Genet the novelist or playwright or polemicist (on the Palestinians, see,
"Prisoner of Love.") a great writer.
www.bn.com
From Kirkus Reviews
Saint Genet's posthumous last book, a semi-surreal record of years spent
with the Black Panthers in the US and with Palestinian soldiers in Jordan
and Lebanon. With his celebrated literary career long abandoned, Genet
(1910-86), a homosexual ex-convict and castoff son of a whore, sought a
strange kind of sainthood he could never achieve, one that embraced thieves
and traitors. He began involving himself with marginal political groups in
the late 1960's; these groups, he felt, kept him wrapped in the outcast
state that he felt most warmed by. But however great his sympathies, he
never surrendered his intellectual freedom and saw gaps in the groups' vague
political programs. He loved, rather, individual fighters and here lists
their virtues as proof of his love. As Edmund White says in his brilliant
introduction, ``Love reconciles Genet's feelings that everyone is of equal
value and that each person is priceless....Emotions live on and only the
people who entertain them die. `The happiness of my hand in the hair of a
boy another hand will know, already knows, and if I die this happiness will
go on.' '' For fun, Genet accepted an invitation to spend a few days with
the Palestinians--and stayed nearly two years. He tells no story here, leaps
from one land to another while telescoping space and time, giving us perhaps
the most intimate picture of terrorism ever written. Among the Panthers,
terror is spectacle and theater, and what change the group brings about in
fighting Nixon and white imperialism is through poetry. ``At the beginning
of 1970 the Party still had both the suppleness and rigidity of a male sex
organ: and it preferred erections to elections.'' The crazy logic of the
Palestinian phenomenon offers a broader, bloodier canvas as Genet writes
under medical notice of his imminent death and seeks life in his nightmares
and memories. Unfinished, provisional, inspired--and it may be updated when
the original manuscript is found. Ringing with eloquence and
intelligence. -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights
reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of
this title.
Hmm...
Jean Genet : From Fascism to Nihilism (American University Studies : Series
Ii, Romance Languages and Literature, Vol 205)
by Harry E. Stewart, Rob Roy McGregor
----- Original Message -----
From: "Justin Schwartz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 1:26 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:13329] Re: Re: Re: Re: Hardt: "Spinoza was a communist
thinker long before Marx"
> Nietzschean, but (or therefore?) rather nice. However, I don't think F was
a
> particularly fine stylist. My French is not exactly fluent, but in either
> English or French F always strikes me as a workmanlike writer who can
> occasionally rise to flashes of eloquence--rather like Merleau Ponty,
> thought not so dense. Given the opacity of most post-war French
> philosophical prose, of course, that marks him as a literary master, but
> only in the sense of the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind (sorry,
> Marta). You want glorious French prose, read Rousseau, Montaigne,
Flaubert.
> In the 20th century, maybe Genet. Or Beckett's novels, originally written
in
> French.--jks
>
> > > Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> > >
> > > >Why then Foucault's fight againt Marxism?
> > >
> > > He had his disagreements with Marxism, but he frequently expressed
> > > his debt to the Old Man, too. To wax Bloomian for a minute, I think
> > > he had a real anxiety of influence issue.
> > >
> > > And so what? So what if MF didn't meet the Marxian purity assay?
> > > Doesn't he deserve being taken seriously anyway? There aren't many
> > > writers of the last century in his league as both thinker and
> >stylist.
> > >
> > > Doug
> >==========
> >
> >"After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it
> >resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one
> >way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower's straying
> >afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of
> >knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive
> >differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on
> >looking and reflecting at all. People will say, perhaps, that these
> >games with oneself would better be left backstage; or, at best, that
> >they might properly form part of those preliminary exercises that are
> >forgotten once they have served their purpose. But, then, what is
> >philosophy today--philosophical activity, I mean--if it is not the
> >critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it
> >consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it
> >might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what
> >is already known?" [MF--"The Use of Pleasure"]
> >
>
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