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Document Details : Title: Unio critica Subtitle: On Jean Genet's 'Mystical Experience' (with a Coda on Jean de Saint-Samson) Author(s): DE KESEL, Marc Journal: Studies in Spirituality Volume: 34 Date: 2025 Pages: 245-257 DOI: 10.2143/SIS.34.0.3294897 Abstract : ‘When, one day, in a train compartment, while looking at a passenger sitting opposite me, I had the revelation that every man is worth as much as every other (…). Behind what was visible of this man (…), I discovered, experiencing it as a shock, a sort of universal identity with all men. (…). What I experienced I could convey only in this form: I flowed out of my body, through my eyes, into the traveler’s, at the same time that the traveler flowed into my own. Or rather: I had flowed, for the look was so brief that I can recall it only with the help of this tense of the verb’. So, we read in a short text of the twentieth-century French writer Jean Genet. Formally Genet’s experience can be described as ‘mystical’, be it that instead of the bliss of joy and delight, that experience had a traumatic effect on Genet’s further life and writing. This article presents an analysis of Genet’s strange, ‘democratic’ ‘mystical’ experience and reflects upon what that could imply for our common view on mysticism. |
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