Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
SE A N HAND
Oxford Brookes University
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Acknowledgements page x
List of abbreviations xi
Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism
Recasting the self: from surrealism to ethnography
Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography
to LAge dhomme
Positional play: La Regle du jeu
Secreting the self: Journal
LA R EG LE DU JEU
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ix
Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time in the making, and I am grateful to a
great many people and institutions. The School of Languages at Oxford
Brookes University, the Department of Language Studies at London
Guildhall University, and the Department of European Languages at the
University of Wales, Aberystwyth, all encouraged my work at different
stages. I have relied a great deal on the facilities of the Taylor Institution
library at the University of Oxford. I have beneted from the opportunity
to discuss related ideas at the universities of Kent, London, Manchester,
Oxford, Paris VII and Reading. Early versions of certain sections have
previously appeared in the journals Aura, Paragraph and Romance Studies,
and in the edited volume LAutre et le sacre (LHarmattan). I am grateful to
editors and publishers for permission to incorporate material in modied
form. For special advice, I am indebted to Dr Vivienne Suvini-Hand.
Dr Rima Dapous acted throughout as an expert and encouraging re-
search assistant, and Helena Garnett assisted with indexing. I wish to
thank everyone at Cambridge University Press, and especially the com-
missioning editors Dr Linda Bree and Dr Katharina Brett for unusual
forbearance, the editor Rachel De Wachter for guiding the book through
production, and Susan Beer for her gentle yet scrupulous copy-editing.
Both Professor Malcolm Bowie and Professor Michael Sheringham,
as successive General Editors of the series, were generous with their
time and encouraging with their advice. Above all, this book is for
Maolosa, who has endured each stage of its intermittent formation,
and for Dominic, whose continuing delight in language puts the exercise
of reading Leiris into joyful perspective. They are the rule and the game
of my work, the law and the love of my life.
x
Abbreviations
A Aurora
AF LAfrique fantome
AH LAge dhomme
Bi Biffures
Br Brisees
CE Cinq Etudes dethnologie
FB Frele Bruit
Fi Fibrilles
Fo Fourbis
GFN Grande fuite de neige
J Journal,
LS La Langue secrete des Dogons de Sanga
LT Langage tangage
MSM Mots sans memoire
N Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour
O Operratiques
P La Possession et ses aspects theatraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar
S Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne
Z Zebrage
xi
Introduction: the deaths of Michel Leiris
Glossaire jy serre mes gloses marks Leiriss ofcial acceptance into the sur-
realist movement. The earliest entries in the book, eventually produced
in its entirety in , were the rst poetic material Leiris produced in
Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism
the doctrinal journal La Revolution surrealiste: between and no
fewer than four extracts, one of them composed of calligrammes, illustrate
Leiriss adherence to surrealist doctrine. It is also the most abiding
and representative of Leiriss literary forms, constantly supplemented
over the years, right up to the rst half of the Langage tangage, ou
ce que les mots me disent, whose title, Souple mantique et simples tics de
glotte, plays on the very word supplementary. Far from being a tick,
the denitions produced express in pure form Leiriss abiding interest
in writing the self by releasing the magical and revelatory power of lan-
guage. This belief is illustrated by the very title of the collection: Glossaire
jy serre mes gloses. The book is a surrealist anti-dictionary in which the
traditional subservience of signier to signied is reversed. The sound
and shape of the word Glossaire therefore creates its own denition:
jy serre mes gloses. Seventy-ve similar entries appeared in the third
issue of La Revolution surrealiste, and were followed by a direct explanation
of their underlying linguistic philosophy. It is a monstrous aberration,
says Leiris, to imagine that language exists for the simple purpose of
facilitating mutual relations. This utilitarian view of language is based
on the erroneous science of etymology which teaches us nothing about
a words real meaning and hence nothing about ourselves. A surrealist
glossary breaks open this false prison-house of enlightened reason:
En dissequant les mots que nous aimons, sans nous soucier de suivre ni
letymologie, ni la signication admise, nous decouvrons leurs vertus les plus
caches et les ramications secretes qui se propagent a travers tout le langage,
canalises par les associations de sons, de formes et didees. Alors le langage se
transforme en oracle et nous avons la (si tenu quil soit) un l pour nous guider,
dans la Babel de notre esprit.
Despite the exoticist and prophetic gestures, we notice again Leiriss
technical and scientic interest in dissecting language to reveal the se-
cret relations within. The tone is subtly different from the more roman-
tic, revolutionary and deliberately deranged endorsement given these
remarks by an enthusiastic Artaud in the same issue:
Oui, voici le seul usage auquel puisse servir desormais le langage, un moyen
de folie, deliminations de la pensee, de rupture, le dedale des deraisons, et non
pas un ou tels cuistres des environs de la Seine canalisent leurs
retrecissements spirituels.
Leiriss project is both more scientic and less local: he is interested in
the analysis of words and the logic revealed by them in a way that will
eventually bring him into close proximity with the aims and techniques of
Texts and contexts
psychoanalysis. But in this he is in fact agreeing with Bretons dismissal
of etymology in Les Pas perdus () as the subjugation of language to a
pietre conservatisme humain whose horror of innity is ingrained in
the closed world of the dictionary. Breton encourages us in Les Mots
sans rides: de considerer le mot en soi; detudier daussi pres que
possible les reactions des mots les uns sur les autres. Leiris may also
have been aware of the six jeux de mots presented by Rrose Selavy
in Litterature, whose very title Breton on one occasion broke up into
Lits et Ratures. But it is perhaps Bretons famous conclusion to Les Mots
sans rides which best describes both the philosophy and technique of
Glossaire jy serre mes gloses: Jeux de mots, quand ce sont nos plus sures
raisons detre qui sont en jeu. Les mots du reste ont ni de jouer. Les
mots font lamour. Beyond the frivolity of punning, in which reason
plays with language as evidence of its control of the world, its condence
in its own identity, and its encyclopaedic and organizational use of the
dictionary to both these ends, lies the realization in les mots font lamour
that words are active and reproductive agents which produce the speaking
subject and reveal him to himself. This is the revolutionary factor which
Leiris even at this early stage is already beginning to introduce when
writing the self.
Many of the entries in Glossaire jy serre mes gloses metatextually pro-
nounce this very point (logically, given my earlier statement that the con-
tent of surrealist language is primarily itself ). One such example, typical
in its panache, is quau gte tot scat ! ( ).
This derides the very foundations of Cartesian knowledge and its logical
use of language as the aspirations of a slug, tediously slithering towards
a miserable haven in which to hide from the innity revealed within
the abstract philosophical term cogito. Elsewhere, all credos, whether
philosophical or religious, which keep language in subservience to the
operations of abstract thought are exposed as props by an autonomous
signier: ode sacree. Les cordes au dos du decor ( ).
Symbols of authority, and the transcendence they bring, are similarly
exposed by the language used to designate them:
= spectre. (MSM )
lest petrie des paroles tues. (MSM )
, transe sans danse. (MSM )
= spectre. (MSM )
, armure. (MSM )
ramure de larmes petriees. (MSM )
minotaure amateur dhommes. Saumatre traumatisme. (MSM )
loi que jaime. Ma moelle. (MSM )
Following the chain of signiers reveals the extent to which the subter-
ranean law guiding the original brash calligramme was one relating to the
fear of death. As we shall see, this is a constant factor in Leiriss works. The
texts productivity, far from exhibiting the sceptre in order to command
Texts and contexts
LE POINT CARDINAL
AURORA
Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour is the fourth and last of Leiriss
major texts dating initially from the twenties which I am analysing here
in terms of their contribution to his emerging approach to the writing
Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism
of the self. The book is in the form of a dream diary which contains,
in a transformed state, some of Leiriss earliest writing: entries in the
posthumously published Journal for March, April and
April , for example, form the basis for the second, third and
fourth dreams recorded in Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour. These
dreams are also chronologically contemporary with the earliest exam-
ples of the anti-dictionary Glossaire jy serre mes gloses: issues four and ve of
La Revolution surrealiste, in addition to containing calligrammatic material
by Leiris, recount a total of nine dreams from the eventual diary. Like
the anti-dictionary, moreover, the dream diary offered Leiris a particular
approach to self-expression, encapsulated in the collections epigraph
from Nerval: Le reve est une seconde vie, to which he remained at-
tached: just as the Glossaire jy serre mes gloses was reissued in expanded
form thirty years later (and further supplemented by such late texts as
Langage tangage ou ce que les mots me disent ) so the original Nuits sans
nuit became, in , the denitive Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour.
Within this consistent formal approach to self-representation, how-
ever, the temporal and intellectual expanse contained in the diary results
in individual accounts which, on both the narrative and metanarrative
levels, reect contrasting conceptions of the self and its situations which
are gleaned progressively from surrealism, psychoanalysis, existential-
ism, or post-war anti-colonialism. Secondly, in conjunction with this di-
achronic development, the collection also bears out a more synchronic
tension between an inspirational spiritual principle and the condensed
representation of an epiphany. The collection does not question the be-
lief that the dream is the complete and undeniable evidence of a poetic
truth, a model learned from the rst issue of La Revolution surrealiste and
celebrated notably by Aragons Une vague de reves; but it tempers this
sense of ecstatic being with a writing principle, to be found in all of
Leiriss work, whose technical and analytic workings conict with un-
qualied approval for a pure, useless, unemployable dream. And lastly,
a third, related tension emerges clearly once individual instances of a
dreams fatality converge as a collection. Their repeated recourse to
the drama of mystery and detection (a rhythm that endorses both the
purity of the dream and the power of its decipherment) has the effect
of dulling in advance the events poetic potential, and so of relocating
it in a realist rather than surrealist perspective. In the same way, their
sequential (and hence implicitly inconsequential ) nature replaces a closed
uniqueness of self-presence with the coudoiement of social encounter and
its production of the dreaming self. Together, these tensions indicate a
Texts and contexts
crucial development in Leiriss writing of the self which derives from
the recognition of two major constraints. The rst involves a dramatic
localization of the individual in terms of both achievement and answer-
ability: the surrealist alter-ego of Fantomas or Jack lEventreur has been
replaced by a bourgeois aneur. The second involves the obligation to
enter extended narrative form: for the rst time in his surrealist writing,
Leiris is recognizably subject to linguistic laws and cultural construc-
tions, formed by a social syntax rather than obliterated by a sublime
aphasia. This conicts with the opposite temptation, simultaneously de-
veloped in Glossaire jy serre mes gloses, to explode the rules of representation
and so conrm an absolute self-intuition and self-expression. This op-
position, which we have already noted, far from being resolved will fuel
the most passionate metatextual moments in Leiriss major autobiogra-
phies. But it is the approach to psychology and form in Nuits sans nuit
et quelques jours sans jour which enables an autobiographical dialectic to
develop in Leiris. While the collection is sustained by a desire to uncover
and inhabit the moment of pure being, its dramas, to which the self must
respond, show clearly how individual identity is now perpetually renew-
able only because it is already circumstantial. Nuits sans nuit et quelques
jours sans jour can be said truly to break open the still not fully negotiated
nature of self-identity in Aurora or Glossaire jy serre mes gloses, then, with a
Baudelairean psychologism which acknowledges the transitory or fugi-
tive nature of selfhood. As such, it is a crucial text, for it brings centrally
into play what henceforth will impinge increasingly upon self, situation
and structure in Leiris, namely, the full phenomenology of modernity.
The modernity and urbanity of the dreams self are immediately ap-
parent. The je in his many situations is a psychiatric patient, a lm-
goer, a tourist, a typist; his heroic alter-egos (especially invoked by the
earlier dreams) are such modern artists as Limbour, Tual, Masson and
Ben Turpin (!). The correlating Other, classically embodied in these
dreams by that terrible and incommunicable being, Woman, is equally
a projection of a male bourgeois, appearing as whore, chambermaid,
moll, nurse, but, above all, wife. At the same time, though, the stereo-
typical scenarios suggested by these cliches are reinforced by the persis-
tence of more abstract personications: the je is a dead man, a fearful
lover, a soldier, a prisoner; while the Woman is Minerva, a prophetess,
an Oriental. In itself this latter tendency could be viewed as a prod-
uct of cultural alienation as much as of desires reiteration. But it is
above all the tension generated between modern and classical image
(employed most dramatically in LAge dhomme), as it here recurs within
Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism
the dreams permutations, which brings out the speed, fragmentation
and reversibility of the self s world, and the consequent instability of
that self which the world conditions. This splitting of the self between
instability and constancy is repeated on the level of the dreams transcrip-
tion. The je often objecties itself through an intentionality (je pousse
(N ); je persiste (N )) reinforced on occasions by a reexive verb
(je me jette (N ); je me dis (N ); je mapercois (N )). The same
effect is produced by a contradictory negativity, wherein the enonciation
afrms the opposite of the enonce, as in je suis mort (N ) or jai oublie
(N ). Often the splitting of the self is the actual drama recorded, as
in the fourth dream, beginning: Un soir, en entrant dans ma chambre,
je mapercois assis sur mon lit. Dun coup de poing, janeantis le fantome
qui a vole mon apparence (N ). Here, as in other examples (N ), the
several different grammatical designations of the rst person add to this
phantasmic self-image. Lastly, in a particularly abyssal twist, individ-
ual dreams themselves acknowledge or experience the state of dreaming
(N , , ), a moment where the terrible anxiety produced testies to
the radical doubt out of which the self s grasp of reality must none the less
emerge.
Modernity and reversibility equally dene the dream situations. The
most typical dynamic in the book is that of the archetypal modern tale:
the detective adventure, with its speed, violence, alienation and dif-
cult decipherment. Not that this is the only recognizable genre however:
indeed, the uidity of genre and register in the dreams assists the impres-
sion that any event is reversible and exists also only within the modern,
urban context of a simultaneity of adventures. Different interpretations
can of course also be placed on the dreams situation. A psychoanalytic
reading is fairly obvious: in general terms, the Oedipus story, like the
dream in Leiris, is an ironic drama of self-deception and self-detection;
in particular the processes of condensation and displacement which,
according to Freud, in part constitute the dreams technical workings
continually resurface in Leiris as a series of brutal obliterations and muta-
tions. These, acting both within and between dreams, condition the self s
situation, which is consistent precisely in being constantly differently
centred . . . and consequently transformed into something extraneous.
But a more political or sociological interpretation is equally valid, the col-
lections overall situation being also a permanent revolution wherein the
je continually registers what Benjamin called the Schockerlebnis or shock
experience of modern life and negotiates an endless series of what Marx
called social hieroglyphics. Whatever the interpretation, though, the
Texts and contexts
situations modernity and reversibility translate, in concrete terms, into
a dangerous trial. Time and again, the je undergoes torture, penetra-
tion and execution. He is red down a barrel, threatened by a vulture,
engulfed by waves. He ends most dreams by screaming. In a very lit-
eral rendering of the savagery and bestiality of modern life, the dreams
overow with dogs, cats, lions, gorillas, panthers, leopards, monkeys,
rams, toads. Reversibility is a constant law: the hero climbs up only to
fall down; he boards a boat only to suffer the threat of drowning. This
possibility of annihilation is in fact at its strongest in the two most obses-
sively repeated scenarios, those of the journey and the sexual overture.
And signicantly, where dreams conjure up a nirvana-like opposite of
the dangerous situation, it is always a reality based on an anti-modern
or anti-urban or anti-European existence which death cannot affect:
Iles, cites, dautres climats, forteresses ou chateaux qui surplombent la
mer: images dun lieu assez distant ou separe pour que la mort ne puisse
my relancer (N ). The unchangeability of these distant places in turn
brings out how the locus of the self s situation acts often specically as
a threshold. This lieu de passage, as I have mentioned, can involve literal
travel, via a bus, a tram, a steamship, a boat, a bicycle, a train, and so
on; but literally it indicates a psychological journey, via halls, grottos,
foyers or stairways. It even marks a threshold onto the sacred as loosely
dened, individual dreams unfolding in churches, brothels and theatres.
Above all, the threshold exists in a modern, urban setting, as a hospital,
a cinema, a prison, a dance-hall, a hotel, a cafe or restaurant, not for-
getting, of course, a library. But there is one, abstract, level on which the
dreams situations register most powerfully the impact of modernity and
reversibility on the conceptual unity of the self: namely, the changing ide-
ological convictions recorded chronologically in the collection. Thus the
surrealist-inspired readings of the dreams from the twenties, involving
linguistic overdetermination, anthropomorphism, and the conuence of
scandal and sentiment, become overlaid in the dreams of the thirties with
more socio-political visions, such as colonialism (N ) or communism
(N ), in the dreams of the early forties with the concrete metaphors
of Occupation, and in the latest examples with the post-war and post-
colonial readings epitomized by the central phrase of one of the few
Chinese dreams recorded: Que lisez-vous? Militez-vous? (N ). The
few constant features in this changing ideological landscape, notably the
fact that the situation continues to be as much verbal as physical, em-
phasize how the collection bears out the complete cultural construction
of the self.
Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism
Changeability is lastly also a strong feature of the collections many
structural patterns. I have already remarked on the roles of conden-
sation and displacement, and we can remind ourselves here of how
Freud saw the formal dimensions of dreams as being the key to their real
content. It is plain, then, that the dreams oscillations (inside/outside,
passion/death, mystery/detection, night/day, and so on) are in them-
selves a structural representation of the self s mutability. By the same
token, it is equally plain that we cannot simply laud the dreams poet-
ics of presence without recognizing how this sense of parousia is from
the very beginning itself differently centred by the various contextu-
alizing forms of secondary revision. This critical distance shows up in
the collection above all as a metanarrative level, one which tempers
the dreams valeur de certitude en elle-meme, qui, dans son temps, nest
point expose a mon desaveu, or assured and celebratory self-postulation,
with a relativizing questioning of the dreams accuracy, message, values
and motives. This lucid disenchantment is encoded in each dreams
dramatic structure, wherein the original mysterious moment typically
undergoes an analytic turn. (The occasionally involuntary nature of the
analysis, in conformity with the idea of the dreams inherently revelatory
power, in no sense invalidates this process of detection or verication.)
The inquietude (N ) marking the commencement of the analysis thus
contradicts Bretons view that in the dream langoissante question de la
possibilite ne se pose pas, for the most absolute kind of possibility, that of
the dreamers own existential nature, is posed as a question through these
structural ironizations, and not only in the dreams recorded during the
existentialist period. Of course, the composite structure of the collec-
tion reinforces this relativization. And in neither case does this internal
distance contradict Freuds basic assertion that dreams have no means
of representing logical relations, and that what relations appear are in
fact part of the dreams material, not a representation of the intellectual
work performed during the dream itself. For the point we are making
is precisely that reversibility of the self is structurally presented by the
dreams.
The dreaming interaction of self, situation and structure in Nuits
sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour brings Leiris from a radical individu-
alism, where the Other is predominantly a phantasmic and potentially
deadly projection of the self s desire, to the threshold of a social theory
that acknowledges the determining fact of the Other on self-intuition and
self-expression. The heuristic, accidental and contemporary dimensions
of the dream diary have encouraged the dissolution of the hypostatized
Texts and contexts
state of society preserved, when actually seen, in Glossaire jy serre mes
gloses, Le Point cardinal and Aurora. Their neurotic sensitivity has here been
resolved as the mutability of modernity itself. In addition, the discursive
and relativizing nature of the writings forms have naturally promoted a
consensual rather than hysterical construction of self-identity, for all the
traumatic tenor. Together these factors predict the attraction which the
intellectual frameworks of ethnography and psychoanalysis were going
to provide for Leiriss writing of the self from the beginning of the thirties.
It is to those writings that we should now turn.
Dans la periode de grande licence qui suivit les hostilites, le jazz fut un signe
de ralliement, un etandard orgiaque, aux couleurs du moment. Il agissait mag-
iquement et son mode dinuence peut etre compare a une possession. Cetait le
meilleur element pour donner leur vrai sens a ces fetes, un sens religieux, avec com-
munion par la danse, lerotisme latent ou manifeste, et la boisson . . . abandon
a la joie animale . . . Premiere manifestation des negres, mythe des edens de
couleur qui devait me mener jusquen Afrique et par-dela lAfrique, jusqua
lethnographie. (AH )
The fundamental nature of this shift of emphasis and its radical implica-
tions for a writing of the self, come over clearly in a contemporary article
by Georges Henri Riviere, A propos de lart negre. Notwithstanding
the typical traces of Levy-Bruhlian racism and blood-tinged excitement,
Riviere importantly isolates the circulation of affect and its underpin-
ning of identity, noting signicantly how aesthetics and technique are
similarly dependent on a network of relations:
[D]ans les societes primitives, le sentiment esthetique, loin de saccumuler
dans les objets specialises, circule dans les institutions, dans les metiers, dans
les croyances, comme le sang de nos veines dans tous les points de notre
corps . . . Dans les civilisations qui nous occupent, tout se tient, tout depend de tout,
comme lecrit notre collaborateur Jacques Soustelle: murs, techniques, croy-
ances sont etroitement solidaires et un reseau de prescriptions et dinterdits
enveloppe lindividu, le xe ou le soustrait a son clan, lasservit a son totem.
Between and , prior to travelling to Africa, Leiris was to re-
hearse the implications of Maussian ethnography for an anti-idealist
Recasting the self: from surrealism to ethnography
view of selfhood in Georges Batailles dissident journal, Documents.
Bataille () was a contemporary of Breton and Artaud with
whom Leiris came into contact in , and who founded the journal
largely in a spirit of rejection of the emmerdeurs idealistes constituting
the Surrealist clique. Financed by an increasingly uncomprehending
and apprehensive Georges Wildenstein, Documentss direction, like the
somewhat misleading title, were Batailles own. Supposedly a deliber-
ately eclectic publication devoted to Archeologie, Beaux Arts, Ethno-
graphie, Variete, its true nature is more accurately given by Leiriss
recollection in De Bataille lImpossible a limpossible Documents:
Bien quil fut loin dy exercer un pouvoir sans controle, cette revue semble
maintenant avoir ete faite a son image: publication Janus tournant lune de ses
faces vers les hautes spheres de la culture (dont Bataille etait bon gre mal gre
un ressortissant par son metier comme par sa formation) et lautre vers une
zone sauvage ou lon saventure sans carte geographique ni passeport daucune
espece. (Br )
In fact, Leiris, as editorial assistant, was perhaps the only person to at-
tempt the full range of the subtitles ambitions, contributing no fewer
than pieces, including collaborative ventures, on every aspect of the
arts as well as on ethnography. But such iconoclasm did mean that dis-
affected surrealists studied lhomme total alongside emerging French
ethnographers. These included the above-mentioned Shaeffner, a mu-
sicologist, Marcel Griaule, the leader of the Mission, and Georges-Henri
Riviere, who reorganized the Trocadero museum. The peculiar mix-
ture of motives and enthusiasms created a unique form of ethnographic
surrealism, capable of refuelling Leiriss abiding dream of a system simul-
taneously aesthetic, moral and scientic. Documents juxtaposed examples
of high and low culture in a presentational as well as intellectual way that
effectively recast the surrealist breakdown of mimetic representation as a
natural ethnographic phenomenon. The surrealist principle of metaphor
(the juxtaposition of umbrella and sewing-machine) informed the mag-
azines ethnographic aim to expose the heterogeneity of cultural reality
and the ideological nature of identity. Such an aesthetic arguably still pre-
served a contemporary disposition to sentimentality and fetishism; and
its juxtapositions of Fantomas with pre-Columbian art, or photographs of
big toes with articles on Gnosticism can be dismissed as merely disingen-
uous. But a main purpose and value of such ethnographic collage was
to recast the surrealist ideal cosmogony as an aggressively anti-idealist
recognition of base material. The surrealist fetish becomes strategically
Texts and contexts
a subversive museographical witness. The big toe and Gnosticism in
themselves expose the (surrealist) taboo placed on anything indicating
our materialist origins, while their juxtaposition conrms the existence of
the taboo in challenging our hierarchy of artistic and intellectual values.
On a practical level, it is hardly surprising that such a carpe et lapin
journal did not survive for long, but Leiriss above-mentioned article
makes plain that for him the journals impossible form signied a higher
impossibility: the attempt to supersede the surrealist conceptual unity
with the ethnographic view of the body as a material and cultural collec-
tion. It should be added that this review of Batailles production, while
admiring of the intractable confrontation it sustains, carefully prefers to
view such a tenacious enterprise ultimately as a qui-perd-gagne game
that only one obsessive spirit can play, and without any progression
or true partnership. Given the journals materialist and heterogeneous
message, this eccentric image is telling (all the more so given supercial
similarities to a long-game strategy in La Regle du jeu). As we shall see,
Leiris will absorb the lesson regarding the dislocating of conceptual unity,
but without desisting from the larger apprenticeship, concerned with the
possibility of self-writing, which will lead him to establish a distance from
the wilder shores of acephalic dissipation.
A number of position papers written by Bataille between
and but not published in Documents make plain the aesthetico-
political disagreement with surrealism (and the psychological rivalry with
Breton). La vieille taupe of denounces the Icarian adven-
ture of surrealism in materialist marxist terms, contrasting the formers
representation of revolution as a lumiere redemptrice selevant au-dessus
du monde, au-dessus des classes, le comble de lelevation desprit (p. )
with the old-mole revolution which hollows out chambers dans un sol
decompose et repugnant pour le nez delicat des utopistes (p. ). The
latter begins, then, dans les entrailles du sol, comme dans les entrailles
materialistes des proletariens (p. ). This is an assumption of Bretons
charge, at the end of the Second Manifeste du surrealisme, that Bataille is a
philosophe-excrements. Batailles response is to rub Bretons nose in
it, denouncing his purely literary view of base earth (and of Marx), and
insisting precisely on overturning this imbecilic elevation through an
excavation of the fetid ditch of bourgeois culture. It is through this
immersion, and not because of larme vengeresse de lidee contre la
bestialite, as Breton would have it, that la force et la liberte humaine
setabliront (p. ). La valeur dusage de D. A. F. de Sade, from the
same period, and Le Jesuve and LOeil pineal, both probably written
Recasting the self: from surrealism to ethnography
in , continue with this dirty protest. The rst praises the literal dra-
mas of excretion and appropriation in de Sade as a morality permitting
the violent eruption of a heterological body, one that reverses the philo-
sophical process and so abolishes exploitation through a sacricial and
revolutionary expenditure. (Breton, in the Second Manifeste, was to reclaim
de Sade for his own sense of surrealist integrity. ) The other two pieces
link the excremental fantasy (p. ) to the pineal eye, that mystical sup-
plementary organ of vision which in Bataille rises from the shit-smeared
and obscene anus to burst orgasmically out of the top of the skull, in a
violent discharge that makes existence immediate, a durable orgasm,
a blind consummation, une evre qui mange letre (p. ).
The shit continues to hit the fan (Bataille denouncing Bretons moral-
izing idealism, Breton denouncing Batailles anti-dialectical materialism)
within the pages of Documents. In Le Langage des eurs, the ideal sym-
bol par excellence, the rose, is stripped down to its hairy sexual organs
and admired for its ability to represent a sacrilege, once it reaches its rotten
form. The article closes with the image of de Sade tossing rose petals
into a manure ditch; Breton in the Second manifeste replied in Mallarmean
tone that la rose, privee des ses petales, reste la rose. This in turn led
Bataille, in Le Jeu lugubre, to celebrate, in Dals canvas of that name,
the soiled subjects shit-stain as both cause primitive et remede and in
the process to recall how, in prison, de Sade screamed down his waste-
pipe, before concluding with a provocation directed obviously at Breton:
il est devenu impossible dorenavant de reculer et de sabriter dans les
terres de tresors de la Poesie sans etre publiquement traite de lache
(p. ). Other pieces focus squarely on de-idealized body parts: eye
(cut, lugubrious, enucleated); mouth (bestial, screaming, spurting); most
famously, on account of the three accompanying photographs, the big
toe (the most human part of our bodies, since the most connected to
our baseness). These and similar celebrations of the bodys irreducible
indecency obviously present radical implications for self-representation,
in terms of presentation as well as vision. Surrealisms tendency to tran-
scendence, verticality, metaphor and ideal unity, is challenged by the
irruption of an aggressive degradation, a violently materialist disartic-
ulation of selfhood. Leiriss apprenticeship in writing the self will be
massively inuenced by this location of identity within corporeal mass,
and by the documentary, testamentary and anti-poetic forms deemed
to be tting to this vision.
It is signicant that several of Leiriss articles for Documents appeared
under the rubric Dictionary, for in effect they shift from an obsession
Texts and contexts
with self-justifying glossolalia towards an ethnographically charged and
socially geared vision of selfhood as corporal and relative. For example,
rather than focus uniquely on the autonomy of the signier displayed in
Glossaire jy serre mes gloses, the article Metaphore recognizes the dialecti-
cal nature of metaphor. Language is not now an alchemical process that
solely refers to and relies on its own essence: it is the gural representa-
tion of our cultural values, whose hierarchy is discursively produced in
a way that engages the speaker in real social exchange and relativity:
Non seulement le langage, mais toute la vie intellectuelle repose sur un jeu de
transpositions, de symboles, quon peut qualier de metaphorique. Dautre part,
la connaissance procede toujours par comparaison, de sorte que tous les objets
connus sont lies les auns aux autres par des rapports dinterdependance.
When Leiris concludes the article with the remark: Cet article lui-meme
est metaphorique, he is not at all suggesting a linguistic abyss deprived
of a referential ground, but is instead turning from the boundless self-
generation of Glossaires language and looking towards the social concept
of language used by ethnography, a concept that additionally has the
effect of presenting a more historical and interactive self. This new ref-
erential framework is displayed in another article, Talkie, where Leiris
comments on popular American movies. The voice of the ideal heroine
in Weary River, we are told, transports us to a realm of sensualite ardente
in a lm that is otherwise idiotically puritan. But the presentation of this
typically surrealist amoureuse, fetishized as pulsing throat and uttering
ngers, here has the effect of bringing to the fore the base material behind
the production of the disembodied voice of surrealism. A new material-
ist concept of the speaking self, one that is more socially determined and
signifying, is literally embodied in this example taken deliberately from
low rather than high culture. The implication of surrealist ethnography
for a linguistic theory of self-identity is most explicitly borne out in the
article Leau a la bouche. Signicantly, the article itself formed part
of a larger, collaborative piece of writing: Leiriss contribution formed
the second paragraph, while the rst, entitled Crachat-ame, was by
Griaule. Leiris concentrates on the privileged situation of the mouth.
