Conclusion

Summary

O, yonder, yonder! to scalp myself and tear away this European mind!

[Oh! là-bas, là-bas! m'y scalper de mon cerveau d'Europe!]

(Laforgue)

‘In their revolt, the Palestinians have assumed this weight – oh! I worry about being too literary – but they have assumed the weight of Cézanne's canvasses’ [‘les Palestiniens, dans leur révolte, ont pris ce poids – oh! j'ai peur d'être très littéraire – mais ils ont pris le poids des toiles de Cézanne’]. Genet's scruples about blunting the immediacy and impact of contemporary history suggest an awareness of the pitfalls facing the European who attempts to write cultural otherness. By retaining the Cézanne analogy, he nevertheless indulges the temptation to aestheticize. But his hesitation hints at an ethical concern not shared by his exoticist predecessors. Not that he refrains from aggressively free association in Un captif amoureux, yet the association is often directed against European self-congratulation. Thus when he splices private sexual fantasies and moments of violent Palestinian insurrection, he is clearly targeting both bourgeois heterosexist orthodoxy and raison d'État.

Alongside such provocation, which risks appropriating the Other to unsettle narcissistically one's own culture, the itinerant dissident in Genet strains to bring about a form of cultural self-emptying. Implicitly, he proposes a retroactive education of exoticists such as Loti, Gauguin, and Montherlant when he insists on the limits of empathy and problematizes the notion of unfettered access to a commodified alterity.