Roger Caillois Reader

A ROGER CAILLOIS READER Roger Caillois Edited by Claudine Frank FRENCH LITERATURE/SOCIOLOGY/PHILOSOPHY The Edge of Surrealism is an essential introduction to the writing of French social theorist Roger Caillois. Caillois was part of the Surrealist avant-garde and in the 1930s founded the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. He spent his life exploring issues raised by this famous group and by Surrealism itself. Though his subjects were diverse, Caillois focused on concerns crucial to modern intellectual life, and his essays offer a unique perspective on many of twentieth-century France's most significant intellectual movements and figures. Including a masterful introductory essay by Claudine Frank situating his work in the context of his life and intellectual milieu, this anthology is the first comprehensive introduction to Caillois's work to appear in any language. These thirty-two essays with commentaries strike a balance between Caillois's political and theoretical writings and between his better-known works, such as the popular essays on the praying mantis, myth, and mimicry, and his lesser-known works. Presenting sev- eral new pieces and drawing on interviews and unpublished correspondence, this book reveals Caillois's consistent effort to reconcile intellectual rigor and imaginative adven- ture. Perhaps most importantly, The Edge of Surrealism provides an overdue look at how Caillois's intellectual project intersected with the work of Georges Bataille and others including Breton, Bachelard, Benjamin, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss. "The Edge of Surrealism is the Caillois in one volume that is so badly needed considering the very dispersed status of Caillois's work and that no such volume exists in any language, not even in France. This selection is excellent, done by someone who not only knows thoroughly the production of the author but knows also what's most relevant for our contemporary interests."— DENIS HOLLIER, author ofAbsent without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War "Roger Caillois has remained relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. This superb selection of his essays, expertly translated, shows the full range of his thought and should place him next to Bataille and the Surrealists as a major intellectual figure in inter- war and postwar France. Claudine Frank's general introduction and detailed commentaries on individual essays provide the necessary contexts for understanding this complex, often paradoxical thinker. A first-rate work that is sure to be of interest to all students of twentieth-century French thought."—SUSAN RUBIN SULEIMAN, author of Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature Roger Caillois (1913-1978) was a French social theorist and writer. Claudine Frank is Assistant Professor of French at Barnard College. On the cover: Death's Head Hawk Moth (Acherontia Atroposj, photograph © Robert Thompson ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-3068-4 ISBN-10: 0-8223-3068-7 90000 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Box 90660 Durham, NC 27708-0660 www.dukeupress.edu 9 780822 330684 The Edge of Surrealism A Roger Caillois Reader By ROGER CAILLOIS Edited and with an Introduction by cLAUD IN E F RAN K Translated by CLAUDINE FRANK and CAMILLE NAISH DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham and London 2003 © 2OO3 DUKE UNIVERSITY p RE s s. All rights reserved. Printed in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA on acid-free paper oo. Designed by AUX RUTH BUCHANAN. Typeset in CARTER & CONE GALLIARD by G8cS TYPESETTERS. Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. TO BIG LITTLE HENRIK Acknowledgments ix Introduction i I. THEORY AND THE THIRTIES, 1934-1939 Surrealism and Its Environs 1. Testimony (Paul Eluard) 59 2. The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis 66 3. Letter to André Breton; Literature in Crisis 82 4. Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia 89 Biology and Myth 5. Review ofUHomme, cet inconnu, by Dr. Alexis Carrel 107 6. The Function of Myth 11 o 7. The Noon Complex 124 8. For a Militant Orthodoxy: The Immediate Tasks of Modern Thought 130 Lucifer at the College of Sociology 9. Interview with Gilles Lapouge, June 1970 141 10. First Lecture: Sacred Sociology and the Relationships among "Society," "Organism," and "Being" 147 11. Dionysian Virtues 155 12. Aggressiveness as a Value 160 13. The Birth of Lucifer 166 14. Paris, a Modern Myth 173 15. Sociology of the Intellectual 190 II. WRITING FROM PATAGONIA, 1940-1945 After the College 16. Preamble to the Spirit of Sects 205 17. Discussions of Sociological Topics: On "Defense of the Republic" 213 18. The Nature and Structure of Totalitarian Regimes 217 Treasure and Culture 19. Duties and Privileges of French Writers Abroad 235 20. Patagonia 240 21. The Myth of Secret Treasures in Childhood 252 22. The Situation of Poetry 262 23. Pythian Heritage (On the Nature of Poetic Inspiration) 268 III. POSTWAR STANCES, 1946-1978 The Moralist 24. Loyola to the Rescue of Marx 279 