Examin the relationship between sexuality and suffering in any of the Essay

Examin the relationship betwixt sexuality and suffering in all of the texts - Essay ExampleWhat is most important to genet, however, is not a simple recounting of his life story, but rather the elaboration of his aesthetic preoccupations. It is in this narrative that genet identifies most clearly his means of literary production, and discusses the relationship of body to text. It is within the context of the stated reality, and as influenced by Genets own sexual proclivities, that the theme of sexuality and suffering asserts itself.Tradition on the wholey, autobiography is a narrative traffic pattern that has as its primary theme the recounting of the life of the author. The key element in identifying a narrative as autobiographical is, to use the terminology of Philippe Lejeune, the pacte autobiographie By identifying the pacte the ideal reader realizes without a doubt that the type denoted by I is indeed a projection of the author on the page. Genet accomplishes this in ledge r principally by providing verifiable statistics regarding his statut civil, - his date of birth and the circumstances which surrounded it. Though a Genet character exists in Genets other novels, this information appears only in Journal du voleur. What is most remarkable intimately this fact is that, rather than stabilizing the identity of the author, by its very genius it destabilizes. The fact that Genet was divest at a young age, and that he knows only the name of his mother, and not that of his father, puts the author character in an awkward position in a society more patrilineal than most. The Journal is in many ways, an aesthetic treatise, an examination of the ideas and practices that have made Genet a creator. The two fundamental concepts that drive his beingness are smash, and a vertiginous aloofness that we could call the vide, or, nothingness. His writing exists in a tense space between the aesthetic attractions of the forcible world, and the intellectual imperativ e of the contemplation of the emptiness of existence.Genet attributes his attraction to the physical world to its beauty. Pinning down a precise meaning of beauty is difficult. In the short approach on beauty in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Aquinas is quoted as defining beauty as that which pleases in the very apprehension of it (80). This definition, though vague, does point to two components of the estimation of beauty, the observer and the observed. There is no beauty without a subjectivity to apprehend it. The article goes on to note that the physical beauty of a gentlemans gentleman being is hard to define in the absence of the desire that is aroused by that person in the beholder. Though philosophers have long searched to provide an understanding of the universality of beauty, we must ask if any assessment of beauty can be truly objective. It would seem that, in order for aesthetic judgements such as beauty to be meaningful, they would have to be understood in the co ntext of subjectivity.Aesthetic philosophy, beginning with Longinus, has chosen to focus on the proud, that which transcends mere physical beauty and creates a deeper, more mystical meaning. In his treatise On the Sublime, Longinus says, sublimity in all its truth and beauty exists in such works as please all men at all times (107). In this case one might ask if any work could possibly live up to such a general definition. Longinus further elaborates on the nature of the sublime in the following quotationBy some innate power the true sublime uplifts our souls we are filled with a proud exaltation and a