Sade/New York/Revolution: readers of Susan Suleiman's Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde will recall her careful delineation of a Sadian intertext coextensive with Robbe-Grillet's novel of ‘otherworldly depravity,’ as it has been characterized on the back cover of Richard Howard's translation, Projet d'une Révolution à New York. The pages that follow may be viewed as a kind of oneiric transform—call it ‘dream-work’—of the configuration structured by those components. Originally delivered in New York (and, pointedly, for reasons whose pertinence will emerge shortly, at Columbia University), they have as their focus an affinity between the writings of Sade and the revolutionary aspirations of an entire wing of France's postwar literary vanguard. They are, moreover, simultaneously tied to a broader analytic—and even self-analytic—project I have pursued over a number of years and which may be worthwhile evoking, however briefly, before turning to my principal focus.

For more than a decade, I had nursed a fantasy that it would be possible to write a history of French thought since the Second World War in terms of the diverse readings of Mallarmé by a slew of major figures. Moreover, I had concluded that Mallarmé might well be the only writer of whom that claim might be made.

I did nonetheless entertain the thought that Jean Genet—given the importance of Sartre's Saint Genet and Derrida's Glas —came as close as anyone else to filling the bill. (It was a proposition, I should say, encouraged by my sense that the sometime inmate of Mettray plainly played a tutelary role in the writing of Foucault's genealogy of prisons, Surveiller et punir.) But the case for Genet was clinched for me when I came across a stunning text on him by Eric Marty, ‘Jean Genet à Chatila,’ which appeared in Les Temps modernes in 2003.