Ideally, the mouth is the site of the word, the sender and receiver of kisses,
the generator of surrealist love and poetry. Materially, it scandalizes and
exposes ideal love and its formulations, by literally bringing up the or-
ganic viscosity of being in the sacrilegious form of spittle. The mouths
divinity is daily sullied, and abstract discourse derided by the organ of
nutrition and excretion. The mucosity of spittle is therefore the perfect
Recasting the self: from surrealism to ethnography
symbolic form of an ethnographic revision of both surrealist idealism
and bourgeois etiquette. No more material expression could be found to
offer happy release to a speaking subject increasingly aphasiac in the face
of surrealist absolutism and bourgeois conformity. As such it is le crachat
dun demiurge en delire, riant aux eclats davoir expectore cette larve
vaniteuse, comique tetard qui se gone en viande soufe de demi-dieu
(p. ). It is also a gesture that brings the surrealist self into the ethno-
graphic domain of sacrilege and sacrice, where the bodys functions and
excretions form an inextricable element of sacred reality. And nally,
it provocatively poses fundamental methodological difculties for the
museums collecting mania. Leiriss later autobiographies will therefore
be inuenced crucially by both a surrealist conception of language and
an anti-idealist ethnography of the bodys functions and behaviour.
This lesson of surrealist ethnography for a vision and a writing of the
self ran in tandem with Leiriss contemporary experience of psychoanal-
ysis. It was again Bataille who, in , suggested to Leiris that he enter
into psychoanalysis as a way of responding to his increasingly desperate
feelings of genital and intellectual impotence. Bataille referred Leiris to
his own analyst, Adrien Borel, by all accounts an avuncular and non-
dogmatic founder member of both the Societe psychanalytique de Paris
and the Evolution psychiatrique movement. With Bataille, Leiris and
Rene Allendy, he also founded the Societe de Psychologie Collective in
; this collective was to publish a two-part article on circumcision
as ritualized castration in and, more generally, to interest itself
in the collective manifestations of the miraculous and the occultist.
Leiris remained in analysis from to , and the psychoanalytic
concepts of the linguistic nature of the self and the revelation of the un-
conscious through language, were to be exploited in LAge dhomme. This
suggests that Borel was perhaps well-suited to bridge the gap between
Leiriss surrealist and ethnographic interests in ecstatic self-loss, on the
one hand, and his contradictory need to recover and retain the basis for
self-identity and expression on the other, the latter rendered pathological
by the Surrealist goal of unmediated unity. Certainly Borels readings of
the convulsionnaires resemble an academic and medical explanation
of the Saints noirs adored by Leiris. Leiris remained reticent, though,
about his analysis and adherence to psychoanalytic doctrine: if he is to
be believed, he read little of the primary literature other than the in-
troductory Psychopathology of Everyday Life; and while understanding in a
surrealist way the attention paid to language and the belief in the central
role played by sexuality, he took the decision to play down the importance
Texts and contexts
of psychoanalysis in favour of the vocabulary of direct political commit-
ment in the additions to LAge dhomme (denigration we could of
course choose to read as indicative of the disciplines real status). In any
event, the analysis of dreams, the language of the unconscious and the
phantasmagoria of sexuality, which remain constant features of Leiriss
work, are central to the ethnographic journal LAfrique fantome. Like
ethnography, then, the human science of psychoanalysis conrmed the
diacritical nature of the linguistic sign to Leiris, and helped to relocate
his surrealist dualism within the more complex social jeux de construction
which he was to analyse (in both himself as well as his surroundings) in
an overdetermined Africa.
Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre: LAfrique fantomes open-
ing quotation, taken ttingly from Rousseaus Confessions, summarizes the
approach of a massive volume that is both the single triumph of surrealist
ethnography and the prototype ethnography of the ethnographer. From
the beginning of this work, the relative nature of identity, the calling into
question of values and civilizations, and the introspective preoccupa-
tions underlying the surface objectivity of an ethnographic science, are
all apparent. LAfrique fantome begins with a fundamental recognition of
the other, a belief that leads this eldwork document continually into the
mysterious and sacred terrain of dreams, fetishes and secret languages.
This cultural and methodological relativity in turn calls into question
the dubious deontology of a Western science felt to be collaborating in
neo-colonialism. Together, these personal and critical meditations cre-
ate an atypical ethnographic format: a chronological and syntagmatic
(rather than paradigmatic) journal intime, whose entry into the culture of
the other engenders an increasingly polyphonic representation, in which
realist irony alternates with surrealist possession. In addition to being a
classic of ethnographic literature, therefore, the book can be read as a
crucial stage in the development of Leiriss unique form of autobiogra-
phy. Its language content displays the evolution of a surrealist poetics
into a socially and politically determined autobiographical situation,
while its form reects a general challenge to the traditional concepts of
genre assumed to exist between poetry, autobiography, ethnography and
psychoanalysis. It is not surprising, though it is ironic, that both Mauss
and Griaule criticized professionally this massive document of synthetic
anthropology for, in its constant yearning to live out a true sense of the
Recasting the self: from surrealism to ethnography
sacred, the work goes beyond being a surrealist ethnography or even
an existential repudiation of scientic objectivity in favour of moral and
political embarquement and temoignage: that is, it ultimately constitutes an
exhaustive programme of auto-ethnography.
LAfrique fantome is the story of a journey. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti
crossed Africa for twenty-one months between and . It was
well publicized and patronized in Parisian circles, thanks to the preva-
lent negrophilia I have mentioned and to the exploitation of personal
connections (Raymond Roussel, for example, was one of its patrons). Its
booty (one of Leiriss professional errors being that he did not conceal
the fact that some of the objects brought back had been stolen) included
over , artefacts for the Trocaderos exhibitions and research labora-
tories, as well as countless photographs and recordings. The expedition
was led by Marcel Griaule, and Leiris was the secretaire-archiviste, his
special concerns being the initiatory language of the Dogons of Sanga
and the possession rites of the Ethiopians of Gondar (he was to publish
academic theses and monographs on both subjects). But it is his diary
of the expedition, sent back in batches to his wife in Paris and published
apparently without change in , which exposes the imperialist legacy
and neo-colonialist maintenance of power-relations deeply ingrained in
the assumptions and aims of this African Mission. This endictment of a
nineteenth-century rationalist epistemology looks back, as the Rousseau
epigraph suggests, to the eighteenth-century philosophical voyage, and
also predates both the emergence of negritude as an historical force after
and Levi-Strausss farewell to exoticism in the structural trav-
elogue Tristes Tropiques. Like the latter book, LAfrique fantomes content
rejects the inevitable abolition of otherness, while its structure acknowl-
edges the irreducible temporal bind in which the ethnographer is caught
between observation and abstraction, solidarity and archaeology, posses-
sion and analysis. The self-reexive melancholy subtending both these
aspects is clearly displayed in the books priere dinserer. In itself this is a
miniature narrative of the move from Aurora to ethnography, from ight
to commitment. A weary Leiris is shown setting off on a poetic adven-
ture and a ritual of self-renewal which happens to take him to Africa.
There his self-obsessions are brought to a desperate pitch, forcing him
to acknowledge that self-realization lies not in escaping from, but in
actively working within, Western capitalism. This ethnographic prise de
conscience is, as he suggests, equally present in the rest of the volume as a
latent design. Both the content and structure of the actual text constantly
dramatize this ethnography of the ethnographer. Leiris describes it in the
Texts and contexts
books Preamble as ce journal a double entree, . . . mi-documentaire, mi-
poetique (AF ). In general, scientic pretensions and capitalist acquis-
itiveness oblige the secretaire-archiviste to chronicle Europes mission
in Africa. But the surrealist ethnographer, whose knowledge of psycho-
analysis and political questioning of poetics make him personally and
professionally appreciative of the eruption of the sacred and the opacity
of language, transforms this academic reciprocity into a dramatic unfold-
ing of the operations of the unconscious and a political apprenticeship,
whose highpoint is reached when Leiris exclaims: Jai besoin de tremper
dans leur drame, de toucher leurs facons detre, de baigner dans la chair
vive. Au diable lethnographie! (AF ).
From the beginning of the book, then, a general ideological struggle
is fought out within ethnography: scientic realism or magic surrealism,
analysis or possession, politics or poetry, language as sign or language as
thing. This debate ultimately concerns which language is to possess and
present Leiriss sense of self, and a further series of binary oppositions
gives dramatic form to this metaphysical struggle. Leiris sets off from
Bordeaux in Baudelairean spirits, in search of tropical rivages heureux.
Singing songs and sipping aperitifs, he enjoys his tourist cruise before
arriving to bring French order to the chaos of Africa: Je commence
a entrevoir ce quil y a de passionnant dans la recherche scientique:
marcher de piece a conviction a piece a conviction, denigme a enigme,
poursuivre la verite comme a la piste . . . (AF ). This truth, which
is to be extracted from the deceitful natives (AF ), will be inscribed
within the prevalent orientalism of the cultured European mind, whose
references and analogies are to Heart of Darkness, Uncle Toms Cabin, Robinsoe
Crusoe and Paul et Virginie! But instead the reality of Africa disappoints
the intellectual tourist. Vulgarity, boredom and a hostile climate turn an
increasingly disillusioned and frustrated sensibility back on itself. Food,
sleep and loneliness come to dominate the narrative, which attempts to
stem its mounting anguish by reducing itself to recording the brutish
mechanics of colonial bureaucracy: Journee purement bureaucratique.
Classement. Courier. Visites (AF ). Having ed the cafard of bour-
geois mediocrity in France, an increasingly anguished narcissism nds no
exotic release in its phantom Africa: meme existence mesquine, meme
vulgarite, meme monotonie, et meme destruction systematique de la
beaute (AF ). The rumblings of war in Europe exacerbate his dark
thoughts on sexual and intellectual impotence, and Africa comes to re-
semble a landscape from Aurora, the unconscious and hallucinatory locus
of European despair:
Recasting the self: from surrealism to ethnography
Voici enn , la terre des a lombre, des convois desclaves, des
festins cannibales, des cranes vides, de toutes les choses qui sont mangees, cor-
rodees, perdues. La haute silhouette du maudit famelique qui toujours ma hante
se dresse entre le soleil et moi. Cest sous son ombre que je marche, ombre plus
dure mais plus revigorante aussi que les plus diamantes des rayons. (AF )
But as Leiriss attempts to express the inexpressible come to acknowledge
that the real subject of the journal is the ethnography of the ethnogra-
pher, so the ethnography of Africa truly begins. Leiriss recognition of
his religious rather than scientic impulses (AF ) opens the way for
a passionate record of fetishism, sacrice and possession. Grafti, cave
markings and the performances of griots all stand as alternative docu-
ments to the bureaucratic classication of the African spirit:
. (AF )
Le griot . . . tracait en mesure des dessins dans le sable. Cetaient des carres et
des gures magiques islamiques . . . Fusion de la musique, du dessin, de la danse,
de la magie. Le personnage semblait completement hors de lui. (AF )
Un enchevetrement de lignes ocre rouge, lignes doubles et regulierement
coupees de petites barres perpendiculaires disposees deux par deux. Le tout
forme un dessin, parfaitement evident en tant que dessin bien quobscur quant
a la representation. (AF )
It is the surrealist valorization of an art language not devoted to the
ego and representation which allows this spectral image of Africa to
emerge. From this point, Leiris proceeds more rapidly from revelation to
revelation (AF ). Central to this surreal reciprocity is Leiriss interest
in the circumcision societies for young boys, and the symbolic entrance
to manhood which their rituals represent. In this we can see a prototype
of Leiriss later autobiographical examination of the painful passage to
adult sexuality recorded in LAge dhomme. It is African children who in
general break down Leiriss inhibitions (AF , ) with their natural
gaiety, curiosity and desire for attention. In addition, their willingness
to cooperate allows Leiris to examine a coherent microcosmic culture,
complete with symbolic objects (AF ), songs (AF ), painful practices
(AF ), complex exchange-systems (AF ) and taboos (AF ), whose
language he learns to speak and translate.
But if it is a surrealist attentiveness to the mysterious and revela-
tory reservoir within language which has thus far helped to reveal the
Texts and contexts
phantom cultural identities of Africa, Leiriss subsequent attempt to de-
cipher and translate the secret, initiatory language of the Dogons chal-
lenges some of the absolutist assumptions of surrealist theories of iden-
tity and expression. Leiriss description of this language reminds us of
Glossaire jy serre mes gloses: la langue secrete est une langue de formules,
faite denigmes, de coq-a-lane, de calembours (?), de phonemes en cas-
cades, de symboles sinterpenetrant (AF ). Leiris notes down a text
delivered in this secret language, and recites it back to the approval of the
elder who is instructing him (and wrongly imagining that Leiris wishes
to be initiated into the mysteries of the societe des masques). Leiriss incan-
tation, beyond conferring on him a social identity, conrms the lesson of
Glossaire, namely that the materiality of a language-system in every case
creates and sustains self-identity. But far from simply conrming surre-
alisms conceptual unity of self-consciousness, the sequel to the incident
reveals the inadequacy of regarding either language or identity as a closed
and self-referential system. Leiriss attempts to have each of the words
of the incantation rigidly translated is met with irritation and eventual
anger. The text is signicant only as a general signifying form, not as an
atomistic network of isolatable signiers. The system of language and the
notion of identity which exists through it are only socially and integrally
signifying. The lesson is conrmed in a further amusing incident which
takes place a fortnight later. Once again Leiris seeks to isolate the syntax
of the secret language in order to compose a literal rather than cultural
translation. Lining up a row of pebbles, Leiris attributes one French word
to each, and then asks for the corresponding Dogon word. His intervie-
wee, however, picks up the rst stone, corresponding to the word man,
and rolls it up and down the table, explaining that the man is going for a
walk. Leiris recognizes that if his interviewee appears childishly incapable
of conceptualizing language as a separate structural entity, he himself is
guilty of attributing an idealist hypostasis to both language and the iden-
tity of man: Une double stupidite: celle dAmbibe, incapable davoir
une claire notion du langage en tant que tel; la mienne, capable davoir
traite les mots dune phrase comme des entites separees (AF ). These
examples of linguistic, cultural and methodological relativity are pecu-
liarly doubled and repeated by dividing the text into two parts. The effect
is to condense the narrative, and as mood changes become more volatile,
so metatextual meditations become more prolonged. Once again, Leiris
emphasizes how disillusionment is a prelude to such auto-ethnography:
the closing words of Part I, enn au seuil de lexotisme! (AF ), give
way only to a sombre picture of Ethiopias precarious political position
Recasting the self: from surrealism to ethnography
in the years immediately prior to Mussolinis invasion and the spineless
complicity of the League of Nations. Leiris meditates increasingly on his
own political role in Africa and the true motivations behind his pres-
ence. He acknowledges that he is less interested in the scientic aims
of the Mission than in the search for a muse (AF ). This results in
entries on the relative merits of psychoanalysis versus a bonte animale
de vagin (AF ). Phobias are then revealed which openly recall the
dynamic details of Aurora (AF ). The ethnography openly becomes
self-analysis: Diverses choses mapparaissent. Une grande partie de ma
nevrose tient a lhabitude que jai de cots incomplets, inacheves, a cause
dun malthusianisme exacerbe (AF ). An anthropological textbook,
Notes and Queries on Anthropology, provokes extended discussion of Freud.
A list of European cliches of Africa is simply noted: Ada, que Verdi
composa pour les fetes dinauguration du Canal de Suez; lhistoire du
pretre Jean; la mort de Livingstone; Fachoda; Arthur Rimbaud vendant
des armes a Menelik (AF ). Most remarkably, Leiris devotes several
closing pages of his eldwork diary to a rough sketch for a short story, fea-
turing a Conrad-type hero in a colonial setting whose characteristics and
circumstances are plainly those of Leiris himself. This ctionalization of
autobiographical material is a logical extension of the search through-
out LAfrique fantome for an authentic narrative model for self-expression.
We move from the false objectivity of classical anthropology, through
the equally false desire to be possessed by the mythical spirit of Africa
to a phenomenological reexivity that raises ethnography to the stage
of existential reciprocity, where Leiriss meditations inevitably become
cultural autobiography.
In part this is symptomatic of the uncomfortable awareness of ethnog-
raphys posture as a juge dinstruction. Jamin at one point makes in-
teresting remarks regarding the methodological paradoxes of Griaule
and the status of native speech. In a brilliant passage, he also high-
lights the fundamental tension between Leiriss growing anti-colonialist
sympathies, wherein ethnography offers a supporting role, and Griaules
interrogatory approach, wherein the ethnographer proceeds with the
assumption that the native is hiding or lying. But the most signicant
indicator of how LAfrique fantomes ultimate preoccupation is the unsta-
ble identity of the ethnographer is the remarkable role played by dreams
in the work. Here the smooth authority of anthropological narrative
is disrupted by the very presence of this other dark continent whose
ethnography runs as a phantasmic drama beneath the data of the con-
scious human science. Some thirty instances of sexual and intellectual
Texts and contexts
preoccupations reveal the fragile identity at the heart of Leiriss heteroge-
neous ethnopoetics: his painful inability to break with Paris (AF , )
versus his desire to be a treacherous francophobe (AF , ); his
fear of emotional and sexual impotence (AF , ) versus his dread
of being wounded, attacked or sacriced (AF , , , ); his
desire for and aversion of punishment (AF ) versus his equally
ambivalent longing for Z (his wife Louise, familiarly called Zette) which
recurs with such insistence towards the end of the book (AF , , ).
It is tting that LAfrique fantomes nal sentence should point to the
continuation of this dream-work: Il ne me reste rien a faire, sinon
clore ce carnet, eteindre la lumiere, mallonger, dormir, et faire des
reves . . . (AF ). The close of the journal merely signals the end of
an apprenticeship in ethnographic and psychoanalytic self-examination
(Leiriss analysis with Borel is curtailed on his return to Paris) and the
commencement of a direct autobiographical enquiry which will seek to
live out some of these methodological insights. LAge dhomme, a collage of
childhood phobias and sexual anxieties, will be tightly organized around
a series of psychoanalytic and mythic icons. In addition to reecting
aspects of LAfrique fantomes form and content, the metatextual obsessions
will reach a new pitch: the competing claims of psychoanalysis and the
sacred, existential politics and surrealist poesie vecue will directly translate
into LAge dhommes rigorous attempt to forge a strict language that can
express lhomme total as an authentic act in itself.
The post-surrealist science of the sacred which Leiriss eldwork in Africa
helped to bring into being was to be applied directly to the autobiography
of a bourgeois Parisian childhood through the auspices of the College
de sociologie. Founded in by Bataille, Leiris and Roger Caillois
(the last a classicist who had studied under Mauss), the short-lived College
sought to pursue a study of modern social structures in a transformational
rather than academic manner. Resembling a revolutionary cell in the
eyes of some (and destined to disappear at the outbreak of the war), and
therefore with a radical political as well as aesthetic mission, the Societys
founding declaration appeared in the July issue of Acephale. This
declaration makes three points: the study of social structures should move
from so-called primitive societies to modern ones, and the discoveries
made should modify the prevalent assumptions and attitudes of research;
this should create an activist form of knowledge, in which the virulent
nature of the realm studied should help to create a moral community
among the investigators; the name for such an activity should be that of
sacred sociology, implying the belief that the sacred is to be regarded as
the link between the obsessive patterns of individual psychology and the
growing structures of society.
The programme of collective desubjectication is anti-functionalist,
the tone is tenaciously committed (Sartre did attend, though this is the
thirties), and the chosen place for such a pronouncement is provocative.
Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography to LAge dhomme
Yet the College was ultimately academic in its analysis of expenditure,
offering in the words of Hollier a critique of the monopolization of
community by the political. It embodied the necessity for depoliticizing
collective experience that is, it embodied a utopia.
As an attitude and as a manifesto, then, these positions might seem to
accord with Leiriss personal and professional styles, as well as his eld-
work conclusions. The phantasmic dramas of the surrealist in Africa
had become for him the real object of ethnography with the recognition
of the religious impulse common to both ethnographer and primitive
society. Thereafter, Leiris began to apply in an increasingly concerted
way these transferential and self-analytic principles to the eldwork in-
volved in writing the self. Between his return from Africa and ,
Leiris produced fragments of the eventual LAge dhomme. His participa-
tion in the College, and in particular his paper Le Sacre dans la vie
quotidienne were thus more than an extension of professional training.
They acted retrospectively upon LAge dhomme as a transformational prise
de conscience, reframing intellectually the completed manuscript prior to
its publication in book form.
This would give Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne a crucial status. Yet
Hollier states in his commentary on the paper that Leiris never adhered
corps et ame to the ambitions or motives of those others for whom the
College acted as a focus. He points out in his expanded English version
of his collection of texts relating to the College that Leiris chose not to
anthologize the paper and dismissed it in a passing reference in Biffures.
We might be tempted to take this typical instance of Leirisian denigration
as evidence of its importance. Certainly, Hollier also calls the paper
pivotal. For all its awkward juxtaposition of the different categories of
detail and their implicit strategies of writing the self, elsewhere separated
out into LAge dhomme and La Regle du jeu, it represents an academic
prototype of the autobiographical eldwork with which Leiris was to
occupy himself for the next few decades.
Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne was delivered as a paper by Leiris to
the College on January and published in revised form six months
later in La Nouvelle Revue francaise. In purely formal terms, the essay tries
to blend the post-surrealist aesthetic of the sacred learned from ethno-
graphy, and the psychopathology of everyday life (whose title it recalls)
culled from his own analysis, into a composite auto-ethnography of his
bourgeois childhood. In the best Maussian tradition, Leiriss paragraphs
build into a card-index of the linguistic, heterogeneous and psycho-sexual
formation of the self within a specic cultural situation. To this extent, it
Texts and contexts
is arguably a unique example of a total sacred sociology managing to go
beyond surrealism, revolution and Freudianism to reveal the heteroge-
neous and ambiguous reality with which we are in collusion. Certainly
this was the opinion of Jean Wahl who makes plain in his reaction to
Leiriss paper that its formal intensity and rigour triumphed over his
scepticism, and that of a large proportion of the audience, for the rst
and only time.
The papers opening denition of the sacred: ce melange de crainte et
dattachement, cette attitude ambigue que determine lapproche dune
chose a la fois attirante et dangereuse, prestigieuse et rejetee, cette
mixture de respect, de desir et de terreur (S ) at once recalls Leiriss
presiding attitude to the phantom of Africa, and indeed the dreams
which formed the heart of that drama. Already the sacred is represented
as ethnographic and psychoanalytical, an anthropological moment of
jouissance triggered here by domestic objects, places and occasions. It is
the domestic situation of jouissance, indeed, that will stand implicitly as the
sign of authentic autobiography in this paper. Exoticism is abandoned in
favour of the menus faits that make up the least sophisticated and hence
truest aspects of our childhood. Thus prestigious objects soliciting the
childs admiration are the earliest domestic site of the sacred. Moving,
then, metonymically from these objects to their location, Leiriss atten-
tion shifts logically to the bathroom, where he and his brother dream
up toute une mythologie quasi secrete (S ), a delirious succession of
animals, plots, detectives, kidnappings, blades, spikes and stakes, dead,
wounded and prisons. From here we move outside, to experience the
sacred thrill of a no-mans land where they are warned not to trust
strangers, before arriving at the Auteuil racecourse, an irresistible locus of
sacred bourgeois activity. Evocation of this eventful place permits Leiris
to introduce events of language, the magical and sexual force in words
themselves. These childhood keys reveal the sacred, either through the
power of their own resonance (as in Glossaire jy serre mes gloses) or because
nally discovering the true nature of words which had been previously
mangled and misunderstood creates a revelatory moment of reciprocity
(as in LAfrique fantome). The new worlds opened up by this subtle change
in the speakers relation to society are the linguistic terrain for a sacred
sociology, which regards the speaker as a ritualist, pour qui le sacre se
resout nalement en un systeme subtil de distinguo, de pointes daiguille
et de details detiquette (S ).
Leiris rounds off his checklist of the domestic sacred with a reitera-
tion of items mentioned, and the transgressive, ambiguous and secret
Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography to LAge dhomme
qualities associated with them. He concludes that henceforth one of
his most sacred aims will be to obtain une connaissance de soi aussi
precise et intense que possible. This programmatic aim is conrmed
by the resurgence of material given here: LAge dhomme already houses
the Radieuse stove (AH ) and the parents bedroom; Biffures will
comment again on the fathers Smith and Wesson (Bi ), the bath-
room mythologies (Bi ), the empty hall (Bi ), Mose (Bi ) and
. . . reusement (with which Biffures opens); Fourbis remembers the Auteuil
racecourse and Rebecca (Fo ). But it is perhaps also precision and
intensity which led Leiris to leave the College shortly afterwards, even
if he was one of the three signatories of the Declaration du College
de sociologie sur la crise internationale, dated the October .
Leiriss continuing preoccupation with the technical and especially lin-
guistic means of achieving self-knowledge draws him away from the
increasingly irrational and apocalyptic negativity of Batailles writings.
It is worth contrasting Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne with Batailles
contemporary equivalent essay, LApprenti sorcier, which, along with
Cailloiss Le Vent dhiver, were published in the July issue of
La Nouvelle Revue francaise as a collective manifestation. Leiriss appeal to
honest scutiny (S ) bears little resemblance to Batailles enthusiasm
for the violent dynamic of myth, whose only goal is the return to a lost
totality, and whose obscurity as a project is dangerously viewed as both
effected and justied by the contemporary politics of despair. So, in a
brief correspondence in July , Leiris reminds Bataille of the original
three aims laid down by the Societys declaration, before articulating
his present doubts about the Colleges failure to achieve its intended
methodological rigour, and in particular its transgression of the rules es-
tablished by Durkheim. Hereafter Leiriss view of the authentic linguistic
act, helped on by the experience of the intervening war years, will come
increasingly to resemble the ethical imperatives stated by Sartre in his
critical essay on Bataille, Un nouveau mystique, published as an article
in and then in book form in , as well as in his Quest-ce
que la litterature? Leiriss ethnographic and psychoanalytic containment
and analysis of surrealisms shamanism will thus join with a specically
committed view of art coinciding largely with the publication of Biffures.
Together, these elements will form LAge dhommes new autobiographical
canon de composition, and a typical retroactive reframing. Above all,
it is in the books preface, De la litterature consideree comme une
tauromachie, that Leiris establishes this next naissance a lenvers, with
its new, authentic, set of criteria for writing the self.
Texts and contexts
Leiriss full entry into autobiography came with LAge dhomme, a psy-
chomythology of the difcult passage to virility, completed in November
(the same month in which Breton published his Position politique
du surrealisme) but published only in . The denitive preface to the
work, De la litterature consideree comme une tauromachie, appeared
only in the edition, however, and therefore post-dates the origi-
nal manuscript in some cases by more than ten years, absorbing and
transforming the books original priere dinserer in the process. By now
this reframing effect is becoming familiar. The preface rereads Leiriss
past surrealist activities as the aesthetics of authenticity. It pre-empts
our judgement, then, of the LAge dhomme with an assertion of
socio-political commitment derived, as we shall see, from Sartre and
the politico-aesthetic programme of Les Temps Modernes. Moreover, it de-
scribes the move from the one to the other, from personal aesthetics to
political praxis, lived myth to formalized existence, as a shift from mere
play, or jeu, to a responsible rigour, or regle, which slots LAge dhomme
neatly into a track leading directly to Biffures (), the rst volume of
La Regle du jeu (), of which ve extracts had already appeared in
print, all of them written after LAge dhomme but before De la litterature
consideree comme une tauromachie. The form of the preface also
bears out this legislative role and anticipates the main texts montage
technique: the original priere dinserer, written before the drole de
guerre, is reinterpreted in more directly political terms by an additional
ten pages written after the war in Le Havre, a perspective which in turn
is subject to a second revision dated Paris January . As presented
by De la litterature, therefore, LAge dhommes writing of the self is gen-
erated, structured and valorized by an existential ethics of language.
To appreciate this shift, it is necessary here to recall Sartres dis-
agreement with both surrealism and Bataille, and to locate the points
of inuence on Leiris. From the Journal, we know that during the
period Leiris still entertained discussions with Bataille while
becoming immersed in a reading of Sartre and de Beauvoir. Specif-
ically, from LEtre et le Neant he isolated the notions of depassement
perpetuel and projet ( J ). In December Sartre pub-
lished the article Un nouveau mystique, in which he praises the acte
veritable of LAge dhomme (p. ), while dismissing Batailles LExperience
interieure as the latest example of the essai-martyre beloved of surrealism
Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography to LAge dhomme
(p. ). Bataille, the mystic, accule au fond de son impasse, sevade
de son degout par une sorte devanouissement extatique (p. ),
offering, like surrealism, a specious jouissance intuitive which is the
opposite of what we are: namely, a project (p. ). This is consistent with
Sartres judgement of surrealism, as outlined in Quest-ce que la litterature?.
Here surrealisms metaphysical destruction (p. ) dissolves subjec-
tivity (p. ) in order to reach the Impossible (pp. ) as a purely
formal depassement (p. ) that never offers un passage de la puis-
sance a lacte (p. ). (It is ironic that Sartre also employs Batailles
charge of class ignorance against surrealism.) Batailles reply to Sartre
focuses on the latters Hegelian teleology, defending with the phrase
Je naboutis jamais (p. ) the agony of process over the certainty of
project. The argument subsequently revolves around the exemplary
gure of Baudelaire. In the January article on Sartres preface to
Baudelaires Ecrits intimes, Bataille insists on the sacred as the limit of
the project (p. ), and on the anguish of poetry as the limit of the
political undertaking (pp. ). Of particular signicance is the fact
that it is Leiris who subsequently prefaces Sartres preface in its eventual
book form. Simultaneously moving to the front and the rear, Leiris dis-
tances himself from Sartres summary execution of surrealism (p. ),
while accepting that the only way to approach poets is sans transe ni
balbutiement de religiosite [. . .] comme sils etaient des proches (p. ).
With these careful words, Leiris none the less indicates his familiarity
with the debate, and his shift from Bataillean dilapidation to Sartrean
depassement.
