Alcibiades at the door

by Lawrence R. Schehr

Focusing on works by Rene Crevel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, and Herve Guibert, this book studies how the figures of homosexuality function at the limits of narrative, as part of the deep structure of narrative, and at the border between public and private discourse. The first three chapters follow the difference between inside and outside, between public and private, between what is known and what can only be surmised. The homosexual Rene Crevel, who is both inside Surrealism and outside it, forces us to reread the marginalized figure of homosexuality in Surrealism. Crevel is discussed in light of his most important work, Mon corps et moi, a sustained effort to negotiate the problems of public and private personae. Long before concentrating on Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre often turned to the subject of homosexuality in his writings of the 1930s and 1940s. The figures and forms of homosexuality in Sartre's work are shown to relate to a phenomenology of perception, to a persisten