SOURCE: Gourgouris, Stathis. “A Lucid Drunkenness (Genet's Poetics of Revolution).” South Atlantic Quarterly, 97, no. 2 (spring 1998): 413-56.

In the following essay, Gourgouris examines Genet's poetics through his widely known and embraced identity as a criminal and his later association with revolutionary groups.

It has already become customary to infuse the end of the twentieth century with a forward-looking gaze to some abyssal, unknown, but nonetheless impending end (of “history,” of “ideology”). Repressed in the allure of this abyssal gaze is the knowledge that the end is measured by a precisely delineated historical past which shadows it completely. While rushing to peer over the other side, we forget that the ground on which we stand is continually slipping along with us. This ground is history's great shadow, animated by the twentieth century's revolutionary foundations, whether we understand them in terms of the explosive legacy of modernism in arts and letters...