Michel Leiris: Writing the Self (Cambridge Studies in French)

MICHEL LEIRIS Writing the Self This is the first full-length study in English of Michel Leiris’s work. Frequently cited as a central figure in contemporary French culture, Leiris was an outstanding writer whose double career as ethnographer and creative writer places him at important points of intersection within French cultural history. Se´an Hand explores Leiris’s active participation in some of the most striking intellectual and artistic movements of the twentieth century: surrealism in the twenties, ethnography in the thirties and existentialism in the forties. Hand locates his writing in these different contexts in relation to the major artistic, political and philosophical concepts of the period. He goes on to argue that Leiris’s multi-volume autobiography La R`egle du jeu stands as the model form of self-enquiry in the twentieth century. More broadly, Hand explores Leiris’s continuing obsession with the notion of ‘presence’. Informed by recent critical theories, Hand offers a multi-disciplinary approach to this intriguing writer. ´  is Professor of French and Head of the School of   Languages at Oxford Brookes University. He is editor of The Levinas Reader and Facing the Other: the Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. He has published on Derrida, psychoanalysis and contemporary French writing.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN FRENCH              : Michael Sheringham (Royal Holloway, London)               : R. Howard Bloch (Columbia University), Malcolm Bowie (All Souls College, Oxford ), Terence Cave (St John’s College, Oxford ), Ross Chambers (University of Michigan), Antoine Compagnon (Columbia University), Peter France (University of Edinburgh), Christie McDonald (Harvard University), Toril Moi (Duke University), Naomi Schor (Harvard University)

Recent titles in this series include    Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion   Simone de Beauvoir, Gender and Testimony   Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities   Gender, Rhetoric and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing   Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference   Women’s Writing in Nineteenth-Century France   Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay in Twentieth-Century France  .  Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature: From Loti to Genet  . .  The Poetry of Fran¸cois Villon: Text and Context   Orientalism in French Classical Drama A complete list of books in the series is given at the end of the volume.

MICHEL LEIRIS Writing the Self ´ N HAND SE A Oxford Brookes University

          The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 2004 First published in printed format 2002 ISBN 0-511-03959-X eBook (netLibrary) ISBN 0-521-49574-1 hardback

For Maol´ıosa and Dominic

Contents

page x xi

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction: the deaths of Michel Leiris



     

Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism





Recasting the self: from surrealism to ethnography





Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography to L’Age d’homme





Positional play: La R`egle du jeu





Secreting the self: Journal –

      

 LA R E` G LE DU JEU

 Excess of joy: the beginnings of presence in ‘ . . . Reusement!’







Organs of learning: sensing presence in Biffures

 The act of union: being-in-the-world in La R`egle du jeu



 Thanatography: non-being as the limit of autobiography

 

Conclusion: locating Leiris

  

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 benefited 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 L’Autre et le sacr´e (L’Harmattan). I am grateful to editors and publishers for permission to incorporate material in modified form. For special advice, I am indebted to Dr Vivienne Suvini-Hand. Dr Rima Dapous acted throughout as an expert and encouraging research assistant, and Helena Garnett assisted with indexing. I wish to thank everyone at Cambridge University Press, and especially the commissioning 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 Maol´ıosa, 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 AF AH Bi Br CE FB Fi Fo GFN J LS LT MSM N O P S Z

Aurora L’Afrique fantˆome L’Age d’homme Biffures Bris´ees ´ Cinq Etudes d’ethnologie Frˆele Bruit Fibrilles Fourbis Grande fuite de neige Journal, – La Langue secr`ete des Dogons de Sanga Langage tangage Mots sans m´emoire Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour Op´erratiques ´ La Possession et ses aspects th´eaˆ traux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar ‘Le Sacr´e dans la vie quotidienne’ Z´ebrage

xi

Introduction: the deaths of Michel Leiris

‘Michel Leiris est enfin mort.’ Lib´eration’s reaction to Leiris’s death at Saint-Hilaire on  September , aged , may initially have seemed like a cruel valediction, and one emphasizing all the ‘brutality of fact’ that Leiris himself admired in exemplary painters of modern sensibility, such as Picasso and Francis Bacon. The world was evidently not listening to the increasingly muted meditations of a twentieth-century Montaigne: the same issue of the newspaper was taken up mostly with the geopolitics of the post-cold war fallout, applying linguistic analysis to President George Bush’s statement to the United Nations about Kuwait, Iraq and the Arab–Israeli conflict, psychoanalysis to the projection and demonization of Saddam Hussain, and something approaching ethnography to the preparations for the opening of ‘Eurodisneyland’. This unconscious and discursively unremarkable use of what had once been revolutionary practice in the hands of Leiris could be read by us as the ultimate compliment and a crowning of his work; more realistically, though, it here betokens his survival into an age of complete mediatization and globalization against which his aesthetic and political endeavours had always struggled, and in which Leiris had perhaps come at the end to represent literally the last of a dying breed. The brutality of Lib´eration’s phrase therefore feels mixed also with a sense of relief and even pity, for the inevitable not to say overdue passing of a torturously complex voice in an age of simplified and simultaneous commentary. The rest of the article, however, and the remaining synopses and testimonies, extending over the issue’s first six pages, and drawing on the judgements and recollections of L´evi-Strauss, Marc Aug´e, Jack Lang, Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, makes clear how the phrase was intended in fact to summarize the heroic endurance of Leiris’s work, its vital cumulative contribution to twentieth-century French writing, and its canonic status as the exemplary autobiographical practice of the previous ninety years. The writer who, in Mathieu Lindon’s words, 



Michel Leiris

had remained all his life a ‘marginal’ to the point of being ambiguously described as ‘Leiris fantˆome’ (p. ), whom L´evi-Strauss described as ‘un ph´enom`ene a` part’ (p. ), and whom Marc Aug´e confined to the past as ‘un e´ crivain d’une certaine e´ poque’ (p. ), was therefore also hailed more historically as ‘un grand maˆıtre’ by ( Jack Lang, p. ), ‘exemplaire’ and ‘remarquable’ (Maurice Blanchot, p. ), and ‘incontestablement l’un des grands e´ crivains du si`ecle’ (Claude L´evi-Strauss, p. ). The brutal facts governing the primary subject of Leiris’s work, namely his own personal life, can be swiftly and banally established. Born in Paris on  April  into a comfortable middle-class family (his father being a stockbrocker’s clerk who advised, among others, Raymond Roussel), and the youngest of four children, the eldest of whom died in childhood, Michel Leiris graduated eventually (with some counselling by Max Jacob) from studies at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, before associating himself via Andr´e Masson with the Surrealists, and producing from  on a series of surrealist poems, narratives, and dream notations. He subsequently acted as ‘secretary– archivist’ on the  – Dakar–Djibouti ethnographic expedition led by Marcel Griaule, the experience of which generated the transgressively reflective ethnographic journal L’Afrique fantˆome, published in . On his return, interrupting his psychoanalysis and becoming a CNRS research assistant, he eventually joined the staff at the Mus´ee de l’Homme, where he was to spend his entire career until retirement in  (replaced in one account by a computer), as director of the department for subSaharan Africa. Related by marriage to the cubist art dealer DanielHenry Kahnweiler, whose collections and exhibitions after the second world war gravitated around the Galerie Louise Leiris, Leiris also consistently published throughout the rest of his life a series of appreciative and involved essays and monographs on key painters and artists, many of them close friends who themselves produced portraits of Leiris, including Picasso, Mir´o, Laurens, Masson, Lam, Giacometti and Bacon. As a committed intellectual, he was in  briefly a member of the Communist Party, contributed to the journals Critique sociale and Documents, and co-founded with Georges Bataille the Coll`ege de Sociologie. After the war, he co-founded with Jean-Paul Sartre and others Les Temps modernes in , was one of the signatories of the Appel des  concerning the right to insubordination during the Algerian war, supported the movement of May  and, with Simone de Beauvoir, helped to direct the Association of Friends of the Maoist paper La Cause du peuple. Such commitment did not prevent Leiris from also noting his love of

Introduction: the deaths of Michel Leiris



opera, whether in the form of private reviews and reflections, or in the mythographic mises-en-sc`ene of his autobiographical works. And throughout all this time, of course, Leiris the writer tenaciously produced a continually evolving body of writing, including surrealist-inspired poetic texts, ethnographic studies centring on language and possession in subsaharan Africa and the Caribbean, and above all the work for which he has become known more widely, a remarkable collection of autobiographies. These include not one but two henceforth classic texts of autobiography: the terse and corrosive one-volume L’Age d’homme (), inspired methodologically and ethically by ethnography, psychoanalysis and existentialism; and the sinuous and labyrinthine four-volume La R`egle du jeu (–), wherein immense temporal prolongation and minute linguistic analysis brought the art of autobiography to a new pitch of selfconscious sophistication and phenomenological registration, driven by a traditional apprehension of cowardice, failure and death. As Lib´eration’s phrase suggests, the work finally met its fate. Michel and Louise Leiris remained childless, and her death preceded his by just over two years. Michel Leiris was cremated on Thursday  October  at . am, and placed in P`ere-Lachaise’s columbarium. These facts, barely adumbrated, suffice to change the resonance of Lib´eration’s blunt phrase. As part of a consciously public oration, rather than as a private dismissal, the newspaper’s reaction summarizes how Leiris’s writing, in part by virtue of its temporal endurance, had become synonymous with the evolution of key twentieth-century cultural movements, and in effect salutes the heroic persistence of a practice which wove a complex of aesthetico-political ideals raised by different disciplines into an exemplary artistic conscience. In addition to the instances of intellectual collaboration mentioned above, Leiris worked actively on such key journals as Minotaure (), La Bˆete noire (–), Pr´esence africaine (–), Critique (), Cahiers d’´etudes africaines (–), and Gradhiva (–). Indeed, through obsessive concentration on Leiris’s autobiographical output, it is sometimes overlooked how intensely collective Leiris’s work also was, the list of active collaborators including at the very least Breton and Aragon, Bataille and Souvarine, Rivi`ere and Griaule, Sartre and L´evi-Strauss, M´etraux and C´esaire. In the course of these fraternal undertakings, Leiris’s work gradually assumed an encyclopaedic weight and resonance, recording both as professional prises de position and more intimate reaction the events surrounding the rise of Fascism and the Front populaire, world war and cold war, the work of UNESCO and decolonization, the birth of nations and the death of world



Michel Leiris

leaders (Che Guevara, De Gaulle, Franco, Mao). And from this perspective, Lib´eration’s valedictory pronouncement does indeed signal that Leiris was the last survivor of a disappearing generation, the final witness of a century of fervent historical change and intellectual revolution. But this in itself also begins to indicate the driven singularity of Leiris’s work. For all the fraternal efforts and enthusiasms, extending from jazz and revolutionary art to political and historical t´emoignage, Michel Leiris remained fundamentally an obsessive autobiographer. Through all its formal and intellectual transformations, Leiris’s œuvre was propelled forward by the one essential and impossible goal, summed up in the title of his greatest work, La R`egle du jeu: that of seizing the rule of its own singular game, a task whose logical and existential termination could be marked only by his final demise. One central effect of this heroic singularity was the renewal and expansion in Leiris of the nature of self-writing. In postmodern debate this area has become progressively represented as a key symptom and recording site of fragmentation and transgression, in which the eurocentric mentality in particular has encountered new, contesting histories, greater psychological complexity, and formal innovation and rupture. The exemplarity here often afforded to Leiris is not merely the result of temporal or social coincidence, but of a confluence of liberating ideas all worked through in the professional knowledge and political support of suppressed causes. In this light, Leiris’s aesthetic (and political) quest for the impossibly perfect balance between self-determination and the autonomy of the other led him to push the limits of autobiography, as well as to raise and exhaust the potential of related genres, including the article, the dictionary entry, the review, the diary, the poem and the card index (and beyond that the testimonies of an oral tradition, ritual, secret languages and sacred and artistic objects). One specific effect of this work was that Leiris became an exemplary model of self-expression and self-liberation to succeeding generations of intellectuals and artists often concerned consciously with psychological or political emancipation. Similarly, another equally important effect of this protracted but always committed writing of the self was the successive trace it uniquely fashioned of the century’s most revolutionary theorizations of identity. Thus Leiris’s autobiography was initially fuelled by the emerging theories of the self propounded by psychoanalysis, linguistics, phenomenology, anthropology, political engagement, sexual and political revolution, decolonization and deconstruction, but subsequently became itself the field of study and discovery for each of these disciplinary approaches.

Introduction: the deaths of Michel Leiris



Though historically Leiris was never as notorious or public a figure as Breton or Bataille or Sartre, then, he can be seen in comparisons typically to have not only shared ideas but also predicted and inspired them, arguably producing in the process an exemplary working-through of their otherwise partial and partisan positions. Certainly Leiris is at the heart of contemporary intellectual and aesthetic debate for the quality as well as range of intellectual responses which his self-analyses have provoked, from the most consciously dynamic and contractual, through to the most aporetic or deconstructionist. Here we can note in passing the appreciation of major critics and philosophers such as Lejeune, Beaujour, Mehlman, Blanchot, Derrida, Nancy, Genette, Pontalis, Levinas and Glissant, the last of these summarizing well why Leiris continues to be a touchstone for continued intellectual enquiry given that he ‘wanted to unfold speech that would be a live fabric, patient and revealing, of those very things that are true to the one who lives them, feels them, and refuses to name them in an ideal conclusion’. This last statement brings me uncomfortably closer to my own intentions in this study. Lib´eration’s spontaneous reaction was also a cultural gesture of anamnesis, that is to say a recollection that the existential effort of Leiris’s work proposes for us all a moral and aesthetic example if not obligation. This is apposite for the academic reader whose tendency (in books such as this one) towards autopsy and necrology is of course implicitly confronted and denounced by Leiris’s dissatisfied conscience. Philippe Lejeune, like others previously mentioned, has grasped this paradox in his foregrounding of the way in which autobiography is as much a way of reading as it is a type of writing. In general, however, it is an existential stake that few critics can hope to live up to, and my own reading of Leiris will be a very pale imitation of his enormous performance of fragmentation and integration. As the first full-length monograph in English on Michel Leiris, this book was somewhat obliged to offer an initially chronological and thereafter thematic survey for the purposes of orienting the new reader and any subsequent investigations. I was also concerned to place the precise nature of Leiris’s artistic resolutions and reassessment within the relevant social and intellectual contexts, and to do this I again needed to conform to an initially chronological and thereafter potentially synthetic approach. Next, given the centrality of Leiris’s autobiography and the theme of writing the self which I had isolated as the key artistic issue, I once more needed to follow the complex unfolding (and refolding) taking place in Leiris firstly through the autobiographies’ progressive publication, and thereafter more synchronically



