Objects of Abjection: The Animation of Difference in Jean Genet's Novels

Abstract

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD Nothing is inherently animate or inanimate. Call objects animate when they present a problem, when they make one notice, question, or challenge their nature; inanimate when they do not. Inanimate objects precisely play their parts in a predictable world. Receptive and supple to the touch, they assert a complete and discrete function that is also a sort of authority: Touch or move me as you wish, I am unchangeable in shape, meaning, aspect. In Rilke's account these objects are full; in Genet's they are rendered useful. To this category belong the sweet, flat icons of advertising that Mark Miller describes, whose self-satisfied place in a system predicated on the cash nexus depends only on our passive affirmation. One may draw examples from Genet's work: A judge's gavel is rendered useful when it is banged to regulate a (real) trial, a general's uniform when worn to war, a bishop's miter when donned for a christening. Each may be important when in use, but its importance is determined by its context and depends on a socially shared determination of meaning.(1) Such objects remind us that the system of meaning - of language, of ordered - depends on the separation of signifiers from one another (oat from goat, cat from hat, and so on) within a legible and comprehensive overall system: These small necessary differences never lead to a sense of incommensurability. Such objects never generate a difference that goes beyond the system's ability to promise linguistic uniformity. Though difference is inevitable between objects, no one of these objects is out of the loop. Nothing means something in itself.(2) Completely flush to the system, such simple objects have what Genet calls stiffness and poverty, what Proust calls Habit. In his book-length study of Genet, Derrida calls such objects remain (s). Genet learns little from such objects, and they matter little to his writing. On the other side of human experience lie animate objects. Sometimes we find ourselves examining something more closely than had ever seemed necessary before: It has managed to catch our attention somehow. While there is no object that has this quality inherently or constantly (Lacan's claim for the phallus as the object extraordinaire of lack and excess notwithstanding), problem objects constantly surface in everyday life. A car can be just part of your way of getting around one day, but the next (when you've heard of a friend's crash) a site of anxiety.(3) Literary and philosophical texts choose to cite as their exempla of this sort of animation a remarkable range of material objects (Fisher). To Rilke, it is the incompleteness of dolls that draws forth a visceral response from humans: Other toys are satisfied with being only mechanical, but dolls evidence a lack.(4) To Proust, the madeleine pierces the veil that keeps Marcel pleasantly stupefied in the present: It threatens to bring back a past inaccessible in the world of ordinary material objects, inaccessible to those who reminisce without a material prop. To Andre Bazin, the almost-disastrous gestures of Charlie Chaplin remystify the world: In Chaplin's films, objects have a life of their own, an intention and mobility that saps or shapes human actions.(5) And to Karel Capek (in an account that resonates with my own experiences as a klutz) it is the genuine oaf (Chaplin only plays one) who reveals the secret ambitions of the material world: Shoelaces really want to be tied to each other, the purpose of corners is to crack skulls, and doorways want to make us stoop unnaturally. There are a great number of ways in which life can accrue around objects in the ordinary world. For example, at certain times everything in the world can be charged with agency. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, projects a feeling out from Dalloway's mind onto all the objects around her, a sort of glowing emotional supercharge: Somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best. …