30 years on

"A lot of Algerian pimps passing through the night at Pigalle used all they had for the Algerian revolution. Virtue was to be found there too. I believe it was Hannah Arendt who distinguished between revolutions that aspire to freedom and those that aspire to virtue—and therefore to work. Perhaps we ought to recognize that the end pursued—obscurely—by revolutions or liberations is the discovery or rediscovery of beauty, that is, something that is impalpable and unnamable except by this word. Or rather, no: by beauty we should understand a laughing insolence spurred by past misery, by the systems and men responsible for misery and shame, but a laughing insolence which realizes that, when shame has been left behind, the bursting forth of new life is easy.

"But on this page the question should also, and above all, be the following: is a revolution a revolution if it has not removed from faces and bodies the dead skin that distorted them? I'm not talking about an academic beauty, but rather the impalpable—unnamable—joy of bodies, faces, shouts, words that are no longer dead, I mean a sensual joy so strong that it tends to drive away all eroticism."

—Jean Genet, "Four Hours in Shatila"