"I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty"
About this Quote
Genet doesn’t “romanticize crime” so much as flip the moral furniture and watch bourgeois taste stumble over it. By naming thieves, traitors, and murderers as bearers of “deep beauty,” he stages a deliberate scandal: beauty is no longer the prize society awards to the obedient, the well-lit, the respectable. It’s something you find in the cellar, in the bodies and lives pushed out of view. “Sunken” is the tell. This isn’t the radiant, museum-approved beautiful; it’s submerged, drowned by shame, poverty, and punishment, still intact under the surface.
The specific intent is aesthetic sabotage. Genet, who wrote out of imprisonment, marginality, and outlaw mythmaking, turns criminality into an optic. In his theater and prose, the “ruthless and the cunning” aren’t heroes; they’re instruments for exposing how respectability manufactures its own innocence by needing an opposite. Calling them beautiful is an act of theft: he steals the language of refinement and spends it on the socially condemned.
Subtextually, the line is also self-portraiture. Genet recognizes himself in these figures, not as a confession of deeds but as an identification with refusal: the refusal to be corrected, redeemed, made legible. “Traitors” is particularly barbed in a century obsessed with allegiance, nationalism, and purity; Genet’s sympathy sits with betrayal as a kind of freedom from compulsory loyalty.
The effect is both erotic and political. He forces the reader to feel attraction where they expected disgust, then interrogate who taught them that choreography in the first place.
The specific intent is aesthetic sabotage. Genet, who wrote out of imprisonment, marginality, and outlaw mythmaking, turns criminality into an optic. In his theater and prose, the “ruthless and the cunning” aren’t heroes; they’re instruments for exposing how respectability manufactures its own innocence by needing an opposite. Calling them beautiful is an act of theft: he steals the language of refinement and spends it on the socially condemned.
Subtextually, the line is also self-portraiture. Genet recognizes himself in these figures, not as a confession of deeds but as an identification with refusal: the refusal to be corrected, redeemed, made legible. “Traitors” is particularly barbed in a century obsessed with allegiance, nationalism, and purity; Genet’s sympathy sits with betrayal as a kind of freedom from compulsory loyalty.
The effect is both erotic and political. He forces the reader to feel attraction where they expected disgust, then interrogate who taught them that choreography in the first place.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|
More Quotes by Jean
Add to List