This shift is borne out in the postulations and charged language of
De la litterature consideree comme une tauromachie. It articulates a
self-imposed existential project that reinterprets the LAge dhomme we
have yet to read. In a complete assumption of Sartres statements in
Quest-ce que la litterature? that parler, cest agir (p. ) and that lecrivain
doit sengager tout entier dans ses ouvrages (p. ), Leiris now asserts, in
the prefaces most famous moment, that his goal in writing the original
LAge dhomme was in fact to faire un livre qui soit un acte (AH ),
generating an autobiographical project that was not so much a litterature
engagee as une litterature dans laquelle jessayais de mengager tout
entier (AH ). Aware of the gap between the retroactive programme
and his previous writings, Leiris brilliantly proposes the prefaces central
moment of reframing: writing the self must be as dangerous as the act
of bullghting:
Texts and contexts
Ce qui se passe dans le domaine de lecriture nest-il pas denue de valeur si cela
reste esthetique, (. . .) sil ny a rien (. . .) qui soit un equivalent (. . .) de ce quest
pour le torero la corne aceree du taureau, qui seule (. . .) confere une realite a son
art? (AH )
In isolated form, the equation of writer with matador would be no more
than an exotic sexual cliche. But its context relates Leiriss past writings
to the future political imperative to be placed on writing the self. The
corrida had already formed the central event of the Grande fuite de
neige (dedicated, moreover, to Robert Desnos, qui mena sa vie comme
une corrida, p. ). Leiris further developed the theme in Tauromachies
() and Miroir de la tauromachie (), the latter representing the sole
publication in the Acephale collection. A article, Espagne
(Br ) had also previously used the bullght to represent the agonies
of the Spanish Civil war. The reframing of surrealist aesthetics within a
concrete political situation is already evident from the start of the article,
therefore, though the main proposition is still at this stage to achieve a
personal catharsis by running the risk of the exposure and humiliation
associated with confessional literature:
Lultime propos: recherche dune plenitude vitale, qui ne saurait sobtenir avant
une catharsis, une liquidation, dont lactivite litteraire et particulierement la
litterature dite de confession apparat lun des plus commodes instruments.
(AH )
The utilitarian restriction on literature suggested here is amply con-
rmed by the immediate revision of this rst priere dinserer. The preface
now becomes much more directly political, and deliberately less aesthetic
in itself, substituting the concise elegance of Leiriss opening phrases for
a discursive presentation of the necessary shift from jeu to regle, a
shift that is repeated no fewer than ve times. Universal myths of death
and catharsis are replaced by the specic landmarks of war and poli-
tics (Le Havre, the drole de guerre, occupied France, Nazis, Sartre) and
Leiriss art language follows the same shift: from presenting the land-
scape in an abstract cubist way (jaugeant en entites ombre et lumiere
(AH )), he turns to a realist picture of social action (Des moteurs ron-
ent; tramways et bicyclistes passent; les gens anent ou saffairent et
mainte fumee monte (AH )). He then reintroduces the idea of the
writer as matador into this new political context in order to suggest that
one can go beyond being a litterateur by transferring the danger of confes-
sion into a stylish self-denition that wins the appreciation of others. In
Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography to LAge dhomme
this light, formal preoccupations are legitimate, since they concern the
language of communication. From this point on, Leiris does no more
than elaborate on the basic shift from the seductive portrait produced by
narcissism to the authenticity achieved through social commitment, in
the process of which a theory of authentic self-writing gradually emerges.
He recognizes that the inevitable predilection for self-contemplation
at the heart of all autobiography tries to make the reader into an ac-
complice instead of a judge, and that self-exposure introduces at best
the shadow of a bulls horn into a literary activity. The task is therefore
to raise writing to the level of action: faire un livre qui soit un acte
(AH ). Rigorous linguistic cape-work becomes a real act in relation to
oneself (through revelation of the unconscious), to others (who inevitably
will be affected by the books portrait) and to literature (by exposing
the underbelly of his previous writings). A form of committed literature,
then, since he has committed himself to it. The reference now to com-
mitted literature leads to the formulation of an aesthetic rule: a rejection
of the playful potentialities of the imagination or a novel in favour of
the purposeful use of language to condense true facts and images into
an historical, scientic and juridical self-portrait: rien que ces faits et
tous ces faits, etait la regle que je metais choisie (AH ). Leiris now
accommodates his surrealist activities within his existential rule of the
game: surrealism is presented as involving a strong reciprocity with the
outside world (the objet trouve and automatism), the use of dreams and
psychoanalysis for the purposes of insight, and an insistence on exposure
(of bourgeois hypocrisy). In this light, Bretons Nadja, or LAge dhomme,
can be called realism, since the montage or collage created leads to
the emergence of an authentic portrait, ma conception quant a lart
decrire venant ici converger avec lidee morale que javais quant a mon
engagement dans lecriture (AH ). The equation made between au-
tobiography and the torero is therefore supposedly based on a common
technical rule: the performance of tragic authenticity. In one sense, this
still does not go beyond a simple jeu de mots (AH ). In another, this
regle fondamentale precisely precludes linguistic play, for the autobio-
graphical version of the toreros exposure to the bulls horn is the direct
confrontation of an unembellished truth:
Car dire la verite, rien que la verite, nest pas tout: encore faut-il laborder
carrement et la dire sans artices tels que grands airs destines a en imposer,
tremolos ou sanglots dans la voix, ainsi que oritures, dorures, qui nauraient
Texts and contexts
dautre resultat que de la deguiser plus ou moins, ne fut-ce quen attenuant sa
crudite, en rendant moins sensible ce quelle peut avoir de choquant. (AH )
Il resterait quil lui faut, se situant sur le plan intellectuel ou passionnel, apporter
des pieces a conviction au proces de notre actuel systeme de valeurs et peser, de
tout le poids dont il est si souvent oppresse, dans le sens de laffranchissement
de tous les hommes, faute de quoi nul ne saurait parvenir a son affranchissement
particulier. (AH )
Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography to LAge dhomme
The conclusion to De la litterature consideree comme une tauromachie
subtly turns the exotic metaphor of the writer as torero into a political
manifesto of the writer as liberator. And as we see, it does so fundamen-
tally in order to technologize the Bataillean transgressions still reected
in Miroir de la tauromachie and related works. As Leiris acknowledges im-
plicitly in , a Sartrean ethic is being used in order to transform
chaos and the necessity of transgression into a dramatological regle
technique (ou defcacite) qui serait en meme temps une regle esthetique
(ou de style) ( J ). The wording alone presages La Regle du jeu; the idea
expressed (akin to Batailles denunciation of Breton) offers another ex-
ample of the negative metacritical shift of position through which Leiris
continues writing the self. In focusing on the same quotation, Jamin
tellingly views this shift as a theatralisation de lecrivain ou lauteur,
tel le protagoniste sartrien, sirrealisant dans le personnage du mata-
dor, met en jeu a son image quelque chose de sa vie. So a Sartrean
shift is effected, the result of which is an ethics of language which governs
the nature of self-representation to the extent that it seeks to homogenize
past, contemporary and future activities. The very different language-
games of surrealism and ethnography can join the LAge dhomme we are
set to read as part of a general moral programme. Predating Sartres
criticism of surrealism that limaginaire pur et la praxis sont difcile-
ment compatibles, then, the subject of LAge dhomme, according to
De la litterature consideree comme une tauromachie, will reach true
authentic manhood to the degree to which the autobiographys reframed
ethics of language will manage to reconcile the imaginary and praxis. As
we shall see, however, this regulatory programme does not sufciently
control the textual traces thrown up by another regulatory programme
exploited within LAge dhomme: that of psychoanalysis. It is a practice
which in the autobiographys additions is signicantly rejected. For
psychoanalysis itself recognizes that denegation rejects a phenomenon
in order to sustain but neutralize it. We have seen this effect already.
The result in the denitive LAge dhomme is a complex autobiographical
narratology whose dynamics result on occasions from the fact that the
programmatic limits set by Leiris are undermined within the text by the
emergence of an unconscious, thus generating a reactive portrait.
Everything is double in LAge dhomme. On the one hand, it aims to present
the clearest and closest portrait of Leiris, from infancy to the age of ;
Texts and contexts
on the other hand, it seeks a therapeutic catharsis of the painful passage
to manhood. As a result, its syntagmatic adherence to Leiriss formative
years is contained by paradigmatic grids drawing on psychoanalytic and
ethnographic categorization. Personal traumas are conceptualized via
the use of a dramatis personae Judith, Lucretia, Holofernes that g-
ures chapters and subsections. Yet subtending this determination are
phantom concepts from psychoanalysis, such as oedipal rivalry, the cas-
tration complex and the death drive, which regularize the individual
moments of pain, fear and desire, in a less controllable manner. These
cultural paradigms are exploited and justied as the operations of an
autobiographical self-building, and indeed correlate to the psychoana-
lytic concept of the secondary process, as described by Laplanche and
Pontalis:
Dans le cas du processus secondaire, lenergie est dabord liee avant de secouler
de facon controlee; les representations sont investies dune facon plus stable, la
satisfaction est ajournee, permettant ainsi des experiences mentales qui mettent
a lepreuve les differentes voies de satisfaction possibles.
But it will become increasingly obvious in the course of the book that
the denitive delivery which this secondary process is designed to ef-
fect, is based on the tense and distorting containment of the primary
process. This complicates the truth function ascribed to the enterprise
of autobiography, for when Leiris categorizes his life via a supposedly
ennabling network of cultural symbols, gures bibliques et de lantiquite
classique, heros de theatre ou bien le Torero mythes psychologiques qui
simposaient a moi en raison de la valeur revelatrice (AH ), it becomes
quickly apparent that this iconography acts as more than a framework
for the subjects emergence into manhood; it equally contains the un-
reasonable demands of the unconscious, which must be compromised
if a notion of social identity is to emerge at all. As Leiris comments
much later: Comment oserais-je me regarder si je ne portais pas soit
un masque, soit des lunettes deformantes (AH ). This means that
already Leiriss constant assertion of the veracity of his representation is
underpinned by its defensive response to the voracious force of the pri-
mary process, and that part of the complex reframing in LAge dhomme
involves an ultimate acknowledgement of how the veracity of the subject
is always culturally and indeed reactively constructed. Within a clinical
structure, then, which seeks to distance itself from ction, the authentic
identity of the subject seems none the less only ever to be representable
as a mythic, theatrical and dramatic parade. From the point of view of
Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography to LAge dhomme
existential depassement, this is the autobiographys abiding inhibition
(not least on the level of the parade itself ). As we shall see, Leiris deals
with this double effect in the usual way, by exploiting and then denegat-
ing psychoanalysis. This double strategy of projection and protection
operates in each chapter.
Stylistic rationalization subordinates chronology. The most remark-
able feature of the rst, unnumbered chapter (AH ) is therefore
the fact that we are introduced to a subject already halfway through his
life (Je viens davoir trente-quatre ans, la moitie de la vie (AH )). This
enables the subsequent retrospective gaze directed on Leiriss transition
from childhood to manhood to be written into an intellectual frame-
work set up in anticipatory fashion as la metaphysique de mon enfance
(AH ). The literal pre-text with which Leiris insinuates this theory into
the life of a child is that of the suite de compositions (AH ) that
adorned the cover of one of his childhood books, Epinals Les Couleurs
de la Vie. This opening equation seeks at once to locate the subject
within a thematic structure that is returned by a conscious analogy, ef-
fected upon childhood by motivated retrospection, to a closed, cultural
system of meaning. Leiriss philosophical passivity in the face of such de-
terminism merely endorses this structural containment of subjectivity:
Je demeure encastre dans ces Ages de la Vie et jai de moins en moins
lespoir dechapper a leur cadre (AH ). It is also towards the end of this
chapter that the subjects theatrical representation rst emerges. Again
this is done in such a way that the violence of desire is subsumed into one
of the secondary processs three guiding themes directeurs. A chance
encounter in a wood with some bare-footed children becomes le theatre
de ma premiere erection (AH ). But no link, we are told, is established
between the phenomenon and the representation which provoked it.
Instead it provides an excuse for the entry of the allegorical gures of
Lucretia and Judith, who have been inspired by Cranachs paintings; and
through them the subjects entry into the age of virility is represented
by the tragic hero Holofernes. Before the autobiography begins, then, it
is effectively over. For, to use the vocabulary of the preface, subsequent
chapters will put into operation, and justify through recollection, the
structure of a catharsis already erected.
The autobiographys rst number chapter, Tragiques (AH ),
bears out this prescription. Once again, the possibility that a dangerous
drama might begin is forestalled by further examples of the pre-text.
These here consist of a quotation (i.e. repetition) of Nervals transla-
tion (repetition) of Goethes rendition (repetition) of the Faust legend.
Texts and contexts
The effect is once again to place the individual existence potentially in
question within the already regulatory framework of intellectual repe-
tition. The enumeration of tragic spectacles at this point is moreover
presented structurally as a regulating feature of the subjects childhood:
Une grande partie de mon enfance sest deroulee sous le signe de spec-
tacles, operas ou drames lyriques (AH ). The subjects behaviour can
therefore be viewed logically and truthfully not as an unregulated life,
but as a (self-conscious and hence self-thematizing) performance: cette
habitude que jai toujours de proceder par allusions, par metaphores ou
de me comporter comme si jetais sur un theatre (AH ). This repetition
of scenarios is once again bound up with the ability of the ego eventually
to master and simulate a situation. It is signicantly in terms of theatri-
cal representation, then, that the early stages of Leiriss education are
presented here, an education which precisely involves the ability (being
voiced prescriptively by the adult Leiris to the adult) to distinguish be-
tween the reality principle, on the one hand, and the censored individual
demand and dangerous libidinal drive that refuses to obey social laws
and actually tries to kill everything around it, on the other:
Je ne saisissais pas que la representation dun drame etait enchassee dans la piece
et que ces spectateurs enthousiastes, applaudissant a lassassinat qui se deroule
sous leurs yeux, netaient pas les spectateurs reels . . . mais des spectateurs gures,
inclus eux-memes dans le spectacle. (AH )
What Leiris eventually learns in this rst chapter is that these spectacles
reect life and can therefore be used as the basis for his own represen-
tation of it (AH ). The young childs reactions to these spectacles,
which is the subject-matter of the rest of the chapter, are therefore used
to delineate a prototype structure for the rest of LAge dhommes cul-
tural representation of the self: they provide the framework for Leiriss
earliest manifestations of virility, terror and punishment. Already, then,
the secondary process is generating a particular autobiographical struc-
ture from these individual instances, which are made to partake of a
pre-established logic. As the following chapter, Antiquites (AH ),
acknowledges in a typically early metatextual moment:
Lhabitude que jai de penser par formules, analogies, images, technique
mentale dont, que je le veuille ou non, le present ecrit nest quune application.
(AH )
put Epinals Les Couleurs de la vie. In all, the picture of the young
Leiris consciously living like a poet is presented with a mixture of em-
barrassment, bathos and distaste. Indeed, Leiris reveals the very serious
psychological consequences resulting from his active decomposition of
referentiality and the deliberate attempt to toy with madness a la Nerval:
je meveillais presque chaque nuit en hurlant (AH ); je fus pris
soudain dune crainte aigue de devenir effectivement fou (AH );
je fus saisi la nuit dune angoisse panique (AH ). It is at this point
of dangerous distress that we enter the nal chapter, Le Radueau de la
Meduse, where, as the title suggests, psychoanalysis and ethnography
emerge as the two intellectual disciplines which helped Leiris to over-
come the self-destructive nature of living like a surrealist. Signicantly,
Leiris glosses their actual linguistic practices, concentrating instead on
their common ability to dispel myths and obsessions by collating and
interpreting data precisely the methodological approach adopted by
LAge dhomme. The end of LAge dhomme therefore marks the comple-
tion of an apprenticeship, and an intellectual recuperation of surrealist
hysteria. Leiris has learned to rediscover his univocal self-identity:
Ce que jy ai appris surtout cest que, meme a travers les manifestations a
premiere vue les plus heteroclites, lon se retrouve toujours identique a soi-
meme, quil y a une unite dans une vie et que tout se ramene, quoi quon fasse,
a une petite constellation de choses quon tend a reproduire, sous des formes
diverses, un nombre illimite de fois. (AH )
Diversion, alibi, rite puricatoire: cet ouvrage dont jattendais quune regle en
emerge, mais qui ne maide ni a faire ni a me faire . . .
Laborieusement calligraphique, cet ouvrage qui, malignement, me consume
au lieu de me fortier . . .
Mesure des hauts et des bas, machine tournant a vide, cet ouvrage qui ne
mapporte aucune matrise et dont je ne suis pas meme le matre. (FB )
BIFFURES
Car pour celui qui ecrit, toute la question est la: faire passer dans la tete ou
dans le cur dautrui les concretions jusque-la valables seulement pour
Positional play: La Regle du jeu
lui deposees, par le present ou le passe de sa vie, au fond de sa propre tete
ou de son propre cur; communiquer, pour valoriser; faire circuler, pour que
la chose ainsi lancee aux autres vous revienne un peu plus prestigieuse, tels ces
boucliers des Indiens du Nord-Oeust americain qui se trouvent doues dune
valeur dautant plus grande quils ont fait lobjet de plus nombreux echanges
ceremoniels. (Bi )
Biffures therefore absorbs surrealist and ethnographic theories of lan-
guage into an autobiographical form of reection which conforms to
the Saussurean dictum that there are no preexisting ideas, and nothing
is distinct before the appearance of language. The opening volume
of La Regle du jeu shows the fundamental astonishment of the subject-in-
language: not only Leiriss astonishment at language, but his astonish-
ment by language (together with the temporality and otherness revealed
within language), a language which creates Leiriss consciousness rather
than being seen in a localizable way to conrm or challenge its exis-
tence. The history of the subject in La Regle du jeu will therefore be the
history of an articulation: the gradual move from an initial utterance to
the full unfolding of a potentially innite, and consequently agonistic,
system of political, moral and aesthetic discourse. Biffuress eight chapters
consequently follow the chronology of a linguistic education: from the
astonishment caused by the word ( . . . Reusement!), we move through
pre-reading and pre-writing phases (Chansons, Habille-en-cour) into
reading and writing stages (Alphabet, Persephone) and onwards to the
increasingly artistic activities of fabulation, self-representation and meta-
textual reection (Il etait une fois, Dimanche, Tambour-Trompette).
In this way, autobiography adopts a graphological rather than biologi-
cal history, placing emphasis on the enonciation rather than the enonce, the
language of self-consciousness rather than the cultural image of selfhood.
This is the most striking difference between LAge dhomme and Biffures,
and it is a difference which, as we shall see, is dramatically displayed by
La Regle du jeus very rst sentence.
In addition, the linguistic reexivity of Biffures allows the principles
of surrealist and ethnographic practice to transform one another. The
intellectual recognition of reciprocity turns a surrealist possession by
language into the ethnographic analysis of such possession. Emmanuel
Levinas reacted to the publication of Biffures by making the acute remark
that Michel Leiris is more of a chemist than an alchemist of the Word.
Biffuress autobiographical reection on the minds linguistic markers
transforms the Rimbaldian dereglement des sens at the heart of much
surrealism into a lucid and systematic construction of a linguistic model
of consciousness. For the same reason, Leiris the surrealist expresses
Texts and contexts
dissatisfaction with the bureaucratic objectivity of ethnography (as on
Biffures, p. ). Biffures begins with the point beyond which LAfrique
fantomes scientic pretensions broke down, namely with the recognition
that ethnographic reciprocity not only provokes and improves self-
expression but is the actual structural condition of self-identity. Ethnog-
raphys gradual but limited willingness to accommodate the Other
becomes in Biffures the more radical surrealist belief that a fundamental
Otherness within self-identity creates the purest and truest form of
self-revelation: jy trouve lexpression la plus pure de moi-meme, dans
la mesure ou il ma frappe par ce quil recelait detrangete . . . (Bi ).
We come now to the books beginning, which we need to quote in full.
. . .
Sur le sol impitoyable de la piece (salon? salle a manger? tapis cloue aux ra-
mages fanes ou bien tapis mobile au quelconque decor dans lequel jinscrivais
des palais, des sites, des continents, vrai kaleidoscope dont mon enfance jouait,
y agencant des constructions feeriques, tel un canevas pour des mille et une
nuits que ne mouvraient alors les feuillets daucun livre? plancher nu, bois
cire aux lineaments plus fonces, coupes net par la noirceur rigide des rainures
dou je mamusais, parfois, a tirer des ocons de poussiere, quand javais eu
laubaine de quelque epingle chue des mains de la couturiere a la journee?)
sur le sol irrecusable et sans ame de la piece (veloute ou ligneux, endi-
manche ou depouille, propice aux courses de limagination ou a des jeux plus
mecaniques), dans le salon ou la salle a manger, dans la penombre ou la lumiere
(suivant quil sagissait ou non de cette portion de la maison dont les meubles
sont normalement proteges par des housses et toutes les modestes richesses
soustraites souvent, par le barrage des volets, aux attaques du soleil), dans cet
enclos privilegie guere accessible quaux adultes et grotte tranquille pour la
somnolence du piano ou dans ce local plus commun qui renfermait la grosse
table a rallonges autour de laquelle toute ou partie de la famille sassemblait
pour le rite des repas quotidiens, le soldat etait tombe. (Bi )
The fall of the soldier symbolizes the fall of the child from the edenic
imaginary into the sins of the symbolic, a realm represented above all by
language. The childs cry unwittingly forces him to recognize how sym-
bolic reality precedes and exceeds him. The long opening description
at the beginning of the chapter was therefore not a mere prelude to the
childs dramatic pronouncement, but the already established existence
of a (linguistic) reality to which the childs consciousness was then
introduced. Leiris the child can no longer play within a closed and pres-
tigious world, sustained with a self-sufcient cry unencumbered by social
communication. For the replacement of reusement by heureusement
introduces the structure of consensual language to Leiris, who is hence-
forth literally interdit. The exuberance of . . . reusement, a cry only of
pleasure demanded and fullled, is inserted into a system of precise signi-
cations. If in some illusory sense the child appears to create language at
the moment of his original articulation, then, the move from reusement
to heureusement forces the autobiographical subject to recognize him-
self henceforth as a social phenomenon and a linguistic event. Language
(and through it Leiris) suddenly acquires a history, one in which the
individual voice functions even in moments of apparent deviation in
conformity with a general rule founded on a principle of difference.
The play of difference between the articulation reusement and the
retort heureusement, which is the ultimate location of the principles
of bifurcation and erasure, creates a self-identity that is therefore always
greater or less than unitary: an identity embodying biffures just as the
subject of representation in LAge dhomme sought to embody manhood.
The difference between the two, however, is fundamental. LAge dhommes
concern to forge a nished subject, a single image presented through
Positional play: La Regle du jeu
the drawing together of different art-images, gives way to a ceaselessly
multiplying and obliterating textual process in Biffures, wherein it is the
difference revealed which produces a subject. Whereas in LAge dhomme, the
subject ultimately seeks to coincide with his representation, here the op-
posite occurs: self-identity arises only at the moment of non-identity, the
deviation or interval stamped on Leiriss mind. In place of the intellec-
tual signication produced in LAge dhomme, in itself a conventional cultural
operation, the sensual production of meaning in . . . Reusement! means
that this subject-in-language emerges as a result of what Barthes calls
signiance, that radical work (which leaves nothing intact) through which
the subject explores how language works him and undoes him as soon as
he stops observing and enters it. Signiance is the without-endedness
of the possible operations in a given eld of language. And lastly, the
inevitable time-lag involved in this without-endedness, a temporal
delay which Leiris deliberately inscribes into the unfolding of this
rst sentence, makes plain that this subject as signiance is the effect of
an unending operation of writing, wherein the mythical voice of pure
consciousness is revealed as fractured from the beginning, and endlessly
redressing itself with a written series of supplements and corrections.
Redressing this scene itself, however, we can see that the apparently
original moment of this linguistic astonishment is, of course, an illusion.
The text itself is testimony to the larger realization, which concerns the
pre-established nature of the linguistic network into which the subject
has entered. The long opening description is not a mere intentum: in-
deed, the fall of Leiriss toy soldier and his exclamation . . . Reusement!
can be read as secondary to, if not inconsequent upon, the books open-
ing setting, a setting constructed from irreducible choices. The rst and
presiding feature of the scene is therefore a system of relations within
which intentionality is then to be found. As a result, we can say both that
the emergence of a subject-in-language is always testamentary, pointing
to the primary nature of the otherness on which sameness is posited,
and that, at the heart of this setting which produces a testament, other-
ness is sustained by an irreducible and already operative deviation or
decalage. These structural points are borne out by La Regle du jeus sus-
pensive opening. On a semantic level, the sentences main clause leads
inexorably to a physical event, the fall of the soldier. This in turn stands
as a metaphor for the chapters more crucial phenomenological event,
the emergence of singularity with the recognition of semantics: Voici
que ce vague vocable . . . est, par un hasard, promu au role de chanon
de tout un cycle semantique (Bi ). On the empirical level of reading
Texts and contexts
the events content, then, the passage conforms to the structure of a de-
tective story or the resolution of a psychological enigma: the sentence
negotiates a series of preliminary choices and qualications, and with in-
creasing condence localizes, claries and characterizes an ethnographic
space. Assumed intentionality is situated by a dramatic event that opens
the way to the chapters eventual expression of knowledge (une allure de
decouverte, comme le dechirement brusque dun voile ou leclatement
de quelque verite (Bi )) and a general sense of self-presence.
Syntactically, the biffures of this main clause conrm this intellection:
two phrases dependent on sur (sur le sol impitoyable de la piece, sur
le sol irrecusable et sans ame de la piece) and two sets of phrases
dependent on a double dans (dans le salon ou la salle a manger, dans la
penombre ou la lumiere; dans cet enclos privilegie . . . ou dans ce local
plus commun) employ the addition and erasure of alternatives to create
a clearer picture of the event and a growing sense of comprehension.
This is further enhanced by the three parentheses: after two brief, hesi-
tant beginnings, the rst parenthesis sets up two huge questions in which
we are none the less given an increasing amount of information and per-
sonal involvement; the second parenthesis progresses from questions to
brief differentiating descriptions; and the third more condently provides
authoritative information in a phrase almost as long as each of the large
questions. The paragraphs secondary phrases, even as they proliferate
within the structure of the sentence, can therefore be read as conrming
the main clauses increasingly structural location of consciousness.
On a purely syntagmatic level, however, the sentences main clause
evidently leads not to the replacement of pre-lapsarian play by knowl-
edge, but to the actual germination of a playful structure of potentiality
and plurality. In this light, it is signicant that the chapters conclusion
describes the singular truth revealed to Leiris as a tissu arachneen (Bi ).
Once we view the passages structural qualities in this, non-Hegelian,
light, consciousness is seen not to pre-exist or come to dominate a ma-
terialist conception of a burgeoning world whose meaning here lies in
its potentially innite form, rather than its increasingly nite content.
Instead, the purely productive nature of the passages playful structure, the
affective rather than cerebral enjoyment and joy associated with these
biffures, and the chapters climax in the revelation of a mystery rather than
a certainty (le langage articule, tissu arachneen de mes rapports avec
les autres, me depasse, poussant de tous cotes ses antennes mysterieuses
(Bi )), together with the sense of plurality and sociality, rather than
singularity, which these qualities all suggest, point to an event which
Positional play: La Regle du jeu
comes to the subject from a radical otherness. This other, which has not
been predicted or accommodated by the subject or the passage, is wit-
nessed by Leiris with a pure passivity. He is located in a situation whose
spacing he does not control (sur, dans, autour de laquelle) and which
increasingly recalls the sacred (grotte tranquille, le rite des repas), in
order nally to be brought face to face with an event which he has not
foreseen and to which he reacts with grammatical passivity (le soldat
etait tombe). The open potentiality which this displays locates Leiriss
subjectivity less in the present and the self than in the future and the other.
Leiris is arguably bounded not by a solitary and virile being-unto-death
but by a systeme subtil de distinguo, as he earlier dened the sacred
in Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne (S ). The structure of La Regle
du jeus opening therefore shows that the condition for the emergence of
singularity is the revelation of a primary and irreducible otherness.
This otherness is conrmed by the parentheses in a number of con-
crete ways. Their a rallonges effect on the structure of the sentence
leads the main clauses intellectual formulation to be physically over-
whelmed by the semantically secondary nature of the worlds potential-
ity and plurality. The main sentences attempts to establish a metaphor
of consciousness are dominated by the size of the metonymic interrup-
tions: the rst parenthesis, consisting of ninety-seven words, occurs after
the main thesis has advanced by no more than seven words; the sec-
ond interruption, seventeen words long, is once again larger than the
ten words given by the resumed main phrase; and the nal parenthe-
sis, consisting of thirty-six words, is preceded by only fourteen words
in the main sentence. In all, parenthetic words occupy per cent of
the total formulation. In addition, the temporality which this creates
within the phrases structure makes us feel directly how consciousness
cannot achieve a purely personal duration but comes into being within
the supposedly secondary nature of the temporal relationship with the
Other, a relationship whose achievement for that reason always lies in
the future rather than in the present. And perhaps most remarkably in
this context, given that grammar is here employed to illustrate inten-
tionalitys structuring powers, the main clause contrasts poorly with the
parentheses from a grammatical point of view. The rst three parts of
the main phrase are structured by an extremely elementary and repeti-
tious use of basic prepositions, nouns and conjunctions, avoured only
by two adjectives, both of which signicantly relate to harsh and imper-
sonal judgement. Only in the nal, extended part of the main clause
does a grammatical exposition of intellection come to life with the more
Texts and contexts
related use of the components listed above and the nal inclusion of
two verbs which, while suggesting a sense of coalescence (renfermait,
sassemblait) none the less are not controlled by the subject and to that
degree suggest a closing down rather than an opening up of intellectual
possibilities. Moreover, if we compare this nal part of the main phrase
with the main question of the rst parenthesis, since they are at opposite
ends of the paragraph and are both forty nine words long, we notice
immediately how the parenthesis contains a much greater grammatical
sophistication. Not only are all the grammatical features of the main
phrase already predicted in this rst parenthesis, but the latter contests
the dead hand of the formers move to totality with a potentially innite
enjoyment of alternatives and embellishment. In a general sense these
biffures permit body and soul to enter the scene (which is certainly neither
empty nor soulless), and in a specic sense it is in the parenthesis that
we rst obtain the basic traditional grammatical constituents of an auto-
biographys beginnings: the rst-person noun and personal pronoun,
the noun enfance, and a verb of inscription (jinscrivais) together,
signicantly, with further verbs relating to enjoyment and addition, and
nouns relating to books and construction. Even grammatically, then, au-
tobiography can be seen to originate here in a parenthesis of potentiality
and otherness rather than in the supposedly central and self-sufcient
expression of self-presence. And even this structural tension is predicted
in the rst parenthesis, which itself engineers a constant play between a
xed, angular and somewhat austere structure, on the one hand, and a
mobile, expandable, fortuitous and more sensuous version of structure
on the other. Thus a tapis cloue is contrasted with a tapis mobile,
and while the three words of the formers qualifying phrase at best can
offer ramages fanes, the latter throws up a forty-word paean to the vrai
kaleidoscope dont mon enfance jouait into which Leiris in every sense
writes himself. Similarly, the rigid lines of the bare boards in the following
question are subverted by a subject who, for amusement, and with tools
provided by chance and good fortune, plumps out their noirceur rigide
by picking uff out of the cracks.
