Genet's Cycle of Ruins

Abstract

This paper engages with daily life aesthetics by questioning how urban filthy spaces have the capacity to trigger processes of self-interrogation due to its non-immunity qualities. Concretely, it portrays a plot's cycle of dissolute and subversive stories that link Jean Genet's rotten life in the Barcelona of the 1930s with a community of neighbours that are currently struggling with its neglected and unsanitary state. Taking into account both Genet's notion of moral enterprise and Esposito's views on immunity, the author argues how the acceptance of the abject and ruinous, in terms of people, places and things, has the potential to act as a form of resistance that posits immunization not as a process that promotes annihilation (and thus the disappearance of the difference), but rather as a mechanism that triggers community quandaries.