Michel Leiris

and synthetically through an accumulation of themes, figures and determinations. For these reasons, the main body of my work is divided into two parts. In the first part, I review each of Leiris’s major works produced in a seventy-year period from  to , both in context and as part of an evolving practice of writing the self. In the second part I turn to the underlying obsessions in Leiris which transcend such contiguity, and which lead primarily via an ongoing phenomenology of perception through ways of being in the world, to the inevitable recognition by autobiography of death, together with its equal recognition of autobiography as a fundamental thanatography, that is to say a record and rehearsal of death as the limits of writing the self. The theoretical approaches of my first part therefore necessarily take their cue in large measure from the historical perspective, tending therefore to accentuate the work of Breton, Bataille, Sartre, Lacan and Derrida, for logical reasons. Those of the second part, in keeping with the emerging unificatory vision, are more obsessively phenomenological, tending therefore to draw on the insights and formulations of Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida and Levinas. Strategically, the ‘fil conducteur’ uniting the two parts, beyond the continuity of approach, is a constant rereading of the famous ‘. . . Reusement!’ scene which opens La R`egle du jeu, this strategy deriving from Leiris’s own revisions and rewritings of this primary moment as the beginning of self-emergence and hence of autobiography. Each key text is therefore extensively contextualized, with reference to works and debates involving other major intellectual figures of the day. I delineate Leiris’s contribution to the major disciplines of the time, such as surrealism, ethnography or existentialism. I draw out his absorption and transformation of key contemporary texts such as the Surrealist manifestoes, the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, L’Exp´erience int´erieure, or L’Etre et le N´eant, or canonic autobiographically related texts such as the Confessions of Augustine and Rousseau, or the work of Proust and Freud; but also more personally significant if less well-known works such as those of Jouhandeau or Melville, to name only two. The opening chapter of the first part, ‘Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism’, examines the early emergence through surrealism of Leiris’s technical attention to writing the self, and the way in which neurotic sensitivity was even here already being resolved by him as the mutability of modernity itself, leading to an increasingly pronounced move from rapid and inconsequential fulgurations to more prolonged and discursive formations. The key texts examined in turn here are

Introduction: the deaths of Michel Leiris



Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses, Le Point cardinal, Aurora, and Nuits sans nuit. The second chapter, ‘Recasting the self: from surrealism to ethnography’, charts the rapid superseding of a surrealist conceptual unity of self and world by an anti-idealist view of selfhood encouraged by Documents and given methodological and political underpinning by this ethnographic vision of the self, in its rituals and sociality, as a material and cultural collection. The key text of this period, L’Afrique fantˆome, is read as a relocation (and subterranean persistence) of surrealist dualism in social and political construction, of absolutism in cultural and methodological relativity, of identity in critical and increasingly distopic t´emoignage. L’Afrique fantˆome, then, is the site of a personal struggle involving competing ways of conceptualizing and writing the self: surrealism or realism, magic or science, possession or analysis, poetry or politics, languages as thing or languages as sign. I also chart the emergence into this complex of psychoanalysis as a key critical tool for both analysing self-repression and simultaneously challenging the prevalent scientism of ethnographic practice. The third chapter, ‘Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography to L’Age d’homme’, details Leiris’s rapid development, following his reflexive use of scientific objectivism, of transferential principles of self-analysis. Through the key text ‘Le Sacr´e dans la vie quotidienne’, I show how Leiris evolves an academic prototype of the autobiographical fieldwork with which he will subsequently occupy himself for the next few decades. This new approach therefore focuses unambiguously on the linguistic, heterogeneous and psycho-sexual formation of the self within a specific cultural situation. This in turn is shown to involve a transformation and re-integration of previous phases of surrealist resonance and ethnographic reciprocity, in the sacred sociology of the domestic initiation of the boy into the painful and humiliating passage to manhood. This move from irrational negativity to psycho-social realism is seen to generate a new compositional approach, one involving specifically an adherence to an existential ethics of language and generally a shift from Bataillean dilapidation to Sartrean d´epassement. Leiris gives this a brilliant reframing by introducing the analogy of the bullfighter, and relocating the litt´erateur’s language play in the purposeful arts of the self-moderating intellectual. This in turn leads to a close reading of the final key text in this chapter, L’Age d’homme. Here I follow closely the implications of this new methodological determination for writing the self. The syntagmatic adherence to time is overlaid by paradigmatic conceptualization and explanation drawn from psychoanalysis and ethnographic categorization. L’Age d’homme demonstrates the view that the autobiographical



Michel Leiris

subject’s veracity is culturally and reactively constructed, through a privileging of the regulatory, the repetitive, the archival and archaeological, the heterodiegetic and the referential, over individuality, immediacy, experience and homodiegesis. The chapter also shows, however, that this resolute control of a chthonian unconscious gives rise within the text to a persistent subject-in-language that resists ethical prescriptions and emerges above all through the unfinished, undetermined and unconscious elements at play within the text itself. This leads directly to the fourth chapter, ‘Positional play: La R`egle du jeu’, where I offer an extended analysis of the key four-volume autobiography that is undoubtedly Leiris’s crowning achievement. I emphasize the shift in temporal, philosophical, formal and moral positions in the move from L’Age d’homme to these later works. The former’s static and composite approach gives way to a mobile and constellatory vision foregrounding chronology and change. The cognitive and clinical objectification of self becomes a more affective and sensual structuration. The reactive emphasis on the rule of the game becomes inverted into an active exploitation of the game of the rule. The reverential, sacred, iconographic and tragic tenor of L’Age d’homme, concerned above all to categorize otherness, is transformed into the atmosphere of social commœdia punctuated by event, diversion and the alterity within self-identity. Key to this fundamental shift is the opening scene of Biffures, the chapter ‘. . . Reusement!’, wherein the enunciative and creative act of remembering, rather than the representation of the object of remembrance and composition, takes precedence. The principles of bifurcation and erasure, inherent in this autogenerative act, are shown to inhabit the mythic object of self-representation as a primary and irreducible otherness. From this first apprehension, and the endlessly deferring structure of self-enquiry it produces in the rest of Biffures, wherein the name is revealed as a privileged locus of such m´econnaissance, I turn to the second volume in the series, Fourbis, in order to read how the child’s initial pedagogy is then situated in a series of wider social and political lessons. Here I observe the return of the existentialist poetics and ethics, as consciousness moves beyond the proto-social scene of linguistic revelation and into the concrete and coenaesthetic situation out of which is generated solidarity, anguish and the apprehension of mortality. A social ´enonc´e overtakes the solipsistic ´enonciation, to create a newly valorized self-identity from communion with others. This new aspiration to reconcile poetical and political authenticity in an elaborate d´epassement is then shown to reach crisis point in the third volume, Fibrilles. I chart his fall from admiration of a socialist utopia into a depressive vortex leading

Introduction: the deaths of Michel Leiris



to a suicide attempt, and subsequent convalescence, in order to detail the autobiography’s recovery through its re-examination of its own writing principles and in particular that of the rule of the game. Here we observe the realization that the failure to find the rule, together with the temporal expenditure involved in the acquisition of such knowledge, are the very constitution of the autobiographer, that is to say, constitute the non-events through which the self can emerge as the event. This belated recognition of non-climactic irresolution is then shown to generate the decision of the final volume of the series, tellingly entitled Frˆele Bruit, to approach the writing of the self as an open architecture, and the self as an unended enunciative modality. This accepting relocation of the self in destructured non-savoir paves the way for a reading in the fifth and final chapter of the book’s first part, ‘Secreting the self: Journal –’, of a posthumously published, designedly modest and unfinished, if massive, journal. Here I focus firstly on the Journal’s primarily derivative status in relation to the polished oeuvre, its complex reinvagination of the previously read and ‘finished’ work, its temporal and formal accentuation of historical, ideological and stylistic irresolution, and its accompanying foregrounding of non-finite forms of representation, such as opera buffa, happenings, and free jazz. I point up how a journal, with its essential subject of temporality, allows the unambiguous emergence of the fundamental cyclomythic structure subtending all Leiris’s work; and test its discreet and intimate status in order to expose both the secrets which it openly is held to contain, and those secrets which it hides (with the collusion of some readers) through the exposure of others. The specific homographesis which I uncover at work here within the highly gendered projection of secrecy held within and around the journal emerges in my analysis as a further intricate instance of the logical and unisolatable biffure as ab-original opening of the writing self. The conclusion to the book’s first part, with its largely chronological review, forces me to dwell thereafter on the underlying impulse driving each one of these distinct and occasionally desperate versions of writing the self: namely, the quest for ‘presence’. In four successive chapters, I review again the key aesthetic and intellectual attempts to achieve a form of autobiographical closure in La R`egle du jeu. The first chapter, ‘Excess of joy: the beginnings of presence in ‘. . . Reusement!’, looks in detail at how pure presence is presented and exposed in Biffures’s opening chapter, the attempt to capture such a state revealing the diff´erance already within the language and structure of self-representation. The metaphysics of selfpresence is shown graphically to be outdone from the beginning by the

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Michel Leiris

operations of the biffure and d´ecalage inherent in self-presence. Building on this realization of pre-figural alterity, the second chapter, ’‘Organs of learning: sensing presence in Biffures’, focuses on the normally effaced organs of self-perception. These are shown to hold and project the drama of presence in La R`egle du jeu’s opening volume, with initial shifts from visual through phonic and then aural immediacy leading to later, more sophisticated figures of sonic registration. As each of these attempted internal simultaneities serves to show up the burrowed biffure, however, Leiris changes tack in Fourbis, determining instead to forge pure presence as a pure authentic action. The sublation is the subject of the third chapter, ‘The act of union: being-in-the-world in La R`egle du jeu’, which focuses on Leiris’s will to give permanent authenticity at least a series of dramatic realizations, gravitating around such key existential phenomena as the act of falling. The chapter analyses how the grasping of such a personal event is projected outwards as an authentic assumption of existential being. I follow how Leiris extends this figure into metaphors of sport and thence to socio-political engagement, as dramatized by precise historical involvement, such as being caught in a crossfire. Thereafter I trace the irruption and attempted significance of similar historical contexts, including the Occupation, the Liberation and May , and through them the ambiguous network of obligations and failures opened up within the homophonically related terms ‘tache’ and ‘tˆache’. We then observe how the final volume, Frˆele Bruit, recognizes how these attempts are at best flashes that illuminate an increasingly crepuscular psychological landscape. The paradox gradually borne in on Leiris is that the presence represented by the tache constantly confirms its own death; and through this he comes to the fundamental recognition that presence as self-determination exists within representation as part of a culture of general thanatography. This statement leads logically to the final chapter, entitled ‘Thanatography: non-being as the limit of autobiography’. Beyond the presence of death as a major content of Leiris’s La R`egle du jeu lies the revelation of death as inherent in autobiography’s technical splitting of selfhood, as predicted and reflected from the beginning in the biffure. The key signs representing self-presence in Leiris point up the objectification and mortification which their existence entail. Leiris’s working-through of this paradoxical limit shows, then, how autobiography depends on a drive to the death: from Biffures’s insectile otherness, we move through Fourbis’s resolve to face the real death of others, and Fibrilles’s failed attempt to sublate death in a feverish, poetic resolution, to

Introduction: the deaths of Michel Leiris



the entertainment of actual death in Frˆele Bruit. The whole of La R`egle du jeu is shown to work with this knowledge and the impossibility of its resolution, self-presence thus being constructed from repeated confirmation of the impossibility of knowing its own completion. The text is peppered, then, with figures of consciousness confronting non-being, driven by the temptation to bring Being to termination and its own existence as continuing rejection of such an eschatology. Once again, this unresolvable dynamic is observed in ‘ . . . Reusement!’, thereafter to be elaborated as realization, speculation or tactic, and emerging especially clearly in later, metatextual sections, where a ‘time out’ is used to confront non-being and to construct or review a non-finite series of images, projections, dreams, meditations and memories. In the work’s closing pages, then, this spectral figuration of the death inherent in self-intuition becomes confirmed by the finishing work’s emergence as the monument to a life reaching its end and the elaborate prefiguring of the autobiography’s unknowable nothingness.

 

Texts and contexts

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Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism

‘L’Aspiration visc´erale a` un syst`eme qui serait a` la fois esth´etique, moral et scientifique. Le Vrai, le Beau, le Bien donn´es en bloc. Une seule chose.’ Michel Leiris’s  definition of surrealism could equally describe the general aspirations of his mature autobiographies, and in particular La R`egle du jeu. The remark demonstrates quite clearly how Leiris never abandoned the moral and aesthetic precepts of his surrealist apprenticeship and regarded himself to the end of his days as a surrealist. This is all the more significant for his work as a whole, given that, according to the Dictionnaire abr´eg´e du surr´ealisme, compiled by Andr´e Breton and Louis Aragon, first published in , Leiris belonged officially to the movement only between  and . These dates in themselves, of course, make Leiris an interesting case-study in the evolution of surrealism, since they mark two of the most decisive moments in the history of the movement:  saw the publication of Breton’s first Manifeste du surr´ealisme, while – witnessed the first serious schism within surrealism (ostensibly over the movement’s political identity) whose acrimony is recorded in Breton’s  Second manifeste du surr´ealisme. Within these dates, Leiris’s surrealist productions fall fairly convincingly into the two main phases proposed by Maurice Nadeau in his Histoire du surr´ealisme: an initial ‘p´eriode h´eroique’, running from –, in which the dominant trait was the first flush of poetic fervour as yet untainted by internecine polemic; and a subsequent ‘p´eriode raisonnante’, lasting from –, in which the increasing intensification of the surrealist voice passes the point of near inarticulacy, giving way to the institutional consolidation of surrealism as a specific literary and social practice. What is particularly interesting to consider, in the case of Leiris, is the degree to which these periods also correspond to the evolution of a sustained voice and its formal equivalents. Already during his surrealist apprenticeship, then, Leiris is engaged, at first furiously and intermittently, upon writing the self. 



Texts and contexts

Surrealism came of age in the aftermath of the first world war, and sought to sweep away the bourgeois conservatism of a previous age with a new, revolutionary, ‘d´eclass´e’ aesthetic that lauded the creative and anti-rationalist properties of language while objectifying an idealist desire for the absolute. Through a skilful involvement with the structure of language, the surrealists sought to explode the ossified logic of a realist epistemology and give free representation to the unconscious. The mental transfiguration of the world would uncover the mythical unity of surreality hidden beneath the dusty causality of habitual action. This tense dialectic gave surrealism the revolutionary dynamism encapsulated in Breton’s credo: ‘Je crois a` la r´esolution future de ces deux e´ tats, en apparence si contradictoires, que sont le rˆeve et la r´ealit´e, en une sorte de r´ealit´e absolue, de surr´ealit´e.’ The obligation to reveal this unconscious world conferred a scientific status on the surrealists’ instrumental use of language to overcome the rational defences of the stultified bourgeois world. Poetry was thus concerned here less with its satisfying form than with its iconoclastic force. Commenting on the dream-like objectivity of the surrealist text, Aragon, in his canonic Trait´e du style, noted: ‘En r´ealit´e, toute po´esie est surr´ealiste dans son mouvement’. Such a metaphysical attitude views the use of words as a violently creative act in itself, rather than as a means of achieving recapitulation or representation. This concrete linguistic moment articulates a self-justificatory spiritual apocalypse, in which life and death, reality and imagination, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable are no longer locked within the rationalist logic of negation and contradiction. Idealism and materialism meet at this point. Poetic language displays its own material qualities instead of devoting itself to verisimilitude, and the surreal representations created by this alchemical process confound rather than confirm the conventional relationship between signifier and signified devoted to a rationalist programme of knowledge and identity. As the surrealist dictionary itself defines the word ‘representation’:     ´          ‘Les repr´esentations conventionnelles des sources g´eom´etriques de la nature ne sont s´eduisantes qu’en fonction de leur puissance d’obscurcissement.’ (A.B. et P.E.)