25. Paroxysms of Society 284 26. Metamorphoses of Hell 298 Signs and Images 27. The Image 315 28. Fruitful Ambiguity 320 29. Surrealism as a World of Signs 326 Diagonal Science 30. The Great Bridgemaker 337 31. A New Plea for Diagonal Science 343 32. The Natural Fantastic 348 Roger Caillois Timeline 359 Notes 363 Bibliography 401 Index 415 Acknowledgments I am very grateful to the late René Chenon, Jacques Chavy, André Chastel, and Louis Dumont. I would also like to thank Olga Tabakmann, Esther Ambro- sino, and Lia Andler. My thanks as well to Camille Naish and to Monique Kuntz and Pierre Bourgoin at the Bibliothèque Municipale de Vichy, Jean- Pierre Le Bouler, Denis Hollier, Michel Winock, Susan Suleiman, Laurent Jenny, Marina Galletti, and to all those who encouraged or helped my research, especially at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and Barnard Col- lege. Catherine Rizea-Caillois and Jean-Marc Chavy and the Lawrence Krader heirs kindly granted me publication rights to family material. Let me also warmly thank my editors at Duke University Press, Judith Hoover, Leigh Anne Couch, Fiona Morgan, and Ken Wissoker, for all of their hard work and support. On a personal note, my gratitude goes to Michèle Cyna, Stéphane Berrebi, Brenda Fowler, John Farrell, Jon, and especially my parents—who fre- quented a philosophy reading group in postwar Paris that (although this was never mentioned) turns out to have included important former members of Acéphale. Note to the Reader A brief word about the translations. The primary goal of The Edge of Surreal- ism: A Roger Caillois Reader is to make Caillois's ideas accessible to an English- language audience. Thus, the translations strive for clarity without attempting to render the stylistic complexity, nuance, and shifts of his prose. Certain terms are difficult to translate, especially when Caillois uses them repeatedly or insis- tently. At times, I simply provide the English cognate of the French word, as in "connivance" and "resemblance"; at others, I provide the French term alongside the English, as in "accuracy" {justesse), which has the additional con- notations of "soundness," "rightness," and "truth." Camille Naish and I collaboratively translated Caillois's texts, with a few ex- ceptions. "The Myth of Secret Treasures in Childhood" was translated by Law- rence Krader. And a few texts I translated alone: "The Birth of Lucifer," "Dis- cussions of Sociological Topics: On Defense of the Republic," "The Nature and Structure of Totalitarian Regimes," "The Situation of Poetry," "Pythian Heritage (On the Nature of Poetic Inspiration)," "Loyola to the Rescue of Marx," and "The Image." Unless otherwise indicated, all translations within the body of the commentaries are mine. Although I use endnotes for my own writing (introduction and commentaries), I have chosen to keep Caillois's footnotes in their original form; trans- lator comments also appear as footnotes with brackets. And finally, the source note with each essay refers to the particular Caillois edition that was translated. Introduction This volume is a general introduction to Roger Caillois (1913-1978), an in- triguing and obstinate French man of letters, whose oeuvre explored the mys- teries of the individual, social, biological, and mineral "imagination" in a be- wildering array of manifestations. In so doing, he nonetheless focused at all times on crucial issues of twentieth-century French intellectual life to engage in debates with some of its most prominent figures, among them, Bataille, Benda, Bachelard, Dumézil, Paulhan, and Lévi-Strauss. As a youth, Caillois was obsessed with resacralizing society, by which he meant restoring to atom- ized, individualistic modernity what the famous last chapter of Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) had lamented as lost, collective effer- vescence. In his last years, he sought to touch the distant, private minds of individual readers with meditative conjectures about the appearance of stones. Throughout, he was an independent and, intellectually speaking, rather lonely figure. "Caillois himself was not always acknowledged by the official special- ists. He was interested in too many things," remarked Maurice Blanchot about Foucault 5s first editor, adding that he "was a conservative, an innovator, always somewhat apart; he did not figure in the number of those who held some form of recognized knowledge."1 Caillois is perhaps most familiar to contemporary American readers through his participation in the College of Sociology, which he codirected with Georges Bataille from 1937 to 1939, after a brief passage in the Surrealist movement during his student days at the Ecole Normale.2 At this time, he fa- vored revolutionary invocations of science and social science. During the war, he sought to foster culture as a bulwark of Western civilization and was known to some American readers through his French literary journal in support of Free France, Les Lettres françaises, published under the auspices of Victoria Ocampo's Argentine journal, Sur.

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