Abstract

Abandoned at the age of seven months, Jean Genet was the son of Gabrielle Genet and an unknown father. While still a baby, he was entrusted to a wet nurse who, after a few months, entrusted him to the Children’s Hospice, as his mother was unable to support him. Orphaned and alone in the world, Jean Genet’s only inheritance was his family name, bequeathed to him by an unworthy mother. The absence of a family genealogy quickly became a permanent mark on the writer’s life, the indelible trace of a ‘lack of being’, of an inner emptiness, which was transformed from adolescence onwards into a veritable obsession with reconstructing himself and his origins. So, at the age of 32, h will attempt – through retrospective writing and memory – to take stock of his life, divided between the various periods spent in prison, where he was interned for theft, the few vague and repressed memories of his youth, stifled by difficult stays in foster care, and his placement, at the age of 13, in the Mettray penal colony. The mutilation of Jean Genet’s identity is thus recomposed and ‘cured’ by a biographical reconstruction developed over the course of his incarcerations, in the disapproved shadow of abjection, where – thanks to solitude and silence the fervent imagination of the ‘cursed’ writer is illuminated to finally poetise a destiny born in the misery and in the absence of affectivity