This dark metaphysical urge is given its most programmatic exposition in Breton’s  Manifeste du surr´ealisme, where it is defined in psychological and technical terms as ‘psychic automatism’. The phrase indicates a quasi-Freudian concept of the unconscious, whose emancipatory language confers the status of shaman on the poet. The focus of the

Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism



Manifesto therefore falls on the creative manipulation of pure language: ‘le langage a e´ t´e donn´e a` l’homme pour qu’il en fasse un usage surr´ealiste’ (p. ). In the first instance, then, language does not have a practical or rationalist content, though its operations may guarantee new objects or realizations. The content of language is primarily itself: it displays its own materiality, creates rather than represents the world, and burgeons beyond the pre-established explicative functions of the dictionary. No correction or negation will be used by the surrealist to bring language to heel. Surrealist freedom is an infinity of utterances, each emancipatory and revolutionary in intent and effect, an activity free of the exigencies of description or dialectic: Le surr´ealisme po´etique, auquel je consacre cette e´ tude, s’est appliqu´e jusqu’ici a` r´etablir dans sa v´erit´e absolue le dialogue, en d´egageant les deux interlocuteurs des obligations de la politesse. Chacun d’eux poursuit simplement son soliloque, sans chercher a` en tirer un plaisir dialectique particulier et a` en imposer le moins du monde a` son voisin . . . Les mots, les images ne s’offrent que comme tremplins a` l’esprit de celui qui e´ coute. (p. )

‘Psychic automatism’ therefore defines the continuous surreality in which language and thought become synonymous. Through the poet as medium, this language, free from conscious content, throws up images which are pure linguistic events. The image of the self which this surrealist practice presents is consequently one that is created and transformed by a pure phonetic explosion and a subsequent mental juxtaposition of images. Breton quotes approvingly Reverdy’s formulation of this idealist conceptualism: L’image est une cr´eation pure de l’esprit. Elle ne peut naˆıtre d’une comparaison mais du rapprochement de deux r´ealit´es plus ou moins e´ loign´ees. Plus les rapports des deux r´ealit´es rapproch´ees seront lointains et justes, plus l’image sera forte – plus elle aura de puissance e´ motive et de r´ealit´e po´etique. (p. )

Leiris’s belief in this revolutionary practice went beyond his circumstantial affiliations, as the notes for a  conference, entitled ‘Le Surr´ealisme et l’unit´e’, make plain. Notwithstanding their contemporary emphasis on political liberation, Leiris significantly describes Surrealism’s essential aspects as constituting ‘une tentative pour rompre le cloisonnement qu’imposent a` notre vie les fa¸cons de penser et d’agir li´ees a` notre condition d’Occidentaux modernes ou, si l’on veut, de “civilis´es”’ (Z ). What is lost in this alienating, capitalist and technologizing world are ‘ces moments qu’on pourrait dire “totaux” et que sont, par exemple, les fˆetes africaines: a` la fois techniques, sociales, esth´etiques,

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Texts and contexts

sportives, religieuses, etc.’ (Z ). Into this sundered civilization, then, comes Surrealism’s revolution, with its fundamental value of freedom (at which point it is compared to existentialism) (Z ), its restitution of complete human liberty, unity and integrity, and its transformation of social relations. Setting aside for the moment the Sartrean enthusiasms, it is significant how much emphasis Leiris places on ‘the unification of personality’ (using Breton’s phrase) (Z ) as well as the overcoming of all internal and external constraints (Z ). An identificational synthesis is therefore implicit for Leiris in this revolutionary aesthetic. What his exhortation does not bring out is the technical means of achieving this unification in writing. If we review now Leiris’s major works during this period, we see quickly how he worked through the implications of this philosophy for an actual writing of the self, including, most significantly, at the points of irreconciliability. A number of very early influences, of an apparently idiosyncratic nature, provided Leiris with a first technical apprenticeship. These influences, of which the most important were Max Jacob and Raymond Roussel, gave Leiris an early opportunity to explore the creation of a ‘bouleversante unit´e’ out of an aleatory conjunction of experience and expression. This combinatory is what Leiris always admired in Jacob, and the conceptual unity generated is what Leiris always focused on in his championing of the work of Roussel. Of general significance here is the fact that Leiris’s appreciation already focuses less on the passive registration of the potentiality of experience than on the will and the technical means of constructing transformation. Looking ahead, it is striking how this already approximates to the linguistic guidelines followed in Leiris’s own L’Age d’homme and La R`egle du jeu, and it demonstrates in my view what will be my main concern here in reviewing the productions of Leiris’s surrealist period: that his early texts not only conform to the doctrine and polemic of their contemporary movement, but also take part in a larger and more personal logic binding the early poetic cosmogony to the more developed and discursive autobiographies. It is in this light that we can in fact gain the fullest appreciation of the first of the four texts I am going to discuss here: Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses. G LOSSAIRE J’Y SERRE MES G LOSES

Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses marks Leiris’s official acceptance into the surrealist movement. The earliest entries in the book, eventually produced in its entirety in , were the first poetic material Leiris produced in

Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism



the doctrinal journal La R´evolution surr´ealiste: between  and  no fewer than four extracts, one of them composed of calligrammes, illustrate Leiris’s adherence to surrealist doctrine. It is also the most abiding and representative of Leiris’s literary forms, constantly supplemented over the years, right up to the first 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 definitions produced express in pure form Leiris’s abiding interest in writing the self by releasing the magical and revelatory power of language. This belief is illustrated by the very title of the collection: Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses. The book is a surrealist anti-dictionary in which the traditional subservience of signifier to signified is reversed. The sound and shape of the word ‘Glossaire’ therefore creates its own definition: ‘j’y serre mes gloses’. Seventy-five similar entries appeared in the third issue of La R´evolution surr´ealiste, 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 word’s real meaning and hence nothing about ourselves. A surrealist glossary breaks open this false prison-house of enlightened reason: En diss´equant les mots que nous aimons, sans nous soucier de suivre ni l’´etymologie, ni la signification admise, nous d´ecouvrons leurs vertus les plus cach´es et les ramifications secr`etes qui se propagent a` travers tout le langage, canalis´es par les associations de sons, de formes et d’id´ees. Alors le langage se transforme en oracle et nous avons l`a (si tenu qu’il soit) un fil pour nous guider, dans la Babel de notre esprit.

Despite the exoticist and prophetic gestures, we notice again Leiris’s technical and scientific interest in dissecting language to reveal the secret relations within. The tone is subtly different from the more romantic, revolutionary and deliberately deranged endorsement given these remarks by an enthusiastic Artaud in the same issue: Oui, voici le seul usage auquel puisse servir d´esormais le langage, un moyen de folie, d’´eliminations de la pens´ee, de rupture, le d´edale des d´eraisons, et non pas un             o`u tels cuistres des environs de la Seine canalisent leurs r´etr´ecissements spirituels.

Leiris’s project is both more scientific 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

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Texts and contexts

psychoanalysis. But in this he is in fact agreeing with Breton’s dismissal of etymology in Les Pas perdus () as the subjugation of language to a ‘pi`etre conservatisme humain’ whose ‘horror of infinity’ is ingrained in the closed world of the dictionary. Breton encourages us in ‘Les Mots sans rides’: ‘◦ de consid´erer le mot en soi;  ◦ d’´etudier d’aussi pr`es que possible les r´eactions des mots les uns sur les autres’. Leiris may also have been aware of the six ‘jeux de mots’ presented by ‘Rrose S´elavy’ in Litt´erature, whose very title Breton on one occasion broke up into ‘Lits et Ratures’. But it is perhaps Breton’s famous conclusion to ‘Les Mots sans rides’ which best describes both the philosophy and technique of Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses: ‘Jeux de mots, quand ce sont nos plus sˆures raisons d’ˆetre qui sont en jeu. Les mots du reste ont fini de jouer. Les mots font l’amour.’ Beyond the frivolity of punning, in which reason plays with language as evidence of its control of the world, its confidence in its own identity, and its encyclopaedic and organizational use of the dictionary to both these ends, lies the realization in ‘les mots font l’amour’ 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 j’y serre mes gloses metatextually pronounce this very point (logically, given my earlier statement that the content of surrealist language is primarily itself ). One such example, typical in its panache, is ‘ – qu’au gˆıte tˆot scat !’ ( ). 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 infinity 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 signifier: ‘ – ode sacr´ee. Les cordes au dos du d´ecor’ ( ). Symbols of authority, and the transcendence they bring, are similarly exposed by the language used to designate them:  = spectre. (MSM )  – lest p´etrifi´e des paroles tues. (MSM ) , transe sans danse. (MSM )

This direct equation between the state of language and self-identity means that the poetic subject does not pre-exist the creative shift of

Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism

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the process of metaphor itself, as Leiris acknowledges in the  article entitled ‘M´etaphore’: ‘Non seulement le langage, mais toute la vie intellectuelle repose sur un jeu de transpositions, de symboles, qu’on peut qualifier de m´etaphorique.’ This speaking subject is not essential and prior to language: instead Leiris exists within a dense metaphorical texture, slung between signifiers which constantly generate and disseminate his essence. As Jacques Lacan, whom Leiris has described as ‘le psychanalyste surr´ealiste’, has put it: ‘L’on peut dire que c’est dans la chaˆıne du signifiant que le sens insiste, mais qu’aucun des e´ l´ements de la chaˆıne ne consiste dans la signification dont il est capable au moment mˆeme.’ This crisis in the representation of a transcendental self simultaneously affirms the productivity of the material sign. (We should note that the text’s typography indicates that the relationship between signifier and signified is not simply and pointlessly reversed: for example, there is no graphic means of equation used consistently throughout). The most dramatic and direct embodiment of these two ideas simultaneously engaged in the autonomy of the creative process is the calligrammes with which the text is studded. Far from being a desire to break through the opacity of language in order to picture reality directly, their conflation of ideographic and phonetic play into the simultaneity of a totemic blazon calls up the symbolic value of a proper name, and exposes the linear and discursive reading which we might still bring to the book as a last defence against our own implication in the signifying and revelatory chain of language, replacing it with an ideogrammatic moment of reading, in which we register and fall into what we can only subsequently dissect and recognize in a new anti-linear form of accommodation. Perhaps the clearest example of this idea, and the most directly emblematic in terms of Leiris’s approach to writing the self, is the one aptly subtitled ‘plongeoir de Narcisse’ (MSM ). Here Leiris’s own proper name is simultaneously displayed as a narcissistic rebus and as the dispersion of identity across the framework of writing (see figure ). This explosion of the conventional symbol for Leiris’s identity offers several surrealist lessons at once. It parodies the dictionary’s normal utilitarian function, in which one element represents or describes the other: here language mirrors itself, not reality. It alters the narcissistic self ’s neon-sign in order to set it teetering on the edge of relational thought, and then adds insult to injury as the eye gradually assembles the ironic rhyme: Leiris/Narcisse. It dramatizes the absolute dialogue promulgated by Breton’s Manifeste: it is its own truth onto itself, a double soliloquy possessing no negation or contradiction, and parodying the dialectic. The

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Texts and contexts

Figure  Le plongeoir de Narcisse.

Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism

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dislocation of the name disrupts our unconscious identification with the proper noun, forcing us to see it for the first time as a word and an image enfolding an empty centre, as well as providing the trampoline which Breton sought for the poetic spirit. And it is a graphic display of how surrealist metaphor both throws up and undermines the proper noun or name of a static identity, endlessly sending out and re-turning its creative impulse. As a result, the identity of Michel Leiris comes face to face with its otherness, staring across at its own unfamiliar reflection. Thus these surrealist lessons already encapsulate the existential conundrum and the formal problematic fundamental to writing the self – problems which the whole of Leiris’s later autobiographical œuvre struggles to resolve. The deferred achievement and the endless rereading which this idea and the ‘plongeoir de Narcisse’ calligram already suggests is elsewhere borne out. A good example is provided by another crystallized symbol of sovereignty whose ideogrammatic nature encourages analysis and rereading, this time entitled ‘le sceptre miroitant’ (MSM ). The elements which make up this object-image are the words ‘Amour’, ‘Mourir’, ‘Miroir’, ‘Roi’, and, at the point of balance, the word ‘’. The result would indeed appear to be a sparkling symbol of magisterial powers (see figure ). The rectitude of this emblem contains a paradox, however. Having been composed from the frictional encounter of signifiers, it seeks to stand regally against their further burgeoning. But a cumulative reading of the entire collection gradually composes a spectral sceptre, one that possesses a dream-like objectivity since it exists only as an intangible concept in the potentiality of the reader. For the chain of signifiers in which we are insinuated constantly offers alternative definitions within the text for the basic elements of the sceptre:  = spectre. (MSM ) , armure. (MSM )  – ramure de larmes p´etrifi´ees. (MSM )  – minotaure amateur d’hommes. Saumˆatre traumatisme. (MSM )  – loi que j’aime. Ma moelle. (MSM )

Following the chain of signifiers reveals the extent to which the subterranean law guiding the original brash calligramme was one relating to the fear of death. As we shall see, this is a constant factor in Leiris’s works. The text’s productivity, far from exhibiting the sceptre in order to command

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Texts and contexts

Figure  Le sceptre miroitant.

Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism

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respect, encourages the realization that it was brandished as a selfdefence (‘armure’) and an act of self-petrification in the face of the bitter and traumatic knowledge (‘Saumˆatre traumatisme’) of mortality. Breton’s Manifeste acknowledges this tendency on the part of surrealism to return to the persistent myth of annihilation underlying and propelling a frenetic nominalism: ‘Le surr´ealisme vous introduira dans la mort qui est une soci´et´e secr`ete. Il gantera votre main, y ensevelissant l’M profond par quoi commence le mot M´emoire.’ This spectral image is entirely consistent with surrealism’s dark metaphysical impulse. But in terms of writing the self, it equally reveals the limitations inherent in the surrealist use of language, and qualifies many of the above statements regarding the revolutionary effect of the signifier and the position given to the reader. For the transcendental signified which represses the irrational irruption of death into representation is replaced by the cabbalistic force of a transcendental signifier. The static, formal disposition of language in Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses rejects all the social forms of communication that gradually compose a conventional picture of the relationship between the speaking person and the world, and offers instead an absolute discourse impossibly confounded into a single word. This desire is seen at its most extreme in the entry for the letter ‘Y’. Here a single letter can defy Newtonian physics and contain a knowledge of the entire world, its definition revealing an omniscient self-consciousness capable of looking on its own death: Y – fourches caudines de la mort. J’Y suis lanc´e. (MSM ) ‘Y’ is the logical nadir of surrealist linguistics: a ‘monade hi´eroglyphique’ directly disclosing the synchronic dream of a transcendental science that dispenses with all utilitarian ends through both being and describing ‘le lieu et la formule’. Language, experience and time collapse into a central magical point in which the gnostic poet conjures up, experiences and represents his own death. Given that this letter ‘Y’ occurs here in the very title of the collection (it occurs also at the end of Grande fuite de neige and Aurora), the whole of Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses ultimately defines the closed world of the transcendental signifier, which replaces the discursive meaningfulness given to the signified by classic representation with the absolute oneness of words ‘making love to each other’. Revolutionary intentions with respect to representation and the consciousness it portrays therefore translate in practice here into the language of hermeticism and the self-justificatory will to transcendence.

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Texts and contexts

This paradoxical logocentrism, which is severely limiting for a full writing of the self, results from surrealism’s material view of language and its idealist view of enunciation. This can be clearly heard in those entries whose phonetically derived signifieds maintain a privileged relation between voice and meaning. For example:  – c’est achev´e a` ailes: P´egase. (MSM )  – aile eue, oeufs eus: air (Elle est comme un oiseau). (MSM )

The sound created by the recitation of each letter in the original word supplies its definition, and suggests in addition a nostalgic urge to recover the natural and original link between speech and meaningfulness. As another entry puts it: ‘ – veritable? Un bal larvaire’ (MSM ). Indeed, this definition in turn indicates that the moment of supreme surrealist identity is one in which self-consciousness coincides completely with a world of mysterious and infinite significance, a world from which language can only separate us in its imperfect and frustrating approximation to truth (‘v´eritable?’) and its inevitable introduction of sequential time and hence mortality (‘un bal larvaire’) into the relation between selfconsciousness and this world. Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses therefore gleams with references to a radiant point of pre-verbal ecstasy: -- – lac essentiel, et fil d’archal . . . (MSM )  – la terre originelle. L’air net. (MSM )  – le bloc massif, l’apex priv´e d’acc`es, l’ultime pinacle (MSM )  – ramage du myst`ere sans clef. (MSM )  – sinuosit´es originaires des races. (MSM )  – qu’il m’attise! Et je n’h´esite . . . (MSM )

This has the effect of working against the privilege so recently granted the signifier. For although the claim may be that it is the signifier which creates its concept, we become once more aware of its subordination to the power of the poet’s predication. The conceptual unity of self-consciousness which this transcendental signifier maintains equally gives the reader an illusory omnipotence freed of all dialectical obligations. One of the best examples of this unity of readership is given by the entry entitled ‘Arbre de stuc’ (MSM ) (see figure ). A stucco tree is a perfect image of surrealism’s desire to transform the real world into an impossible conceptual art object. (Significantly, a similar

Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism

Figure  Arbre de stuc.

