archive : s0metim3s

The text of Genet’s was prompted by the banning of an English underground newspaper, The International Times, for carrying ads for ’special friendships’. Hearing of this, Genet responded: ‘Why friends? Personally, I am looking for a suitable enemy.’ And he proceeded to write the text, which was published in 1991, according to his wishes, as the first page of the posthumous collection of his political writings. Miller writes:

The address to the enemy refers the “personality” of the advertisement back to the sovereignty of its author. And yet, the ad remains curious. It cunningly avoids pinpointing the one who decides and ascribing a subject (the sovereign in person) to the decision. Though the author of the ad seeks the declared enemy, nothing in the ad suggests that he is the one who signed the declaration of the enemy. On the contrary, his self-proclaimed lethargy suggests that he only withdraws himself from making any decisive declaration. Moreover, the declaration only appears in the form of the past participle, suggesting a decision that had been made by an indefinite “one” in an indeterminate past. A decision without subject. And without object: for, the form of the personal advertisement (seeking an other not yet found) implies that the object of the decision, the enemy himself, is also lacking. The ad thus does no more than circulate the news of an anonymous sovereign decision. Both subject and object can only be revealed if and when someone decides to respond to the address.

Miller goes on to counterpose what he calls Genet’s ‘praxis of solitude’ from Arendt’s ‘institutional figures of solitude’, remarking that Genet’s ‘work also differs from hers in its presenation of the withdrawal whereby the politics of truth opens beyond public sphere.’ Furthermore:

The paradoxical discrete address of the personal ad entails a space that Arendt’s truthteller opens but does not inhabit. Solitude, for Genet, becomes the solitude of decision, adherence to a cause, acceptance of the invitation. “[I]t is in solitude that I accept to be with the Palestinians. It is not when I say yes to Layla [Shahid], yes I will leave with you, not at that moment. It is when I am alone and I decide in solitude. At that moment, I believe that I am not lying” [ED 283]. Using a term that Genet often uses to refer to himself (in his “May Day Speech,” for example), one might say that this is the solitude of the “vagabond.”

Political commitment is a matter of deciding to become part of the world of the other’s gaze, a decision that necessarily takes place in solitude because that world is invisible, if not structurally abolished. Thus, on the very first page of Un captif amoureux, Genet insists that his period with the Palestinians was “time spent among” but “not with the Palestinians” [PL 3]”. just as he speaks of himself walking among the tortured dead of Chatila. And, later in the memoir, he will describe how he only ever finds his own gestures” or, more precisely, as he writes, his own size ”in the interstices of the gestures of the fedayeen”, in much the same way that he described the dimensions of the enemy vanishing into the gestures of those dead among which he walked.

Povinelli, of course, discusses Genet’s ‘world of sailors’, an intimacy without genealogy. Miller draws attention to Genet’s figure of the ‘vagabond’, who walks among but not with.

In wondering about Genet’s fictive ad for a suitable enemy - which, perhaps most interestingly, breaks the steady connections between decision and sovereignty, poses the question of a non-sovereign decision - I’m reminded of Agamben’s closing remarks from the chapter “Gigantomachy Concerning a Void”, from State of Exception:

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.

In the meantime, it seems that there are rather frantic attempts to identify oneself as the enemy (or friend) all about, to answer to the address of the personal ad as its object (or subject) and thereby position oneself on the sovereign gridmap, as it were - and moreover let’s say, publicly - and to bind the knots between intimacy and genealogy (and whatever-now-passes for the public sphere) ever tighter.

(As always, I’m happy to pass along the essays mentioned here, to those who can’t access them otherwise.)