A living subject can resist the interpretive gaze that dead subjects cannot

Evidence

Flaubert, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Freud were not able to answer back to Sartre’s interpretations, but Genet was. His response was mixed. Sartre enjoyed telling a story that Genet first threw the manuscript into the fireplace, then pulled it out just before the flames took hold — which may or may not have been true. Genet did comment to Jean Cocteau that it made him nervous to have been turned into a ‘statue’ by Sartre. Sartre must have noticed the irony of writing an interpretive study of how a man refused to accept the interpretive gaze of others. It was particularly awkward for the self-mythologising Genet to become a writer written about; he was more used to being on the other end of the pen, and he felt ‘disgust’ at being stripped of his artistic disguise. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 714

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Sartre’s core themes of the look/the gaze from Being and Nothingness — biography as a form of objectifying the subject, resonant with the reader’s existentialism orientation. — connects to: The death one seeks for a phantom is not real annihilation of self — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 126
• QUESTION: Worth wondering: how does biographical interpretation of living subjects differ in ethics from interpretation of the dead? This tension recurs in literary biography.