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Texts and contexts

calligram concludes Le Point cardinal.) The tree exfoliates the absolute means of reflecting upon its total sense of self unpruned by any negation or contradiction. Indeed, it displays ingrowth rather than outgrowth, seeking, in the words of Breton’s Point du jour, ‘to recover itself in the labyrinth of its own song’. Language and mind coincide in this crystallized form, and reproduce their simultaneity in the reader’s eye as it registers how the language of its own deciphering (‘silence’, ‘clef ’, ‘cel´e’, ‘scrut´e’) is held together by the tree’s central yet separate fork: the letter ‘Y’, with its ‘fourches caudines de la mort’, and by the ghostly presence within the tree of the signifier ‘Leiris’. This silent knowledge intuits the divine point of the text and its underlying philosophy. Its ultimate determination is described clearly in Breton’s  Manifesto: Tout porte a` croire qu’il existe un certain point de l’esprit d’o`u la vie et le mort, le r´eel et l’imaginaire, le pass´e et le futur, le communicable et l’incommunicable, le haut et le bas cessent d’ˆetre per¸cus contradictoirement. Or, c’est en vain qu’on chercherait a` l’activit´e surr´ealiste un autre mobile que l’espoir de d´etermination de ce point.

Breton goes on to state that the absolute self-awareness of this point annihilates phenomenal being only to place thought back on the road to total understanding and restore it to its original purity. So any crisis in self-identity and representation here is only provisional, for the transcendental power of enunciation which provokes this crisis transforms the mediocrity of the real world into self-justificatory mental matter, which then petrifies into infinite self-reflection. The transcendental signifier and the transcendental reader are generated, therefore, by surrealism’s desire to triumph over a subtending mortality. Pure matter and pure mind close to form a dense and violent simulacrum of oneness which destroys the rules of representation while poetically sustaining a total understanding and a pure articulation of this exploded universe. The potential for a sustained writing of the self is ultimately limited by this stasis, which emphasizes the abstract construction of mental matter to the detriment of the sign’s social dimension. From this perspective, it is interesting to turn now to Leiris’s surrealist narratives, Le Point cardinal and Aurora. LE POINT CARDINAL

Le Point cardinal transforms the typographical star-bursts and selfincubating imagery of Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses into a sustained prose

Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism



narrative of erotic transcendence. Its continuous succession of mental landscapes resulting from the generative feeding of imagery by syntax has the effect of flushing out the speaking subject, marking the first true dramatic localization of the first-person voice that will narrate all of Leiris’s major works. The book’s four sections offer the most programmatic account to date of the gradual attainment of surreality by a speaking subject, even if this achievement still culminates in an ideogram. The narrative introduces us to the first-person narrator, who crosses the barrier separating bourgeois representations from precise hallucination by copulating furiously with an ing´enue at the back of a theatre. He enters a petrified landscape whose presentation is ceaselessly accelerated and annihilated by a libidinal dynamics, and mysteriously explained by a surging series of autonomous numbers and letters. Three travellers then narrate accounts of dangerous sexual confrontation and pain, replete with funereal garb, the increasing mineralization of organic matter, and the confusion of spatio-temporal co-ordinates. The simultaneous death of two lovers launches us into the final section which accelerates to a multilingual and impossibly immediate world cataclysm. The speed and pressure exerted by the desire to close the interval between mind and matter become so climactic by the end of the book that the world blurs into a series of abstract signs, while the narrator is vitrified into his final ‘true self ’, ‘a fragile scaffolding of letters’ (MSM ) (see figure ). This final syntactic prolongation of the purely poetic metamorphosis spasmodically figured in Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses arguably acts as the culminating or cardinal point for what is the first surrealist narrative in Leiris’s work. In addition, for all its mythic tenor, its prosaic loosening of an earlier tense nominalism now suggests how Glossaire’s constellations are in fact the hard-won goal of surrealist identity. In this way, the narrative line of Le Point cardinal can be said to demonstrate how the telescoping of time and movement into a climactic unity in fact depends in part on the suppression or repression of a rather more banal and traditional allegory of sexual fear and desire. Once this discourse is reinscribed here, an extended mise-en-sc`ene of mental matter, with an attendant yet autonomous first-person presence, automatically unfolds. This more open contrast between nominalism and narration presages the development of poetic apperception into a phenomenological project. This potential produces a number of recurrent symptoms, indicative of neurotic yet localizable identity. For all the negativity of its ‘naissance a` l’envers’ dynamic, then, to recall Alexandrian’s

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Texts and contexts

Figure  Paris, October .

Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism

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insightful phrase, what we see emerge in the episodic sequences of Le Point cardinal is none the less a potential autobiographical form, as Alexandrian goes on to suggest in his comment that it is ‘une all´egorie traduisant le passage du Mot de l’´etat pens´e a` l’´etat e´ crit, les symboles sexuels et guerriers ne servant qu’`a illustrer le sens intime et risqu´e de cette op´eration’. To this forensic reading we can add the contextual remark that the pathological gestures of the narrative, far from lying beyond identificational recuperation, fairly clearly partake of an episodic culture in part absorbed from contemporary readings of Aragon, and reflected almost immediately. The speed of retransmission, arguably due once again to Leiris’s desire to acquire the technical means to express and resolve emotional turbulence, leaves clear parallels between the stages of Le Point cardinal and the ‘Passage de l’Op´era’ section of Le Paysan de Paris, focused especially on the literal signs with which both texts are punctuated. Beyond this, two contemporary quotations in Leiris’s posthumous Journal show that he was also familiar with Aragon’s mock-epic Les Aventures de T´el´emaque. Other, long-term, effects possibly include Le Paysan de Paris’s metropolitan realism, and Les Aventures de T´el´emaque’s elevation of ´egarements to the level of the rule of the game. In these ways, then, Le Point cardinal takes on some of the conditions and continuities of articulated time, and so approaches a consistency which, because of persistent anti-historical tendencies, begins to sketch in an individual history. But its general tendency, in conformity with the absolute dissatisfaction of surrealist desiring, is still to progress by pressurizing expressivity to the point of impasse or explosion, culminating then in an ideal sublime aphasia that supposedly sustains plenum and void in numinous union. This logic of hysteria is given its most prolonged narrative expression, and hence autobiographical potential, in Aurora. AURORA

Aurora, written between  and , finally appeared in print in . The delay in publication is an interesting one. It is not simply due to a waning interest in surrealism or a nagging doubt regarding the worth of the texts. If a change of attitude did occur, it was more the result of what is my central claim here: that the logical development of surrealist discourse brought these works to an impassible pitch of intensity, producing a narrative hysteria that could only peter out in organic and architectural images of the narrator’s breakdown. It should be stressed that hysteria is certainly not used here in a pejorative or dismissively

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Texts and contexts

pathological sense. Hysteria is simply the supreme means of surrealist expression, as the Dictionnaire abr´eg´e du surr´ealisme makes clear:    ´    – Cet e´ tat mental est fond´e sur le besoin d’une s´eduction r´eciproque, qui explique les miracles hˆativement accept´es de la suggestion (ou contresuggestion) m´edicale. L’hyst´erie n’est pas un ph´enom`ene pathologique et peut, a` tous e´ gards, eˆ tre consid´er´ee comme un moyen supr`eme d’expression. (L.A et A.B.)

The entry is credited to Louis Aragon and Andr´e Breton, who in ‘Le Cinquentenaire de l’hyst´erie’ gave the fuller version from which this definition is taken. Hysteria in their view challenges the positivist hypotheses of the nineteenth century and is therefore ‘the greatest poetic discovery’ to come out of the end of that age. As such, it is an irreducible mental condition involving the subversion of the relations between the subject and the moral world. This is a perfect general description of the way surrealist language creates a mental vision of the world based on a limitless and unsatisfiable desire. As a supreme means of expression it can only tend logically towards an increasing condensation of poetic language in reaction to an increasingly absolute form of transcendent experience, culminating in an epiphany where experience and expression coincide in silence. This is precisely what Breton envisages in the rather naive and idealistic section regarding Freud in the first Manifesto: ‘un monologue de d´ebit aussi rapide que possible, sur lequel l’esprit critique de sujet ne fasse porter aucun jugement’. Finally, even in clinical terms the term hysteria accurately evokes the thematic and dramatic trajectory of Aurora and also Grande fuite de neige, a dynamics prefigured by Le Point cardinal: in each of these surrealist narratives, a series of traumatic encounters generates lyrical and erotic outbursts that lead ultimately to submission to a subliminal message and the indifferent abandonment of the body to its complete ‘morcellement’. Aurora combines the most traditional features of surrealist narrative with the phantasmagoria and linguistic experiments particular to Leiris. The book’s title is taken in part from Nerval, a hero of the surrealists: ‘Aurora’, among other things, then, is the schizophrenic conjunction of Aur´elia and Pandora. Like Nerval’s Pandora, Aurora is an ‘ind´echiffrable e´ nigme’ who provokes a violent narrative revolving around the schism described in Pandora’s epigraph: Deux aˆ mes, h´elas! se partagent mon sein et chacune d’elles veut se s´eparer de l’autre: l’une, ardente d’amour, s’attache au monde par le moyen des organes du corps; un mouvement surnaturel entraˆıne l’autre loin des t´en`ebres, vers les hautes demeures de nos a¨ıeux.

Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism

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Aurora dramatizes this tension by blurring the distinction, as ever, between dream and reality, a surrealist dictum here taken from Aur´elia, whose opening line is ‘Le rˆeve est une seconde vie’, and by identifying the narrative voice with a number of different characters whose appearance, like the doppelg¨anger of Aur´elia, signify the proximity of death. The narrator’s encounters with the mythical muse Aurora therefore constitute a dangerous and hallucinatory roman d’amour, which is driven, like Breton’s Nadja, by ‘des rapprochements soudains, des p´etrifiantes co¨ıncidences’. The hero’s body is endlessly dismembered and revivified by this Medusa, who controls the text’s dream logic in her various guises: Eau-Rˆo-Rah,  ,   , Horrora, ’. In addition to being a surrealist transformation of a typical roman d’amour, moreover, it is clear that Aurora is the first text by Leiris that can be read without difficulty as an autobiography, albeit a more oblique version of the surrealist model offered by Nadja. Several scenes correspond closely to events in Leiris’s own life. The preamble to the main story refers to the house at Boulogne-Billancourt inhabited in the early twenties by Leiris and his wife, the scenes in Egypt and Greece, from the second and third chapter respectively, recall the visits actually paid by Leiris to those countries in , and the story of Damocl`es Siriel (pp. –), whose name makes plain how this surrealist tale is an anagrammatic autobiography, had already existed as a more condensed and poetic autobiographial fragment. It is tempting to read this vertiginous novel as an allegory of a surrealist path to self-knowledge. The narrator makes clear in the preface to the action how his descent into a lugubrious chamber will result in a speleological examination of the body and its unconscious motivations and phantasms: Cet escalier, . . . c’est ton tube digestif qui fait communiquer ta bouche, dont tu es fier, et ton anus, dont tu as honte, creusant a` travers tout ton corps une sinueuse et gluante tranch´ee . . . Ces marches d’escalier, . . . ce sont les e´ chelons qui, a` chaque coup, te manquent et te rapprochent de jour en jour d’un corridor glac´e, rempli de vieux e´ pouvantails . . . Et toute ta vie tu descendras cet escalier. Les po`emes que tu e´ criras, les stupidit´es que tu diras, . . . tout cela n’aura pas plus de r´ealit´e pour toi que le permier venu d’entre les diff´erents phantasmes qui peuplent en ce moment mˆeme les t´en`ebres de cet escalier dont la pente seule est sanglante et r´eelle. (A –)

The concluding part of the quotation also shows that the sentimental education on which the narrator is about to embark will continually run up against the inability of any ‘intellectual production’ to express the ‘an´eantissement de l’ˆetre en un brillant, int´erieur et aveugle’ other than

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Texts and contexts

by raising the narrative to hysteria and breakdown. The novel can therefore also be read as the autobiography of desiring language. To do this properly, especially as the narrative disrupts a realist logic, I need to review the storyline. At the end of the preface the narrator bursts into the street to be confronted by the first of many oracles, a plaque on which he can read both his past and his future. The name Aurora is pronounced for the first time, and the narrator is promptly transported on a sea-voyage of discovery. Here his adventures include a trip to a bar, ‘Au rendez-vous des parties du corps’, where he narrowly escapes being knifed or rather sliced, and is transported again by the touch of hair and a whiff of perfume. The first-person male voice registers his own increasing mineralization, decides that he has ‘arrived’ and that ‘la dynamite des faits’, the objective order of pure surrealist creation, can now take over. In the second chapter, a man in a white dinner jacket makes love to Aurora at the top of pessimism’s skyscraper. They flee on horseback, pursued by ennui, to the point where a cone-shaped prison spins and crashes into the desert. Aurora reveals her name, straddles what has become a priapic pyramid, and is torn to shreds as she revolves on its rising axis. The final remnant, her hair, becomes flames, and the pyramid is transformed into a volcano spewing forth the dead. The next chapter shifts its attention to a young man who discovers the ruins of the temple of Damocl`es Siriel, a tyrant sexually excited by petrification who alters the temple dedicated to Femininity in order to represent his own taste for cold, angular constellations, and who, threatened by his outraged subjects, floods the temple. The spectre of Aurora floats over his story. In the fourth chapter, a young vagabond, through a reading of Paracelsus casts further light on Aurora’s identity. Paracelsus’s coat of arms bears the motto ‘ ’ and his book’s description of ‘la Pierre philosophale’ makes plain how Aurora’s ubiquity signifies the book’s search for ‘l’essence mˆeme de la puret´e, a` cause de cette perp´etuelle ondoyance que repr´esente cette chevelure, sous le ligne de laquelle elle est plac´ee. Purifiante et purifi´ee, elle est le signe de la pens´ee’ (A ). The search for a final, impossible union with Aurora, who by now is a meteoric phantom, is one which will therefore permit the simultaneous existence of metamorphosis and destruction, the surrealist state of self-engendering and annihilating movement in which everything that exists is Poetry (A ). The fifth chapter is therefore devoted to the vagabond’s rejection of the attributes of foul reason and his longing to feel the destructive and purifying flame of the undescribable, unnamable and unknowable

Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism

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Aurora. In the final chapter the narrator re-enters the sea and floats up the Seine to Paris. By now the other characters are all dead, and the delicate name of Aurora has been transformed into the barbarous and decadent Latin: , though the narrator is consoled by the associated terms ‘hour’, ‘mouth’, ‘orifice’, and Mount Ararat. After the water journey marking the end of this disaster, then, the oracular truth of Aurora will bring him to a sacred climax. He comes to rest near Notre-Dame. A cigar-ring on his paralysed finger bears the red and gold words ’, and his quiescent, vitrified gaze observes the spiral cross of a cathedral on whose stones are reputedly carved the secrets of an even greater enigma. By recalling the prefatory equation between ‘la Mort cath´edrale’ and the third person singular (A ), we know that this enigma marks the epiphany of silence and, with it, death. Even this schematic view brings out clearly how Aurora is the summation of Leiris’s surrealist work, both in being a full embodiment of the occultation of thought demanded by Breton, and in bringing to a climax the inherent tension between this and the psychological and narratological implications of a full writing of the self. This tension is reflected if not diffused in the narrative’s typical surrealist contrasts, between the architectural and the organic petrification and fluidification, mineralization and decomposition. In Aurora, these elements become raised to the level of an obsessional order: the angular presence of labyrinths, palaces, icebergs, museums, stones, diamonds, pyramids, cones, cathedrals and temples, in which people become cold, nude and rigid, or transformed into mummies or statues, is constantly obscured by ‘des ramifications v´eg´etales’, or traversed and transformed by floods, seas, rivers, alcohol, birds, clouds and honey. Beyond the simulacrum of fury which the speed of alternation can bring to these scenarios, therefore, lies a programmatic preoccupation, represented above all by the unchanging presence of the Philosopher’s Stone. In the Second Manifesto Breton makes clear that this is ‘rien autre que ce qui devait permettre a` l’imagination de l’homme de prendre sur toutes choses une revanche e´ clatante’: the furious movement of the narrative is underpinned by the unaffected imagination of the poet as alchemist. Breton specifically tells us that love is ‘le lieu d’occultation id´eale de toute pens´ee’. It therefore comes as no surprise that the Philosopher’s Stone and Aurora are equated in the novel. Verbal possession, then, lies at the heart of the story’s calculated chaos, and in this love and knowledge combine to form a surrealist desiring language. Woman and the Stone are the same dangerous and enigmatic medium whose violent possession enables the narrator to achieve the

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occultation of thought and the gift of verbal transmutation. All of this bears out Breton’s exclamation: ‘Gloire [. . .] a` l’hyst´erie et a` son cort`ege de femmes jeunes et nues glissant le long des toits’. But this also presents a fundamental inhibition to any extended self-representation. This inherent contradiction is embodied in the unchanging if multiple character of Aurora. She is the impossible erotic object of surrealism, through which one achieves gleaming annihilation, a cadavre exquis, part Germaine Berton, part classical academic nude, made to perform every conceivable instance of ‘convulsive beauty’. As ‘le signe de la pens´ee’, this Muse is not only the surrealist angel of language at whom the narrator directs a fanatical, self-referential monologue which culminates in emotional absolutism. Aurora is language, and the decalcomania which takes place around her is consequent on the poet’s impossible struggle here to express the autonomous and inhuman matrix of language. In Aurora (as in Grande fuite de neige), this struggle ultimately leads him to submit to a subliminal and enigmatic message and abandon the body to its final wastage. Two related techniques are used to fabricate a resolution. Firstly, the narrative movement brought to the individual instances of Glossaire results in such a saturation of images that the reader is induced by this programmatic paralipsis to select the metaphors which guide the mental reactions to the book. Our understanding is therefore encoded in the mentality of the reader in a highly traditional manner: Ainsi s’´ecoulaient entre les monotones berges de l’espace le fleuve e´ ternellement semblable a` lui-mˆeme, malgr´e ses soi-disant contradictions qu’´etait l’esprit du vagabond. Ainsi s’avan¸cait-il, a` travers les d´etours toujours insuffisants des phrases, vers l’oc´ean mortel qu’une e´ cume d’´eclats de rire ne parviendrait jamais a` rendre moins amer. (A )

This in turn encourages us to approve of the essentially untouched and unchanging mind of the narrator in his various guises. By predicating the total revolution of the object, the first-person voice can register its own knowledge of the inadequacy of language to the task, as we see from the above quotation. He can therefore sustain the ideal of a permanently unsatisfied desire, and with it an unassailed sense of ideal self-identity. Damocl`es Siriel makes this plain when he deliberately revolutionizes the nature of imagery by inverting every symbol in his temple to Femininity. The result merely confirms his dark desire to achieve absolute self-intuition: Sur le plafond de cette matrice qui repr´esentait une nuit e´ toil´ee semblable a` la vraie nuit qui envoˆutait le temple, j’allai mˆeme jusqu’`a peindre mon nom,

Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism

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encadr´e des principales figures de la g´eom´etrie, et cela en noir sur fond blanc, ce qui indiquait clairement la volont´e formelle que j’avais de me refuser a` consid´erer le monde autrement que comme une fonction de moi-mˆeme, esclave blanc de terreur sous le talon noir de ma pens´ee. (A )

Every sign in the book, of which Aurora is the prototype and goal, is in fact used, then, to confirm the power of this ego. As a result, though, the revolutionary implications of language use in Glossaire are contradicted. The narrative form reveals a closed movement from ‘je’ to ‘moi’: Je pourrais dire d’abord que ces quatre lions malgr´e leurs pelages dissemblables sont e´ gaux, et que ce mot ‘´egaux’ est l’´equivalent du pronom latin   , qui veut dire moi. (A )

The finality of such an equation points to the often sententious use of language in the text. Again a narrative of desire, with the psychological identifications it produces between narrator and reader, transforms instances of magic nominalism into the generalizations of an incontestable speaker. Woman is therefore ‘un briquet’, ‘un coup de pioche philanthropique’, ‘le sang d’un caisson’. The arbitrary nature of analogy advocated in the Manifesto becomes the confirmation of linguistic possession in a ritualized and contrived encounter. The potential destruction or denigration of the Cartesian-Kantian language of intelligibility affirms the power of desiring language to possess and register these seismic images. This power protects the narrator from the uninterrupted succession of latencies unleashed. In a surrealist novel, poetic alchemy and the desired possession of the Philosopher’s Stone creates a specific and reactionary heroic position not present in the self-generating glosses of the surrealist anti-dictionary. And as opposed to the multiple sites on which language is simultaneously engaged in Glossaire, the various guises of the narrating voice in Aurora are designed only to protect heroic predication from the mortal effects of prolonged temporal involvement. Even when the narrator finally passes beyond desire, it is the memory of the death of others which endures. If Aurora as language does not change, then, the ultimate concern of Aurora is the attempt to perpetuate the narrator’s selfhood. This translates technically into the poet’s registration of a transcendental ideal unity. The logic of Aurora brings Leiris to a fundamental choice. It shows that the hysterical dynamics of surrealist narrative can finally represent the self only as blindly and endlessly running up against the limits of representation in its effort to create a permanent jouissance. The narrative result of a total revolution of the object, then, is voicelessness and breakdown. But at the same time, the controlled narrativization of hysteria and of its

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failing indicates the growth of a confessional and rationalizing framework. Underpinning the spasmodic linguistic eruptions, then, is the registration of alterity which builds through the narrative into the structure of self-projection. It is no doubt this tension and potential which leads Marie-Claire Dumas to conclude that, while ‘surrealism excludes autobiography’, Aurora is Leiris’s first autobiography in that it ‘laisse pressentir le trajet autobiographique’. In addition, in its localization and development of a first-person ‘merveilleux’, it partakes fully of the narrative effects of realism dismissed as inferior by Breton’s Manifeste. We can see, then, that the tension between Aurora’s lyrical performance and its ‘projet de connaissance’ brings Leiris to the point where he can recognize that the possibilities presented by the surrealist programme of transcendence for a writing of the self are inadequate. He never denied the ethics of surrealist identity, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter: in the  preamble to Aurora he was still prepared to defend ‘le d´eni . . . qu’oppose a` presque chaque page cette condition d’homme devant laquelle . . . certains ne cesseront pas de se cabrer’ (A ). But significantly, he already found the technical means offered here to self-expression to be embarrassingly inadequate: ‘le fatras d’une allure symbolique et les rodomontades dans le goˆut “noir” ou “fr´en´etique” dont cet e´ crit est rempli’ (ibid.). The  preface to Grande fuite de neige similarly speaks of an ‘abuse’ of language and a ‘premeditated’ chaos, while retaining a belief in poetry as a ‘n´ecessaire gageure’ (GFN –). It is clear from these remarks that Leiris eventually moved beyond the surrealist view that in the beginning was the word. From the late twenties on, he desired to find a new relationship between language and the self it represented, one that would continue to show the inextricable link between the two while dealing adequately with the concrete social reality which surrealism’s frenetic dualism could no longer for him represent. Ethnography and psychoanalysis were to provide the intellectual framework for this new relationship. And the link between these two stages was arguably facilitated by the dream diary Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour. NUITS SANS NUIT

Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour  is the fourth and last of Leiris’s major texts dating initially from the twenties which I am analysing here in terms of their contribution to his emerging approach to the writing

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

of the self. The book is in the form of a dream diary which contains, in a transformed state, some of Leiris’s 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 examples of the anti-dictionary Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses: issues four and five of La R´evolution surr´ealiste, 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 collection’s epigraph from Nerval: ‘Le rˆeve est une seconde vie’, to which he remained attached: just as the  Glossaire j’y 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 definitive Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour. Within this consistent formal approach to self-representation, however, the temporal and intellectual expanse contained in the diary results in individual accounts which, on both the narrative and metanarrative levels, reflect contrasting conceptions of the self and its situations which are gleaned progressively from surrealism, psychoanalysis, existentialism, or post-war anti-colonialism. Secondly, in conjunction with this diachronic 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 belief that the dream is the complete and undeniable evidence of a poetic truth, a model learned from the first issue of La R´evolution surr´ealiste and celebrated notably by Aragon’s Une vague de rˆeves; but it tempers this sense of ecstatic being with a writing principle, to be found in all of Leiris’s work, whose technical and analytic workings conflict with unqualified approval for a pure, useless, unemployable dream. And lastly, a third, related tension emerges clearly once individual instances of ‘a dream’s 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 event’s 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 Leiris’s writing of the self which derives from the recognition of two major constraints. The first involves a dramatic localization of the individual in terms of both achievement and answerability: the surrealist alter-ego of Fantˆomas or Jack l’Eventreur has been replaced by a bourgeois flˆaneur. The second involves the obligation to enter extended narrative form: for the first time in his surrealist writing, ‘Leiris’ is recognizably subject to linguistic laws and cultural constructions, formed by a social syntax rather than obliterated by a sublime aphasia. This conflicts with the opposite temptation, simultaneously developed in Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses, to explode the rules of representation and so confirm an absolute self-intuition and self-expression. This opposition, which we have already noted, far from being resolved will fuel the most passionate metatextual moments in Leiris’s major autobiographies. 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 renewable 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 j’y serre mes gloses, then, with a Baudelairean psychologism which acknowledges the transitory or fugitive 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 apparent. The ‘je’ in his many situations is a psychiatric patient, a filmgoer, 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 stereotypical scenarios suggested by these clich´es are reinforced by the persistence of more abstract personifications: 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 product of cultural alienation as much as of desire’s reiteration. But it is above all the tension generated between modern and classical image (employed most dramatically in L’Age d’homme), 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 dream’s transcription. The ‘je’ often objectifies itself through an intentionality (‘je pousse’ (N ); ‘je persiste’ (N )) reinforced on occasions by a reflexive verb (‘je me jette’ (N ); ‘je me dis’ (N ); ‘je m’aper¸cois’ (N )). The same effect is produced by a contradictory negativity, wherein the ´enonciation affirms the opposite of the ´enonc´e, as in ‘je suis mort’ (N ) or ‘j’ai oubli´e’ (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 m’aper¸cois assis sur mon lit. D’un coup de poing, j’an´eantis le fantˆome qui a vol´e mon apparence’ (N ). Here, as in other examples (N ), the several different grammatical designations of the first person add to this phantasmic self-image. Lastly, in a particularly abyssal twist, individual dreams themselves acknowledge or experience the state of dreaming (N , , ), a moment where the terrible anxiety produced testifies to the radical doubt out of which the self ’s grasp of reality must none the less emerge. Modernity and reversibility equally define 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 difficult decipherment. Not that this is the only recognizable genre however: indeed, the fluidity of genre and register in the dreams assists the impression 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 dream’s 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 dream’s technical workings continually resurface in Leiris as a series of brutal obliterations and mutations. 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 collection’s 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

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situation’s modernity and reversibility translate, in concrete terms, into a dangerous trial. Time and again, the ‘je’ undergoes torture, penetration and execution. He is fired down a barrel, threatened by a vulture, engulfed by waves. He ends most dreams by screaming. In a very literal rendering of the savagery and bestiality of modern life, the dreams overflow 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 obsessively repeated scenarios, those of the journey and the sexual overture. And significantly, 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, cit´es, d’autres climats, forteresses ou chˆateaux qui surplombent la mer: images d’un lieu assez distant ou s´epar´e pour que la mort ne puisse m’y relancer’ (N ). The unchangeability of these distant places in turn brings out how the locus of the self ’s situation acts often specifically 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 defined, 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 caf´e or restaurant, not forgetting, 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 ideological convictions recorded chronologically in the collection. Thus the surrealist-inspired ‘readings’ of the dreams from the twenties, involving linguistic overdetermination, anthropomorphism, and the confluence 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 postcolonial 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, emphasize 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 collection’s many structural patterns. I have already remarked on the roles of condensation 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 themselves a structural representation of the self ’s mutability. By the same token, it is equally plain that we cannot simply laud the dream’s poetics of presence without recognizing how this sense of parousia is from the very beginning itself ‘differently centred’ by the various contextualizing forms of secondary revision. This critical distance shows up in the collection above all as a metanarrative level, one which tempers the dream’s ‘valeur de certitude en elle-mˆeme, qui, dans son temps, n’est point expos´e a` mon d´esaveu’, or assured and celebratory self-postulation, with a relativizing questioning of the dream’s accuracy, message, values and motives. This lucid disenchantment is encoded in each dream’s 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 dream’s inherently revelatory power, in no sense invalidates this process of detection or verification.) The ‘inqui´etude’ (N ) marking the commencement of the analysis thus contradicts Breton’s view that in the dream ‘l’angoissante question de la possibilit´e ne se pose pas’, for the most absolute kind of possibility, that of the dreamer’s 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 collection reinforces this relativization. And in neither case does this internal distance contradict Freud’s basic assertion that dreams have no means of representing logical relations, and that what relations appear are in fact part of the dream’s 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 individualism, 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

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Texts and contexts

state of society preserved, when actually seen, in Glossaire j’y 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 writing’s 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 Leiris’s writing of the self from the beginning of the thirties. It is to those writings that we should now turn.