The innocence of such activity itself stands in playful contrast to the
signication of this opening passage. La Regle du jeu begins by happily
displaying how the subject originates in diversion and is structured by
differance. The supposed rst event of intentionality, whose climax is
self-expression, is immediately seen to depend on a prior space of
deviation or interval. Autobiographys rst presence is not that of a
subject or an object, a self or a world, intention or intentum; it is that of
Positional play: La Regle du jeu
a structural relation which pre-exists the existent, setting conditions of
existence that lead to the other. The immediate structural patterns of
. . . Reusement! reveal how, in the largest sense, autobiographical
identity emerges only within what Foucault calls a discursive formation
(which is not to say that this referential network in turn can ever attain
or even suggest a pure, prediscursive world of silent self-sufciency).
Structurally as well as linguistically, the je begins and ends only
in relation with the other. This is ultimately the proposition that is
accorded a truth value at the end of . . . Reusement! when Leiris
acknowledges the presence of a cycle semantique and a fundamental
realite . . . commune et ouverte . . . , partagee . . . , socialisee (Bi ).
There is both nostalgia and exuberance in this ethnographic recogni-
tion. The nostalgia results from the little death represented in the climax
to the paragraph, a jouissance that marks the interruption of a natural,
preconscious structure of being, a primordial play, by the equally myth-
ical rst moment of knowledge, leclatement de quelque verite (Bi ).
Both the pure interjection (ibid.) of . . . Reusement!, a fractured word
that represents the fracturing of primordial happiness, and the founding
event of consciousness which comes to fracture this happiness, still seek,
of course, to absorb the non-identical into the identical. The exuberance,
on the other hand, is obviously reected in the language of pure joy used
in the passage (including, most importantly, the term . . . Reusement!
itself, which, as an impure formulation, manages to suggest verbally a pre-
discursive state of pure feeling) and the fertile, overowing biffures which
the text playfully releases and through which the subject emerges in play.
As can be seen in their simultaneous representation, there is ultimately
no question of choice being made between these two outlooks. Such a
question would, in fact, entail an attenuation of the subjects historicity.
The event stands, rather, as a metaphor of the structural condition of the
present je of autobiography, one that results dramatically from a combi-
nation of recollection and protension, loss and projection, memory and
learning. The ow which this suggests indicates how . . . Reusement!
acts nally not in a representational but in a functional and productive
manner. The fundamental movement of the event, a distinguo revealing
difference to be the condition for individuality, as we now see, climaxes
not in a cardinal representation or expression of the self s essence but
in an ordinal conguration or interjection of the subjects disposition.
Function and diachrony therefore both form the structural heart of
subjectivity, and generate a rst moment of non-intentionality and
duration.
Texts and contexts
. . . Reusement! demonstrates, then, how autobiographys rule of the
game is an innite signifying form originating in the other rather than
a totalizing signied content posited by the ego. The nal truth and
mystery facing Leiris at the end of the episode is therefore the simulta-
neous sense of impossible freedom and impossible responsibility gener-
ated by this rst event. In the rest of Biffures the self-proclaiming centre of
autobiographical structure, namely the idea of the subject as a control-
ling and reducing identity, will represent itself as charting this revelation
of the structure of structure, the subjects own (double) structuration.
The representation of such a double bind therefore involves the contin-
ued use of a phenomenological narrative, in which Leiris confronts and
reacts to a series of objects, but in each case the object (like the word
. . . Reusement) is in some sense impossible. None of the objects repre-
sents something as such; instead, each one embodies a further dening
event in which the autobiographical subject nds himself in a hetero-
geneity without ontological foundation. Most signicantly, then, each
impossible object is also primarily an ambiguous name.
In subsequent chapters, Leiris learns the complexities of signicant
names encountered in childhood: Clairet, Blaise, tetable, Mose,
Saul. Each acts as a productive meconnaissance for a self-consciousness
which only then comes into being, in lieu of designating any stable
pronominal identity for either subject or object. The names, then, form
matrices of an equally unlocalizable productivity. We cannot say where
Clairet, Blaise or tetable lie, any more than we can say what they
represent as intentum. Instead, just as each name is seen to result from
a combination and then to create a network, so each forms part of
an autobiographical education in the nature of the subjects position
within a discursive formation rather than in the nature of the world. It is
Alphabet which shows this most clearly. Leiriss early education centres
on a reading of Genesis, and he is fully aware of the pedagogical and
ideological reasons behind the choice of text:
Genese: modelage de la nature et de lhomme dans leur prime jeunesse; peut-on
rever lecture plus astucieusement appropriee au tout premier modelage de
lesprit dun enfant que cet A.B.C. si antique et si fruste de lenfance du monde?
(Bi )
Dimanche
The shift from Biffuress dualist structure of subject and language into
Fourbiss dialectical interaction of individual and group is anticipated also
in Biffuress penultimate chapter, Dimanche. First published in Les Temps
modernes, its reception is in part the subject of the nal chapter Tambour-
trompette. Together, these two chapters existential ethnography of the
signicance of the bourgeois Sunday, and subsequent metalinguistic
analysis of the reactions to the piece, shift La Regle du jeus structural
conception of subjectivity more into the realm of social transformation.
This works in tandem with a move away from an oracular or nominalist
thrust in language towards the socially signicant themes which will form
the guiding obsessions of Fourbis: death, authenticity and full communi-
cation. These rst and overriding considerations, namely the permanent
possibility of non-being, the question of freedom within the context of
social, rather than individual existence, and the projection of oneself to-
wards the Other in a structure of surpassing constitute the specic praxis
of Fourbis, but appear already in prototype in Dimanche. As is so often
the case in La Regle du jeu, Dimanche is therefore on one level a subtle
rewriting of the opening . . . Reusement! chapter. Within the context
of the bourgeois Sunday ritual, the mysterious force of language (here
Leiriss earliest orisons), far from encouraging a cabbalistic loss of self,
becomes the meaningful expression of a reunion ceremonieuse (Bi );
while the familial vision of such formulae is now observed as evidence of
a binding social practice that persists in spite of or even because of the
locutions secular banality:
Plates atteintes au langage, comme a seule n de constituer un argot dans lusage
limite duquel quelques-uns se sentiront solidaires; jeux de mots qui ont pour but
moins de faire rire que de se reconnatre, a la maniere dinities, entre membres
dune meme famille; locutions purement conventionnelles autour desquelles
laccord des usagers se scelle, si fermement quil se montre encore efcace et que
je ne puis songer aujourdhui a lune quelconque de ces miserables plaisanteries
sans etre emu (et confus de mon emotion) detre ainsi dun seul coup plonge
dans une vieille franc-maconnerie familiale. (Bi )
FOURBIS
FIBRILLES
Leiris eventually emerges from his convalescence into a very new state,
which he describes as lying on the other side of a personal soundbarrier.
The effort required to match the speed of revolutionary totalization
with the pace of a poetic sensibility has left him not only exhausted,
but suddenly old. A whole life has therefore been described in this one
chapter, from the rebirth after the disaster of revolutionary idealism to
the indifference and etat datonie et de repli to which his phantoms have
now led him. He is capable of recording more brutally than ever the socio-
historical events that condition his existence (Crise au Laos. Tentative
de debarquement contre-revolutionnaire a Cuba. Putsch militaire en
Algerie, heureusement avorte apres menace de son extension a la France.
(Fi )) but can no longer react feverishly as though he were at the centre.
Instead, the sense of indifference and withdrawal leads Leiris to focus
on the most immediate and highly cultural form of discursive formation
sustaining his identity, a reection back on the positionality of play: that
is, on the rule of the game of autobiography itself.
Easter in Kumasi, Sunday in Peking: Leiris begins section of Fibrilles
by comparing two dramatic and ultimately religious rituals, whose al-
ternative structures of history have offered him the possibility of going
beyond the connes of the self in a shamanistic or scientic way. Of the
latter, Chinese experience, Leiris now judges MarxismLeninism to be a
true religion in terms of the liberating capacity of its messianism, and a
dangerous mysticism to the degree to which it is founded on a dogmatic
metaphysics of pure reason and economic positivism. What emerges
above all from this next stage of depassement is Leiriss perception of time
Positional play: La Regle du jeu
itself, as his ability to view these periods from which he now feels disen-
gaged leaves him, rather like the narrator near the end of A la recherche du
temps perdu, situe dans le temps mais deja hors du temps (Fi ). Moving
up and out of the underworld of the previous section, he emerges onto
a metatextual plane from which he openly analyses the professional
morality that has (fallaciously) attempted to unir les deux cotes en-
tre lesquels je me sens partage, formuler une regle dor qui serait en
meme temps art poetique et savoir-vivre (Fi ). This analysis is antici-
pated by the reiteration (Fi , , ) of key phrases used in section
(Fi , , ) to relocate Leiriss project within the structure of revolution,
and in itself obviously represents a further stage in the endless spiral of au-
tobiographical reection. But Leiriss analysis of this morale de la parole
(Fi ) reveals the contradiction in terms involved in seeking to es-
tablish and full a programme of poetic transcendence, when the latter
necessarily must exceed recuperation. What emerges from the taboos
or rules which he lists and tests at the end of Fibrilles, therefore, is at
best a structural rather than transcendental conception: quelque chose
comme le gros oeuvre dun art de lautobiographie (Fi ). Section
of Fibrilles concludes, then, with a double self-denition, wherein Leiris
attempts and fails to nd the rule of the game of the autobiographers
moral position but simultaneously characterizes this failure as the shell
or structural outline of the genre of autobiography. This works in tan-
dem with the following, nal sections closing observations, which are
that there is no rule (Fi ), but that there is time (Fi ). Together,
these metatextual statements, which at the close of Fibrilles underline
the very problem of closure, point to the highly signicant approach of
Frele Bruit, a volume that acts primarily as an open comment on the archi-
tecture and operational procedures of autobiography as an enunciative
modality.
F R E L E B R U I T
The following affair with Lena will therefore hopefully ood his life with
a sense of the sacred, helping him to overcome the fear of death and
so emerge from himself. As Leiris clearly states: Cest donc entre ce
double processus de repulsion et dattirance que se joue tout le drame
( J ). This determination explains the proto-existentialist character-
ization of the affair: the irruption of Lenas physical presence into his
cerebral world, his (literary) desire to become a grand costaud genre
Hemingway, his Roquentin-like reections:
Je ne prendrai pas dautre demi de cette biere francaise que je naime pas. Ce
quil faut maintenant cest appeler le garcon, payer, me lever, partir. Demain
ou quelque autre jour si demain je ne puis pas jirai dans un autre cafe et je
continuerai. Puis, il y aura Lena qui rentrera. A ce moment tout se decidera et
je saurai peut-etre enn si pour toujours je dois me comparer a une quelconque
bestiole prisonniere dun mesquin parallelepipede de verre. ( J )
If we really need to place the domestic secrets known as Louise and Lena
in this larger context of the attempt to achieve (virile) exteriorization, it
is equally necessary for us to examine what has been left interiorized
within their heterosexual colouring. Jean Jamin himself provides the
pretext for this investigation by revealing the apparently formative in-
uence of Melvilles Pierre, a translation of which Zette had sent to him
in , during his mobilization in Beni-Ounif. His claim, supposedly
substantiated in letters to his wife, is that the novel gave Leiris an inspir-
ing literary model for an oblique, structural exposure in Biffures of Zettes
secret status. It is certainly true that Pierre presents complex familial rela-
tions. The novel concerns Pierre Glendinning, and his peculiar dealings
with women: his mother, with whom on the linguistic level he entertains
a rather incestuous relationship; his illegitimate sister, Isabel, whom he
passes off as his wife; and his original ancee Lucy, who scandalously
moves in with Pierre and Isabel. In addition, the novel offers much
that could be viewed as typically Leirisian: an obsession with decipher-
ment, with social mores and correctness, with the signifying properties
of words and names (p. ), with the power of the written word in how-
ever insignicant a form (pp. ), with the mystery and doubling of
representation (pp. ).
What has been masked in this comparison, however, is the much more
profound analogy of a secret that remains. It has been convincingly argued
that the ostensible deciphering of the bizarrely heterosexual complexities
of Pierres storyline is in itself an encrypting of the homosexual. In the
words of James Creech: In Pierre, homosexuality is explored from the
perverse perspective of its impossible place, and thus its closeted space.
In other words, its cryptology is indeed related to a sexual secret, one
which logically is occluded by the texts stiing drama. This elaborate
encrypting recalls in turn the work of Raymond Roussel, one of Leiriss
acknowledged mentors. According to Foucault, who constantly empha-
sizes the link between Roussel and Leiris and argues at one point that the
latter sought to preserve the formers work by encoding it in his own as
well as writing about it, the process employed by Roussel transformed
what is revealed into an enigma. The link allows us to reinforce this
different view of the Journals intimacy: like Comment jai ecrit certains de
mes livres, the Journal can be viewed as secret and posthumous, hiding as
Texts and contexts
much as it reveals, in the specic context of homotextuality. In Foucaults
words: Perhaps beneath the process revealed in this last text, another
set of laws governs even more secretly and in a completely unforeseen
way . . . , telling a kind of salutary lie a partial truth, which signies
that one must look further and in greater depth (pp. ). And in the
Postscript to the English-language edition, he adds: Between cryptogra-
phy and sexuality there is certainly a direct relationship (p. ), afrm-
ing that (sexual) life and work are related not because the latter translates
the former but because the former is part of the latter: The work is more
than the work: the subject who is writing is part of the work (p. ).
Such insights bring home how concerted cultural forces have pre-
sented the Journal as implicitly heterosexual. Leiris himself has con-
tributed, somewhat obsessively, to this resolution. In the process, what
has become ignored is the presence of the homosexual and the effect of
the homographic in the totality of his work. It is especially important to
investigate such inuence in the context of the Journal, where the expo-
sure of the secrets dictating Leiriss writing has reinforced the secrecy of
a constituent homographesis. The work of homographesis has been ex-
plained by Lee Edelman, who uses the term to denote relations between
representations of gay male sexuality and the logics and anxieties of
representation as such. Believing that sexuality is constituted through
operations as much rhetorical as psychological (p. xiv), Edelman concen-
trates on homosexualitys textual or semiotic overdetermination. As with
any gural logic, this results in metaphoric and metonymic manifesta-
tions. For Edelman, these are reductive and deconstructive respectively:
in the former, homosexuality is essentialized as secondary, sterile and
parasitic in relation to heterosexualized totalization; in the latter, the
desire-generated metonymy which emerges out of such a xed system
of identity results in homosexuality coming to signify the potential per-
meability of every sexual signier and by extension, of every signier
as such (p. ). The term homographesis therefore indicates the work of a
hermeneutics of suspicion that resists the silent hardening of sexually
contingent connections into essential equivalences (p. ) and logically
de-scribes itself in the very moment of its inscription (p. ).
While such an operation resembles in general Leiriss biffural logic, a
close attention to the specic dimension of homographesis in the Journal
brings out at once how the rhetorical and formalist mechanism of secre-
tion and exposure deployed by Leiris and critics is propelled in part by
the homographic differance that remains secreted but inaccessible inside
the text.
Secreting the self: Journal
The Journals literal beginning is a secret, one whose existence and
supposed content provide the pretext for the initial act of exposure. After
the opening words [Sans doute] ( J ), which are actually those of
Jamin, we are referred at once to the rst of endnotes also by Jamin.
This one informs us that Leiris tore out the rst pages of manuscript
number one, and erased (biffees) the subsequent ve lines to such a
degree that they became indechiffrables, de sorte quil nest possible de
dater precisement le commencement de ce journal ( J ). By way of
elucidation, Jamin refers to the journal entry for February and
to page of Fourbis, from which he extracts that the entries were later
excised since Leiris considered their concern with hermetic science to be
trop betes. As Jamin himself notes, though, the reference to alchemy
in Fourbis simply prefaces the exact recollection of another, this time
unexpurgated, journal entry, originally dated October :
Notre mort est liee a la dualite des sexes. Un homme qui serait a la fois
male et femelle, et capable de se reproduire seul, ne mourait pas, son ame se
transmettant sans melange a sa posterite.
La haine instinctive que les sexes ont lun pour lautre vient peut-etre de la
connaissance obscure de ce fait que la mortalite est due a la differentiation des
sexes. Rancune violente, balancee par la tendance a lunite seul chiffre de
vie quils tentent de satisfaire par le cot. ( J )
We can see that the entrys real concern is with the inevitable death
caused by heterosexual recognition and activity, the instinctive hatred
which this obscure knowledge produces, and the specic magical ideal
of total sexual union within one mans body. Turning now to the journals
entry, we nd again that an attendance to the whole passage brings
out the nature of the concern later dismissed as stupid. Leiris remarks
that he has been to see the Albert Lewis lm version of Dorian Gray for
the second time in as many days, adds that he read the book (together
with A rebours) around , and then recalls that the stupid pages had
noted avec, bien entendu, beaucoup de vanite, que je me conduisais
ou tendais a me conduire a legard de mes amis comme Dorian Gray a
legard de Sibyl Vane ( J ). To this he adds a complex literary context:
Cote Dorian Gray de tout un aspect de Jouhandeau: Ximenes Malinjoude, LAmateur
dimprudence, Astaroth. Cf., egalement, ce que Proust dit du cote Haroun al-
Rachid de Charlus, quant a son noctambulisme special. Tout ceci, remontant
au prince Rodolphe des Mysteres de Paris et meme a Restif de la Bretonne.
The ostensible link between these disparate writers is arguably a rened
individuals semi-detached observation of society, but once we add to this
Texts and contexts
ad-hoc tradition the entry, the sexual charge within each disjunc-
tion clearly emerges. This ceases to be incidental when Leiris concludes
the entry by placing Biffures in the tradition thus created: Les Biffures en
tant que portrait de Dorian Gray peint par lui-meme et qui ne serait pas
moyen de garder sa jeunesse. So the journals repressed beginning now
returns, via a regressing (remontant) alternative canon that many would
view as a homotextual mapping, in order to offer up a previously unac-
knowledged model for Biffuress self-portrait. Between this new text, and
Jamins proposed model, Pierre, of course, the link is the cryptography of
a homosexual secret. Given the intricate nature of Leiriss act of secretion
and exposure here (indirectly revealing repressed references in a secret
diary to private links to oblique representations) and the fact that it has
not been commented, it is worth pursuing in part this cote Dorian Gray.
It is fair to say that, of the writers cited by Leiris, Jouhandeau is the
least canonic. He merits a passing reference in the most recent histories
of literature in French; while a cursory glance at those works which
these Histories superseded shows that this present passivity is in part the
result of a more knowing exclusion. The work of Henri Peyre, for ex-
ample, has been instrumental in the growing acceptance by the canon of
the centrality of the literature of sincerity. His French Novelists of Today,
one of the rst and most inuential assessments of the contemporary
eld produced after the war, and also largely contemporary in its re-
visions with the central volumes of La Regle du jeu, places Jouhandeau
in the negative category of unclassiable outsiders (p. ). Once this
seemingly innocent view is adumbrated, however, an astounding ho-
mophobia emerges. Jouhandeau is called one of those demented and
ranting extremists (p. ) who display the exhibitionism which delights
[. . .] Catholics [. . .] dwelling in Sodom (p. ). Peyre here obviously
derives satisfaction from subjecting Jouhandeaus mystique de lenfer
to a professorial nal judgement. More generally, it is instructive for us
to recall that canons by their institutionalized nature are constructed in
large measure out of such determined biffures. But this concerted efface-
ment makes Jouhandeaus position at the head of Leiriss list all the more
signicant. It is easy to trace both Jouhandeaus formative presence in
Leiriss life up to the production of LAge dhomme, and Leiriss determined
effacement of this mystique thereafter from his self-representations. In
other words, Leiris concurs with the critical obliteration of Jouhandeau,
as part of a process of autobiographical orthodoxy. We can argue, then,
that Jouhandeaus disappearance represents a more authentic level of
secrecy, one to which the Journal seems actively dedicated. As a signier
Secreting the self: Journal
of homographic difference, Jouhandeau reveals an aim which runs con-
trary to that of an autobiographers supposedly artless journal intime but
precisely forms part of the prefatory claim in The Picture of Dorian Gray,
namely [t]o reveal art and conceal the artist.
The largest block of references to Jouhandeau offers an oblique record
of an intimate relationship that reached an intense point between March
and July . At their most enthusiastic, Leiriss allusions become mys-
tical, lyrical and poetic:
Mercredi a jeudi mars
Nuit chez Jouhandeau. Le starets (Pere Laberthonniere).
Quand nous levons la tete, le ciel nous bande les yeux (Andre Breton).
( J ).
The relationship is brief and to the death. The following days regis-
ter: Purete de la haine ( J ), Le meurtre spirituel ( J ), Liens de
linimitie ( J ), and Jouhandeau vaincu: il me voit en assassin ( J ).
Its physical climax occurs at the end of March, an event marked in the
journal only by a row of dots (inserted by Jamin) indicating that the
page of the original cahier had been ripped out by Leiris. This is sim-
ply the least subtle manifestation of a biffure which Leiris has by this
stage already brought into play. Viewed negatively, it shows that Leiris
attempts almost at once to erase or disperse Jouhandeaus homosexual
presence. Read more positively, it is one of many gestures manifest-
ing how Jouhandeau becomes an inuential homographic signier in
Leiriss self-construction.
Pursuing the negative side rst, it is easy to reconstruct the repressed
homosexual event. Leiris provides a clue in a note written at the
beginning of his analysis with Borel:
La gene dont je me plains est apparue sous forme de gene physique (douleur
et contraction anormale dun des testicules) apres une aventure dordre
pederastique relatee dans le cahier jaune (n mars-debut avril ). ( J ).
This detail is also mentioned in the closing sections of LAge dhomme. Leiris
explains here that his testicular pain (which he claims to be a material
source of psychological impotence resulting in almost no sexual relations
with women) arose a la suite dune grande fatigue, apres plusieurs nu-
its presque blanches passees a vaticiner sur un plan indecis entre la
passion, le mysticisme et le lyrisme avec lami homosexuel dont jai
parle a propos des diverses incarnations de Judith (AH ). This in
turn refers us back to the scene where Leiris encounters a tart in a bar
Texts and contexts
where he was drinking en compagnie dun ami plus age et pederaste
(AH ). A violent scene ensues during which the companion scratches
the womans face, following which Leiris sees him home and then sleeps
with him apres avoir humilie ma bouche et la sienne dans un reciproque
egarement (AH ).
Having relocated this absent event of the secret journal by, ironically,
rereading a public confession and virile programme such as LAge
dhomme, we can begin to appreciate the subtle written strategies em-
ployed within the Journal itself in order to suppress the events aesthetic
implications. Firstly, the relationships direct expression as a prophetic
adherence to poetry, mysticism and lyricism is deliberately turned against
Jouhandeau in order to generate his artistic and moral biffure. Thus he
is literally written out as
Ni mystique ni poete ( J), un [mystique]
chretien ( J ), and someone for whom [L]e mysticisme catholique est
la forme conventionelle quil a choisie pour lexpression de son lyrisme
( J ). At the same time, Leiris takes his distance, so that the denigration
of Jouhandeau acts as the afrmation of both Leiriss physical innocence
and his artistic superiority. Thus Jouhandeau is [p]as poete: son lyrisme
nest jamais quune declaration damour ( je le sais car la seule fois que
jai voulu me transporter avec lui sur le plan lyrique, cela a tourne en
declaration damour) ( J ); and we are told that whereas Jouhandeau is
iconoclatre, Leiris and his friends are iconoclastes ( J ). Leiriss break
with idolatry is quite literal in this context: endnotes by Jamin tell us that
a comment on the pederastie du professeur ( J ) and two large sections
which reect a partial reconciliation with Jouhandeau ( J ) were
dropped by Leiris when he copied manuscript number one, the cahier beige,
into the crucial manuscript number two, the cahier bleu. He reinforces
such actions with a specic recommendation to himself: Supprimer tout
ce qui me lie: souvenirs, fetiches de toutes sortes . . . Bruler tout derriere
soi ( J ). Henceforth, this virile determination results in a silence
surrounding Jouhandeaus name that is broken only by the occasional
derogatory adjective: scandaleux ( J ); mythomane ( J );
epouvantable ( J ); sinistre ( J ). The most complex suppression
by far, though, occurs when a entry suddenly declares: La veritable
inversion de Jouhandeau: faire de la pederastie le prototype du Mal
alors que lantisemitisme est regarde comme un bien ( J ). This
inversion of inversion, which allows Jouhandeau the pederast to be
condemned for other reasons, is repeated much later, and this time with
an attendant aesthetic Judgement, as a footnote commentary added
six months after the event to the record of Jouhandeaus funeral:
Secreting the self: Journal
Oui, malgre son talent indeniable decrivain stricto sensu (encore que le classi-
cisme de sa langue soit assez proche dun academisme), fait aujourdhui gure
dhomme incroyablement narcissique qui durant toute sa vie est passe a cote
de tout, ne sinteressant guere qua ses petites histoires dalcove ou de famille
et se preoccupant seulement de les transformer litterairement en bijoux. Plus
mechamment: un homme qui parlait de mal a propos de son homosexualite,
mais na jamais juge bon de battre sa coulpe a propos de lantisemitisme auquel
il avait temporairement cede (--). ( J ).
Une voix interieure lui soufe quil cherchait par la a etouffer quelque voix
plus interieure qui eut bien voulu le faire entendre, sil se fut repose un instant
pour lecouter . . . Quand il agissait, il ne faisait que reagir, tantot contre un desir
poignant, sauvage, aveugle, encore a demi inconnu, qui montait, bride de ses
entrailles, tantot contre un absolu qui, descendu trop vite des splendeurs de son
intelligence, eut risque dilluminer par surprise ce desir obscur. (XM ).
Within the paragraph break occurring near the bottom of the page in
the Journal ( J ), Jouhandeau had actually added:
[I]l etait lunique amant de lEtre, lamant de Dieu nu quil poursuivait, nu
lui-meme, dans lombre des choses comme derriere un buisson pour ly etreindre
et letouffer. Oh! le terrible amant de Dieu! Etait-ce pour tenter Dieu? Cetait
pour Dieu seul que se grimait Ximenes. (XM ).
And where Leiris breaks off again at the bottom of the page ( J ),
Jouhandeau had continued:
[A]pres des annees dhumiliation et de renoncement devant lui, il avait admis
une bouche en delire a toucher pour la premiere fois et la derniere afrmait-il,
sa bouche hauteine, parfumee et peinte. (XM )
As we have seen, what has not been suppressed has been absorbed
into LAge dhommes virilization and petrication of self. Here it is sig-
nicant that Leiris records how Jouhandeau reproaches him for LAge
dhommes abstractions, confesses that Jouhandeau is right to hate the
books egotism ( J ), but attempts to justify its approach as a
liquidation and cette volonte de se depasser . . . qui est le signe de sa
valeur poetique [mais qui] na pas a prendre necessairement une forme
poetique ( J ). The formulation encapsulates what was to become,
of course, the central plea of the preface added to LAge dhomme for its
republication in . It therefore demonstrates once more how Leiriss
Secreting the self: Journal
biffure of the homosexual portrait has generated a subterranean homo-
textuality, with its own covert and highly inuential addressee.
It is clear on examination that the homosexual apprenticeship con-
cealed within the Journal is more profoundly operative than those het-
erosexual secrets of Lena or Louise which criticism is happy to endorse.
We can see also how the homosexual persists as a negative grounding
in Leiriss most accomplished work, underlying, for example, the reso-
lute heterosexualization of LAge dhommes form, content and prefatory
programme. More generally, it is evident that Jouhandeaus signicance
really lies in the permeability and instability which, as a signier, it is
capable of releasing into the text. Its determined erasure therefore ex-
poses the existential and institutional desire to totalize and essentialize
that obviously tempts both Leiris and his professional readers. As we
come now to the end of our chronological review of Leiriss work, it
is crucial for us to bear this lesson in mind. As a text, the Journal itself
confounds the imposition of any simple evolutionary pattern by showing
how complex derivative operations of the biffure have been active from
the beginning of Leiriss writing. Similarly, if we attend to the journals
dynamics of admission rather than to its degree of narrative completion,
we cannot maintain hierarchical distinctions based on genre or apparent
complexity. In both these complications, the Journal, far from being the
marginal ebauches of the polished uvre, emerges in retrospect as a major
Vorbild. And as it operates with an unresolved and persistently secretive
nature, this model text undermines the work of totalization even as it
compiles a massive record of its constituent elements. At the origin and
end of the major autobiographies, therefore, we are obliged to recognize
non-nitude, heterogeneity, and repression rather than revelation, and
so to revise our reading of Leiriss whole confessional and contractual
undertaking. Such an aporetic conclusion is at least consistent with the
nature of the Journal. But, more positively, it directs our attention towards
what none the less drives all of Leiriss writing, namely the obsession with
self-presence. What we need to do now, therefore, is to supplement our
chronological assessment with a specic examination of the thematics of
Presence in Leiris.
The quest for presence in La Regle du jeu
. . .
