verify his conceptualism. From the universe that he recreates with the purpose of offering it to himself as an object of imaginary experience one could derive the principles of a scholastic philosophy: the concept is the form that is imposed upon all matter (in other words, it is initiation or birth that creates the person); in changing form, the same matter changes being (in other words, one moves from one caste to another as a result of naming); any reality that, in any aspect of its nature, pertains to a concept immediately becomes the singular expression of the entire concept -thus, every object can simultaneously or successively express immutable and conflicting Ideas, and these Ideas are concrete totalities, actual principles of individuation (in other words, since the group is eminently present in each of its members and confers upon each his sacred reality, an individual who belongs to several groups at the same time is simultaneously and entirely each of these groups). Is this a kind of Aristotelianism? One would think so at times, for it seems–this is the theory of gesture which we set forth above–that men and things are visited by essences that settle upon them for a moment and disappear: if they make a movement or strike another attitude or if there is simply a change in the surrounding environment, they immediately receive a new name, a new being. Policemen have only to be attentive to Divine and they immediately become Holy Women. And in order for Divine to be an infanta all that is needed is a four-wheeled carriage and an iron gate. The animating force of all these metamorphoses is, as for the medieval clerk, analogy; every apparent analogy is a sign of deep identity. Resting against the cushions of a carriage, Divine is in a position analogous to that of an infanta; therefore she is an infanta. The weight of the word “infanta” crushes the details of the image that might check the metamorphosis and does away with Divine's masculinity and poverty. In the realm of the imaginary, the operation succeeds every time: “the royal idea is of this world.” Take the word royal as in the old expression “royal art”: this is conceptualism. The aim of this masturbator is very like that of the alchemists. He wants to give lead the form of gold. For Genet this means to place, in imagination,a piece of lead in a system of relations that ordinarily refer to gold, and then imperceptibly to speak of lead as if it were gold.
Time–opaque, irrational, nullifying time, the time of chance and of ignorance, the time through which we grope our way–disappears in this perspective. An event is nothing other than a transubstantiation, in short a naming. A being receives a new essence and a new name. When Genet describes a scene minutely, he does so because it excites him. Moreover, these favored–and, in general, erotic–scenes are frequentative. That is, he gathers together in a single narration a hundred events that recurred in the course of time in an identical way. And, in that case, the tale is not, as one might think, a later “digest” of a hundred experiences whose fundamental identity is gradually isolated. On the contrary, the identity is posited at the very beginning; it is the concept that is temporalized, the sacred essence that is projected into and developed in duration. Thereupon, the event becomes a ceremony, and the tale changes into a ritual. At times the characters exchange words, but these words reach us in the flow of the sacred discourse that announces the rites. Most often the words are the rites themselves: “She meets him in the evening on the promenade of the boulevard, where he tells her very sweetly the story of his life, for he knows nothing else. And Divine says: ‘It's not your life story you're telling me, Archangel, but an underground passage of my own, which I was unaware of.’ Divine also says: ‘I love you as if you were in my belly,’ and also: ‘You're not my sweetheart,
Aj Harmon, Christopher Harmon