Recasting the self: from surrealism to ethnography

The beginning of the thirties saw the dispersal of surrealist aesthetics. Some former members of the movement (Aragon) became committed communists, while others (Crevel) chose suicide. Historically, surrealism’s metaphysical convulsions became translated into the emergence of more directly socio-political concepts of the self. This period, beginning perhaps with the momentary crisis of , continued through the subsequent years of growing political instability and extremism, to the moment of mobilization which for many marks the end of surrealism and its related aesthetic practices. Intellectually, it is equally turbulent, fluctuating wildly between leftist and rightist positions, and dominated, even captivated, by Koj`eve’s presentation of History as fundamentally tragic and fundamentally over. It is a dynamic summed up in Bataille’s phrase: ‘politics of the impossible’. Ideologically, Leiris registers this turbulence, passing from the rigorously controlled group-effect of surrealism through, successively, such transliterary journals and societies as Documents (–), La Critique sociale ( –), Minotaure (), Contreattaque (–), Ac´ephale (–), and the Coll`ege de sociologie (–). This intense intellectual and political ferment, as we shall see, was to throw up a host of confused yet daring identificational practices, not least on the level of a writing of the self, which were to influence Leiris’s work radically. Paradoxically, then, such uncertainty meant that it was therefore in the growing scientific disciplines of ethnography and psychoanalysis that surrealism’s revolutionary absolutes were often best preserved and developed, albeit by shifting towards a collective and usually consensual interpretation to pathological expression. In other words, the methodological rigour and analytic irony of these two disciplines, in many ways closely related in their recognition of the transferential relationship operating between the attentive science and the expressive object of their inquiry, managed to represent the subject’s mysterious possession by the 

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Texts and contexts

revelatory power of the unconscious, by relocating it within the shared grammar and iconography of a community. If this suggests a sense of cure, it is one that is certainly used by Leiris (though it does not go unchallenged); it is true, however, as we shall see, that Leiris’s meditations on his involvement with both disciplines stress the purely psychosocial dimensions and psychological benefits as much as a reassessment of surrealist aesthetics. The definitive declaration of this rite de passage, which reinterprets surrealist self-identity as an historical moment located within a dialectical relationship, will come eventually in the closing chapter of L’Age d’homme, fittingly entitled ‘Le Radeau de la M´eduse’. If recognition of the Other is the most significant quality which the human sciences of ethnography and psychoanalysis therefore brought to surrealist self-expression, its origins none the less lay in pure exoticism. Negrophilia formed an essential ingredient in the twenties’ cocktail of fashionable modernity. The term betrays the ethnocentrism of the ChampsElys´ees, embracing everything from African tribal masks to the spectacle of Josephine Baker dancing, apparently dressed only in bananas. When the artefacts ‘collected’ during the famous  – French ethnographic expedition across Africa, the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, on which Leiris acted as ‘secr´etaire-archiviste’, were eventually exhibited at the Mus´ee du Trocad´ero, Josephine Baker was photographed at the opening, shaking one item, a magician’s rattle, as though it were a pair of maracas. Throughout this period, voodoo ritual, American jazz, and above all Negroes formed an exotic fetish in all the arts. As early as , the Dadaists performed violent, rhythmic ‘Negro’ chants as part of a general attempt to sabotage ‘civilization’ with the flippant scandal of ‘savagery’.  saw the publication of Cendrar’s Anthologie n`egre, an eclectic collection of folklore, invention and ethnographic features. This was equally the year in which the Goncourt was awarded to the Martinique writer Ren´e Maran for his ‘true black novel’, Batouala. Its relatively mild indictment of French colonialism earned it an immediate ban throughout the French colonies, even though many black intellectuals since have viewed the book as being far from emancipatory, and one, Frantz Fanon, has gone so far as to dismiss it as the work of a neurotic which does nothing to promote a potential political ‘restructuration du monde’. In  the slightly bizarre and not terribly talented Ballets Su´edois performed La Cr´eation du monde, with a jazz score by Milhaud and ‘savage’ costume designs, featuring monkeys and crocodiles, by L´eger. In  Andr´e Schaeffner, who was also to take part in the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, produced a book on Le jazz: la musique moderne. Upon the Mission’s return, funds were raised

Recasting the self: from surrealism to ethnography



via a gala boxing exhibition, given by the black bantamweight world champion, ‘Paname’ Al Brown, on  April , at Cirque d’Hiver in Paris. These proceeds served among other things to finance the publication of a pamphlet by Leiris on how to collect ethnographic objects. Marcel Griaule opened the gala with a speech in which he drew an analogy between Brown and the Mission’s work: Brown, he said, was an example of the negro ‘fighting’ to make the land of his ancestors better known and so respected. The frivolity and inherent racism of much of this spectacular adoration of ‘tropical energy’ was to be acknowledged by Leiris in a famous passage of L’Age d’homme: Dans la p´eriode de grande licence qui suivit les hostilit´es, le jazz fut un signe de ralliement, un e´ tandard orgiaque, aux couleurs du moment. Il agissait magiquement et son mode d’influence peut eˆ tre compar´e a` une possession. C’´etait le meilleur e´ l´ement pour donner leur vrai sens a` ces fˆetes, un sens religieux, avec communion par la danse, l’´erotisme latent ou manifest´e, et la boisson . . . abandon a` la joie animale . . . Premi`ere manifestation des n`egres, mythe des e´ dens de couleur qui devait me mener jusqu’en Afrique et par-del`a l’Afrique, jusqu’`a l’ethnographie. (AH  –)

Leiris’s clear depiction of the frenetic activities of a dying civilization demoralized by the first world war, addicted to sensation and inarticulately anticipating the totalitarian suicide of the late thirties none the less evidences a positive dimension. A surrealist thematics of magic and possession is able to be recast as a social and political phenomenon, which Leiris can abstract with a clear application of ethnographic and psychoanalytic irony; a confidently assumed tone of scientific realism can thus supersede the neurotic instabilities of Aurora. This new tone could be said to indicate a liberation of concepts of selfhood from the self-defeating aesthetics of irrationalism effected by an increasing ethnographic, psychoanalytic and political analysis of the nature of selfhood, and a recognition of the indispensable sense of otherness on which it is always predicated. So when the ‘cas Trotsky’ occurred in , and several surrealists failed to appear at a meeting designed to air the possibility of collaborative political action with figures external to the movement, the schism marked by their subsequent excommunication (including that of Leiris) crystallized a number of wider divisions. It also hastened the emergence of a core of ethnographers created in France between  and , first at the Institut d’Ethnologie, under Marcel Mauss’s inspired teaching, and later at the Trocad´ero museum (which was to become

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the Mus´ee de l’Homme). Mauss’s Essai sur le don () was the focus for this emerging fieldwork-oriented anthropology, and became the training manual for every major French ethnographer before . Its general theory of reciprocity, a system of perpetual exchange, in addition to being in many ways a humanist and socialist response to the first world war and the consequent nihilism dramatized in the last quotation from L’Age d’homme, also powerfully represented a materialist subject formed by involvement in an endless dialectical process. L´evi-Strauss was later to view Mauss as a proto-structuralist, and the conclusion to Mauss’s Essai sur le don offers a suggestive programme for an attempted transposition of the lone surrealist transcendence into the more political search for social authenticity: In certain cases, one can study the whole of human behaviour, and social life in its entirety. One can also see how this concrete study can lead not only to a science of customs, to a partial social science but even to moral conclusions, or rather, to adopt once more the old word, ‘civility’, or ‘civics’, as it is called nowadays. Studies of this kind indeed allow us to perceive, measure and weigh up the various aesthetic, moral, religious, and economic motivations, the diverse material and demographic factors, the sum total of which are the basis of society and constitute our common life, the conscious direction of which is the supreme art, Politics, in the Socratic sense of the word.

 The fundamental nature of this shift of emphasis and its radical implications for a writing of the self, come over clearly in a contemporary article by Georges Henri Rivi`ere, ‘A propos de l’art n`egre’. Notwithstanding the typical traces of L´evy-Bruhlian racism and blood-tinged excitement, Rivi`ere importantly isolates the circulation of affect and its underpinning of identity, noting significantly how aesthetics and technique are similarly dependent on a network of relations: [D]ans les soci´et´es primitives, le sentiment esth´etique, loin de s’accumuler dans les objets sp´ecialis´es, circule dans les institutions, dans les m´etiers, 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 d´epend de tout, comme l’´ecrit notre collaborateur Jacques Soustelle: mœurs, techniques, croyances sont e´ troitement solidaires et un r´eseau de prescriptions et d’interdits enveloppe l’individu, le fixe ou le soustrait a` son clan, l’asservit a` son totem.

Between  and , prior to travelling to Africa, Leiris was to rehearse the implications of Maussian ethnography for an anti-idealist

Recasting the self: from surrealism to ethnography



view of selfhood in Georges Bataille’s 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 id´ealistes’ constituting the Surrealist clique. Financed by an increasingly uncomprehending and apprehensive Georges Wildenstein, Documents’s direction, like the somewhat misleading title, were Bataille’s own. Supposedly a deliberately eclectic publication devoted to ‘Arch´eologie’, Beaux Arts, Ethnographie, Vari´et´e’, its true nature is more accurately given by Leiris’s recollection in ‘De Bataille l’Impossible a` l’impossible Documents’: Bien qu’il fˆut loin d’y exercer un pouvoir sans contrˆole, cette revue semble maintenant avoir e´ t´e faite a` son image: publication Janus tournant l’une de ses faces vers les hautes sph`eres de la culture (dont Bataille e´ tait bon gr´e mal gr´e un ressortissant par son m´etier comme par sa formation) et l’autre vers une zone sauvage o`u l’on s’aventure sans carte g´eographique ni passeport d’aucune esp`ece. (Br )

In fact, Leiris, as editorial assistant, was perhaps the only person to attempt the full range of the subtitle’s 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 disaffected surrealists studied ‘l’homme total’ alongside emerging French ethnographers. These included the above-mentioned Shaeffner, a musicologist, Marcel Griaule, the leader of the Mission, and Georges-Henri Rivi`ere, who reorganized the Trocad´ero museum. The peculiar mixture of motives and enthusiasms created a unique form of ethnographic surrealism, capable of refuelling Leiris’s abiding dream of a system simultaneously aesthetic, moral and scientific. 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 magazine’s ethnographic aim to expose the heterogeneity of cultural reality and the ideological nature of identity. Such an aesthetic arguably still preserved a contemporary disposition to sentimentality and fetishism; and its juxtapositions of Fantˆomas with pre-Columbian art, or photographs of big toes with articles on Gnosticism can be dismissed as merely disingenuous. 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

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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 confirms 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 Leiris’s above-mentioned article makes plain that for him the journal’s impossible form signified a higher impossibility: the attempt to supersede the surrealist conceptual unity with the ethnographic view of the body as a material and cultural collection. It should be added that this review of Bataille’s 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 journal’s materialist and heterogeneous message, this eccentric image is telling (all the more so given superficial similarities to a long-game strategy in La R`egle 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 aestheticopolitical disagreement with surrealism (and the psychological rivalry with Breton). ‘La “vieille taupe”’ of – denounces the ‘Icarian adventure’ of surrealism in materialist marxist terms, contrasting the former’s representation of revolution as a ‘lumi`ere r´edemptrice s’´elevant au-dessus du monde, au-dessus des classes, le comble de l’´el´evation d’esprit’ (p. ) with the ‘old-mole’ revolution which hollows out chambers ‘dans un sol d´ecompos´e et r´epugnant pour le nez d´elicat des utopistes’ (p. ). The latter begins, then, ‘dans les entrailles du sol, comme dans les entrailles mat´erialistes des prol´etariens’ (p. ). This is an assumption of Breton’s charge, at the end of the Second Manifeste du surr´ealisme, that Bataille is a ‘philosophe-excr´ements’. Bataille’s response is to rub Breton’s 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 ‘l’arme vengeresse de l’id´ee contre la bestialit´e’, as Breton would have it, that ‘la force et la libert´e humaine s’´etabliront’ (p. ). ‘La valeur d’usage de D. A. F. de Sade’, from the same period, and ‘Le Jesuve’ and ‘L’Oeil pin´eal’, both probably written

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

in , continue with this dirty protest. The first praises the literal dramas of excretion and appropriation in de Sade as a morality permitting the violent eruption of a heterological body, one that reverses the philosophical process and so abolishes exploitation through a sacrificial 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 supplementary 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 fi`evre qui mange l’ˆetre’ (p. ). The shit continues to hit the fan (Bataille denouncing Breton’s moralizing idealism, Breton denouncing Bataille’s anti-dialectical materialism) within the pages of Documents. In ‘Le Langage des fleurs’, the ideal symbol 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, priv´ee des ses p´etales, reste la rose’. This in turn led Bataille, in ‘Le “Jeu lugubre”’, to celebrate, in Dal´ı’s canvas of that name, the soiled subject’s shit-stain as both ‘cause primitive et rem`ede’ and in the process to recall how, in prison, de Sade screamed down his wastepipe, before concluding with a provocation directed obviously at Breton: ‘il est devenu impossible dor´enavant de reculer et de s’abriter dans les “terres de tr´esors ” de la Po´esie sans eˆ tre publiquement trait´e de lˆache’ (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 body’s irreducible indecency obviously present radical implications for self-representation, in terms of presentation as well as vision. Surrealism’s tendency to transcendence, verticality, metaphor and ideal unity, is challenged by the irruption of an aggressive degradation, a violently materialist disarticulation of selfhood. Leiris’s apprenticeship in writing the self will be massively influenced by this location of identity within corporeal mass, and by the ‘documentary’, testamentary and anti-poetic forms deemed to be fitting to this vision. It is significant that several of Leiris’s articles for Documents appeared under the rubric ‘Dictionary’, for in effect they shift from an obsession

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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 signifier displayed in Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses, the article ‘M´etaphore’ recognizes the dialectical nature of metaphor. Language is not now an alchemical process that solely refers to and relies on its own essence: it is the figural representation 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, qu’on peut qualifier de m´etaphorique. D’autre part, la connaissance proc`ede toujours par comparaison, de sorte que tous les objets connus sont li´es les auns aux autres par des rapports d’interd´ependance.

When Leiris concludes the article with the remark: ‘Cet article lui-mˆeme est m´etaphorique’, he is not at all suggesting a linguistic abyss deprived of a referential ground, but is instead turning from the boundless selfgeneration of Glossaire’s 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 referential 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 ‘sensualit´e ardente’ in a film that is otherwise idiotically puritan. But the presentation of this typically surrealist ‘amoureuse’, fetishized as pulsing throat and fluttering fingers, here has the effect of bringing to the fore the base material behind the production of the disembodied voice of surrealism. A new materialist 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 ‘L’eau a` la bouche’. Significantly, the article itself formed part of a larger, collaborative piece of writing: Leiris’s contribution formed the second paragraph, while the first, entitled ‘Crachat-ˆame’, 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 organic viscosity of being in the sacrilegious form of spittle. The mouth’s divinity is daily sullied, and abstract discourse derided by the organ of nutrition and excretion. The mucosity of spittle is therefore the perfect

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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 d’un d´emiurge en d´elire, riant aux e´ clats d’avoir expector´e cette larve vaniteuse, comique tˆetard qui se gonfle en viande souffl´e de demi-dieu’ (p. ). It is also a gesture that brings the surrealist self into the ethnographic domain of sacrilege and sacrifice, where the body’s functions and excretions form an inextricable element of sacred reality. And finally, it provocatively poses fundamental methodological difficulties for the museum’s collecting mania. Leiris’s later autobiographies will therefore be influenced crucially by both a surrealist conception of language and an anti-idealist ethnography of the body’s functions and behaviour. This lesson of surrealist ethnography for a vision and a writing of the self ran in tandem with Leiris’s contemporary experience of psychoanalysis. 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 nondogmatic founder member of both the Soci´et´e psychanalytique de Paris ´ and the ‘Evolution psychiatrique’ movement. With Bataille, Leiris and Ren´e Allendy, he also founded the Soci´et´e 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 unconscious through language, were to be exploited in L’Age d’homme. This suggests that Borel was perhaps well-suited to bridge the gap between Leiris’s 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 Borel’s 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 introductory 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

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of psychoanalysis in favour of the vocabulary of direct political commitment in the  additions to L’Age d’homme (denigration we could of course choose to read as indicative of the discipline’s real status). In any event, the analysis of dreams, the language of the unconscious and the phantasmagoria of sexuality, which remain constant features of Leiris’s work, are central to the  ethnographic journal L’Afrique fantˆome. Like ethnography, then, the human science of psychoanalysis confirmed 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. ’  ˆ  ‘Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre’: L’Afrique fantˆome’s opening quotation, taken fittingly from Rousseau’s 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 preoccupations underlying the surface objectivity of an ethnographic science, are all apparent. L’Afrique fantˆome begins with a fundamental recognition of the other, a belief that leads this fieldwork 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 create 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 Leiris’s unique form of autobiography. Its language content displays the evolution of a surrealist poetics into a socially and politically determined autobiographical situation, while its form reflects 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