Leiris drops a toy soldier, picks it up, sees that it is not broken and cries
. . . Reusement! This opening scene presents no less than the whole
irradiant-concealing coming to presentness of Being itself . An entire
eschatology of self-presence unfolds in its apparently conventional and
modest picture of a childhood innocence which comes to self-awareness
through a mythical rst confrontation with the possibility of a fall, a
Excess of joy: the beginnings of presence in . . . Reusement!
loss, a damage or impairment, that would break the closed world of self-
contained play. Leiriss reaction is to express his relief, to send up praise,
an imperfect hallelujah or neume. This rst act of self-expression, gram-
matically imperfect, points to two already existing perfections: that of the
self behind the expression; and that of the potential pure, absolute voca-
tive of the exclamation, turned to an addressee who is not Augustines
God (the object of the Confessions opening praise) but is the listener within
Leiris himself: Il netait pas casse, et vive fut ma joie. Ce que jexprimai
en mecriant: . . . Reusement! (Bi ). Nothing appears to be broken
(into), and Leiris as pure self-presence can use an imperfect expression
as a pure praise of the Eden prior to a fall, the (non)time before the
movements, ignorances and engagements with the Other that exist in
language and structure. Language is not felt to be necessary to this per-
manent moment, it is merely a luxurious hosanna for the pure play
which has been saved. The joy and mystery of being as pure, closed play,
a play which makes its own regulations and praises itself, a play existing
prior to grammar (language) or an independently adjudicated pattern
(structure). The hand, the eye, the voice, the ear are all complicit in this
conrmation of self-presence and draw no attention to themselves as
such. The scene conrms that Leiris is. What joy.
Such a play, however, is conceptually impossible other than as an al-
ready lost and fervently desired represented ideal. La Regle du jeu does not
begin, therefore, by showing that Leiris is. It begins, rather, with the lin-
guistically and structurally necessary knowledge that to show that Leiris is
is already to indicate the ideality of pure self-presence. The autobiogra-
phy therefore opens with a complex temporal and spatial differentiation
which will permit the rst expression of a self-consciousness arising from
a fall which has already taken place. It closes by realizing this space and
time of differentiation, this belated self-representation and this imperfect
state as a shared and socialized existence, mysteriously represented by
the insectile otherness already inherent in language: le langage [. . .] me
depasse, poussant de tous cotes ses antennes mysterieuses (Bi ). The
supposed rst moment of pure self-intuition at the beginning of La Regle
du jeu is therefore in fact preceded by the acknowledgement within pre-
sentness that the now is already other, that is to say, part of the complex of
time. It is time which begins at the beginning of La Regle du jeu, a fact which
autobiography and its sequential nature can only serve to emphasize,
even as the paragraphs single sentence acts as an attempt to reduce the
other of temporal and spatial difference opened up within representa-
tion to a unique point of presentness. As a result, Leiriss identity is now
The quest for presence in La Regle du jeu
and simultaneously seen to be indissociably related to an otherness, a
foreign intrusion that generates the rst instance of self-representation.
The false alarm of the potential violence done to the toy soldier (let alone
by a soldier), which was used to conrm an unbreachable presence is a
reappropriating repetition of the real violence done to the nontempo-
ral and nonspatial sphere of self-presence which is the autobiographys
impossible ideal, impossible because the commencement of the autobi-
ography marks the movement of time and space, and the relation to the
Other which necessarily arises from that instant. In this opening chapter,
this much greater violence is already in language (the already broken
. . . Reusement!) and structure (the physical and pedagogical contain-
ment of the child). But ultimately it exists already within the child, from
the moment that the objectifying equation between self-intuition and
childhood has been made. This equation, and the even more sober dif-
ferentiation between childhood and adulthood which the temporal and
spatial preliminaries of . . . Reusement! bring about by the chapters
conclusion, introduce the idea of negativity into pure play, a negativity
well represented by the broken . . . Reusement!
However, this is not how La Regle du jeu begins, either. This incuba-
tory scene, in which Leiriss entry into consciousness is represented as
conceived, gestated and laboured over as well as involving a death of
pure self-presence, simultaneously offers the sign of self-presence. Play
is, indeed, this very rst sign, a representation of the mastery of nega-
tivity within a structure of presence and absence. The fall of a toy and
the willed reafrmation of the toys undamaged state is an appropriate
rst representation of how, through autobiography, being is, again. It is at
this point, in fact, that consciousness begins in La Regle du jeu: presence
is restored and reappropriated by this primary autobiographical mo-
ment, primary in the sense of marking the beginning of representation.
If the rst stage, pure presence, is not in need of language, given the
absolute immediacy within which presence perceives itself in this ideal
state, and if the second stage, that of negativity, or the reprise (Je me
suis ecrie: . . . Reusement!. Lon ma repris. (Bi )), is revealed by lan-
guage, showing that it is in words and language that things rst come
into being and are, then this third stage is the philosophical moment,
the reasonable use of words in thinking, which can recognize, dialecti-
cally, the second stage, the negation of parousia, and so regain presence by
representing this knowledge as the moment of the emergence of Being.
This representation is therefore what leads for the rst time to the meaning
of Being, a meaning which can therefore take up and subsume the fall
Excess of joy: the beginnings of presence in . . . Reusement!
of primordial presence into derivitive consciousness, and use this fall to
represent its own coming into presentness. In this way, La Regle du jeus
opening is still completely metaphysical: it still assumes the precedence
of autos over bios, the joy of spirit or essence over invading otherness.
This otherness is remembered, interiorized and overcome by becoming
the experience that opens up childhood to representation. Autobiog-
raphy recovers presence by way of proximity, then, and in this regard
the representation of the joy and mystery of childhood at the beginning
of La Regle du jeu completely and impressively dominates its linguistic
form, returning its revelations to the service of the sign. This is fur-
ther assured by all the cultural resonances of the scene, each of which
conrms . . . Reusement!s representation of self-presence. Proust and
Rousseau have already been mentioned in connection with language,
but my reference above to Augustine is particularly pertinent here to
the ontotheological culture to which La Regle du jeus representation of
presence ultimately makes appeal. (This also further illuminates the role
of biblical exegesis in Alphabets representation of Leiriss early edu-
cation.) These cultural forms of repetition and reappropriation indicate
how the pure presence of play is being regained by Leiris via his rep-
etition of this originary play on the level of the sign itself, the playful
complexity imposed on the syntax of the opening paragraph being used
to dominate the alterity and negativity of language. This leads to one
further, paradoxical strategy. This opening chapter seeks to overcome
the impossibility of pure self-presence not only by subsuming but in fact
by emphasizing the repetitive element in representation which precisely
involves exile from the pure state of parousia. Within a series of syntac-
tic repetitions, backtrackings and overlappings, then, we are presented
with a setting that is varied subtly as it is repeatedly placed before us,
the repeated fall of the toy, the repetition of Leiriss joy both as feeling
and as expression, several repetitions of the reprise, and, of course, the
repetition of the childs repetitive play on the level of the practice of this
repetitive form of writing. If the presence preceding representation can
be shown only as lost or desired, then the representation of presence
can perhaps suggest a pure origin by overemphasizing its own impure,
decadent circumvolutions. This sublation of repetition has the effect of
re-presenting presence as the still pivot of autobiography.
But the purpose of this representation is outdone from the beginning
by what this writing practice uncovers. For prior to the constitution of
the autobiographical subject by the . . . Reusement! scene, there exists
the double movement of the biffure and the decalage which are gured by
The quest for presence in La Regle du jeu
the scene as already operating within the law and structure of the rst sign
of self-presence. La Regle du jeu does not begin, therefore, with the dialec-
tical manipulation of nonpresence by representation in order to conrm
the original ideal of self-presence through a self-effacing act. What exists
even prior to this beginning is the already operative biffure and decalage
whose temporal and spatial nature is not denable as a modalization of
presence. The constantly attempted nowness of La Regle du jeus open-
ing, which from the beginning has to negotiate a series of temporal and
spatial hurdles, is the closest representation that can be offered of the
real beginning of autobiography: the rst moment as forever attempted
reduction of an original biffure. This scenario operates otherwise than
on the level of the representation of presence and can only be glimpsed
through it. An original bifurcation and an original erasure, already dif-
ferent and beyond denition, to which the act of presencing comes in
an attempt to reappropriate Being. An original interval and an original
deviation, already elsewhere and beyond the point of Being, to which
the act of presencing comes in an attempt to systematize the absolutely
Other of Being. This impossible non-conceptualization of Being can only
be conceived as the pre-original moment of autobiography, a moment
erased and reproduced as the founding unthought of self-representation.
. . . Reusement! shows how autobiography must posit a moment prior
to biffure and decalage in order to bring the concept of difference, and
hence of identity, into being. It is this rule which forms the opening sol
impitoyable (Bi ) of autobiographys game, the rst and necessary limi-
tation with which to effect self-presence. For the aboriginal structure and
time of biffure and decalage cannot be represented as such. They can only
be revealed in the course of autobiographys mise-en-scene of childhood
and a coming into presentness.
At its most radical level, therefore, La Regle du jeus opening shows up the
preoriginal biffure and decalage of a self-presence which can only be given
as already split and effaced, spatialized and projected. This is the real and
greatest violence of autobiographys opening, an opening of the abso-
lutely other which does not simply offer an origin of nonpresence subse-
quently reappropriated by a philosophical turn. This opening has no site
of its own, and cannot be thought as such. Erasure and displacement exist
within it, prior to the dialectical movement that would reappropriate it.
It is the absolutely unconscious of autobiographical representation, an
alterity that does not think itself in terms of presence or absence.
The absolute opening of autobiography is therefore that of the in-
conceivable arch violence of the absolutely other. Such an absolute
Excess of joy: the beginnings of presence in . . . Reusement!
vertigo can only be handled by representation, presented metaphysi-
cally as the excessive effect of a biffure and decalage that marks the advent
of self-presence. In a circular manner, then, this excess in the sign of
self-presence is shown to condition the rst emergence of presence, time
and representation from a moment subsequent to self-presence: lespece
de deviation, de decalage qui sest trouve de ce fait imprime a ma pensee
(Bi , my emphasis). Representing the vertigo in this way, that is to say
erasing the biffure prior to presence allows self-presence to posit itself as the
beginning of self-representation. On the most original level, therefore, be-
yond anything conceivable as an autobiographical project, La Regle du jeu
once more shows how representation precedes presence, in revealing
within the metaphysics of self-presence the workings of an unthinkable
primary biffure.
The chapter opens with a visual and vocal recognition of the conditioning
detours of identity. Leiris scrutinizes and describes the social and geo-
graphical details of his new address, bis quai des Grands-Augustins,
and views himself in his new study ou avec force detours, retours, ra-
tures, biffures, bifurcations diverses presentement jecris (Bi ). What
this writing itself also afrms is the intersubjective nature of the je and
the impossibility of a pure and unaffected vocalization of self-presence:
quest-ce quun je un je unique et isole sans un tu, sans un nous, sans
un il gravitant autour de lui . . . ? (Bi ). In spite of these visual and vocal
screens, however, Leiris persists in afrming that certain experiences offer
a pure presentation of Being, and places these moments under the sign
of the oral and subterranean name of Persephone (Bi ). The exam-
ples which Leiris provides of the spiralling nature implicit for him in the
name constitute one of the most famous passages of La Regle du jeu, and
include the following:
La feuille dacanthe quon copie au lycee quand on apprend a manier tant bien
que mal le fusain . . .
lhelicode inscrite sur la coquille dun escargot . . .
le simulacre infect quune legere pression des doigts tire dun pere-la-colique,
les jaspures etalees sur les tranches de certains livres relies . . .
les circonvolutions cerebrales . . .
la conque dune oreille . . .
tout ce qui est feston, volute, rinceau, guirlande, enroulement, arabesque . . .
(Bi )
What is most immediately striking in these disparate images of a unique
spiralling effect is the relation they establish between representation
(books, inscriptions, writing, drawing, a simulacrum produced by the
Organs of learning: sensing presence in Biffures
ngers), consciousness (cerebral circumvolutions) and the ear. In effect,
the spiralled name of Persephone attempts to overcome the original
movement of the biffure and decalage by locating it as a visual shape and
a sonic roar within the conch of the ear. The name Persephone itself
furthers this link between a metaphysical circuit and the actual organ
of the ear: on the level of the cultural signied, it evokes the organic
myth of death and rebirth embodied in the daughter of Demeter, who
spent half of each year in the underworld with Pluto; while on the level
of the resonant signier, its proximity to perce-oreille or earwig evokes
the penetration of the open organ by an insect doubtless related to the
one representing language in the opening . . . Reusement! scene. This
piercing of the ears membrane by the earwig of language leads Leiris in
turn to establish a suture between the throat and the tympanum. The
tympanum can be shattered by an excessive outburst from the throat
(perhaps the result, he adds, of an overjoyful game), an outburst that can
break the vocal chords in the process. But the two equally belong to the
same cavernous region, one in which the pure vibration of a spirit an-
nounces a presence. This cartilaginous cavern, an ear with the latency
of the voice, directly linked to nature (Persephones myth is normally in-
terpreted as the birth and death of seed, while Leiris imagines the earwig
boring into the heart of a fruit) yet before it and beneath it, a subter-
ranean kingdom full of the immanence of presence, therefore suggests
an absolute organic source. This cavernous space is premetaphorical,
for with its original emptiness it acts as a resonating chamber for all
other things. Externality and alterity cannot surprise it, for it envelops
all differentiation with the same absolute passivity. All things come to this
matrix, but within itself no dividing movement marks its own registration.
Instead, it lies between inside and outside:
Et les cavernes, en n de compte, deviennent le lieu geometrique ou se re-
joignent divinite chtonienne, insecte perceur de noyaux, matrice ou se forme la
voix, tambour que chaque bruit vient frapper de sa baguette dair vibrant; les
cavernes: obscures tuyauteries plongeant au plus secret de letre pour conduire
jusqua la cavite toute nue de notre espace mental les bouffees de temperature,
consistance et agrement variables qui se propagent en longues vagues hori-
zontales apres etre montees tout droit des fermentations du dehors.
Dune part, il y a donc le dehors; dautre part, le dedans; entre les deux, le
caverneux. (Bi )
The original cavernous space of the ear in Persephone has by now ex-
panded to incorporate the throat and the entrails, all of which is charge
de vibrations qui ne sont que les exhalaisons dont il sest impregne durant
The quest for presence in La Regle du jeu
sa periode de latence dans ce monde souterrain (Bi ), in other words,
a total registering and reproducing organ, full of the spirit and breath of
a mysterious presence. Leiris emphasizes this mystery by the way he im-
mediately goes on to describe the (singing) voice which can produce this
vibration within the cavernous region: it is mysterious, and its mystery, if
one had to give a gure of speech to what cannot by denition have one,
could be represented as a margin surrounding the object, simultaneously
isolating it and underlining its presence (Bi ) precisely the function
of the ear. Persephone therefore proposes the ear as the ideal spiritual
organ for a resounding self-presence.
But the above description of the cavernous already shows clearly how
this absolute region of self-presence is in fact the effect of an astonish-
ingly complex metaphorical mechanism linking inside to outside, brain
to body, ear to voice, the vertical to the horizontal, and limit to passage.
These movements are all the more absolute for being interior. Within
the vibration that marks a spiritual presence, temporality and spatiality
are already evident. As this wand of vibrating air strikes the mem-
brane, moreover, exteriority and alterity are inevitably gured, if only
as the experiences to which the tympanum fearfully remains open (lon
peut sinquieter a lidee du tympan, membrane fragile menacee detre
trouee (Bi ). This membrane, meanwhile, is busy distorting, amplify-
ing, deadening and diverting the supposedly premetaphorical vibration
of pure spirit, and it is this biffure which autobiography then postulates
as the origin of a self-presence that is aux prises avec lineffable, la ligne
melodique se presentant comme la traduction, en un idiome pure-
ment sonore, de ce qui ne pourrait etre dit par le moyen des mots
(Bi ).
On the one hand, then, Leiriss autobiography offers itself a pure
source that exists prior to vocal and visual representation in the form
of the original breath of presence within the cavernous depths of an
absolute ear, a chthonian immanence revealed in all its latency within a
pretemporal and prespatial matrix. On the other hand, this subterranean
source still cannot sink below or exist prior to the biffure that marks
a differentiation within the pure point of Being, for the amplications,
obliterations, passages and pulsations of the vibration and the membrane
are still required to bring this most spiritual identity into being. Within
the cavern of the absolutely same, a trembling otherness has already
happened.
In an attempt to restore the pure mystery of the source and its singing
voice, however, Leiris now goes on to represent two cultural versions
Organs of learning: sensing presence in Biffures
of this notion of pure sonic presence. The rst appropriation of the ear
takes the form of an evocation, in Persephone, of a childhood phono-
graph. In addition to being obviously a mechanical reproduction of the
mechanism of the ear which Leiris has just dismantled, the value of
this machine for Leiris is the unlocalizable origin of the presence it pro-
duces: it supplements the mystery insubstantially framing the voice with
the mystery of the machines disembodied reproduction of the recorded
sound. In this way, cest avec un mystere presque pur quon se trouvera
face a face (Bi ). This double mystery of production and reproduction
centres on the strange wax rolls which are inserted into the machine.
Sound is reproduced by transmitting the vibrations inscribed like a tight
helix in the wax cylinder to a sensitive membrane or diaphragm, thus
transforming into sound waves the oscillations communicated by the roll.
Even more importantly, however, Leiris recalls an awesomely superior
version of the same machine, belonging to his father, un instrument
quasi miraculeux, rebelle par denition a toute espece danalyse (Bi ).
This marvellous mechanism, which has the signicantly inverted name
of Graphophone, is capable not only of reproducing recordings but
also of recording freshly onto a roll of still virgin wax. The analogy
with the mythical ear, capable of recording its own immanence, is exact,
even to the point of retaining the sexual dynamics of the original. But
in appropriating the notion of sonic presence, Leiriss representation of
the mechanism of aural being also restores presence and purity of in-
tention to its own operations. Leiris the child listens to the marvellous
recording and reproduction of the graphophone. Leiris the adult listens
to Leiris the child, and records with images the childs experience of
sonic presence. The image offered of the experience represents directly
the ghost of immanent presence which the original notion of vibration
had sought to suggest; while the organ propagating his image, Leiriss
own autobiography, partakes of the mystery and purity of the original
process of recording and reproduction which the child experiences, and
so appropriates for itself the same aural purity and immediacy of pres-
encing which had taken place in the original night of the cartilaginous
passage:
Assez longtemps trace, peut-etre, dun phantasme auquel javais cru comme
a une realite positive alors que je netais pas encore initie aux mysteres de
lenregistrement? il me fut impossible decouter un air chante, tel quun duo
par exemple, reproduit au phonographe, sans me representer aussitot les deux
voix, qui alternaient et parfois se melaient, comme issues de deux creatures
minuscules se tenant debout dans la nuit de ce corridor. (Bi )
The quest for presence in La Regle du jeu
The second cultural appropriation of the ear takes place in the fol-
lowing chapter, Il etait une fois . . . . The chapter actually opens with a
denition of its own heading:
Il etait une fois . . . (de toutes ces locutions, il est vrai, la plus vague, celle
qui ne se refere meme a nul passe precis), formule traditionnelle evoquant des
temps en marge de lhistoire et que nous connaissons elle-meme de si longue
date pour lavoir lue ou entendue, maint et maint jour de notre enfance, au
commencement dun conte. (Bi )
We have already reviewed earlier how La Regle du jeu moves from its
opening nominalist celebrations to a sense of communication embody-
ing an existentialist morality. This logic inevitably reects the structure
of autobiography itself, as Leiris comes to perceive and assess himself as
a speaking and writing subject. The desire for pure presence is therefore
intimately bound up with the possibility of pure communication, a pos-
sibility thwarted by the irreducible biffure within any expression of this
ideality. It is paradoxical, then, that it is in recognizing the inevitable
failure of the attempt to achieve the permanent presence of a pure in-
temporal expression and in resolving as a result to break the boundaries
of introspection through action that Leiris appears successfully to sublate
the biffure within interiority, most notably in Fourbis. For the resolution arti-
culated in the second volumes desire to transformer le verbe humain en
un vivant trait dunion avec les auditeurs (Fo ) sufces in itself as an
act of presencing. This presencing views the word as an outward-tending
act of generosity, and so transcends all internal self-division. In addition,
it represents, on the level of pure event, the goal of ideal self-presence, for
it is an illocutionary act whose expression fulls its own desire. In both
cases, a moral resoluteness uses the biffure of language to overcome the
aboriginal biffure within presence, and restore an authentic feeling of being
ones self, a state in which one is not detached from the world or isolated
as a free-oating I, but bonded to the Other (and intimately to ones own
identity) in the brave, open-faced act of being in the world. As Heidegger
writes in Being and Time: Resoluteness brings the Self right into its current
concernful Being-alongside what is ready-to-hand, and pushes it into so-
licitous Being with Others. This double act of union (with others and
already with oneself) most importantly contains no sense of an internal
biffure as part of its structure, for as resoluteness it exists only as the pure
moment of resolution, as the constantly reafrmed and permanently
present event of Being. With resoluteness, Being is a pure event, one that
The quest for presence in La Regle du jeu
purges any notion of an internal biffure through its afrmation of the
integrity and authenticity of the event.
If resoluteness fulls itself, however, by the same token the pure event of
being is conceptually impossible. It cannot be lived and known simulta-
neously. From the start, it is necessarily compromised by representation.
Leiriss autobiography must enmesh the pure event within the structure
of the biffure in order to think the pure event. Such a thought can at best
produce the image of a permanent sublime, a continuous crisis with its
own completely internalized (that is to say non-existent) morality and
gratication. Even to think of it as continuous, however, is to suggest a
temporality it refuses to inhabit, while to think of it as crisis is already
not to be in crisis.
In representational terms, then, the pure event of Being is a crisis
beyond crisis, an event unto itself. Such a permanent resoluteness re-
presents nothing, in fact it presents nothing, it just is, in a permanent
state of non-self-knowing. Pathologically, this might be called psychosis;
philosophically, it would be an absolute Ereignis, a pure event of appro-
priation not present to itself, even though tending permanently towards
death as its ownmost possibility, to use Heideggers phrase.
A permanent autobiographical authenticity is an impossible concept,
therefore. If a constant and complete state of self-realization or authentic
awareness is an autobiographical ideal, it is equally something that would
wipe out autobiographical presence in a permanent white light. The au-
tobiographical representation of authentic self-presence must necessarily
reside in an intermediate space, one in which a presence ickers, within
a general eld of dull inauthenticity, as a series of dramatic realizations.
The representation of ones ownmost possibility requires this dramatic
focusing of time, if resoluteness, authenticity, and the true autobiograph-
ical presence which they indicate are to be realized.
One of the traditional dramatic moments which realize an authentic
self-presence is that of the fall. In cultural terms, this event is virtually a
rite de passage of the autobiographical canon: to mention only those whose
names have already been cited, one thinks immediately of the religious
teleology of Augustines Confessions; or of the way in which this theological
concept of falling is given a natural reinterpretation by Rousseau at
the end of the second promenade of Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire. In
phenomenological and existential terms, such a particular scene of falling
betokens the general condition of falling. The latter is a denite existential
characteristic of Dasein itself. In Heideggers view, an existential mode of
Being-in-the-World is documented in the phenomenon of falling.
The act of union: being-in-the-world in La Regle du jeu
The condition of falling, and the event of a fall, carry all the para-
doxes of authentic presence within themselves. On the one hand, falling
reveals an essential ontological structure of Dasein, in Heideggers view.
On the other hand, the fall, through which being in the world, authen-
ticity and resolution are realized, must be experienced as an unexpected,
and therefore unnecessary, event, this unexpectedness, indeed, being the
necessary guarantee of the events authenticity. On the one hand, the res-
oluteness of self-present authenticity, which acts in itself as a pure event
of presencing in the world with others, is anticipatory, in the way that
resolutely self-presence declares itself and sets itself before the world of
potential events. The resolute event of assuming and taking over ones
own facticity is a presentation of ones present constructed from a reap-
propriation of ones past and a projection of ones possibilities. Therefore
resoluteness gains its authenticity as anticipatory resoluteness. On the
other hand, however, the incident of a fall exists as a necessary disappoint-
ment of anticipation, which means that to some degree the anticipatory
nature of resoluteness evinces an inauthenticity by seeking to prescribe
the nature of an authentic, unforeseen event, such as a fall. In this way the
event manifests both a full presence in the world and a certain absenti-
cation from it. The paradox of presence in autobiography is therefore
fully encapsulated in the ambiguity of this pure act.
This accounts for the obsessive return of the fall in all of Leiriss works
which reveal an autobiographical presence. In Aurora, Leiriss desire for
an inaccessible purity and his horror of xation (A ) generate an
obsessive confrontation with death in which the hero (epitomized by
the anagrammatic character Siriel) suffers repeated dismemberment
and revivication while in the thrall of a dangerous surrealist muse,
Aurora. Imminent annihilation threatens each male character who dares
to approach the pure surrealist thought embodied in Aurora. Yet this is
precisely what permits the self-conscious presence in the text to stand
before itself, unscathed and transformed, within a general situation of
perpetual falling punctuated by confrontations with death. In LAfrique
fantome a rst, conscious series of falls is enacted: the intellectual tourist
resolves to escape from old Europe and to reject the legacies of Western
imperialism. But these are quickly revealed to be inauthentic events in the
face of the ethnographers true fall, a fall that comes with the gradual
emergence of Africas true signicance for the disillusioned ethnogra-
pher. His jaded voice may announce: voici enn , la terre
des a lombre, des convois desclaves, des festins cannibales, des
cranes vides . . . (AF ). Yet Africa persists in existing even beyond
The quest for presence in La Regle du jeu
this image of Europes death. By resisting both scientic analysis and
surrealist immersion, Africas phantom forces Leiris to confront what
lies beyond the ethnographic muse. Like Aurora, Africa acts as a disclo-
sure to Leiris of the impending possibility of his own distinctive death.
In Africa, therefore, Leiris resolutely ees a European death in order to
realize his own authentic Being-towards-death. In LAge dhomme a series
of falls dramatizes the entire virile falling of the young man into man-
hood. Any number of examples could be selected from this catalogue of
wounds, transgressions and abject failings. A very clear example is the
already cited incident in which Leiris lies bleeding profusely from a blow
to the head. His immediate reaction raises the event onto the level of the
existential falling of the subject into tragic authenticity, in which he may
assume the existential destiny so obsessively pursued by the volume as
a whole, that of becoming, in Heideggers words, a Being-towards-the-
end:
Comment pourrai-je aimer? me disais-je, sentence qui memplit tout entier,
montant de mon coeur a ma tete, et sous le coup de laquelle jaurais certainement
defailli, si par sa formulation meme je ne metais senti place sur un certain plan
de tragedie, ce qui me donnait et la erte davoir a jouer un role et la force
necessarire pour le tenir a peu pres correctement. (AH )
But it is in La Regle du jeu that the experience of the fall is most fully repre-
sented, for it combines Auroras drive for epiphany, LAfrique fantomes socio-
political melancholy and LAge dhommes psychoanalysis of the bourgeois
sacred. And yet again we nd that Biffuress opening . . . Reusement!
scene encapsulates the general drama of the whole autobiography. For
with . . . Reusement! Biffures begins with a pure event and a primary
resolution.
. . .
My previous interpretations of La Regle du jeus opening scene have high-
lighted how the desire to begin from an established presence is undercut
by the preoriginal biffure within interiority. In terms of coming into being
in the world, however, this same rst scene provides the opening authen-
tic event of Being. In this eventful form of presence, the undercutting
effect of the biffure is dramatically dominated by a primary appropria-
tion. Here, self-presence is experienced as an original situation, one in
which Leiris comes to assume with resolution a simple line of existence
out of an undetermined and unhistorical eld of possibilities.
The act of union: being-in-the-world in La Regle du jeu
Leiris drops a toy soldier, picks it up, sees it is not broken, and cries
. . . Reusement!. He is corrected, and comes to a new awareness.
This rst event, conducted against a background which is pitiless and
indisputable, and which provides the forum for privilege and ritual,
reveals to Leiris the possibility of his nitude. In a primary clearing or
opening which sets in question but is not in itself questioned, La Regle
du jeus beginning represents the rst autobiographical moment as being
the questioning of the truth of Leiriss assumed being. Within an original
clearing, Leiris grasps the question of Being and through this comes into
his own authentic existence. Read in this light, such a grasping can be
seen to be conrmed, rather than undone, by the linguistic and structural
representation of the event. The rst sentences gradual emergence now
resembles less the presence of an already established biffure than the au-
thentic negotiation of an existential situation. Leiris grasps his existence
by confronting and appropriating the shock of the event which opens the
autobiography, and in this grasping achieves self-presence. A recognition
of fallenness and a resolute representation of the event gives autobiogra-
phy its basis and validation. . . . Reusement! is therefore the authentic
grasping of Leiriss fall into time.
The fall of the toy soldier, and the grasping of the event by represen-
tation, are therefore intimately related in terms of authentic presence.
The signicance of the toy lies in its belonging to Leiris: Lessentiel
netait pas quun soldat fut tombe . . . , cetait quil y eut quelque chose
mappartenant qui fut tombe (Bi ). The signicance of the toys fall
therefore lies in Leiriss struggles literally to grasp, handle and manipu-
late this event of falling which belongs to him, including on the level of
a writers apprenticeship:
As the title of the chapter implies, Les Tablettes Sportives re-presents
. . . Reusement! s original personal drama of play as the more social ac-
tivity of sport. This shift of approach, which ties in generally with Fourbiss
existentialist ethnography of bourgeois life, achieves several things.
Firstly, it is used in order to introduce a playful engagement with the world
into a more socio-political chronology: the chapter opens by explaining
that its title is derived from a pre-rst world war yearbook; it concludes
with Leiris attending the World Peace Congress in Vienna, and
resolving as he watches iceskaters henceforth to play a full part in the
great human game and above all to act; and in between it covers Leiriss
participation in the Second World War and the Occupation with a
constant appeal to the participatory and contestatory aspects of sport.
