Geometry and Jean Genet: Shaping the Subject. By Joanne Brueton

Abstract

This capstone in Joanne Brueton’s impressive assessment of Jean Genet demonstrates her increasing fluency in her own voice, writing on modern philosophy oriented in Western European social thought. Her comparative historical method of literary analysis contextualizes Genet’s œuvre within the connected histories of metropolitan French and decolonial social thought on subjectivity. Embedded translations and extensive bibliographies assist readers in following a complex analysis. Brueton vividly renders the perforated points, lines, and grids of Genet’s novels in living, and loving, colour. Genet’s use of the language of geometry ‘to figure a mobile cartography of selfhood that inscribes the very border it uproots’ (p. 3) allows Brueton to ask a central question: under what philosophical circumstances is it useful to measure individuality like a geometer does the earth? What emerges is Genet’s anti-identitarian epistemology and spatial map of subjectivity. Brueton traces the point and circle (arpenteur) as poetics that give richer meaning to the familiar shapes of Western European literary subjectivities, such as the punctum (Barthes), rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari), stigmata (Cixous), labyrinth (Derrida, Nancy), panopticon (Foucault), and fils or ties (Sartre, Nancy). Chapter 1 is fundamental to her broader argument, where ‘the point and arpenteur’ lay the groundwork for the restless elaboration throughout the book on the question-and-answer sequence of ‘What is the point?’ and ‘The point is…’. Chapters 2 to 4 explore the other three concepts energizing Genet’s geometric toolkit: vectors (lines), obliques (lines), and grids (planes). Genet’s geometric method explains how the ‘perforated relation in which individuals reach out as lone points in a shared separation’ (p. 29) entangles wounding and writing across metropole and colony. These social processes traditionally tiptoe around violence embedded in language and culture. In Chapter 3, there is a refreshing consideration of the geopolitics of cultural studies. Digging in the dark of literary criticism from the Global South, Brueton situates Genet within Walter Benjamin and Sara Ahmed’s discussions on obliquity and transversality. This permits a reading of Genet that legitimizes him as a politicized French dissident. Genet belongs to more than the classical French canon, which emphasizes being over becoming; instead, he waltzes to the rhythm of social-theoretical canons developed from the subjectivity of Western European colonies. Readers looking for a broader interpretation of French language and culture, inclusive of French colonial subjectivities and their shapeshifting politics, should look elsewhere. Aimé Césaire is discussed as a fellow poet and philosopher offering insights on mathematical renderings of human consciousness, but only briefly in the Introduction. Édouard Glissant and poets from the Négritude movement are silently bypassed in obliquity, while Black Panthers and Palestinians are narrowly invoked within Foucauldian geometries of prison reform. By remembering francophone poets and philosophers, the point of French colonialism in shaping Genet’s anti-identitarian geometry becomes reducible within Brueton’s analysis. A global positioning strategy illuminating Genet within a francophone epistemology would have invited new methods of meaning-making about Genet’s own life, as well as his literary and political afterlife in Western culture.