Funeral Rites, Queer Politics
- Funeral Rites, Queer Politics
We build on Genet’s ‘Funeral Rites’ and on psychoanalytic theory to construct a model for a psycho-political technique, which depends on distributed, fissured subjectivities. We then confront the model with contemporary political struggles in the contexts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of AIDS.
Executioner adoration syndrome
A well-known Jewish hereditary disease
Don’t get excited.2
Genet’s Funeral Rites was published 52 years ago. It is a sinister and bitter book. But since sinister and bitter days are here now, it is fitting, so it seems, to consider it still. The novel’s bitterness is inevitable. Jean, the narrator, has lost his lover, resistance hero Jean D., in the final days of the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation. How can one not be left with a bitter taste having devoured him — the dearest and only lover who ever loved me? Indeed, as Jean assures us, to eat a youngster shot on the barricades, to devour a young hero, is no easy thing (17–18)3. But before we conclude our grief by feasting on the dead, I would like to discuss what it is that may happen between the time a love is lost, and the time when we will have incorporated it into our minds and flesh.
What happens in Genet’s Funeral Rites between loss of love and incorporation of the dead, happens across an elaborate complex of identifications, desire and grief. We will attempt to articulate these events in terms of Freudian analyses of mourning and melancholia and of the ethical problems that such analyses raise (Butler’s revisions, among others, will play an essential role). Between loss and incorporation, we will discover, the novel’s subjective array tries to escape melancholia by deferring and displacing identification from the lost love to its mortal enemies.
Our reading will highlight the power potential inherent to this psycho-political technique through various case studies (relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and AIDS). In the gap between loss and incorporation we shall find a political technique which is identity shattering (hence queer), which is operated across and below the level of the subject, a level underlying micro-politics, a sort of ‘nano-politics’. At this level political techniques arise contingently through unstable fissures in subjective surfaces, which they temporarily re-form. Such technique therefore cannot be adapted to a political discourse where fully fledged subject positions are supposed. Between loss and incorporation we find wedged an exploration of the ethics, eschatology and motivation to engage in contingent, temporary and sub-subjective political techniques.
1 Which dreamed it?
Here we describe Funeral Rites’ distributed subjective array
The plot of the novel, the network of relations between events and characters, is realized in the elementary structures of intercourse. Around the narrator, Jean (the namesake of Jean Genet), and a small nuclear family (mother Giselle and sons Paulo and Jean D.) revolves a complex network of sexual relations.
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(Diagram of characters and relations in Funeral Rites. I do not distinguish in ‘real’ from ‘fantasized’ sexual relations, because the novel does not make such distinction).
But the plot is also construed through the rhizome of Jean’s identifications with Nazi soldier Erik, with Hitler, with French collaborator Riton, with traitor Pierrot, with Jean D.’s half-brother Paulo, with national heroine Jean d’Arc, as well as through the assimilation of the dead hero Jean D. into the soul of Jean. These identifications, along with frequent cuts between narrative segments, are patched together in disharmony, roughly sewn by the hands of an artisan who sees no need to bother the reader with virtuosity.
For example, the four events described below (Jean/Erik’s stroll by the monastery, Jean’s jealous fit, the death of Jean D., and Paulo’s visit to Riton), which are far apart in time and place, are compactly welded together into a single paragraph. No doubt to wander about near an old monastery at the edge of a torrent, I had assumed the form of Erik, his grim face, and I camouflaged myself in the mist that always emanates...