Secondly, this stress on the social dimension of the game serves to empha-
size the primacy of the Other, choice and action over the self-centredness
of a playful exclamation of being. Thirdly, the historical and negotiated
nature of this general metaphor of sport, in contrast to the apparent un-
historical immediacy of . . . Reusement! s cry, permits Leiris to frame
the chapters central moment of socio-political self-presence with a gen-
eral series of false or inauthentic engagements with history, such as those
which constituted his experiences of the drole de guerre. And lastly,
The quest for presence in La Regle du jeu
Leiris can use this suspenseful structure, in which he may or may not
achieve a moment of authentic consciousness, to protect (as well as nego-
tiate and expose) himself with the image of a timorous player who comes
to embrace the games risk in an intoxicating moment of direct physical
self-presence (an experience of his position in the system which, given
the sporting allusions, is ttingly confronted while seated on a bicycle).
This authentic event occurs when Leiris is caught in a crossre during
the Paris Occupation (Fo ). Signicantly, it is framed by two par-
odic or inauthentic versions of being in the ring line. The rst of these
is presented as a running joke on the subject of Leiriss pusillanimous if
fraternal participation in the activities of an artillery battery stationed in
North Africa during the drole de guerre. He is happy enough to practise
shelling with the company when his only job is to count the spent cases
and when the only casualties are his ears (in itself an ironic twist to the
lessons of Persephone) and a distant ock of sheep, one of which is actu-
ally blown into the air. Unfortunately, however, his commanding ofcer
presents him with a coup dhonneur, which entails actually detonat-
ing a cannon himself, a privilege he dare not refuse. Leiriss fear delays
this engagement until one of their last sessions when, having nally
accomplished the action, he immediately begins to experience a certain
disappointment for these jeux militaires qui nont ete pour moi quune
comedie toute exterieure (Fo ). The fear preceding this initiation
now gives way to the sensation that his intact body is still that of an
impubere. Nor does he nd an authentic, virile being-unto-death later,
during the triumphal procession of the Free French along the Champs-
Elysees to celebrate the liberation of Paris, when he is forced, along with
the other participants, to dive to the ground as snipers open up from
the rooftops. Like the coup dhonneur, this incident amounts merely to
an intermede pittoresque dans le tohu-bohu dune fete (Fo ). These
interludes therefore merely serve to frame a real dramatic incident dur-
ing the liberation of Paris in which Leiris feels space to be transformed by
the immediate presence of danger. Within this structure of the possibil-
ity of non-being, Leiris experiences with extreme intensity both his own
body and its proximity to other objects. Turning the corner, as he puts it,
pour mengager sur le pont de la Concorde, he suddently nds himself
caught between a German armoured car and an ominous pool of blood:
Durant quelques secondes jeus conscience de moi comme dun corps expose
au vent, desarme, denude, avec la sensation aigue du poids de mes fesses sur
la selle et de la pesee de mes pieds sur les pedales, les dimensions spatiales se
The act of union: being-in-the-world in La Regle du jeu
resumant en les distances qui me separaient, vers la droite, de la mare sanglante,
vers la gauche, du vehicule dacier, et le temps, lui aussi, reconnu comme une
dimension: cela donnee par le mouvement du velo actionne par leffort de mes
jarrets et ameliorant, a chaque instant, ma position dans le systeme. (Fo )
Le moi que je suis depend en lui-meme du moi que je ne suis pas encore, dans
lexacte mesure ou le moi que je ne suis pas encore ne depend pas du moi que je
suis. Et le vertige apparat comme la saisie de cette dependance. Je mapproche
The quest for presence in La Regle du jeu
du precipice et cest moi que mes regards cherchent en son fond. A partir de ce
moment, je joue avec mes possibles. Mes yeux, en parcourant labme de haut
en bas, miment ma chute possible et la realisent symboliquement.
In the light of this quotation, play can now be read not as the serene state
prior to the disruption which causes vertigo, as in . . . Reusement!, but
rather as that action which represents the reective apprehension of the
self, that is to say an existential anguish resulting from the vision of ones
non-being and the necessity of decisive action which ensues. Such play
therefore destroys the unreective vertigo or fear produced by ones sudden
arrival at a precipice, a power it reveals by imitating and symbolically
realizing the possible fall. The fall of the soldier in . . . Reusement! in
this context therefore becomes a rehearsal for the authentic existential
anguish which marks the new, true beginning of Leiris the soldier in
Les Tablettes Sportives.
The central pont de la Concorde scene from Les Tablettes Sportives
directly represents Leiriss body as exposed to the possibility of non-being
in a socio-historical setting. The interpretation of the scene directly repre-
sents Leiriss presence as the authentic moral consciousness which grasps
this nihilation in a socio-political way. La Regle du jeu thus posits a new
autobiographical point of origin, one in which the primacy of the word
in Biffures is replaced by the primacy of choice or action in Fourbis.
This move is given a further twist when repeated in the nal volume,
Frele Bruit. Leiris recalls Goethes famous translation of divine conscious-
ness into dogmatic rationalism:
Au commencement etait laction. Cest ainsi que Faust, vers le debut du drame
goetheen, paraphrase la sentence initiale de levangile de saint Jean: au com-
mencement etait le Verbe. (FB )
On the most immediate level, this recollection of the primacy of action
bears out Fourbiss major revisions of . . . Reusement!. The statement
would endorse the view that self-presence exists not via the verbal
conrmation of a marvel, but in the physical conrmation of a wilful
intellection. As we have already seen in an earlier chapter, however, this
implied opposition between poetry and politics, which Fibrilles sought
to fuse, is not sustained by Frele Bruit. Instead, the latter volume in
a rhizomatic manner connects passages concerning language, often
of the most simplied, and hence exclamatory, nature, with scenes of
The act of union: being-in-the-world in La Regle du jeu
participation in a modern event. The result offers a structural and tem-
poral self-representation not determined by sublation or closure, in which
word and action are not ideologically opposed. It is above all this constel-
latory nature which exposes the ultimate bad faith of Fibrilless attempt
to make poetry and politics coincide in a feverish instant: the earlier
work now not only seems to court the dangers of insanity but to point
to a totalitarian structure which can ultimately only deny freedom, and
hence an authentic self-presence (where freedom is understood as the
space of the Other, that is, the biffures possibilities).
In the context of Frele Bruits accommodating structure, therefore, and
given the metatextual function of the Goethe reference, this allusion to
the revision of . . . Reusement! undertaken in Les Tablettes Sportives
signals less a simple reinforcement of the valorization of decisive action
over revelatory word than the coexistence of action and word in the nal
volumes form and content. Presence will here be marked by an authentic
act of freedom, but this act may well be verbally marvellous. In similar
vein, this mark of presence may be persistently literal and particular,
and simultaneously indicate the whole ethico-political framework for
the production of such a mark. As a sign of this interconnectedness and
of Frele Bruits accommodating nature, it is tting that Leiris employs a
double term which signals both intellectual coexistence and homophonic
singularity: tache/tache.
Three dated events in Frele Bruit rst of all combine to establish a gen-
eral recollection of the moral choice posed by Les Tablettes Sportives.
In the books very rst scene, dated August (FB ), Leiris is
shown witnessing another bloody confrontation between the occupying
Germans and the Free French. He ees in horror to the kitchen where he
automatically washes his hands. Once he becomes aware of what he is
doing, however, he forces himself to return to the window to observe the
rest of the killing. In the second event, dated August (FB ),
Leiris once again recalls the snipers re which sought to disrupt the
celebration of the liberation of Paris. Here in fact he does use the term
tache in reafrming his pleasure at this pure sense of presence in the face
of death, and his subsequent rejection of an inauthentic presence based
on fastidious and cowardly non-involvement: oubliant la crainte des
taches ou autres petits degats qui si souvent embarrasse mes mouvements
(FB ). The third occasion, dated May , connects the previous
occupation and liberation scenes to the May student resistance to
the CRS. Here Leiris explicitly emphasizes how his trips to the kitchen
on this occasion are done not in order to wash his hands of the affair,
The quest for presence in La Regle du jeu
but in order to bring out basins of water which are used by the students
to combat the effect of tear gas. Into this general framework Leiris can
now introduce the indicators tache/tache and related actions of washing
ones hands of an affair or else using them to create an authentic pres-
ence. He begins a section of four entries by recalling the suggestion made
by Marcel Mauss (persecuted as a Jew by the Nazis) that the fork was
invented by cannibals who wished to avoid sacriligious contact with their
human esh. This leads Leiris to meditate ethnographically on his own
and others fastidiousness (lon dirait qua faire ainsi la main se tache
vilainement (FB )) before concluding by reminding himself of Lenins
dictum that one should not be afraid to dirty ones hands when one works
for the Revolution (FB ). In spite of this conscious repudiation, how-
ever, the image of washing ones hands persists in the two subsequent
entries. The rst is a direct account of a black girls night-time vision
of two disembodied hands washing. The second is an allusion to Lady
Macbeths sonambulistic attempt to rid herself of the damned spot of
guilt, while regretting that all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten
this little hand. The nal entry interprets all these images as a com-
mentary on Leiriss own moral presence: Coupe de tout ce qui sagite
sous mes fenetres, . . . suis-je plus vivant que deux mains a la derive quon
decouvre en train de se laver sous un robinet, dans la penombre dune
cuisine? (FB ). The solution he offers himself is realist and dogmatic:
descendre dans la rue, but this does not preclude further moral and
metatextual ruminations on these blemishes affecting presence. A series
of blood-spattered women pass before his eyes, each dramatizing Leiriss
own fear of la tache de sang intellectuelle denoncee par Isidore Ducasse
(FB ). One such image, that of Lucia di Lamermoor, leads to the open
statement: Dailleurs, est-il possible de rester sans tache? Et lune des
pires, nest-ce pas de faire en sorte quon nait jamais a expressement se
tacher? (FB ). Thereafter, answers will be found to these questions
on both a conscious and a subconscious level, and it is typical of Frele Bruit
that these levels should be made to overlap. For example, in a dream
(FB ), Leiris is guilty of some kind of event, and is apprehended
by a policeman whose job is complicated but interesting, comme dans
Marcel Proust les feuilles dautomne (FB ). This dream is inter-
preted, however, in a dogmatically realist manner as a moral tale of
commitment. In the course of explication, the theft is thus renamed a
tache and the policemans job a tache dorganisation, while the com-
pressed reference to Proust and Hugo is read as representing a shame-
ful literary topology full of unpronounced words and unmade gestures.
The act of union: being-in-the-world in La Regle du jeu
The tache/tache framework produces a damning conclusion: behind a
mask of moral rectitude, which is worn in order to abstain from (possibly
violent) action in the world, Leiris is in fact a weak and contemptible
little coward.
Conversely, when Leiris begins almost immediately after this to record
his real experiences of Cuba and his conscious revolutionary hopes
(FB ), he articulates the tache of a disparity between appearance
and reality more specically in terms of imaginative representation:
Prendre garde a cette tache de sang: conclure abusivement de ce que lon pense
a ce que lon est. Autre tache possible: souhaiter que la Revolution progresse
et setende, alors que progressivement on ne fait rien ou a peu pres rien pour
hater, chez soi, son declenchement . . . Inutile dargumenter, je suis marque par
cette tache, signe entre autres du grave hiatus ouvert en moi entre facon de se
representer le monde et facon de sy comporter. (FB )
This conclusion leads in turn to examples of the correct moral tache left
by writing, examples inspired by the grafti of May (FB ).
As implied in one such famous slogan, Soyez realistes, demandez
limpossible, there is nothing simplistically realist or rationalist about
the poetics envisaged. Leiris immediately produces an example of such
a tache: : un chant de beau navire pour calmer la mer ou je
me meurs, fumee; un vin qui, sans peser, se rie de ma tristesse et me
fasse rever; (FB ). A real revolutionary situation has been properly
answered by a demand for dreaming.
On both these levels, therefore, the typical Leirisian tension between
poetry and politics is absorbed into a presence whose teleology is that of
the tache/tache. Frele Bruit concludes with the hope that the tache de sang
representing Leiriss complicitous and cowardly presence in the world be
vitiated by those gestural taches which he has managed to make in the
service of an authentic revolution dened as un desir daffranchissement
maximal [. . .] ou taches et biens seraient equitablement repartis
(FB ).
These concluding representations of the tache/tache of presence are
among the most afrmative moments in Frele Bruit, yet they could hardly
be considered a successful nal sublation of the biffure within interiority.
At best such intermittent ashes emphasize the sense of mortality which
increasingly darkens Frele Bruit. The nal volume of La Regle du jeu after
all opens and closes not with the primacy of action, but with a crepus-
cular sense of resignation that names interruption, lack and absence as
its limits. This is Frele Bruits original and ineffacable tache. Given that
The quest for presence in La Regle du jeu
La Regle du jeus opening offered a similar conception of the preoriginal
biffure, this conclusion to the autobiography is not surprising. Moreover, it
is logical to phenomenological autobiography, since self-representation
will involve Being apprehending itself as not being its own foundation.
Equally, it conforms to the dynamics of the tache, in the sense that
the representation of the nihilating movement of reection as character
isolated by a deed, to engross the present and dominate memory will
inevitably involve the violent erasure of rejected possibilities. In auto-
biography, where these erasures must be self-inicted, the paradox is
therefore that the presence represented by the tache constantly conrms
its own death.
This returns us, nally, to the fundamental paradox of representation
itself. In general, Frele Bruits continued love of verbal marvels precludes
any simply performative view of authentic self-presence in which a word
is dogmatically an intentional act (as in Sartres Theatre de Situations). And
the embarrassment of words inherent in any realist aesthetic is simply
made more acute by the particular term tache. This tache is meant
to stand for the death of introspection and for a vital being in the world.
But its intimate associations with death (whether when owing like blood
from death, or surging like violence towards it, or indicating even in its
imminent coagulation the advent of a nal death) ultimately conrm
less the wilful intellection of an abgrund than the ineffable mark of death
which ontologically and poetically is the true grund of presence as event.
This death of autobiography marks the ultimate limit of life for both the
subject and the genre of autobiography. Presence as self-determination
must still be represented within the culture of a general thanatography.
We have already seen in my previous examinations of . . . Reusement!
how all of these complex considerations are present from the opening of
La Regle du jeu. Biffuress opening chapter displays not simply an original
nostalgia but more fundamentally a rst evidence of the absentication
within self-presence which takes place from the beginning of conscious-
ness. La Regle du jeus original moment of self-observation cannot view
itself wholly as a moment of presence; at best it manages to open up
a rst moment in the world by placing all non-original moments in
parenthesis. The rst paragraphs move from this initial parenthetical
negativity to the concluding image of the already fallen toy soldier there-
fore does more than set the terms for the emergence of a particular
consciousness. It represents the general lesson of the biffure, the fact that
self-representation can only open up on the basis of a self-effacing space,
a space generated not only by those external limits of presence towards
which autobiography progresses and from which it feels it emanates, but
also more intimately by the internal death inherent in self-presence.
As in so many other matters, . . . Reusement! here adumbrates many
of La Regle du jeus later narratives. Logically enough, this thanatography
is especially apparent in the autobiographys metatextual sections. As
the object of its own analysis, the narrative at these points can be read
as a single enormous gure of the non-coincidence within self-presence.
A common pattern emerges: the section becomes dead in leaving the
time and landscape of action; it moves to a discussion of death as a
phenomenon; and it offers in the process some abiding image, network
of images or structuration of the event of death which gurally suggests
what cannot directly be lived or faced, namely the death inherent in the
structure of self-intuition.
It is in Dimanche that Biffures reverses the normal chronological evo-
lution of the life which it has hitherto charted in order to work back to the
source or soubassement (Bi ) of what might otherwise seem entirely
the result of chance. This professional negative of a personal life quickly
leads to a number of dispiriting conclusions. Leiriss original conception
of the poet as spiritually and socially en marge has not withstood his slow
Thanatography: non-being as the limit of autobiography
absorption into paid work and regulated habits. Writing is no longer a
sacred moment; instead, Leiris has become in every sense an ecrivain du
dimanche who produces autobiography for various deathly reasons:
Je necris presque plus de poemes et plus aucun recit imagine, tendant a adopter
lautobiographie en prose pour unique moyen dexpression. Je ne sais sil ne faut
imputer cette sterilite relative a lexistence trop ordonnee que je mene, au fait
de navoir plus tout mon temps (ce qui, quant a la poesie, pourrait bien revenir a
nen avoir plus aucun) ou si ce nest pas, plutot, parce que la veine poetique etait
deja plus qua demi tarie et ma foi emoisee, que jai pris lhabitude de faire un
usage quasi scientique de la litterature en meme temps que je me xais dans
mon actuel metier. (Bi )
In Fourbis, the emergence and disappearance of presence as an object
around the question of value is linked directly to an existentialist morality,
one which deals on an open, thematic level with the internal link between
death and self-intuition. Here self-presence is explicitly the result of the
need in self-consciousness to justify its being. This value for presence
can, of course, only be constructed from a moral representation that
conceptualizes and objecties presence. The whole of Fourbis therefore
envisages non-existence, and nowhere more directly than in the opening
chapter, Mors.
Il me faut donc remonter: Leiriss undertaking at the beginning of
Fourbis presents itself rstly as a quasi-Proustian awakening a return
to the conscious world from the depths of sleep which parallels the
Proustian echoes already noted at the beginning of Biffures. But more
generally it refers to the gulf into which Leiris had sunk by the end of
Biffures, in terms both of the Orphic failure on which it had closed, and
the mortifying effect which its denitive publication as an autobiography
has had on him. Leiris determines, therefore, to lift the veil on these
failures in the hope of transforming the value of his work and life. The
images of curtains or clouds or partitions or guipures with which Mors
is punctuated are therefore all forms of a fundamental psychological
leucoma whose blindspot Leiris must remove if he is to come clearly face
to face with his future and past non-being and so attain the authentic
Thanatography: non-being as the limit of autobiography
existentialist freedom of anguish. If this sounds Sartrean, it is because,
immediately prior to the undertaking quoted above, Leiris expresses his
physical, artistic and ideological reawakening in terms that are in part
highly reminiscient of LEtre et le Neant:
Angoisse, sitot tire du noir par ce signal, de se sentir petrie, redevenu presque
conscient mais sans controle sur des membres inanimes, ossements epars atten-
dant un jugement dernier; desespoir, sans cri qui vienne lattenuer, de jamais
emerger de ce matelas de sommeil confondu avec le matelas materiel lui-meme
epais et oconneux sur lequel la nuit, avec nous, sest allongee; avenement bru-
tal, enn, nous arrachant a ces affres quand (sans quon sache comment pareille
vapeur aux rouleaux etouffants a pu, dun coup, se dissiper) lon se trouve les
yeux dessilles. Seuil, donc, assez deplaisant a franchir que celui de leveil, chaque
fois que ce retour exige que nous restions ainsi lucidement suspendu dans les
limbes durant un temps indetermine. Incubation dans la penombre, attente
anxieuse avant levanouissement des brouillards ou le retrait soudain du rideau
comme quand, par exemple, arrive apres une periode de confusion et de tor-
peur leclaircie qui fait quon se met a ecrire, pousse ainsi par quelque chose qui
demeure etranger bien que cela soit interieur, et moyennant un saut dont nous
ne sommes jamais assures quil pourra saccomplir parce quil ne depend que
partiellement de notre volonte. (Fo )
Faible chant lance pour soi et quon devine etre laccompagnement ou le produit
direct de quelque occupation qui, elle, ne se laissera pas deviner; fragile son qui,
a travers le labyrinthe que constituent les parties interieures de lorgane de loue,
naura charrie nul message. (Fo )
Il me faut donc remonter. The Orphic ascent chronicled in Mors has
several major effects. It marks the beginning of Fourbis and the continu-
ation of La Regle du jeu with the testimony of a series of autobiographical
deaths. It rewrites the beginning of consciousness, transforming it from
a quasi-Proustian notion of waking into a more directly Sartrean con-
frontation with contingency. It balances the original pleasure, nostalgia
and ideality of the rst of these effects with the original fear, resolve and
materiality of the second. It creates a new list of cultural precedents
The quest for presence in La Regle du jeu
and inuences in the process, recalling only in passing Biffuress crucial
abecedaire, changing or rearranging the rst volumes biblical, operatic
and fabular references, and introducing the Comtesse de Segur and
Jules Verne on account of their mise-en-scene of subterranean exploration.
Above all these reassessments of a rst moment of consciousness are
based on an entirely new set of early memories. This fresh series of
presuppositions for self-representation in itself constitutes a remarkable
enough thanatography, given its explicit theme of a primary confronta-
tion with non-being. But its real logic offers an even more profound
thanatography, for it involves the progressive move from staging the ex-
ternal appearance of nothingness to guring the internal death within
pure reection, a death increasingly recognized to be the precondition of
presence the more Leiris attempts to reach and represent the mysterious
heart of self-inquiry.
Both Biffures and Fourbis have therefore begun with a reassessment, and
further rejiggings, of an ontological, moral and aesthetic kind, will con-
tinue throughout the rest of La Regle du jeu. Even while the autobiography
progresses towards its end, Leiris will continue to search for the authen-
tic origin or approach, prior to any ressassement, which would permit the
nal emergence of a pure rst presence. Such a moment would most
absolutely mark autobiographys death. And, indeed, the next occasion
on which Leiris plunges himself into the mouth of the Gulf is when
he attempts suicide, as recorded in Fibrilles: je menfoncai decidement
dans le noir (Fi ). The subsequent continuation of the autobiography
of course bears witness to the failure of this desire here to live both the
poetics and the politics of Orpheus as a pure timeless fureur; and in
fact, on reawakening from his post-suicidal coma, Leiris determines to
complete his unnished article on the evolution of Aime Cesaires po-
etry and political theses, something which neatly encapsulates both the
wish to emulate this prime example of Sartres black Orpheus and the
inevitable death of pure intuition and expression entailed in this intel-
lectual depassement. Following Fibrilless failure to reach and represent
a pure death, then, Frele Bruit can be read in turn as a further ascent and
reassessment. As a sadder and a wiser Orpheus, Leiris abandons trying
to nd and inhabit the instantaneous point of convergence between
poetry and political commitment (FB ),and instead emphasizes, in
a series of melancholy reections, ou (quy puis-je?) le noir domine
(FB ), the enormous temporal gap which Leiris the subject traverses
on his journey from the anxiety of waking (FB ) to the nameless
Thanatography: non-being as the limit of autobiography
horror of a nal sleep (FB ). As we have seen in this section, the ex-
ternal nature of this journey offers a gure of the fundamental internal
gap separating representing consciousness and represented conscious-
ness. As it closes, La Regle du jeu therefore recognizes in its own enor-
mous presence a permanent monument to this primordial death within
self-presence which already pregures the existential apprehension of a
forever approaching nothingness.
Conclusion: locating Leiris
Existing between two deaths, the rst inherent in the original apprehen-
sion giving rise to self-consciousness, and the second projected in the
nal and unknowable termination of selfhood, Leiriss autobiographical
practice emerges at the end of the twentieth century as a comprehensive
and exemplary achievement in writing the self, to be placed historically
in a lineage including Montaigne and Rousseau. Progressively exploring
and exhausting inherited metaphysical or ideological resolutions to self-
identity and the place and form of its writing, Leiriss autobiographical
quest moreover arguably stands as a classic example of the centurys
most radical intellectual investigations, to be ranked here alongside key
texts by Freud, Sartre, or Levi-Strauss. Though historically grounded
assertions about canonic status are still premature, such claims will cer-
tainly be boosted by the forthcoming publication in Pleiade form of the
entirety of Leiriss uvre. What is certainly clear already is that Leiris
represents one of those key French writers of his time who, in the words
of Michel Foucault, shattered a founding self-evidence of the subject,
and generated exemplary and transgressive forms for an interrogation
of delimitations that demonstrated how this subject could no longer be
taken to have cette forme originaire et autosufsante que la philoso-
phie classiquement lui supposait. In this context, we can add that what
makes Leiris an exemplary postmodern instance of writing the self is
the singular assumption of a plurality of formal and philosophical ap-
proaches, and the generation of autobiographical integrity within and
through this critical and cultural dispersion of identity.
Such historical and strategic features account in part for the wide-
ranging critical appreciation of Leiriss work. Two extreme examples
offer a clear illustration of this point. Georges Mays LAutobiographie is
a well-established reading of the genre that reects rather than chal-
lenges conventional denitions of the form (p. ), generally endorses
the referential tenets of humanist criticism, including intentionality,
Conclusion: locating Leiris
identication, and universalism (pp. ), and ultimately supports
the utopian vision of humanity to be found in his work as a whole,
including his many analyses of the Enlightenment. Within this con-
ventional framework, May sees the goal of autobiography as the
attainment of an impossible truth or sincerity (pp. ), within
which all protean or polymorphic instances can be understood as
the repeatedly deformed and incomplete reection of individualitys
irreducible unicity (pp. ). Such a philosophy of individuation
can therefore easily absorb the example of Leiris, ignoring its reduc-
tion of the radical biffural effect. The case of Leiris is therefore pre-
sented by May as both abnormal and exemplary (p. ), and its
intellectual and formal ruptures a typical product of their age (p. )
notwithstanding which La Regle du jeu le range a cet egard dans une
tradition autobiographique parfaitement reconnaissable (p. ). At the
extreme end of this conventional approach, the contemporary decon-
structive project of Jacques Derrida, as demonstrated in Marges de la
philosophie, works to challenge conventional denitions of a form, pri-
marily that of philosophy, through the detailed foregrounding of the
onto-theological establishment of limits and margins. Far from being a
philosophy of individuation incorporating and nullifying abnormal and
exemplary types, this approach works within and beyond the margin
of the philosophical text, in order to de-place, de-limit and de-termine
the space of (philosophical) registration, as Derrida makes plain in the
books introduction, Tympan: deplacer le cadrage, par la philosophie,
de ses propres types [. . .]. Delimiter la forme dune cloture qui nait
plus danalogie avec ce que la philosophie peur se representer sous
ce nom, [. . .] Determiner, tout contre le philosopheme, lintraitable
qui lempeche de calculer sa marge [. . .]. Manger la marge en luxu-
ant le tympan, le rapport a soi de la double membrane (pp. xxxxi).
This relationship to itself of the double membrane is precisely one that
we have seen Leiriss work consciously negotiate as part of the paradoxi-
cal constitution of autobiographys self-presence, and the references here
to limits, spaces, eating and hearing are designed to recall the myth of
Persephone, on which Leiris drew, in the central chapter of that title,
in Biffures. In fact, Derrida makes the inspiration explicit, in citing as
a marginal text to the whole of Tympan an extract from Persephone
(Bi and ) that begins with Leiriss description of that nom tout
a la fois oral et souterrain. Tympanizing philosophy through the incor-
poration of Leiris as part of the double membrane, and a crucial extract
from Leiris at that, wherein he attempts to gure the chthonian otherness
Michel Leiris
of self-constitution, relating it to personal, mechanical and social forms
of registration, Derrida displays a very different appreciation of Leiriss
abnormal and exemplary ability to facilitate a strategic programme of
formal and philosophical rupture by writing otherwise (p. xx).
These opposing approaches, of unicity and dispersal, lead naturally
to a larger and concluding consideration of the generic way in which
Leiriss work in the future might be located. As we have repeatedly seen,
Leiriss writing and ideas involved a constantly unsettling shift between
margins and centre. The movements he championed, like the disciplines
on which he drew, were importantly driven by the overturning of con-
ventional collective representations. His literal migrations and their ac-
companying politico-aesthetic rejection of eurocentrism were mirrored
textually by his exploration of genres. This constant revolution in self-
recognition, brought to its most complex exemplication in La Regle du jeu,
was in turn symptomatic of the wider contemporary epistemological ex-
plosion, generated in Europe by a shift from modernist to postmodern
conceptions of space and time, and beyond Europe by a growing af-
rmation, which Leiris promoted, of the experience and expression of
metissage. By the same token, of course, this immersion in fragmenta-
tion was predicated on the tenacious attempt to maintain deep-rooted
ideals of lucidity and integrity, evidenced in Leiriss case by the persistent
desire to renew and inhabit the integral aspirations of the latest vision,
be it surrealist or ethnographic or existentialist or post-colonial.
In other words, Leiris can be located abstractly as an effect of globaliza-
tion, offering a dramatic autobiographical registration of its conceptual
framework as well as, on a technical level, what Anthony Giddens de-
scribed in the year of Leiriss death as its complex relations between local
involvements (circumstances of co-presence) and interaction across dis-
tance (the connections of presence and absence). Just as the dialectics of
globalization have causally intensied local afliations and afrmations
of difference (to the point of this becoming the new post-imperial eld of
conict), so Leiriss biffural dynamic of univocity and internal dissent can
be read in this context not just as the autobiographical preservation of
the twin Enlightenment ideas of the universal and the particular, or the
dialogic complicity of colonizer and colonized, but also as the symptom
of accelerating globalization and its obvious contribution, beyond any
psychic principles of identication (as detailed clearly in, for example,
Homi Bhabhas Lacanian reading of Frantz Fanon ), to the increasing
dis-location of the intellectuals identity and role in globalized society.
Read in this specic context, Leiris can be appreciated as once more
Conclusion: locating Leiris
offering an individual yet exemplary lesson. Permanently vacillating be-
tween deep involvement in the intricate textuality of autobiographical
consciousness on the one hand, and the moral impulses of the secular
and perhaps especially post-colonial critic, on the other hand (to take up
here the terms of a tension propounded polemically by Edward Said ),
Leiriss writing could be held to fail on both counts, given the extreme
sophistication of its anti-hegemonic inhabitation of alterity, and its con-
sequent inability to achieve either textual or critical closure. Yet, as with
all his writing, its association with failure marks the scale of its ambitions
and indicates its ultimate achievement, for the non-resolution of this
tension in his discourse results in the unquiet maintenance of a critical
consciousness that emerges as an exemplary oppositional position in a
globalized culture. This view of Leiris as a model of postmodern dis-
located consciousness is indirectly given credence by James Clifford, in
The Predicament of Culture. Here Clifford focuses acutely on the methodo-
logical ambivalence within Saids postulation (involving his deployment
of the tools of a culture he oppositionally rebukes), before raising the ob-
vious following question regarding the possibility of any cultural iden-
tity being classied as native in a globalized culture (pp. ). By way
of indirect reply, the whole of Cliffords book repeatedly advances the
positions of Leiris as evidencing an exemplary exploration and reten-
tion of the complexities inherent in oppositional projects, and his often
pioneering work as an early formulation of a dis-located identity and
critical role in the general culture of conjuncture arising out of this new,
heterogeneous historical situation (pp. , ). At the beginning of the
twenty-rst century (and post-globalization), then, the new and emerging
locations of Leiris should conrm his status as a major French writer of
his age, an exemplary intellectual of the postmodern period, and, above
all, a revolutionary contributor to the exercise of writing the self.
