"Abjection is a methodical conversion, like Cartesian doubt and Husserlian
epoché: it establishes the world as a closed system which
consciousness regards from without, in the manner of the divine understanding.
The superiority of this method to the other two lies in its being lived in pain
and pride. It therefore does not lead to the transcendental and universal
consciousness of Husserl, the formal and abstract thinking of the Stoics, or the
substantial
cogito of Descartes, but to an individual
existence at its highest degree of tension and lucidity.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
"His pre-war novel, Nausea, really supplies the key to
all his work. Here is stated the fundamental problem of the assimilability of
the world in its repulsive, slimy, vacuous, or obtrusively substantial
thereness—the problem which moves all of Sartre’s writings. Being and Nothingness is an attempt to develop a language to
cope with, to record the gestures of, a consciousness tormented by disgust. This
disgust, this experience of the superfluity of things and of moral values, is
simultaneously a psychological crisis and a metaphysical problem."
"In Being and Nothingness, Sartre reveals
himself as a psychologist of the first rank—worthy to rank with Dostoevsky,
Nietzsche, and Freud. And the focus of the Baudelaire essay is the analysis of
Baudelaire’s work and biography, treated as texts equivalent from a symptomatic
point of view, disclosing fundamental psychological gestures. What makes Saint Genet even more interesting than the Baudelaire essay
(though, at the same time, more unmanageable as well) is that, through thinking
about Genet, Sartre has gone beyond the notion of action as a mode of
psychological self-conservation. Through Genet, Sartre has glimpsed something of
the autonomy of the aesthetic. More exactly, he has redemonstrated the
connection between the aesthetic dimension and freedom, rather differently
argued by Kant. The artist who is the subject of Saint
Genet is not psychologized away. Genet’s works are interpreted in terms
of a saving ritual, a ceremony of consciousness. That this ceremony is
essentially onanistic, is curiously apt. According to European philosophy since
Descartes, world-creating has been the principal activity of consciousness. Now,
a disciple of Descartes has interpreted world-creating as a form of
world-procreating, as masturbation.
Sartre correctly describes Genet’s spiritually most ambitious book,
Funeral Rites, as “a tremendous effort of
transubstantiation.” Genet relates how he transformed the whole world into the
corpse of his dead lover, Jean Decarnin, and this young corpse into his own
penis. “The Marquis de Sade dreamt of extinguishing the fires of Etna with his
sperm,” Sartre observes. “Genet’s arrogant madness goes further: he jerks off
the Universe.” Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all
abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has
to be repeated again and again. It is a rather good description, anyway, of
Sartre’s own phenomenology of consciousness. And, certainly, it is a perfectly
fair description of what Genet is about."
-Susan Sontag, en Sartre’s Saint
Genet, de Against Interpretation.
