................................................................................................. 337
Biography ................................................................................................................................... 348
viii
Introduction.
Nigel Williams – Imagine that we were to meet the writer Jean Genet himself. Would we be
meeting the real Genet?
Jean Genet – Is there a fake going around? Is there a fake Genet out there? Am I the real one?
You're asking if I'm the real one. So where's the fake?
N.W. – Yes, I understand.
J.G. – Perhaps after all, I am an imposter who has never written a book. Perhaps I'm a fake
Genet, as you say.1

In the above extract from a televised 1985 BBC interview, Nigel Williams
distinguishes between "the writer Jean Genet," whom viewers presumably know
through his work, and "the real Genet," whom the interview's function is to reveal to the
viewing public. Genet's disingenuous question, "[i]s there a fake going around?" both
pokes fun at and refuses Williams's desire to discover his extra-literary truth. In his
falsely conciliatory response, "[p]erhaps I'm a fake Genet, as you say," Genet thoroughly
violates the interview contract: for BBC to interview a Genet imposter rather than the
"true Genet" would be both scandalous and absurd, delivering viewers a simulacra in
the place of the authentic.
Genet's evident pleasure in upsetting the interview contract by pretending to
impersonate himself recalls a series of moments in his literary works: in his 1943 novel,
Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs), when police barging into an apartment
are disconcerted to discover a mannequin rather than a corpse; in his 1956 play, The

1 "Nigel Williams – Imaginons que nous rencontrions l'écrivain Jean Genet lui-même. Est-ce que
c'est le vrai Genet que nous rencontrons ? Jean Genet – Est-ce qu'il y a un faux qui circule ? Est-
ce qu'il y a un faux Genet à travers le monde ? Est-ce que je suis le vrai ? Vous me demandez si
je suis le vrai. Où est le faux alors ? N.W. – Oui, je comprends. J.G. – Peut-être après tout suis-je
un imposteur qui n'a jamais écrit de livre. Peut-être suis-je un faux Genet, comme vous dites,"
Jean Genet, L'Ennemi déclaré: textes et entretiens, ed. Albert Dichy (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 302.
1
Balcony (Le Balcon), when the brothel client dressed as the Bishop worries aloud that a
sinner's sins might be invented rather than real; and in his 1958 play The Blacks (Les
Négres), when it is revealed that the coffin at center stage allegedly holding the corpse of
the woman whom "the blacks" are on trial for having murdered might actually be
empty.2 In each of these examples, the imposture of a false crime in the place of a real
one perturbs a scene of judgment, parodying both the Catholic and the modern judicial
conceptions of a guilty conscience that can be made to confess itself and can thereby be
rendered legible to power. If both the crime and the confession are simulacra, then how
can power pretend to know and to discipline the guilty conscience? Genet's resistance to
the scene of the interview through the invocation of imposture should flag to us that he
saw the interview as yet another scene of crime, interrogation, and judgment. Indeed,
later in the interview, Genet accuses Williams of behaving like a cop, complaining, "you
continue to interrogate me exactly as the thief that I was thirty years ago was
interrogated by policemen, by a squad of policemen."3
In this BBC interview, conducted in 1985, one year before Genet's death,
Williams had no intention to put Genet on trial for his past crimes. Rather, his
"interrogation" was driven by a desire to know and to understand the biographical
motivations, the personal development, and the philosophical world-view that could
lend Genet's scandalously heteroclite oeuvre coherence within the arc of a life narrative.
Genet, however, had good reason to be suspicious of such a knowledge practice. If he

2 Publication dates refer to the first published French edition of Genet's works, and not to the
English translation.
3 "vous continuez à m'interroger exactement comme le voleur que j'étais il y a trente ans était
2