Notes
:
Liberation, October , pp. , p. .
Edouard Glissant, Michel Leiris: the Repli and the Depli, in Yale French Studies
(), pp. , p. .
Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, Seuil, , p. .
:
See Un entretien avec Michel Leiris: Breton le patron, in Le Nouvel Obser-
vateur, May , pp. , p. .
Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surrealisme, Paris, Seuil, .
Andre Breton, Manifeste du surrealisme, in uvres completes, Paris, Gallimard
(Pleiade), vol. , , p. .
Louis Aragon, Traite du style, Paris, Gallimard, , p. .
See Andre Breton, Second manifeste du surrealisme, in uvres completes, vol. ,
p. .
See Andre Breton, Dictionnaire abrege du surrealisme, in uvres completes, Paris,
Gallimard (Pleiade), vol. , , p. .
Le Surrealisme et lunite, collected in Zebrage, pp. .
See Leiriss preface to Max Jacob, Le Cornet a des, Paris, Gallimard, ,
pp. , p. . I examine these early inuences in more detail in an article
which also repeats some of my other claims in this chapter. See The sorcerers
apprentice: Leiris and surrealism, Aura (), pp. . In a future work,
I examine more closely the homotextual dimension of Leiriss mentors.
I touch on the theme later in this book, in my reading of Leiriss Journal.
Glossaire jy serre mes gloses, Paris, Editions de la Galerie Simon, ; reprinted
(without the illustrations by Andre Masson) in Mots sans memoire, Paris,
Gallimard, , pp. . All references are to this latter edition, which
is referred to in parenthesis as MSM.
See: La Revolution surrealiste ( April ), pp. and (which include
Brisees, pp. and ); La Revolution surrealiste ( October ), p.
(reprinted in Glossaire jy serre mes gloses, pp. and ); La Revolution surrealiste
( March ), pp. .
Notes to pages
Reprinted in Brisees, p. .
Reprinted in Brisees, p. .
See Le monde des mes reves est un monde mineral, Le Disque vert, Paris,
Brussels, (March ), pp. , p. .
. Andre Breton, Les Mots sans rides, Les Pas Perdus, in uvres completes, vol. ,
p. .
Originally the pseudonym of Marcel Duchamp, subsequently adopted by
Robert Desnos. See Robert Desnos, Corps et biens, Paris, Gallimard, ,
pp. .
Ibid., p. .
Brisees, p. .
Un entretien avec Michel Leiris, ibid., p. .
Jacques Lacan, LInstance de la lettre dans linconscient, Ecrits I, Paris,
Seuil, (Points), , p. .
uvres completes, vol. , p. .
Cf. Brisees, p. .
Andre Breton, Point du jour, in uvres completes, vol. .
Second Manifeste du surrealisme, in uvres completes, vol. , p. .
Sarane Alexandrian, Le Surrealisme et le reve, Paris, Gallimard, , p. .
I pursue this intertextuality further in a separate article. It is obvious that,
through the inuence of the Les Aventures de Telemaque, which is a
rewriting of Fenelons novel, Le Point cardinal retains a paradoxical
trace of canonic derivation. See Louis Aragon, Les Aventures de Telemaque,
Paris, Gallimard, . Leiriss quotations in the Journal are on pp. and
, and refer without full referencing to Les Aventures de Telemaque, p. ,
and Le Paysan de Paris, pp. . This latter quotation, from the section
Le Songe du paysan reproduces almost the entirety of Le Paysan de Pariss
nal two pages, fragments of which were originally published under the
title Idees in La Revolution surrealiste, no. , April , p. . In the same
issue, Leiris published La Revendication du plaisir, co-written with Jacques
Baron (pp. ) and, more signicantly, two pages of entries from the even-
tual Glossaire jy serre mes gloses (pp. ), plus the article [Une monstrueuse
aberration . . . ] (p. ) which was added by Artaud.
For a full examination of this paradox, see Paul de Man, Literary history and
Literary modernity, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary
Criticism, London, Methuen, , pp. .
Aurora, Paris, Gallimard, ; reprinted (coll. LImaginaire), . Page
references are to the latter edition, referred to in parenthesis as A.
Dictionnaire abrege du surrealisme, in uvres completes, vol. , p. .
Le Cinquentenaire de lhysterie (), La Revolution surrealiste
(March ). Included in Andre Breton, uvres completes, vol. , pp. .
Manifeste, p. .
Notwithstanding this, Marie-Claire Dumas has importantly documented the
transformation of the manuscript in the book in Commencer et
nir. Le manuscrit dAurora de Michel Leiris, in Didier and Neefs, Manuscrits
Notes to pages
surrealistes, , pp. . Here is perhaps the moment to note that I am
obviously not following the categorization of the texts of this period given
by Catherine Maubon in this same collection: A cette periode dintense
creativite appartiennent dun cote Simulacre, une partie des gloses de Glossaire
jy serre mes gloses et des poemes de Failles; de lautre, Le Point cardinal, Grande
fuite de neige, et Aurora; ainsi que, dans lentre-deux, Le Pays de mes reves, et
certains des recits de reve de Nuits sans nuit. (See Le Forcat vertigineux
de reve ou du bon usage du surrealisme, in Didier and Neefs, Manuscrits
surrealistes, , pp. , p. .) Although this exploits a legitimate if un-
examined and contestable generic differentiation (poetry versus prose with
the dream-work between the two), it strangely does not permit the poetic
texts to be included in the convincing correlation between the chronological
development of textual sequentiality and autobiographical expressivity, of
the kind noted by Maubon herself ( on p. ) in relation to the moment in
Le Forcat vertigineux where Leiris writes: . . . M comme la
mer, I comme un rire [etc.] (see Michel Leiris, LEvasion souterraine, Mont-
pellier, Fata Morgana, , p. ). In the Journal, p. , Leiris also gives the
collective term Autocritique to Simulacre, Le Point cardinal, Le Forcat vertigineux,
and Aurora.
Gerard de Nerval, uvres, Paris, Gallimard (Pleiade), , vol. (where
Pandora is named La Pandora), p. .
Andre Breton, Nadja, in uvres completes, vol. , p. .
See Jacqueline Chenieux, Le Surrealisme et le roman, , Lausanne,
LAge dhomme, , pp. . Certain other details in Aurora may have
been inuenced by Georges Limbours work in Soleils bas and Le Cheval de
Venise.
Second Manifeste, p. .
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
My reference here is obviously to the covers of the rst and last editions of
La Revolution surrealiste, which gathered the (male) surrealist gang around a
female icon: in the rst issue, this female was Germaine Berton, a woman
who had killed a proto-fascist; by the twelfth and nal issue, the female gure
signicantly had become a classical academic nude.
See the serene version of this same state given at the end of Bretons con-
temporary Exposition X . . . , Y . . . in Point du jour, uvres completes, vol. ,
p. .
See Marie-Claire Dumas, in Didier and Neefs, Manuscrits surrealistes, ,
p. .
Andre Breton, Manifeste du surrealisme, in uvres completes, vol. , pp. .
See Jacqueline Chenieux, Le Surrealisme et le roman, p. .
Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour, Paris, Gallimard, . Henceforth
referred to in parenthesis as N. The retention of the full title in my text
is necessary in order to distinguish it from an earlier version, published as
Notes to pages
Nuits sans nuit, Paris, Fontaine, . For details of the differences between the
two editions, see Catherine Marbon, Michel Leiris en marge de lautobiographie,
Paris, Corti, , pp. .
The publication of material, eventually contained in Glossaire jy serre mes gloses
and Nuits sans nuit, in La Revolution surrealiste is as follows:
no. , April , pp. : seventy-ve entries collectively entitled
Glossaire jy serre mes gloses.
no. , July , p. : four sketches of dreams published in expanded
form in the Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour (pp. , , , ).
no. , July , pp. : sixty-one further entries entitled Glossaire
jy serre mes gloses (suite).
no. , October , p.: calligrams from the edition of Glossaire
jy serre mes gloses (pp. and ).
no. , October , pp. : ve sketches of dreams republished in
expanded form in Nuits sans nuit et quelque jours sans jour (pp. , , , , ).
no. , March , pp. : sixty-seven further entries again entitled
Glossaire jy serre mes gloses.
no. , June , pp. : a dream republished, in slightly augmented
form, in Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour (pp. ).
Langage tangage ou ce que les mots me disent , Paris, Gallimard, .
The rst issue of La Revolution surrealiste contained dreams by Giorgio de
Chirico, Breton, and Renee Gaulthier. Louis Aragon, Une vague de reves
(Commerce, , Autumn, ), Paris, Seghers, . For a lyrical evoca-
tion of the emancipatory power of dreaming, see in particular pp. . In
this celebration of dreams, there are several statements which interestingly
anticipate later cultural theories, such as: il ny a pas de pensee hors des mots
tout le surrealisme etage cette proposition . . . (p. ). Given the date, it is
not surprising that Leiris is not included in the list of dreamers on page .
Aragons contributions to the rst two issues of La Revolution surrealiste stress
the notion of perpetual revolution. It is perhaps this which inspired Leiriss
rst entry in his Journal regarding Aragon: Actuellement, je ne vois quun
litterateur dont on puisse dire quil ecrit au participe present, cest Aragon
(p. ), an appreciation apparently betrayed, to judge by the disillusioned
tone of the nal entry on Aragon ( December ), written two days
after the latters funeral: Chez Aragon, il ny a pas eu delite a une idee,
mais delite a une eglise (dont pourrait-on dire mechamment il avait besoin
pour sa gloire) (p. ). This tendency to denigrate an original enthusiasm
is another aspect of the dynamic of the naissance a lenvers in Leiris. We
shall see it return several times in this book.
See Louis Aragon, Traite du style, Paris, Gallimard (), , pp. :
La purete du reve, linemployable, linutile du reve, voila ce quil sagit de
defendre contre une nouvelle rage de ronds de cuir qui va se dechaner. Il ne
faut pas permettre que le reve devienne le jumeau du poeme en prose, le
cousin du bafouillage ou le beau-frere du ha-ka.
Roger Caillois, LIncertitude qui vient des reves, Paris, Gallimard, , p. .
Notes to pages
For just one example of each, see respectively Marcel Noll, Reves, La
Revolution surrealiste, , June , p. ; and Leiriss Journal, p. .
I am obviously referring to Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne,
uvres completes, Paris, Gallimard, Pleiade, , pp. .
Ibid., x. La Femme, p. .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Harmondsworth, Penguin
(Pelican Freud Library vol. ) , chapter , pp. .
For an interesting discussion of these theories in the general context of moder-
nity and with occasional reference to surrealism, see David Frisby, Fragments
of Modernity, Cambridge-Oxford, Polity, , especially pp. , , .
Freud, ibid., p. : The form of a dream or the form in which it is dreamt is
used with surprising frequency for representing its concealed subject-matter.
Andre Breton, Manifeste du surrealisme, in uvres completes, vol. , p. .
Ibid., p. .
Freud, ibid., p. .
Compare Eluards publication notice for Les Dessous dune vie: Les reves,
nul ne peut les prendre pour des poemes. (Paul Eluard, uvres completes,
Paris, Gallimard, Pleiade, , pp. .) Breton considered this generic
division to have distanced Eluard from the fundamental tenets of surrealism.
See Andre Breton, Entretiens , Paris, Gallimard, , pp. .
:
See, for example, Denis Holliers remarks in Un homme du secret discret,
an interview by Aliette Armel with Denis Hollier and Jean Jamin, Magazine
litteraire (), pp. , p. .
See Georges Bataille, uvres completes , p. .
One of the best intellectual reviews of the inuence of Negro art on West-
ern culture from this period on is given by Leiris in The African negroes
and the arts of carving and sculpture, in Interrelations of Cultures, Unesco,
, pp. . See also James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-
Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge, Mass. and London,
England, Harvard University Press, , p. , and James Clifford, ,
February: negrophilia, in A New History of French Literature, edited by Denis
Hollier, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England, Harvard University Press,
, pp. , p. . For a clear and admirably cynical account of the use
of the term negre during this period, see Jean Jamins introduction to his
edition of ethnographic writings by Leiris, Miroir de lAfrique, Paris, Gallimard
(Quarto), , pp. .
Leiris contests the common myth that this took place at La Revue Negre,
claiming that he saw Baker dance in the Revue in , and that the famous
bananas appeared only after she had moved to the Folies-Bergere. See Jazz
Magazine, no. , January , pp. . I am grateful to Jean-Michel
Besnier for bringing this interview to my attention.
Notes to pages
For evidence of this point, see Minotaure (), a special issue devoted to
the Mission. Leiris was in fact the real editorial and directing spirit of this
special issue, organizing and supervising every aspect of its publication with
Skira. But as he was loyal to the idea of a collective spirit, the issue does not
credit him as editor. For conrmation of this point, see Jean Jamin, On the
Human Condition of Minotaure, in Focus on Minotaure, Geneva, Musee dArt
et dHistoire, , pp. , p. , footnote . For a similar photograph, see
Miroir de lAfrique, p. . Jamins introduction (pp. ) provides an excellent
contextualization of Leiriss preoccupation in the light of the work of the
Musee de lHomme and the Mission Dakar-Djibouti.
Rene Maran, Batouala, Paris, Albin Michel, (edition denitive, ).
Michel Leiris, Instructions sommaires pour les collections dobjects ethnographiques,
Paris, Musee dethnographie du Trocadero, .
Jamins account of this is excoriating, emphasizing the absurd stereotyping of
Brown together with his simultaneous exceptionality, and how his enforced
display made him into one more collected object. See Miroir de lAfrique,
pp. . The following page is devoted to a photograph, taken in the
museum in April , depicting the seated Al Brown gazing with apparent
pleasure at a Bambara mask held by Michel Griaule. Georges Henri Riviere
leans towards Brown; behind them stands Browns match-maker David
Lumiansky.
I document in more detail Leiriss inevitable involvement in this mood of
the period, and its textual trace in some of his early writings, in Hors de soi:
politique, possession et presence dans lethnographie surrealiste de Michel
Leiris, in LAutre et le sacre, ed. C. W. Thompson, Paris, LHarmattan, ,
pp. .
See Claude Levi-Strauss, Introduction a loeuvre de Marcel Mauss, in
Marcel Mauss, sociologie et anthropologie, Paris, PUF, , pp. ixliii.
Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don, Paris, PUF, ; The Gift: The Form and
Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls, London, Routledge,
, p. .
Georges Henri Riviere, A propos de lart negre, Le Figaro artistique, July
August , pp. . Quoted by Jamin in Miroir de lAfrique, pp. .
Denis Hollier notes both the apprehensions of the co-founders and the shifts
in the rubric. See Les Depossedes, Paris, Minuit, , pp. .
See Leiriss somewhat ofcial account of their intellectual collaboration,
De Bataille lImpossible a limpossible Documents, Brisees, pp. . The
article was rst published in Critique (nos. , , pp. ), another
journal founded, after the war, by Bataille.
Jamin points up the anti-historical or fetishistic preoccupations revealed in
the choice of objects collected by the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, almost half
of which were connected with ritual or game, that is, with unicatory rather
than conictual practice. See Miroir de lAfrique, p. .
La vieille taupe, uvres completes , pp. ; La valeur dusage de
D. A. F. de Sade, uvres completes , pp. ; Le Jesuve, uvres completes ,
Notes to pages
pp. ; LOeil pineal, uvres completes , pp. . On the subject of
rivalry, Jean-Francois Farny has even suggested that Batailles motivations
were bound up with the desire to win back a Leiris who had been taken
and seduced by Breton. See A propos de la querelle Breton-Bataille, Revue
dhistoire litteraire de la France, , pp. .
Andre Breton, Second manifeste du surrealisme, in uvres completes, vol. , p. .
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
And beyond! See for example, from , Batailles La religion surrealiste,
uvres completes , pp. ; and from , Les problemes du
surrealisme, uvres completes , pp. . See also the notes on pp.
and for further ejaculations.
Georges Bataille, Le Langage des eurs, Documents , June , pp. .
Reprinted in uvres completes , . Andre Breton, Manifestes du surrealisme,
p. .
Georges Bataille, Le Jeu lugubre, Documents , December , pp.
. Reprinted in uvres completes , . Given that Breton and Bataille
were ghting this time for possession of Dal and that Dal had not permitted
reproduction in Documents of his canvas for fear of offending Breton, the
charge of cowardice is also being launched against Dal.
Oeil, Documents , September , p. , reprinted in uvres completes ,
pp. ; Bouche, Documents, second year, , , p. , reprinted in
uvres completes , pp. ; Le gros orteil, Documents , November ,
pp. , reprinted in uvres completes , pp. .
Metaphore, in Brisees, pp. , p. .
Talkie, in Brisees, pp. .
On an institutional level, it is interesting in this context to recall Holliers
remark that Batailles exploitation of Marxs opposition of use-value and
exchange-value, pervasive if unmentioned in Documents and more directly
acknowledged in La Valeur dusage de D. A. F. de Sade, in the context
of the museum devait conduire a lintroduction du corps dans lespace du
musee, devait ouvrir lespace apollinien du musee au monde du corps et
des besoins. See Hollier, La poesie jusqua Z, , p. . On a purely
representational level, Jack J. Spector claims that Leiris, along with dissi-
dent surrealists Bataille, Masson and Caillois, during this period rejected
the patriarchal dominance of Breton by welcoming images and myths of
the mother ignored in favour of the mistress in Bretons work. For all its
suggestive nature, this claim seems to me to be outweighed in the case of
Leiris by the profoundly masculine and traditionally libidinous assumptions
inhabiting and structuring his work of this, and indeed every other, period.
See Jack J. Spector, Surrealist Art and Writing, /. The Gold of Time,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, , p. .
LEau a la bouche, in Brisees, pp. .
See Elisabeth Roudinesco, La Bataille de cent ans. Histoire de la psychanalyse en
France, vol. , Paris, Ramsay, , p. .
Notes to pages
For this useful information and further references, see Dean ,
pp. .
For an account of the criticism which LAfrique fantome provoked, see
Jean Jamin, Les metamorphoses de LAfrique fantome, Critique, (),
.
Jamin lists the butin in Miroir de lAfrique, p. . His account of the expedi-
tion rightly stresses its cote Pieds Nickeles: its scheming, theft, and deceit; its
machine guns, political machinations, and media-conscious posturing. See
Miroir de lAfrique, pp. . Most tellingly, Jamin is able to draw on unclas-
sied archive material in the Museum in order to demonstrate the colonial
dimension of the expeditions acquisitiveness. He quotes Rivets December
note to the effect that one of the roles of an ethnographic museum
is to be un instrument de propagande culturelle et coloniale and, pour
les futurs coloniaux ou pour les coloniaux tout court, un centre precieux
et indispensable de documentation sur les populations quils sont appeles a
administrer. See Miroir de lAfrique, p. . This puts into sinister context the
picture of Leiriss socializing given for the same period, December
, in LAfrique fantome.
Reprinted as LAfrique fantome, in Brisees, pp. .
Miroir de lAfrique, pp. .
I am uncomfortably aware of how in my reading of Leiriss Journal, I have
approached him acting as a latter-day Griaule.
:
L A G E D H O M M E
Titres et travaux. Collected in Cest-a-dire. Entretien avec Sally Price et Jean Jamin,
Paris, Jean-Michel Place, , pp. , p. .
Acephales one book publication was the Miroir de la tauromachie,
illustrated by Masson, and published under the Guy Levis Mano
imprint.
For an account of Contre-Attaques equivocal politics, see Denis Hollier,
On Equivocation (between Literature and Politics), October , Winter :
. For an account of Bretons and Batailles collaboration on Contre-
Attaque, see Henri Behar, Andre Breton. Le grand indesirable, Paris, Calmann-
Levy, , pp. .
Georges Bataille, La Structure psychologique du fascisme, La Critique sociale
, November , , and , March , . Reprinted in
uvres completes , .
Georges Bataille, LApprenti sorcier, Nouvelle Revue francaise , July :
; reprinted in uvres completes , .
Denis Hollier describes it as rising from the ashes of the Popular Front.
See D. Hollier, Foreword: collage, The College of Sociology. , ed.
D. Hollier, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, , pp. viiixxix,
p. xiii.
Notes to pages
Acephale , July , . Along with all the major documents relating to
the College, this text is collected in Le College de sociologie, ed. D. Hollier, Paris,
Gallimard, . See pp. .
D. Hollier, Foreword: collage, ibid., p. ix.
Le College de sociologie, p. .
The College of Sociology, pp. .
Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne, Nouvelle Revue francaise , July ,
. Reprinted in Le College de sociologie, pp. .
See Jean Wahl, LAir du mois, La Nouvelle Revue francaise , February ,
quoted in Le College de sociologie, p. .
Le College de sociologie, pp. .
See Le College de sociologie, pp. .
For details of rst publication, see note of the next section.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Un nouveau mystique, Cahiers du Sud , December ;
reprinted in Situations I, Paris, Gallimard, , pp. . References are
to this later edition.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Quest-ce que la litterature, in Situations II, Paris, Gallimard,
, pp. .
Georges Bataille, Reponse a Jean-Paul Sartre, in Sur Nietzsche: volonte de
chance, uvres completes , , pp. .
Georges Bataille, Baudelaire Mis a nu. LAnalyse de Sartre et lessence
de la poesie, Critique , JanuaryFebruary , pp. . Large sections
of this were cut out of the version which became part of La Litterature et le Mal.
See uvres completes , pp. , to which page numbers here refer. Bataille
is more appreciative of Sartres reading of Genet. See uvres completes ,
pp. .
Michel Leiris, Sartre et Baudelaire, preface to Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire,
Paris, Gallimard, ; reprinted in Brisees, pp. . Page references are
to this last edition.
Miroir delAfrique, p. .
Jean-Paul Sartre, ibid., p. .
J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, Paris, PUF, ,
p. .
I give a more detailed version of some of my following observations in The
orchastration of man: the structure of LAge dhomme, Romance Studies , :
.
See Emile Benveniste, Problemes de linguistique generale, Paris, Gallimard, ,
especially chapters and , pp. .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE , pp. .
J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, p. .
See the already mentioned The orchastration of man: the structure of LAge
dhomme.
We know from the Journal that this image was inspired by his affair with
Helene Gordon. See pp. .
Rather more banally, this can also be read as referring to his affair with
Helene Gordon. See Ibid.
Notes to pages
See Cinq Etudes dethnologie, p. .
See Jacques Lacan, La chose freudienne, Ecrits, Paris, Seuil, , p. .
See Sigmund Freud, SE , p. .
: L A R E G L E D U J E U
: JOURNAL --
Journal , Paris Gallimard, . Henceforth referred to in paren-
thesis as J.
Jean Jamins editorial material displays how this huge text is not only perfo-
rated by gaps, but virtually originates in them. The very rst endnote, qual-
ifying the volumes opening entry which in its entirety reads [Sans date]
( J ), explains how the rst pages of the journals rst manuscript were torn
out by Leiris, after which the rst ve lines were also so heavily erased as to
be unreadable ( J ). And on the previous page, in a preliminary comment
Notes to pages
on editorial policy, Jamin admits that a central concern in the construction
and presentation of the journal from several notebooks was to create rela-
tions and close lacunae, but that further as yet unabsorbed archival material
will result in a necessary modication of the Leiris which Jamin has here
helped to compose.
See J , , , , . Most of these relate to the future LAge dhomme.
For example J , , , , , .
As, for example, in Biffures, pp. :: un journal qui ne sera pas publie
ni meme lu de mon vivant mais constituera seulement, dune maniere
posthume, le dernier signe que jaurai adresse a ceux des miens qui me
survivront.
The term invagination is associated most often with La Double Seance,
in Derridas La Dissemination, Paris, Editions du Seuil, (even though
that essay actually employs more the term hymen). For two discussions of
invagination which are pertinent here to the generic status of the Journal and
to its primarily derivative relation to works such as Regle du jeu, see respectively:
The law of genre, Glyph : Textual Studies, Baltimore, , p. ; and Living
on: borderlines, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. H. Bloom et al., New York,
Seabury Press, , pp. .
Alain Girard, Le Journal intime, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, ,
p. .
Two other posthumous journals of lesser signicance Lhomme sans honneur
(Paris, Jean-Michel Place, ) and the Journal de Chine (Paris, Gallimard,
) bear out many of my characterizations of the Journal . In
the Journal itself, Leiris admits a propos the Journal de Chine that his work was
badly organized since he tried to cover the most diverse questions ( J ), a
remark which Jean Jamin recalls in his presentation to the Journal de Chine in
order to conclude that it is un echec a la fois litteraire et scientique (p. ).
Given that the experience of China is crucial to Fibrilles, the remark suggests
that the Journal de Chine is primarily derivative in relation to Fibrilless artistic
resolution. In the same vein, Jamin notes in his presentation of Lhomme sans
honneur: Cest dune certaine maniere toute La Regle du jeu que le cahier
annonce (p. ).
A trace of this view remains in Girards presentation of the journal intimes
essential failure: Insatisfaction, et misere qui en resulte, retours severes sur
soi, entrecoupes de mouvements dorgueil, ruine des esperances, inanite
de lexistence, vanite de leffort, offrent autant dexpressions dune meme
experience repetee, et ont en lui leur racine commune (Alain Girard,
Le Journal intime, p. ). He adds that this is a relative rather than ab-
solute failure, since the journal by its nature has no pre-established goal,
but none the less suggests a failed autobiographical act, and through it an
unfullled life, with his later remarks that le moi de lintimiste demeure
au conditionnel passe and that sa personne est restee a letat virtuel.
(ibid. p. ).
Notes to pages
Guy Poitry takes a less ironic view of Leiriss schematizations in his
Michel Leiris, dualisme et totalite, Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail,
.
In his presentation, Jamin suggests this relation between structure and clutter
in a different way by pointing out that Leiris kept his manuscripts in the
apartment room known as the lingerie, describing the things found there
as le debarras . . . tous ces objets . . . dont on ne se sert qua loccasion.
( J ), un bric-a-brac dobjets et de papiers ( J ).
Theodore Fraenkel, Tristan Tzara, Andre Lefevre, Braque, Cocteau, Bataille
( J ); Giacometti ( J ); Breton ( J ); Rene Leibowitz ( J ); Jeanne
Godon, Picasso, Asger Jorn, Jean-Marie Serneau, Jacques Lipchitz, lle
anee Lacan ( J ); Queneau ( J ).
The biffure which takes place in the very inscription of this insight is partic-
ularly apposite and logical.
See J footnote .
Cf. Andre Clavels remark in LEvenement du jeudi, September ,
pp. , p. : Son journal fut sa chambre mortuaire, sa torture. Et aussi
sa victoire. The preterite tense adds a further ironic twist.
J.-B. Pontalis, Michel Leiris, or psychoanalysis without end, in On Leiris (Yale
French Studies, ), ed. Marc Blanchard, Yale University, , pp. ,
p. . See J , for a general example of the inevitable disappointment
arising from the simultaneous envie de sortir and envie de me replier, and,
more particularly, J for notation of the marasme into which Leiris falls
again once the Liberation is achieved.
See, for example, the negative and nasty review by Angelo Rinaldi, Leiris
malgre Leiris, LExpress, September , pp. .
Alain Girard, Le Journal intime, p. viii.
Jean Rousset, Le Lecteur intime. De Balzac au journal, Paris, Corti, , p. .
Louis-Rene des Forets relates Leiriss change of opinion regarding the work
of Puccini, and in particular Turandot, whose plot centres on a secret, to
Leiriss family secret. See La passion de lopera, Magazine litteraire ,
September , pp. , p. .
Florence Delay quotes from Leiriss commentary to Pierre Braumbergers
lm on the subject: Pour netre pas touche, le secret est de rester immobile.
See Meditations taurines, Magazine litteraire , September , pp. ,
p. .
Maurice Blanchot, Combat avec lange, in LAmitie, Paris, Gallimard, ,
pp. , pp. .
Francois Bott, Detective story, Le Monde, September , p. .
Maurice Nadeau, Quinzaine litteraire , September , p. .
See, for a partial example of this, Francis Marmande, Michel Leiris: the
letter to Louise, in On Leiris, pp. .
Un homme du secret discret, an interview conducted by Aliette Armel,
Magazine litteraire , September , pp. .
Notes to pages
Jamin was charged by Leiris with the posthumous destiny of his work, and
Jamin and Hollier are joint editors of the forthcoming Pleiade edition of
Leiriss uvres. For the way in which this was settled, see Magazine litteraire,
pp. .
At one point, Leiris writes explicitly: Aujourdhui, la droite et la gauche
sont pour moi nettement incarnes par deux femmes ( J ). Guy Poitry is
exhaustive on these schemata. See Poity, Michel Leiris.
Jamin in Magazine litteraire recalls Holliers well-known linking of Leiriss
autobiographical being to the moment of his marriage: comme la bien
montre Denis Hollier, le mariage constitue pour Leiris le moment ou lauteur
nat a son uvre, a son autobiographie (p. ). An alternative view of the
profound modication effected by his marriage would be that Leiris sought
to close down the homosexual dimension to his life. See my later examination
of this other secret, and Leiriss comments on this period in LAge dhomme,
p. .
See also J , .
For the latter point, see J note .
To judge from the ve references to him in the journal, Jamin seems keen to
promote a relationship with Leiris, based ostensibly on academic exchange:
for his part, he offers Leiris books ( J ), ideas ( J , ), titles ( J ),
even memories ( J ). This indicates, perhaps, that his desire to be Leiriss
addressee predates his presentation of the posthumous work.
Francis Marmande, Leiris au prix des mots, Le Monde, September ,
pp. and , p. .
Francis Marmande, Michel Leiris: the letter to Louise in On Leiris (Yale
French Studies ), ed. Marc Blanchard, Yale University, , pp. ,
p. . Marmande adds a propos LAfrique fantome that Leiris kept a journal
every night, sending her instalments without ever discovering that under-
neath the names which obsessed him (Dogon, Gondar), it was actually her
name he had been rewriting all along: the name of Louise Godon (p. ).
