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quoi du reste aujourd'hui, pour nous, ici, maintenant, d'un Hegel?
-Jacques Derrida, Glas
« ce qui est resté d'un Rembrandt déchiré en petits carrés bien réguliers, et foutu aux chiottes » se divise en deux.
Comme le reste.
What remains today, for us, here, now, of the encounter between Jacques Derrida and Jean Genet?1 How should we revisit an encounter between two of the most important figures of twentieth-century French textuality-two writers who consistently challenged the very categories of both "French" and "textuality"? Their encounter was not only biographical and historical but also conceptual, textual, and intertextual-and in that way, also political. Of their meetings, conversations, debates, of their friendship and collaboration, we are left with remains, with writing as remains, most notably Derrida's monumental 1974 book Glas, dedicated, in part, to Genet. Yet within this writingas-remains there is another kind of "remains," an internal remains that I uncover and discuss here. I wish to reclaim its crucial political importance to the understanding of Derrida and Genet's works both historically, but also to us, here and now, in Europe and in the Middle East.
Genet and Derrida first met in 1964-so the biographical story goes-at the home of Paule Thévenin (the famous editor of Antonin Artaud's posthumous works and a close friend of Genet's). From their very first meeting "something very powerful happened between Derrida and Genet."2 They connected on many different levels and shared topics-Genet, at this point already a legendary writer, trying some of his theories regarding fate and choice on Derrida, and Derrida, a young but rising thinker, busily joining and disjoining philosophy and literature, engaging the creativity of a living author. Derrida's biographer goes so far as to suggest that his second son Jean, born in 1967, was named after Genet.3 Their friendship grew following several shared dinners and nocturnal walks through half-deserted Paris in May 1968, inspired by the demonstrations;4 and in the early 1970s one could find them together at soccer games, supporting a French team with a Moroccan player.5 Their relationship culminated in 1973-74, when Derrida was writing Glas, which, together with Jean-Paul Sartre's 1952 Saint Genet (though very different in motivation and style), marks the most significant intellectual engagement with Genet's oeuvre. Born, like Saint Genet beforehand,...