ABSTRACT
Saint Genet is unique among Sartre’s major works in that it deals with a living subject with whom he was intimately acquainted. His esteem for Genet seems to have rested on the latter’s living out of the principles of existentialist freedom; but whether because of the paradoxical situation of a man whose project touches the limits of that freedom, or because of the immediacy of the person, there is something unsatisfying about much of the work-the description is rich, the asides brilliant, and yet it is as if Sartre’s professed ambivalence about conventional good and evil resulted in a lack of depth, a kind of skating over the surface, a reprise of the ‘game of mirrors’ in Being and Nothingness on a more personal and therefore more disturbing level. The taste for paradox can be indulged without risk in a literary context, and the conclusion of The Devil and the Good Lord exploits it admirably. Goetz speaks:
But in a critical work with philosophical pretensions the danger of the paradoxical is that it may seem merely inconclusive. Sartre calls ‘whirligigs’ (in French ‘tourniquets’) the arguments of Genet that grow out of the paradox of the liar (and which have been developed with some degree of preciosity by R.D.Laing under the name of ‘knots’), summarizing them under the ‘General Principle’: ‘If you affirm being, you find yourself in the process of affirming nothingness, but in this movement of affirmation you transcend nothingness and find yourself in the process of affirming being, etc.’ (SG 334). He concludes a sketch of these accelerating and unstable efforts to grasp the real with a masterly comparison of Genet and Nietzsche, but it leads to no positive conclusion.
