Jean Genet's Inquiry into Language

Jean Genet and Jacques Lacan were Parisian contemporaries, and belong to the flowering of French intellectual life hothoused by the Second World War. On the nineteenth of March 1944, Lacan partied with Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Bataille, Picasso and Braque. Four days earlier, the petty criminal, Jean Genet, was released from the Camp des Tourrelles in Paris, a known deportation centre for the concentration camps. He emerged as one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, and would never again be behind bars.…