Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (French: Saint Genet, comédien et martyr) is a book by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre about the writer Jean Genet. It was first published in 1952. Sartre described it as an attempt "to prove that genius is not a gift but the way out that one invents in desperate cases."[1] Sartre also based his character Goetz in his play The Devil and the Good Lord (1951) on his analysis of Genet's psychology and morality.[2]
In the introduction to this book, the heart of Sartre's discussion of Genet is his description of Genet as belonging to that family of people who are known by the barbaric name of "passéistes", which Sartre defines in the opening pages of Saint Genet as one who defines all of his experiences based on a period of time in one's youth where a spiritual metamorphosis occurs.[3] Sartre notes that Genet selected those experiences in his writing which occurred between the ages of 10 and 15. This constitutes what Sartre referred to as the sacred liturgical drama.[4] Sartre likens this to a rite of passage in primitive societies.[5] The essence of this rite is one of death, not an actual death, but a death of one's innocent youth and a re-birth as another person.[6] i.e., the death one can look back to as opposed to the physical death which awaits us.[7]
Sartre believes that Genet, in his writing, identifies a significant event in one's youth where one realizes that one is beyond remedy. Sartre states that Genet carries within himself, the "vertigo of those beyond repair".[8] He wishes to die again. In an instant, he gives himself away to those cathartic crises which multiply and are thus carried to the sublime realization of their first fascination: crime, capital punishment, poetry, the orgasm and homosexuality. Which in each case, allows us to re-discover the paradox of who we were before and after this defining event.[9]