Genet's dying words

Bradley, Arthur (2025) Genet's dying words. Textual Practice, 39 (8). pp. 1213-1230. ISSN 0950-236X

Text (Manuscript_with_author_details (1))
Manuscript_with_author_details_1_.pdf - Accepted Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
Download (262kB)

Abstract

This essay re-reads Jean Genet’s dying words – which is to say the words he wrote as dying, the words he wrote on dying, as well as the dying of words – in ‘Quatre heures à Chatila’. To outline its argument, I propose that Genet’s work on the Sabra and Shatila massacres does not simply bear witness to the death of the other, but to the death of the one who bears witness to that death and, finally, to the death of the very world that attempts to bear witness to that witness. If Genet’s speech acts defy interpretation in any other terms than their own, I argue that his late work is part of a larger philosophical dossier upon the (im-) possible relationship between the one death and the many deaths, between death in the singular and mass death, between the solitary act of murder and the massacre, the genocide or even the world-destroying apocalypse. For Genet, what we call the instant of my death is also the instant of the death of the world. In response to the question of what may remain of the world after Sabra and Shatila, I conclude that Genet’s answer is a species of flower.