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Funeral Rites, Queer Politics FUNERAL RITES, QUEER POLITICS ROY WAGNER Abstract. This paper builds on Jean Genet’s funeral rites and on psychoanalytic theory to construct a model for a psycho-political tech- nique. The paper then confronts the model with contemporary political struggles in the contexts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of AIDS. We find that the technique we articulate is not only identity shattering (hence queer), but also contingent, temporary and unstable. Moreover, this psycho-political technique operates below micro-politics: it depends on distributed, fissured subjectivities; it therefore cannot be adapted to a political discourse where fully fledged subject positions are supposed. In some sense, we admit, this unstable ‘nano-politics’ is bound to even- tually fail. We then discuss what might be the telos of, and motivation to engage in, such queer, pre-subjective, psycho-political technique. Executioner adoration syndrome A well-known Jewish hereditary disease Don’t get excited.1 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)2. 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 incorpo- ration of the dead happens across an elaborate complex of identifications, I thank Yehonatan Alshekh, Dr. Lyat Friedman, and Prof. Adi Ophir for their com- ments on earlier drafts of this paper. 1Talkback no. 121 to Yitzhak Frankenthal, “Arafat, get well soon”, Ynet, October 30, 2004, http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-2997192,00.html (Hebrew). 2Page numbers in parentheses refer to Jean Genet, Funeral Rites (Bernard Frechtman, trans., Grove Press, 1969). I apply the convention of using boldface to mark quotations. Italics in quotations are always in the original. 1 2 ROY WAGNER 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 es- sential role). Between loss and incorporation, we will discover, the novel’s subjective array tries to escape melancholia by deferring and displacing iden- tification 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 underly- ing 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. Be- tween 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 char- acters, 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. FUNERAL RITES, QUEER POLITICS 3 (Characters and relations in Funeral Rites. I do not distinguish here ‘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 to- gether 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 from a gloomy hero. I felt protected by the fab- ulous power of the Reich. Nevertheless, I was aware of the sharp, luminous presence within me of Jean Genet, mad with fear. But perhaps I had never been so aware of myself as at such moments. 4 ROY WAGNER When I kept Jean clinging by the teeth to the muzzle of my re- volver, fear also shrank my center of consciousness by making it more acute. The fear of firing was combating the fear of not fir- ing. Jean was living his last seconds more than I. Anyway, Riton’s peace was definitively restored, one morning, ten days later, when he was called to the guardroom. Someone wanted to see him right away. It was a civilian. “Oh! Paulo!” (225–226). And in yet other times and places, not only events, but characters are welded together as well; the border between voices is breached. When Riton reached to feel between Erik’s legs, he parted his lips. He stayed that way for a few seconds, straining his mind so as to be fully aware of his joy. But within just half a page the third person narrative description of Riton is given up for a first person statement in the narrator’s voice: I prejudged its splendor in action and imprisoned it, sleeping little girl that I was, in my big ogre’s paw (153–154). In that alone there’s nothing new. The cutting and pasting of voices and events is to be found, in different degrees, throughout Genet’s work. But in this novel the conundrum is inevitable. The novel deals with Jean’s grief over his lover, resistance fighter Jean D., who dies during the final stages of the Parisian liberation uprising. Jean, the narrator-author, is bound to be displaced, because the text he writes is meant to decompose the gleam of light (composed mainly of love and pain) that is projected by my grieving heart (13), and because his story is a story only if this is a fitting title for the prismatic decomposition of my love and grief (22). This decomposition, this chaotic system of voice and identity displace- ments, the statement I shall publish the novel so that it may serve Jean’s glory, but which Jean? (164), all resonate Alice’s question as she wakes from her journey Through the Looking Glass: Which dreamed it? Jean’s response could hardly be any simpler than Alice’s You see, Kitty, it MUST have been either me or the Red King. Jean’s response to the question which flows through the entire novel, his response to the question but which Jean? must cut across the entire distributed subjective array of the book. Now the question, which I shall confront with the novel, is not “what does it say?” nor “how does it work?” but “what can we do with it?”. Given this stance, the response to the question which Jean? is charged not only with explaining, but also with doing. The narrator’s name, ‘Jean’, the most banal name in French, could not possibly carry this weight. Neither can ‘Jean Genet’, regardless of whether he be the novel’s author or the FUNERAL RITES, QUEER POLITICS 5 one present mad with fear in the heart of narrator-Jean. In order to come up with a name which is up for the task, in order to set Jean apart from the underground fighter Jean D., and in order to recall the German identification of prismatic-decomposition-Jean (identification with Nazi Erik and Hitler, with their collaborators Riton and Pierrot), we shall refer to the one-for-the-glory-of-whom-the-novel-is-published as does Nazi Erik, as Erik refers to our Jean just a few lines before Jean wormed his way into Erik’s past (36), just a few lines before Jean assumes Erik’s voice: we shall call him “Djian”. ‘Jean Genet’ Erik would likely pronounce ‘Djian Dgene’. Therefore I decide here and from this moment on to give the presumed and collective author of Funeral Rites the German name ‘Djian Dg.’, which shall be regularly replaced by the Hebrew burr Djondge. 2. Identifying away We follow the displacement of melancholic identification from the lost love to its mortal enemies Jean explains: little by little I became terribly afraid that since the friendship towards the dead Jean D.
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