The Ontological Priority of Violence/On Several Really Smart Things About Violence in Jean Genet's Work

William Haver

The Thought of Violence

The first really smart thing Jean Genet said regarding the ontological priority of violence, in The Thief's Journal, is this: »Too many people think, I said to myself, who don't have the right to. They have not paid for it by the kind of undertaking which makes thinking indispensable to your salvation.« (Genet 1964, 84) More than twenty years later, in conversation with Tahar Ben Jelloun, he was to say this:

Insofar as [the Left] perpetuates Judeo-Christian kinds of reasoning and morality, I find myself incapable of identifying with it; it is more idealist than political, more annoying than rational. As for Sartre, I've understood for a long time that his political thought is pseudo-thought. To my mind, what is called Sartrean thought no longer exists. His position-taking is only the hasty judgment of an intellectual too pusillanimous to confront anything but his own fantasms. (Quoted by Ben Jelloun 1992, 94-95)

Or, again, in an interview with Michèle Manceaux à propos the Black Panthers, Genet said: »The non-violent stance of the Whites belongs to a moral dilettantism. Nothing else.« (Genet 1991b, 59)

The questions I am trying to approach in my current work concern the situation of thinking with regard to violence insofar as it exceeds its instrumentality, insofar as it is also something other than negativity. What is at stake for thinking when it is a question of non-instrumental, or perhaps more accurately para-instrumental, violence? Can we think consequently when what is at stake is terror? Or must we, insofar as we think we are thinking, resign ourselves to the philosophical tragedies of aporia? Can we think terror, violence in its non- or para-instrumentality, as also something other than aporia...

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