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sacred, the work goes beyond being a surrealist ethnography or even an existential repudiation of scientific objectivity in favour of moral and political embarquement and t´emoignage: that is, it ultimately constitutes an exhaustive programme of auto-ethnography. L’Afrique fantˆome 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 prevalent negrophilia I have mentioned and to the exploitation of personal connections (Raymond Roussel, for example, was one of its patrons). Its ‘booty’ (one of Leiris’s 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 Trocad´ero’s exhibitions and research laboratories, as well as countless photographs and recordings. The expedition was led by Marcel Griaule, and Leiris was the ‘secr´etaire-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 n´egritude as an historical force after  and L´evi-Strauss’s  farewell to exoticism in the structural travelogue Tristes Tropiques. Like the latter book, L’Afrique fantˆome’s content rejects the inevitable abolition of otherness, while its structure acknowledges the irreducible temporal bind in which the ethnographer is caught between observation and abstraction, solidarity and archaeology, possession and analysis. The self-reflexive melancholy subtending both these aspects is clearly displayed in the book’s pri`ere d’ins´erer. In itself this is a miniature narrative of the move from Aurora to ethnography, from flight to commitment. A weary Leiris is shown setting off on a poetic adventure 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

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book’s Preamble as ‘ce journal a` double entr´ee, . . . mi-documentaire, mipo´etique’ (AF ). In general, scientific pretensions and capitalist acquisitiveness oblige the secr´etaire-archiviste to chronicle Europe’s mission in Africa. But the surrealist ethnographer, whose knowledge of psychoanalysis 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 unfolding of the operations of the unconscious and a political apprenticeship, whose highpoint is reached when Leiris exclaims: ‘J’ai besoin de tremper dans leur drame, de toucher leurs fa¸cons d’ˆetre, de baigner dans la chair vive. Au diable l’ethnographie!’ (AF ). From the beginning of the book, then, a general ideological struggle is fought out within ethnography: scientific 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 Leiris’s 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 qu’il y a de passionnant dans la recherche scientifique: marcher de pi`ece a` conviction a` pi`ece a` conviction, d’´enigme a` e´ nigme, poursuivre la v´erit´e 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 Tom’s 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: ‘Journ´ee purement bureaucratique. Classement. Courier. Visites’ (AF ). Having fled the cafard of bourgeois mediocrity in France, an increasingly anguished narcissism finds no exotic release in its phantom Africa: ‘mˆeme existence mesquine, mˆeme vulgarit´e, mˆeme monotonie, et mˆeme destruction syst´ematique de la beaut´e’ (AF ). The rumblings of war in Europe exacerbate his dark thoughts on sexual and intellectual impotence, and Africa comes to resemble a landscape from Aurora, the unconscious and hallucinatory locus of European despair:

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Voici enfin ’      , la terre des ◦ a` l’ombre, des convois d’esclaves, des festins cannibales, des crˆanes vides, de toutes les choses qui sont mang´ees, corrod´ees, perdues. La haute silhouette du maudit fam´elique qui toujours m’a hant´e se dresse entre le soleil et moi. C’est sous son ombre que je marche, ombre plus dure mais plus revigorante aussi que les plus diamant´es des rayons. (AF )

But as Leiris’s attempts to express the inexpressible come to acknowledge that the real subject of the journal is the ethnography of the ethnographer, so the ethnography of Africa truly begins. Leiris’s recognition of his religious rather than scientific impulses (AF ) opens the way for a passionate record of fetishism, sacrifice and possession. Graffiti, cave markings and the performances of griots all stand as alternative documents to the bureaucratic classification of the African spirit:     (AF )     . Le griot . . . tra¸cait en mesure des dessins dans le sable. C’´etaient des carr´es et des figures magiques islamiques . . . Fusion de la musique, du dessin, de la danse, de la magie. Le personnage semblait compl`etement hors de lui. (AF ) Un enchevˆetrement de lignes ocre rouge, lignes doubles et r´eguli`erement coup´ees de petites barres perpendiculaires dispos´ees deux par deux. Le tout forme un dessin, parfaitement e´ vident en tant que dessin bien qu’obscur quant a` la repr´esentation. (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 Leiris’s 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 Leiris’s later autobiographical examination of the painful passage to adult sexuality recorded in L’Age d’homme. It is African children who in general break down Leiris’s 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 revelatory reservoir within language which has thus far helped to reveal the

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Texts and contexts

phantom cultural identities of Africa, Leiris’s subsequent attempt to decipher and translate the secret, initiatory language of the Dogons challenges some of the absolutist assumptions of surrealist theories of identity and expression. Leiris’s description of this language reminds us of Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses: ‘la langue secr`ete est une langue de formules, faite d’´enigmes, de coq-`a-l’ˆane, de calembours (?), de phonˆemes en cascades, de symboles s’interp´en´etrant’ (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 soci´et´e des masques). Leiris’s incantation, beyond conferring on him a social identity, confirms the lesson of Glossaire, namely that the materiality of a language-system in every case creates and sustains self-identity. But far from simply confirming surrealism’s 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. Leiris’s attempts to have each of the words of the incantation rigidly translated is met with irritation and eventual anger. The text is significant only as a general signifying form, not as an atomistic network of isolatable signifiers. The system of language and the notion of identity which exists through it are only socially and integrally signifying. The lesson is confirmed 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 interviewee, however, picks up the first 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 identity of ‘man’: ‘Une double stupidit´e: celle d’Ambib`e, incapable d’avoir une claire notion du langage en tant que tel; la mienne, capable d’avoir trait´e les mots d’une phrase comme des entit´es s´epar´ees’ (AF ). These examples of linguistic, cultural and methodological relativity are peculiarly 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, ‘enfin au seuil de l’exotisme!’ (AF ), give way only to a sombre picture of Ethiopia’s precarious political position

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in the years immediately prior to Mussolini’s 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 presence. He acknowledges that he is less interested in the scientific aims of the Mission than in the search for a muse (AF ). This results in entries on the relative merits of psychoanalysis versus a ‘bont´e 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 m’apparaissent. Une grande partie de ma n´evrose tient a` l’habitude que j’ai de co¨ıts incomplets, inachev´es, a` cause d’un malthusianisme exacerb´e’ (AF ). An anthropological textbook, Notes and Queries on Anthropology, provokes extended discussion of Freud. A list of European clich´es of Africa is simply noted: ‘A¨ıda, que Verdi composa pour les fˆetes d’inauguration du Canal de Suez; l’histoire du prˆetre Jean; la mort de Livingstone; Fachoda; Arthur Rimbaud vendant des armes a` M´en´elik’ (AF ). Most remarkably, Leiris devotes several closing pages of his fieldwork diary to a rough sketch for a short story, featuring a Conrad-type hero in a colonial setting whose characteristics and circumstances are plainly those of Leiris himself. This fictionalization of autobiographical material is a logical extension of the search throughout L’Afrique fantˆome 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 reflexivity that raises ethnography to the stage of existential reciprocity, where Leiris’s meditations inevitably become cultural autobiography. In part this is symptomatic of the uncomfortable awareness of ethnography’s posture as a ‘juge d’instruction’. Jamin at one point makes interesting remarks regarding the methodological paradoxes of Griaule and the status of native speech. In a brilliant passage, he also highlights the fundamental tension between Leiris’s growing anti-colonialist sympathies, wherein ethnography offers a supporting role, and Griaule’s interrogatory approach, wherein the ethnographer proceeds with the assumption that the native is hiding or lying. But the most significant indicator of how L’Afrique fantˆome’s ultimate preoccupation is the unstable 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 conscious human science. Some thirty instances of sexual and intellectual

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preoccupations reveal the fragile identity at the heart of Leiris’s heterogeneous 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 sacrificed (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 fitting that L’Afrique fantˆome’s final sentence should point to the continuation of this dream-work: ‘Il ne me reste rien a` faire, sinon clore ce carnet, e´ teindre la lumi`ere, m’allonger, dormir, – et faire des rˆeves . . . ’ (AF ). The close of the journal merely signals the end of an apprenticeship in ethnographic and psychoanalytic self-examination (Leiris’s 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. L’Age d’homme, a collage of childhood phobias and sexual anxieties, will be tightly organized around a series of psychoanalytic and mythic icons. In addition to reflecting aspects of L’Afrique fantˆome’s form and content, the metatextual obsessions will reach a new pitch: the competing claims of psychoanalysis and the sacred, existential politics and surrealist po´esie v´ecue will directly translate into L’Age d’homme’s rigorous attempt to forge a strict language that can express ‘l’homme total’ as an authentic act in itself.



Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography to L’Age d’homme

Leiris’s ethnographic curriculum vitae, Titres et travaux, describes L’Afrique fantˆome as ‘amor¸cant la s´erie d’´ecrits autobiographiques qui repr´esente le noyau de son oeuvre d’´ecrivain’. Certainly, upon his return from Africa, Leiris’s work seemed to become more confident and focused, in contrast to the confused extremes of his intellectual milieux. He acted as the (anonymous) editor of the second issue of Minotaure, which recorded the intellectual and concrete findings of the Mission; and he contributed seven rather dutiful reviews of psychological and political literature to Bataille’s La Critique sociale. But he took no part in Bataille’s ‘Ac´ephale’, either in its textual form as a journal of Nietzschean enthusiasms, or in its lived version as a supposedly secret sect driven by mystical negativity. Nor did he contribute to the ‘equivocal’ politics of ‘Contre-Attaque’, whose proposed ‘surfasciste’ transcendence of both fascism and liberal democracy produced a short-lived reconciliation with Breton. Leiris’s reticence is partly a question of temperament, but more fundamentally one of technique allied to vision. It was not mere expediency that later led Leiris to break with Bataille over the latter’s insufficiently correct application of Durkheimian principles, within the activities of the Coll`ege de sociologie. During this period, Leiris followed courses given by Marcel Mauss () and Maurice Leenhardt (), eventually qualifying with a certificate in sociology in ; and he produced pure ethnographic studies as well as the more radical autoethnography ‘Lucr`ece, Judith et Holophernes’ that became known as L’Age d’homme. Bataille, however, is appropriating Durkheim’s view of the sacred and Mauss’s examination of potlatch to review fascist power in terms of heterogeneous force in La Critique sociale. Such an ambiguous celebration of ‘un recours opportun a` des forces affectives renouvel´ees’ (p. ) or, later, of a ‘force exigeant que la r´ealit´e inf´erieure se soumette a` son empire’, sat increasingly uneasily with Leiris’s patient demythologizations, including of domestic politics and its ‘sacred’. 

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Texts and contexts

The crowning period of this period of research for Leiris is L’Age d’homme, a book marking Leiris’s full entry into autobiography, and one ` Georges Bataille, qui est a` l’origine de ce livre’, whose dedication, ‘A marks a typically subtle distantiation as well as a fundamental debt. This in turn indicates a complex retrospective reframing of L’Age d’homme’s writing of the self in the light of two subsequent influences, both related critically to Bataille’s immersion in the virile and ritual act. These influences are firstly the collective research of the Coll`ege de sociologie; and secondly the Sartrean analysis of both surrealist identity and Bataillean ecstasy, which is heavily present in revising footnotes and, above all, the essay ‘De la litt´erature consid´er´ee comme une tauromachie’ which prefaced L’Age d’homme for the first time in the  edition. In keeping with this complex reframing (one reproduced internally in the autobiography’s non-chronological collection of the v´ecu), I shall examine these influences before engaging with the main body of L’Age d’homme itself. ‘ ´    ’ The post-surrealist science of the sacred which Leiris’s fieldwork 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 Coll`ege de sociologie. Founded in  by Bataille, Leiris and Roger Caillois (the last a classicist who had studied under Mauss), the short-lived Coll`ege 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 Society’s founding declaration appeared in the July  issue of Ac´ephale. 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 desubjectification 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 L’Age d’homme

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Yet the Coll`ege 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 Leiris’s personal and professional styles, as well as his fieldwork 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 fieldwork involved in writing the self. Between his return from Africa and , Leiris produced fragments of the eventual L’Age d’homme. His participation in the Coll`ege, and in particular his paper ‘Le Sacr´e dans la vie quotidienne’ were thus more than an extension of professional training. They acted retrospectively upon L’Age d’homme as a transformational prise de conscience, reframing intellectually the completed manuscript prior to its publication in book form. This would give ‘Le Sacr´e dans la vie quotidienne’ a crucial status. Yet Hollier states in his commentary on the paper that Leiris never adhered ‘corps et aˆ me’ to the ambitions or motives of those others for whom the Coll`ege acted as a focus. He points out in his expanded English version of his collection of texts relating to the Coll`ege 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 L’Age d’homme and La R`egle du jeu, it represents an academic prototype of the autobiographical fieldwork with which Leiris was to occupy himself for the next few decades. ‘Le Sacr´e dans la vie quotidienne’ was delivered as a paper by Leiris to the Coll`ege on  January  and published in revised form six months later in La Nouvelle Revue fran¸caise. In purely formal terms, the essay tries to blend the post-surrealist aesthetic of the sacred learned from ethnography, 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, Leiris’s paragraphs build into a card-index of the linguistic, heterogeneous and psycho-sexual formation of the self within a specific 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 ‘heterogeneous and ambiguous’ reality ‘with which we are in collusion’. Certainly this was the opinion of Jean Wahl who makes plain in his reaction to Leiris’s paper that its formal intensity and rigour triumphed over his scepticism, and that of a large proportion of the audience, for the first and only time. The paper’s opening definition of the sacred: ‘ce m´elange de crainte et d’attachement, cette attitude ambig¨ue que d´etermine l’approche d’une chose a` la fois attirante et dangereuse, prestigieuse et rejet´ee, cette mixture de respect, de d´esir et de terreur’ (S ) at once recalls Leiris’s 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 child’s admiration are the earliest domestic site of the sacred. Moving, then, metonymically from these objects to their location, Leiris’s attention shifts logically to the bathroom, where he and his brother dream up ‘toute une mythologie quasi secr`ete’ (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-man’s 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 j’y serre mes gloses) or because finally discovering the true nature of words which had been previously mangled and misunderstood creates a revelatory moment of reciprocity (as in L’Afrique fantˆome). The new worlds opened up by this subtle change in the speaker’s relation to society are the linguistic terrain for a sacred sociology, which regards the speaker as a ‘ritualist’, ‘pour qui le sacr´e se r´esout finalement en un syst`eme subtil de distinguo, de pointes d’aiguille et de d´etails d’´etiquette’ (S ). Leiris rounds off his checklist of the domestic sacred with a reiteration of items mentioned, and the transgressive, ambiguous and secret

Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography to L’Age d’homme



qualities associated with them. He concludes that henceforth one of his most sacred aims will be to obtain ‘une connaissance de soi aussi pr´ecise et intense que possible’. This programmatic aim is confirmed by the resurgence of material given here: L’Age d’homme already houses the ‘Radieuse’ stove (AH –) and the parents’ bedroom; Biffures will comment again on the father’s Smith and Wesson (Bi ), the bathroom mythologies (Bi ), the empty hall (Bi ), Mo¨ıse (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 Coll`ege shortly afterwards, even if he was one of the three signatories of the ‘D´eclaration du Coll`ege de sociologie sur la crise internationale’, dated the  October . Leiris’s continuing preoccupation with the technical and especially linguistic means of achieving self-knowledge draws him away from the increasingly irrational and apocalyptic negativity of Bataille’s writings. It is worth contrasting ‘Le Sacr´e dans la vie quotidienne’ with Bataille’s contemporary equivalent essay, ‘L’Apprenti sorcier’, which, along with Caillois’s ‘Le Vent d’hiver’, were published in the  July  issue of La Nouvelle Revue fran¸caise as a collective manifestation. Leiris’s appeal to ‘honest scutiny’ (S ) bears little resemblance to Bataille’s 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 justified 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 Society’s declaration, before articulating his present doubts about the College’s failure to achieve its intended methodological rigour, and in particular its transgression of the rules established by Durkheim. Hereafter Leiris’s 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  Qu’est-ce que la litt´erature? Leiris’s ethnographic and psychoanalytic containment and analysis of surrealism’s shamanism will thus join with a specifically committed view of art coinciding largely with the publication of Biffures. Together, these elements will form L’Age d’homme’s new autobiographical ‘canon de composition’, and a typical retroactive reframing. Above all, it is in the book’s  preface, ‘De la litt´erature consider´ee comme une tauromachie’, that Leiris establishes this next ‘naissance a` l’envers’, with its new, authentic, set of criteria for writing the self.



