L’Écriture et la mort : Les Valises de Jean Genet

Abstract

On a piece of paper, stored in one of the two suitcases that Jean Genet gave to his lawyer two weeks before his death—a testament to what he will not have published, and which will nevertheless be published by Albert Dichy thirty-four years after his death—Genet writes: “I committed the crime of escaping crime, of escaping prosecution and its risks. I said who I was, instead of living who I was, and saying who I was, I was no longer.” Through this gesture, Genet exposes a fundamental paradox: the act of writing consists of a betrayal; any medium remains at odds with the content it claims to summon. In the same way, Genet wrote that theater must be performed, not on stages, but in cemeteries and columbaria, to show how representation is above all a process of annihilation. This acute awareness of the deadly power of the medium eventually pushes Genet into an editorial—not a scriptorial—silence: he stops publishing but continues to write. This article examines the singular status of that writing and its relationship to death.