Jamins revelation of Zettes illegitimacy suggests that Leiris did know he was
rewriting her name.
See Mireille Calle-Gruber, Journal intime et destination textuel, Poetique
(September ), . This is a response to the original publication
of some of Roussets ideas as Le journal intime, texte sans destinataire?,
Poetique (), . The essence of her argument is that the addressee
is not merely extratextual.
Aliette Armel, Leiris au jour le jour, Magazine litteraire, p. .
See, for example, J , where Leiris notes his mothers concern over Leiriss
noting of his own heterosexual anxieties.
Beatrice Didier, Le Journal intime, Presses Universitaires de France, . It
is also presumably the reason why my earlier reading of LAge dhomme left
unchallenged its deliberate focus on the heterosexual such that instances
of the homosexual, for example, were silently assigned to preliminary or
marginal or pre-authentic stages.
Notes to pages
( J ), ( J ), ( J ), ( J ).
Bataille was to publish LExperience interieure in . Leiriss determination,
here expressed, not to collaborate by publishing was in fact not entirely
honoured.
Direct and indirect acknowledgement of Sartres inuences become marked
during this period. See J and for citation of his work, J
for his physical presence during the Liberation period, and J for
Leiriss post-war reections on litterature engagee.
Herman Melville, Pierre; or the Ambiguities (). All page references to the edi-
tion by Lawrence Thompson, New York, Hendricks House (Signet Classic),
. For Jamins remarks, see Magazine litteraire, pp. , and J note
. The French translation was by a relative, Pierre Leyris (who crops up
in La Regle du jeu), and published by Gallimard in . Jamin adds in the
Magazine litteraire interview that he himself had included a long note on
Melville in his Les Lois du silence. Essai sur la fonction sociale du secret, Maspero,
, wherein he had postulated that initiatory secrets operated less through
their derisory content than through their status as secret. On explaining
this theory to Leiris, the latter had apparently been interested and amused
(p. ). The reason was obviously then still Leiriss little secret.
James Creech, Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melvilles Pierre, Chicago
and London, The University of Chicago Press, , p. .
Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: the World of Raymond Roussel, translated
by Charles Ruas, Berkeley, Los Angeles, University of California Press, ,
p. .
Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory, New
York and London, Routledge, .
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke
and Proust, New Haven, Yale University Press, , p. . Cited by Edelman,
p. .
For example, the link between orientalist imagery and homosexual simula-
tions in the work of Proust is established by Edward Hughes, The mapping
of homosexuality in Prousts Recherche, in Mapping the Other: Anthropology and
Literatures Limits, Paragraph : (), pp. . On the two occasions
Haroun Al Raschid is mentioned in A la recherche, the context involves a
male brothel. See Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, Paris, Gallimard
(Pleiade), , vol. , pp. , and note . I am very grateful to Eddie
Hughes for these references.
One is inevitably reminded of the massively overdetermined narrative of
The Picture of Dorian Gray. See Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (),
Harmondsworth, Penguin, .
A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Harvard University Press, , gives one incidental reference (p. ) in
the context of Gide; The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French, ed.
Peter France, Oxford, Oxford University Press, , offers lines (p. )
which dene Jouhandeau as an unorthodox mystic Catholic novelist and
Notes to pages
memorialist. Neither of these mentions the works cited by Leiris; the latter
mentions Jouhandeaus homosexuality.
The Oxford Companion to French Literature, eds. Sir Paul Harvey and J. E.
Heseltine, Oxford, Oxford University Press (), , which discusses
Jouhandeau in more detail ( lines, p. ), exposes the secret of his homo-
sexuality by alluding to his mystique de lenfer (a phrase used in by
Claude Mauriac), and by noting that a dramatic marriage features in his c-
tion. Certain French equivalents, while later in date, are similar in approach:
Henri Lematres Dictionnaire Bordas de litterature francaise, Paris, Bordas,
( lines, p. ), refers to Jouhandeaus vie discrete and uvre aux senteurs
voulues de scandales et de soufre, and takes care to mention his tempestuous
marriage to the ex-dancer Caryathis. One of the longest entries is, perhaps
logically, also the most sympathetic: Alain Nidersts entry in the three-volume
Dictionnaire des Litteratures de langue francaise, eds. J.-P. de Beaumarchais, Daniel
Couty, et Alain Rey, vol. (GO), Paris, Bordas, , pp. , is as
coded as the later Bordas work (amities sensuelles, qui se bornent souvent
a de furtives rencontres (p. )) and it still explains his homosexuality
in the context of his marriage, but it at least mentions specic works such
as Astaroth and offers a rudimentary characterization of his literary work:
Dans ses plus belles pages, Jouhandeau nous laisse deviner cette prudente
meticulosite, cette lente demarche vers la verite (p. ). Unfortunately,
I do not here have the space to discuss critical evaluations by writers such as
Blanchot or Sartre. See Faux Pas and Les Temps Modernes, respectively.
Henri Peyre, Literature and Sincerity, New Haven, Yale University Press, .
Henri Peyre, French Novelists of Today, Oxford and New York, Oxford
University Press (), . The snobbery, bigotry and above all homo-
phobia of this work are shocking. Focusing merely on the last of these, no
less a writer than Proust can be admonished on aesthetic grounds [for] a
vision of the world that sets up abnormality as the norm [and for] a justi-
cation of unorthodox sexual behaviour . . . which some of us still refuse to
acclaim as a sign of especial grace and as the privilege of genius (pp. ).
At the same time, we are asked to acclaim Dutards treatise of seduction
Le Petit Don Juan as entertaining and healthy (p. ), Romain Garys Pour
Sganarelle as a good-humored attack against the gloom of unsexed and sedu-
lously tedious modern ction (p. ), and Histoire dO as an impeccable and
fastidious . . . masterpiece of eroticism (p. ). Far from dismissing Peyre as
an idiosyncratic vision, we should recognize how completely he represented
and even helped to mould orthodox opinion. He was born in the same
year as Leiris, contributed to the construction of the canon in his primers
Quest-ce que le classicisme (Paris: Droz, ), Quest-ce que le romantisme (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, ) and Quest-ce que le symbolisme (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, ), and brought the work of Hugo,
Proust and Sartre in particular to a wider American audience via a series of
brief monographs. A measure of his inuence on the interpretation of French
culture can be gleaned from the Festschrift compiled by Mary Ann Caws,
Notes to pages
Writing in a Modern Temper. Essays on French Literature and Thought in honor of Henri
Peyre, Saratoga, California: Anma Libri, . It includes contributions from
Robert Greer Cohn, Jean Hytier, Victor Brombert, Bettina Knapp, Anna
Balakian, J. H. Matthews, Michel Beaujour, Neal Oxenhandler, Edouard
Morot-Sir, Edith Kern and Peter Caws. In French Novelists of Today we can say
that Peyre is reecting accurately since somewhat unconsciously what was felt
by both Right and Left to have been a disastrous period involving the deviril-
ization of French society and culture from the turn of the century to the mid-
thirties. As I state several times, Leiris follows this course of opinion himself.
One recent resistance to such a tendency is Christopher Robinsons
Scandal in the Ink, London, Cassell, . While he seems to disapprove of
Jouhandeaus Christian dimension (pp. , ), Robinson presents the writer
in general as a representative example of a growing post-war celebration
of homosexual culture: his texts become both more open about his own
sexuality and more assertive of the work of the experience across the s
and s (p. ). Robinsons work is valuable not just as a catalogue of gay
writing but also as an instrument with which to reassess dominant cultural
stereotypes: he shows, for example, how it is possible to use Jouhandeaus
Traite de labjection as a starting point for a critique of both the exteri-
orizing and totalizing nature of thirties writing and of its heterosexualism
(all of which, as we have seen, Leiris assumed). As Robinsons primary aim
is to establish an alternative compendium, he does not venture far into
this speculative eld. This does leave him in turn somewhat open to the
charge of enthusiastic aestheticization: we may be warned of Jouhandeaus
Decadent Catholicism and Romantic revolt (pp. ), but we are never
told of his anti-semitism. Robinsons aim appears to be the construction of a
particular positive image of the male gay writer, indirectly a political act, but
more explicitly one with an aesthetic impetus. From Edelmans perspective,
one would have to say that this is an ultimately essentialist approach, for it
uncovers difference without deconstructing the binary logic.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, p. . Jouhandeau is, of course, neither an isolated
nor an original instance the whole point of my argument is to challenge pre-
cisely that structural dimension of doxa. Jacob can be read in the chronology
of events given on page (where Leiris again recalls reading Dorian Gray),
and a relationship with Jacob, which may have been amorous, preceded
that with Jouhandeau. (Leiris later confesses obliquely in LAge dhomme: pour
un peu, je serais alle jusqua partager ses vices, si cela avait ete un moyen
dacquerir son genie (AH ).). Similarly, were we to add the name of
Roussel to the above, we should be obliged to begin a whole enquiry into
Leiriss relation to acknowledged mentors who are generally presented as
marginal by the canon and whose sexuality is always known but rarely
gured.
An endnote indicates that Jamin is not unaware of the content of the
contraction taking place here: Sagit-il de Jouhandeau? ou de Max Jacob?
( J ).
Notes to pages
See J , note and J , notes and . For details of the
overlapping chronologies of the various cahiers, see J .
See, for example, Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, Paris, Cahiers du
cinema, Gallimard, Seuil, , pp. ; and Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier,
Loyola, Paris, Seuil, , p. .
See my earlier note .
Marcel Jouhandeau, Ximenes Malinjoude () in Contes denfer, Paris,
Gallimard, , pp. . Henceforth referred to in parenthesis as XM.
The work was originally published in , the date Leiris gives in his
later selection of extracts obviously referring to himself ( J ), but
noted by Jouhandeau as having been completed at Gueret in . Given
that Leiris elsewhere records his correction of the proofs of other works
by Jouhandeau, and shows indirectly that Jouhandeau read at least LAge
dhomme in manuscript form ( J ), it is reasonable to speculate that
Leiris was familiar with details of Ximenes Malinjoude prior to its publication.
See J ; and AH , .
Bizarrely, Leiris deliberately omits the word etroite. The remote possibility
that J was written before ( Jamin carefully notes that it was colle
dans le journal apres le juin ( J note , my emphasis)) and
that it therefore inuenced Jouhandeaus description does not actually
alter my essential point regarding the retention of the homotextual
secret at the heart of Leiriss autobiography and, indeed, his very journal
intime.
For another example of Jouhandeaus unacknowledged inuence on
Leiriss aesthetic formulations, see the similarities between a entry
( J ) and Leiriss response to an NRF survey (Reves, La Nouvelle
revue francaise, no. , October , pp. ) which is quietly presented
as being part of a letter to M. J..
For a treatment of homosexual love as mystical apprenticeship, see
Jouhandeaus Les Instantanes de la memoire, Journaliers II, Paris, Gallimard,
, p. . See also his Chronique dune passion, Paris, Gallimard, , where
he extols the utility and necessity of passion as the sole agent permitting
him to go beyond himself (p. ). The anti-semitism to which Leiris makes
reference in order to erase Jouhandeau (and for which see, for example,
his horrible Le Peril juif, Paris, Sorlot, ) operates in Chronique dune
passion in an ambiguous way. In the narrative, Marcels passion substitutes
Jacques, whom he must relinquish, for God; Marcels wife, Elise, retorts,
as it were, by presenting her desire to kill Jacques as doing Gods will. It
is then that Jacquess Jewishness is made explicit (p. ). Homosexuality,
murder, anti-semitism and Catholic mysticism become ingredients of the
one necessary Passion. Incidentally, this work also uses the Dorian Gray
device: Jacquess attering portrait of Marcel gradually takes over the
marriage household until Elise, unable to kill Jacques, defaces the portrait
instead. She is persuaded to give up the (castrating) knife she uses by a
priest.
Notes to pages
:
. . .
Martin Heidegger, a late marginal commentary on Being and Time, quoted
in Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Being and Time,
Division I, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, MIT Press, , p. .
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven and London,
Yale University Press, , p. .
For a particularly good example of the absoluteness of consciousness
in Husserl, see the extract from Emmanuel Levinass book, La theorie de
lintuition dans la phenomenologie de Husserl, in The Levinas Reader, pp. .
Jacques Derrida, La Differance, in Marges de la philosophie, Paris, Minuit,
, pp. , p. . The essay is ttingly preceded by Tympan, in which
Derrida employs part of the Persephone chapter from Biffures. There are
two English translations of La Differance, neither of which is completely
satisfactory, though each contributes to an understanding of the essay:
Differance, in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of
Signs, tr. David B. Allison, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, ,
pp. ; and Differance, in Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan
Bass, Brighton, Harvester and Chicago, The University of Chicago Press,
, pp. . My future page references will be to the latter.
Differance is by now a well-known term: with it Derrida denotes the already
differential (active) and deferred (passive) nature of meaning, the -ance
ending (as opposed to -ence) resulting from the fundamental play of language,
acting as the graphic mark of this difference, and indicating how a phonic
impression of presence is already part of a representational system.
Jacques Derrida, La Differance, ibid., p. .
Martin Heidegger, A Letter on Humanism, quoted in George Steiner, Heidegger,
London, Fontana, , p. .
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. .
: BIFFURES
I am aware that the excretory function also serves to represent the spiralling
passage from interiority to exteriority in Leiris, and could be added to
this list. Sufce it to say here that as a function it conforms to the same
dynamics as those of vision, voice and hearing, while undoing their ideal
associations. One inevitably thinks of Bataille in this context.
: ---
L A R E G L E D U J E U
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Oxford, Blackwell, , H. , p. .
My analysis of Leiris in this section uses certain ideas and terms taken from
Heidegger, mostly from Being and Time. I do not pretend to offer a systematic
analysis of these terms, let alone the way in which their meaning evolves
Notes to pages
in Heideggers works, especially after . In associating them with a
Leirisian logic, however, we perhaps gain an interesting critical perspective
on their meaning and signicance.
Martin Heidegger, ibid., H. , p. .
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, uvres completes, I: Les Confessions et autres textes
autobiographiques, Paris, Gallimard (Pleiade), , p. . Here it is the
fall itself which restores Rousseau to life and through which he nally
achieves an original, mythical urstate of authenticity, one in which nature
and existence cooperate in a pure Ereignis:
La nuit savancoit. Jappercus le ciel, quelques etoiles et un peu de verdure. Cette
premiere sensation fut un moment delicieux. Je ne me sentois encor que par la.
Je naissois dans cet instant a la vie, et il me sembloit que je remplissois de ma legere
existence tous les objets que jappercevois. Tout entier au moment present je ne me
souvenois de rien; je navois nulle notion distincte de mon individu, pas la moin-
dre idee de ce qui venoit de marriver; je ne savois ni qui jetois ni ou jetois; je ne
sentois ni mal, ni crainte, ni inquietude. Je voyois couler mon sang comme jaurois
vu couler un ruisseau, sans songer seulement que ce sang mappartint en aucune
sorte. Je sentois dans tout mon etre un calme ravissant auquel chaque fois que je me
le rappelle je ne trouve rien de comparable dans toute lactivite des plaisirs connus.
Martin Heidegger, ibid., H. , pp. .
Martin Heidegger, ibid., H. , p. .
Jean-Paul Sartre, LEtre et le Neant, Paris, Gallimard, , p. .
Cf. Martin Heidegger, ibid., H. , p. . Although I am bringing together
certain similar phrases and concerns from Heidegger and Sartre, I cannot
detail here the important differences which exist between their philosophies
concerning nothingness, anxiety, etc. For one such detailing, cf. Michel
Haar, Sartre and Heidegger, in Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to
his Philosophy, eds. Hugh J. Silverman and Frederick A. Elliston, Brighton,
Harvester, , pp. .
Jean-Paul Sartre, ibid., p. .
In using the term insanity, I am aware of the dangers of equating pure
presence with madness, a romantic, surrealist and ethnocentric ideal which
occasionally surfaces in some of Leiriss work (which is to say that it exists as a
temptation in all of his work). One thinks also of early Foucault. I employ the
term for two reasons: rstly to describe the process of absolute coincidence
between inside and outside which is Fibrilless dream; and secondly to
recall its peculiar presence in a nal footnote to Sartres essay on la liberte
cartesienne in Situations I (Paris, Gallimard, , pp. ). Sartre here
recognizes by way of denegation how such a coincidence causes fundamen-
tal problems for his concepts of freedom and the dialectic (this was its value
in early Foucault). Hence, for Sartre meme le desarroi, cest-a-dire limitation
interieure de lexteriorite, meme lalienation supposent la liberte (p. ).
Sartres response to a romanticization of madness is a dogmatic rationaliza-
tion of it. This is in turn dependent on the essays astonishing opening a
stupidly nationalist historicization of the practice of independent thinking
Notes to pages
which has been implicitly understood and carried out by nous autres
Francais qui vivons depuis trois siecles sur la liberte cartesienne (p. ).
William Butler Yeats, A circus animals desertion. The political and meta-
physical ambiguities inherent in this revisionist account of a writers actions
also recur in Heideggers An Introduction to Metaphysics, when he famously
appeals to the primordial realm of the powers of being and new spiritual
energies unfolding historically from out of the centre (pp. ). I should
argue that one chief value of Leiriss autobiography is the ultimately exem-
plary manner in which its complexities guard against such a simple return
of the spirit. For further reections on Heideggers position in this regard,
see Jacques Derrida, De lesprit, Paris, Galilee, , and Herman Rapaport,
Heidegger and Derrida: Reections on Time and Language, Lincoln and London,
University of Nebraska Press, , especially p. . Presumably, Sartres
intention in Aller et retour (Situations I, pp. ) was to offer a similar
critical judgement of Brice Parain. Interestingly, the conclusion to the
rst part of this essay, which speaks of the dangers of le puissant orgueil
metaphysique qui fut lesprit de lapres-guerre (p. ), mentions Leiris,
but Sartre does not make it clear whether or not he exonerates Leiris from
this tache.
: -
Augustine, Confessions, Book , Harmondsworth, Penguin, , p. .
Jean-Paul Sartre, uvres romanesques, Paris, Gallimard (Pleiade), , p. .
One can also recall here how, in LEtre et le Neant, Sartre denes the dening
look of the Other as given just as well when there is a rustling of branches,
or the sound of a footstep followed by silence (p. ), before going on to
repeat the point that this noise is apprehended by me not as the existence
of someone else but as my own vulnerability (p. ).
:
Michel Foucault, Dits et ecrits , vols., Gallimard, vol. , p. .
Georges May, LAutobiographie, Presses Universitaires de France, .
Cf. Jean Boorsch, Hommage a Georges May: a propos du Dilemme,
in Dilemmes du roman: essays in honour of Georges May, edited by Catherine
LaFarge, Saratoga, California, Anma Libri, , pp. , p. . Of
Mays work, see Quatre visages de Denis Diderot, Boivin et Cie., ; Diderot et
la Religieuse, New Haven, Yale University Press and Presses Universitaires
de France, ; Le Dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siecle, New Haven, Yale
University Press and Presses Universitaires de France, .
Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, Minuit, .
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press,
p. .
Notes to pages
See Homi Bhabha, foreword to Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,
London, Pluto Press, , pp. viixxvi.
E. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge, MA, Harvard
University Press, .
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography,
Literature, and Art, Cambridge, MA and London, England, Harvard
University Press, .
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Only those poems, articles and fragments not collected in book form are listed
individually. For a complete bibliography see Louis Yvert, Bibliographie
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no. ), . Wherever possible, the original Gallimard publications have been
used.
Sur lesprit de Dieu [traduction et presentation du poeme de Sir Thomas
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Simulacre, Editions de la Galerie Simon .
LIdee de bien chez Tolsto et Nietzsche, Clarte (), .
Les Illumines, Clarte (), .
Joan Miro [translated by M. Cowley], The Little Review, New York, : (),
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Andre Masson [translated by M. Cowley], The Little Review, New York, :
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Le Point cardinal, Editions du Sagittaire .
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Index
Index
Cahiers detudes africaines, ethics, of ethnography, ; of language , ,
Caillois, Roger, , n; Le Vent dhiver, , , ; existentialist, , ; of
capitalism, ; the social reality of, surrealism,
castration complex, ethnography, , , , , , , ,
Cesaire, Aime, , , , , , , ; of bourgeois life, ;
China, , , n the ethics of, ; as reviewed in the Journal,
Chirico, Giorgio de, n ; and surrealism, , ,
class relations, existentialism, , , , n; as reviewed in
Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture, the Journal,
cold war,
College de sociologie, , , , ; and Fanon, Frantz, ,
Declaration sur la crise internationale, Fascism, , ,
colonialism, , , , ; see also Faust,
neo-colonialism First World War, , , ,
commitment, ; and Sartre, , ; Foucault, Michel, , , , , n,
existentialist, , ; and literature, ; n; LHistoire de la sexualite and Le souci de
political, , , , , , , , , soi, n
, ; revolutionary and fraternity,
anti-colonialist, ; social, , , ; to Freud, Sigmund, , , , , ; and
truth, dream-work, , ; The Interpretation of
communism, , , ; and the Communist Dreams, ,
Party, Friche, Claire,
Contre-attaque, , , n Front populaire,
Creech, James,
Critique sociale, La, , , Gambetta, Leon Michel,
Critique, Gaulthier, Rene, n
Croix du Sud, Genesis, the Book of, and autobiography,
Cuba, ,
Genette, Gerard,
Dal, Salvador, , n Giacometti, Alberto,
death, see mortality Girard, Alain, , , n
decolonization, Glissant, Edward, , n
deconstruction, globalization,
Deleuze, Gilles, n Gnosticism,
Denigration, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, , ,
Derrida, Jacques, , , ; Marges de la
philosophie; Gordon, Helene, , , , ,
Desnos, Robert, , ,
detection, and Biffures, ; and the Journal, ; Gradhiva,
and Nuits sans nuit, , , Griaule, Marcel, , , , ; and LAfrique
devirilization, , , , , fantome, ; and Documents, ; and
Didier, Beatrice, Mission Dakar-Djibouti, ,
difference, , , n; and identity, guilt,
Documents, , , , ; and Antonin
Artaud, ; and Georges Bataille, Heidegger, Martin, , , , , n; Being
; Leiris as the editorial assistant of, and Time,
Don Juan, Hemingway, Ernest; ,
Dorian Gray, , n; Leiriss cote Dorian heterosexuality, , , , ,
Gray , ; The Picture of, ; see also Hollier, Denis, ,
Albert Lewis Holofernes, , , ,
Durkheim, Emile, , homoeroticism,
homographesis, ,
Edelman, Lee, homosexuality, , , n, n; in
Eluard, Paul, n Herman Melvilles Pierre,
engagement, see commitment Hugo, Victor;
Index
Husserl, Edmund, , , , , , , , ,
hysteria, as means of surrealist expression, , , , , , , ;
, , , , Biffures (La Regle du jeu I), , , , ,
, , , , , , , ,
identity, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, ; corporeal, , ; , , , , , , , ,
construction of, , , , , , ; De la litterature consideree comme
, , , n; and difference, ; une tauromachie, , ; LEvasion
and difference, , ; the souterraine, n; Fibrilles (La Regle du jeu
ethnographers, ; and language, III), , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , ; , , n; Fourbis (La Regle du jeu II),
nominal, , ; sexual, , , , , , , , , , , ,
; social, , ; surrealist, , , , , ; Frele Bruit
impotence, see devirilization (La Regle du jeu IV), , , , , ,
Institut dEthnologie, , , , ; Glossaire jy serre
mes gloses, , , , , , , , ,
Jacob, Max, , , , n; LHomme de chair , , , , , , , n; Grande
et lhomme reet, fuite de neige, , , , , , n;
Jamin, Jean, , , n, n, n; and the Journal, , , , , , ,
Journal, , , , , , n, , , ; the reception of, ;
n Langage tangage ou ce que les mots me disent, ,
jazz, , , , , ; Metaphore, ; Miroir de lAfrique,
Jouhandeau, Marcel, , , n, n, n; Miroir de la tauromachie, , ; Mots
n; his formative inuence on Leiris, sans memoire, , , , , ; Nuits sans
; his liaison with Leiris, ; nuit et quelques jours sans jour, , , ,
Ximenes Malinjoude, , ; Chronique n; Le Point cardinal, , , , ,
dune passion, n , n; La Regle du jeu, , , , , , ,
Judith, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , ,
Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, , n, see also Biffures (La Regle du jeu I)
Khadidja, , , , Fourbis (La Regle du jeu II), Fibrilles (La Regle
du jeu III) and Frele Bruit (La Regle du jeu IV);
Lacan, Jacques, , , Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne, , ,
Lang, Jack, , ; Simulacre, , n; Tauromachies, ;
language, and autobiography, , , ; Titres et travaux, ; Zebrage,
the ethics of, , , , ; and Lejeune, Philippe,
ethnography, , ; and identity, , Lena, see Helene Gordon
, , , ; poetic, , ; the Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, , ,
referentiality of, ; as source of the Levinas, Emmanuel, , , , ; and Biffures,
merveilleux, ; and surrealism, ,
, , , , , , Levi-Strauss, Claude, , , , , n; on
Laplanche, Jean, Mausss Essai sur le don, ; Tristes
League of Nations, Tropiques,
Leenhardt, Maurice, Lewis, Albert, Dorian Gray, the lm, , see also
Leiris, Louise, (nee Godon), the wife of Michel Dorian Gray
Leiris, , , , , , , , , Limbour, Georges,
, , ; as the addressee of the Lucretia, , , , ,
Journal, ; as the main character of Le Lycanthrope, ,
the Journal, ; the death of, ; in
dreams, ; the illegitimacy of, , Man, Paul de, n
n; as Judith, Maran, Rene, Batouala,
Leiris, Michel, Aurora, , , , , , , Marmande, Francis,
, , , , , , , , , Marx, Karl, , , n
n; LAfrique fantome, , , , , , marxism, , Hegelian,
, , n; LAge dhomme, , , , , Masson, Andre, , , n
Index
Mauss, Marcel, , , ; and LAfrique poetry, , , ; and politics, , , ,
fantome, ; Essai sur le don, , ; surrealist, ,
May , , , , Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, , ,
May, Georges, LAutobiographie, possession, , , , , ; linguistic, ;
Mehlman, Jeffrey, surrealist,
Melville, Herman, , Pierre; or the Ambiguities, Presence africaine,
, Proust, Marcel, , , ; A la recherche du
Metraux, Alfred, temps perdu, , , , n
Minotaure, , ; Leiris as the editor of, psychoanalysis, , , , , , , , ,
Miro, Joan, , , , , , , , , , ,
Mission Dakar-Djibouti, , , , , n; , , n; Leiriss rejection of, ,
and Raymond Roussel, ; and surrealism, ; undergone by
modernity, , , Leiris, see Adrien Borel
Montaigne, Michel de,
mortality, , , , , ; in LAfrique racism, , ,
fantome, ; in LAge dhomme, , , ; in reciprocity, existential, ; ethnographic, , ,
Aurora, , ; in Fourbis, , , ;
in Frele Bruit, , ; in the Journal, reexivity, phenomenological, ; linguistic,
, , , , ; self-presence in relativity, linguistic and cultural, ; linguistic,
the face of, , ; and Leiriss suicide cultural and methodological,
attempt, , , , repression, , , , , ,
Musee de lHomme, , ; see also Musee du Reverdy,
Trocadero Revolution surrealiste, La, , , n, n
Musee du Trocadero, , , , ; see also revolution, , , , ,
Musee de lHomme. Rimbaud, Arthur, ,
mythology, see antiquity Riviere, Georges Henri, ; and Musee du
Trocadero,
Nadeau, Maurice, , Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, , , , , ;
names, , , , , , , ; and Les Confessions, , n, n; Les Reveries
autobiography, , , , ; du promeneur solitaire,
and the calligrames, Roussel, Raymond, , , n; Impressions
Narcissus, dAfrique, ; Locus Solus, ; and Mission
negritude, , Dakar-Djibouti,
negrophilia, , , n Rousset, Jean,
neo-colonialism,
Nerval, Gerard de, , , , ; Aurelia, , sacred, the, , , , , , , , ;
and Georges Bataille,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, , , Sade, Marquis de,
Said, Edward, W.,
Oedipus, the myth of, ; oedipal rivalry in Sartre, Jean-Paul, , , , , , , ,
LAge dhomme, , , , , , , n, n;
opera, , , and College de sociologie, ; his criticism of
orientalism, surrealism, , ; LEtre et le Neant, ,
otherness, , , , , , , , , , , , ; La Nausee, ; Un nouveau
, , n; as femininity, , mystique, , ; Orphee noir, ;
Quest-ce que la litterature?, , , , ;
parousia, , and selfness, ; Theatre de Situations,
Peignot, Colette, , , Saussure, Ferdinand de,
Persephone, , Schaeffner, Andre, , Le jazz: la musique
Peyre, Henri, French Novelists of Today, , moderne,
n Second World War, , , , ; and
phenomenology, , , , D-day and Liberation, , , , ,
Picasso, Pablo, , , ; and the Communist ; and drole de guerre, , , ,
party, , , ; and Occupation, , ,
Plato, , , ,
Index
Segur, Comtesse de, co-editor of, ; and the publication
self, the, , , , , , , , , , , of Biffures, ; and the publication
, ; psychoanalytical concept of, ; of Fourbis, ; its policy towards
socio-political concept of, ; as seen by poetry,
surrealism, , ; see also identity thanatography, , , ; see also
shamanism, , mortality
Societe psychanalytique de Paris, thanatos,
sociology, , , Trotsky, Leon,
Spanish civil war, Tual, Roland,
Spector, Jack, J., n Turpin, Ben,
Stalinism,
Stendhal, Henri Beyle, Le Rouge et le Noir, unconscious, the, , , , , , , , ,
structuralism, n ,
suicide, see mortality UNESCO,
surrealism, , , , , , , , , ,
, ; and ethnography, , , Vane, Sibyl, see Albert Lewis
; as reviewed in the Journal, ; and Verdi, Giuseppe, ,
language, , , , , , Verne, Jules,
; and its poetics, , ; and
psychoanalysis, Wahl, Jean,
Wildenstein, Georges, and Documents,
Les Temps modernes, , ; and black poets, ; World Peace Congress in Vienna,
and the critical response to Dimanche,
; the founding of, ; Leiris as a Zette, see Louise Leiris.