The Humanism and the Mirror Stage of Jean Genet

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The Humanism and Mirror Stage of Jean Genêt In “The Tightrope Walker” Prepared for: Professor Sabrina Fuchs-Abrams Prepared by: Lyn C. Wiltshire Date: December 16, 2011 LIB-644500-01-11FA1: Seminar in Liberal Studies Fragment of the Artwork (2003) translated by Charlotte Mandell is a collection of essays and letters by Jean Genêt, French political essayist, playwright and novelist. A seductive essay in this collection is “The Tightrope Walker,” from the French “Le funambule” (1958), written for his lover, in which the artist performer represents solitude. In 2008, I was influenced by this essay to co-create a ballet in three acts entitled “The Rope: Tres Momentos” (2010), a collaborative international choreographic exchange between a Colombian choreographer and me. Extracted from three sources, the French, Spanish and English versions, the essay mirrors the characteristics of the choreographer and dancer as a self-absorbing solitary artist that sees objects, gesture, love and metaphorical death as a creative force. Looking inside the essay, the wire for the acrobat, as seen through the post structural approach of Jacques Lacan, symbolizes “the self as a fiction or fantasy” (Smith and Riley 199). Looking inside the author, through the existential or humanistic influence of Jean-Paul Sartre (French existentialist philosopher), Genêt a ‘vagabond turned writer’, “celebrate[s] the objects of his love, assassins or Death itself” as a means of freedom (Botsford 82). The mirror reflection through words, images and the Jungian shadow (Berger 128) in his text and in his life possesses the self-destructive nature of narcissism and sublimation blatantly in “The Tightrope Walker” (Berger 113-119). Of biographical details, Genêt was the illegitimate son to a single mother who abandons him in his first year. As a ward of the state, aspects

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