Texts and contexts ‘   ´   ´    ’

Leiris’s full entry into autobiography came with L’Age d’homme, a psychomythology of the difficult passage to virility, completed in November  (the same month in which Breton published his Position politique du surr´ealisme) but published only in . The definitive preface to the work, ‘De la litt´erature consider´ee comme une tauromachie’, appeared only in the  edition, however, and therefore post-dates the original manuscript in some cases by more than ten years, absorbing and transforming the book’s original pri`ere d’ins´erer in the process. By now this reframing effect is becoming familiar. The preface rereads Leiris’s past surrealist activities as the aesthetics of authenticity. It pre-empts our judgement, then, of the  L’Age d’homme 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 describes 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 ‘r`egle’, which slots L’Age d’homme neatly into a track leading directly to Biffures (), the first volume of La R`egle du jeu (–), of which five extracts had already appeared in print, all of them written after L’Age d’homme but before ‘De la litt´erature consid´er´ee comme une tauromachie’. The form of the preface also bears out this legislative role and anticipates the main text’s montage technique: the original  pri`ere d’ins´erer, written before the ‘drˆole 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 litt´erature’, therefore, L’Age d’homme’s writing of the self is generated, structured and valorized by an existential ethics of language. To appreciate this shift, it is necessary here to recall Sartre’s disagreement with both surrealism and Bataille, and to locate the points of influence 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. Specifˆ et le N´eant he isolated the notions of ‘d´epassement ically, from L’Etre perp´etuel’ and ‘projet’ ( J –). In December  Sartre published the article ‘Un nouveau mystique’, in which he praises the ‘acte v´eritable’ of L’Age d’homme (p. ), while dismissing Bataille’s L’Exp´erience int´erieure as the latest example of the ‘essai-martyre’ beloved of surrealism

Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography to L’Age d’homme

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(p. ). Bataille, the mystic, ‘accul´e au fond de son impasse, s’´evade de son d´egoˆut par une sorte d’´evanouissement 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 Sartre’s judgement of surrealism, as outlined in Qu’est-ce que la litt´erature?. Here surrealism’s metaphysical destruction (p. ) dissolves subjectivity (p. ) in order to reach the Impossible (pp. –) as a purely formal ‘d´epassement’ (p. ) that never offers ‘un passage de la puissance a` l’acte’ (p. ). (It is ironic that Sartre also employs Bataille’s charge of class ignorance against surrealism.) Bataille’s reply to Sartre focuses on the latter’s Hegelian teleology, defending with the phrase ‘Je n’aboutis jamais’ (p. ) the agony of process over the certainty of project. The argument subsequently revolves around the exemplary figure of Baudelaire. In the January  article on Sartre’s preface to ´ Baudelaire’s 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 significance is the fact that it is Leiris who subsequently prefaces Sartre’s preface in its eventual book form. Simultaneously moving to the front and the rear, Leiris distances himself from Sartre’s ‘summary execution of surrealism’ (p. ), while accepting that the only way to approach poets is ‘sans transe ni balbutiement de religiosit´e [. . .] comme s’ils e´ taient 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 ‘d´epassement’. This shift is borne out in the postulations and charged language of ‘De la litt´erature consid´er´ee comme une tauromachie’. It articulates a self-imposed existential project that reinterprets the L’Age d’homme we have yet to read. In a complete assumption of Sartre’s statements in Qu’est-ce que la litt´erature? that ‘parler, c’est agir’ (p. ) and that ‘l’´ecrivain doit s’engager tout entier dans ses ouvrages’ (p. ), Leiris now asserts, in the preface’s most famous moment, that his goal in writing the original L’Age d’homme was in fact to ‘faire un livre qui soit un acte’ (AH ), generating an autobiographical project that was not so much a ‘litt´erature engag´ee’ as ‘une litt´erature dans laquelle j’essayais de m’engager tout entier’ (AH ). Aware of the gap between the retroactive programme and his previous writings, Leiris brilliantly proposes the preface’s central moment of reframing: writing the self must be as dangerous as the act of bullfighting:

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Texts and contexts

Ce qui se passe dans le domaine de l’´ecriture n’est-il pas d´enu´e de valeur si cela reste ’esth´etique’, (. . .) s’il n’y a rien (. . .) qui soit un e´ quivalent (. . .) de ce qu’est pour le torero la corne ac´er´ee du taureau, qui seule (. . .) conf`ere une r´ealit´e a` son art? (AH )

In isolated form, the equation of writer with matador would be no more than an exotic sexual clich´e. But its context relates Leiris’s 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 Ac´ephale collection. A  article, ‘Espagne –’ (Br –) had also previously used the bullfight 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: L’ultime propos: recherche d’une pl´enitude vitale, qui ne saurait s’obtenir avant une catharsis, une liquidation, dont l’activit´e litt´eraire – et particuli`erement la litt´erature dite ‘de confession’ – apparaˆıt l’un des plus commodes instruments. (AH )

The utilitarian restriction on literature suggested here is amply confirmed by the immediate revision of this first pri`ere d’ins´erer. The preface now becomes much more directly political, and deliberately less aesthetic in itself, substituting the concise elegance of Leiris’s opening phrases for a discursive presentation of the necessary shift from ‘jeu’ to ‘r`egle’, a shift that is repeated no fewer than five times. Universal myths of death and catharsis are replaced by the specific landmarks of war and politics (Le Havre, the drˆole de guerre, occupied France, Nazis, Sartre) and Leiris’s art language follows the same shift: from presenting the landscape in an abstract cubist way (‘jaugeant en entit´es ombre et lumi`ere’ (AH )), he turns to a realist picture of social action (‘Des moteurs ronflent; tramways et bicyclistes passent; les gens flˆanent ou s’affairent et mainte fum´ee 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 litt´erateur by transferring the danger of confession into a stylish self-definition that wins the appreciation of others. In

Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography to L’Age d’homme

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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 accomplice instead of a judge, and that self-exposure introduces at best ‘the shadow of a bull’s 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 book’s 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 committed 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, scientific and juridical self-portrait: ‘rien que ces faits et tous ces faits, e´ tait la r`egle que je m’´etais 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 trouv´e and automatism), the use of dreams and psychoanalysis for the purposes of insight, and an insistence on exposure (of bourgeois hypocrisy). In this light, Breton’s Nadja, or L’Age d’homme, can be called ‘realism’, since the montage or collage created leads to the emergence of an authentic portrait, ‘ma conception quant a` l’art d’´ecrire venant ici converger avec l’id´ee morale que j’avais quant a` mon engagement dans l’´ecriture’ (AH ). The equation made between autobiography 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 ‘r`egle fondamentale’ precisely precludes linguistic play, for the autobiographical version of the torero’s exposure to the bull’s horn is the direct confrontation of an unembellished truth: Car dire la v´erit´e, rien que la v´erit´e, n’est pas tout: encore faut-il l’aborder carr´ement et la dire sans artifices tels que grands airs destin´es a` en imposer, tr´emolos ou sanglots dans la voix, ainsi que fioritures, dorures, qui n’auraient



Texts and contexts

d’autre r´esultat que de la d´eguiser plus ou moins, ne fˆut-ce qu’en att´enuant sa crudit´e, en rendant moins sensible ce qu’elle peut avoir de choquant. (AH )

Linguistic austerity and its artistic parallels (sculpture, photo-montage, the analysis of dreams and eroticism, ‘classicism’) represent the existential approach that can confer an ethical value on the exposure of dramatic and even romantic content. Play, in both senses, is contained (‘th´eaˆ tralement, le hasard doit apparaˆıtre domin´e’ (AH )) by a ‘r`egle de m´ethode’ that brings together a ceremonial identity and a ‘canon de composition’. This ‘identit´e (. . .) de la forme et du fond’ works in two ways: the text reveals Leiris’s own content to himself even as it gives it form; and the strictly governed portrait that results helps to create a common point of revelation between himself and the Other. Bullfighting is no longer an exotic symbol of the poetic imagination, but has become the guiding metaphor for an existential ethics of language. Combining prescription (r`egle) with description ( jeu), the presence of the bull’s horn as the only ‘r`egle de composition’ confers authenticity and merit on the autobiography’s subject. The highest claim of such writing is therefore to use words to restore significance to human action: ‘l’un des buts les plus hauts (. . .) est de restituer au moyen des mots certains e´ tats intenses, concr`etement e´ prouv´es et devenus signifiants, d’ˆetre ainsi mis en mots’ (AH –). This concrete valorization of the writer’s efforts also means, though, that the revolutionary freedom granted to the signifier by Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses is being rethought: language must not be abused in order to achieve the purely formal magical unity of a play on words, but must become part of the writer’s material commitment to the emergence of truth: ‘ne pas m´esuser du langage et faire par cons´equent en sorte que sa parole (. . .) soit toujours v´erit´e’ (AH ). The linguistic rules of L’Age d’homme therefore reject a surrealist chatoiement and accept instead that the self-portrait they create is an existential ‘passage de la puissance a` l’acte’, to use the words of Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la litt´erature? Instead of being a linguistic emanation, then, self-identity in L’Age d’homme is reinterpreted as a cultural gestation. The liberation or catharsis which autobiography can achieve now depends not on the liberation of language, but on a socio-political commitment to the liberation of the citizen: Il resterait qu’il lui faut, se situant sur le plan intellectuel ou passionnel, apporter des pi`eces a` conviction au proc`es de notre actuel syst`eme de valeurs et peser, de tout le poids dont il est si souvent oppress´e, dans le sens de l’affranchissement de tous les hommes, faute de quoi nul ne saurait parvenir a` son affranchissement particulier. (AH –)

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The conclusion to ‘De la litt´erature consider´ee 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 fundamentally in order to technologize the Bataillean transgressions still reflected in Miroir de la tauromachie and related works. As Leiris acknowledges implicitly in , a Sartrean ethic is being used in order to transform ‘chaos’ and the ‘necessity of transgression’ into a dramatological ‘r`egle technique (ou d’efficacit´e) qui serait en mˆeme temps une r`egle esth´etique (ou de style)’ ( J ). The wording alone presages La R`egle du jeu; the idea expressed (akin to Bataille’s denunciation of Breton) offers another example 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 ‘th´eaˆ tralisation de l’´ecrivain o`u l’auteur, tel le protagoniste sartrien, s’irr´ealisant dans le personnage du matador, 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 languagegames of surrealism and ethnography can join the L’Age d’homme we are set to read as part of a general moral programme. Predating Sartre’s criticism of surrealism that ‘l’imaginaire pur et la praxis sont difficilement compatibles’, then, the subject of L’Age d’homme, according to ‘De la litt´erature consid´er´ee comme une tauromachie’, will reach true authentic manhood to the degree to which the autobiography’s reframed ethics of language will manage to reconcile the imaginary and praxis. As we shall see, however, this regulatory programme does not sufficiently control the textual traces thrown up by another regulatory programme exploited within L’Age d’homme: that of psychoanalysis. It is a practice which in the autobiography’s  additions is significantly 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 definitive L’Age d’homme 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 L’Age d’homme. On the one hand, it aims to present ‘the clearest and closest portrait’ of Leiris, from infancy to the age of ;

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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 Leiris’s 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 figures chapters and subsections. Yet subtending this determination are phantom concepts from psychoanalysis, such as oedipal rivalry, the castration 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 justified as the operations of an autobiographical self-building, and indeed correlate to the psychoanalytic concept of the secondary process, as described by Laplanche and Pontalis: Dans le cas du processus secondaire, l’´energie est d’abord ‘li´ee’ avant de s’´ecouler de fa¸con contrˆol´ee; les repr´esentations sont investies d’une fa¸con plus stable, la satisfaction est ajourn´ee, permettant ainsi des exp´eriences mentales qui mettent a` l’´epreuve les diff´erentes voies de satisfaction possibles.

But it will become increasingly obvious in the course of the book that the ‘definitive delivery’ which this secondary process is designed to effect, 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, ‘figures bibliques et de l’antiquit´e classique, h´eros de th´eaˆ tre ou bien le Torero – mythes psychologiques qui s’imposaient a` moi en raison de la valeur r´ev´elatrice’ (AH ), it becomes quickly apparent that this iconography acts as more than a framework for the subject’s emergence into manhood; it equally contains the unreasonable 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 d´eformantes’ (AH ). This means that already Leiris’s constant assertion of the veracity of his representation is underpinned by its defensive response to the voracious force of the primary process, and that part of the complex reframing in L’Age d’homme 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 fiction, 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

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existential d´epassement, this is the autobiography’s 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 denegating psychoanalysis. This double strategy of projection and protection operates in each chapter. Stylistic rationalization subordinates chronology. The most remarkable feature of the first, unnumbered chapter (AH –) is therefore the fact that we are introduced to a subject already halfway through his life (‘Je viens d’avoir trente-quatre ans, la moiti´e de la vie’ (AH )). This enables the subsequent retrospective gaze directed on Leiris’s transition from childhood to manhood to be written into an intellectual framework set up in anticipatory fashion as ‘la m´etaphysique 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, Epinal’s ‘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, effected upon childhood by motivated retrospection, to a closed, cultural system of meaning. Leiris’s philosophical passivity in the face of such determinism merely endorses this structural containment of subjectivity: ‘Je demeure encastr´e dans ces Ages de la Vie et j’ai de moins en moins l’espoir d’´echapper a` leur cadre’ (AH ). It is also towards the end of this chapter that the subject’s theatrical representation first emerges. Again this is done in such a way that the violence of desire is subsumed into one of the secondary process’s three guiding ‘thˆemes directeurs’. A chance encounter in a wood with some bare-footed children becomes ‘le th´eaˆ tre de ma premi`ere e´ rection’ (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 figures of Lucretia and Judith, who have been inspired by Cranach’s paintings; and through them the subject’s 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 autobiography’s first 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 Nerval’s translation (repetition) of Goethe’s rendition (repetition) of the Faust legend.

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Texts and contexts

The effect is once again to place the individual existence potentially in question within the already regulatory framework of intellectual repetition. The enumeration of tragic spectacles at this point is moreover presented structurally as a regulating feature of the subject’s childhood: ‘Une grande partie de mon enfance s’est d´eroul´ee sous le signe de spectacles, op´eras ou drames lyriques’ (AH ). The subject’s 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 j’ai toujours de proc´eder par allusions, par m´etaphores ou de me comporter comme si j’´etais sur un th´eaˆ tre’ (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 significantly in terms of theatrical representation, then, that the early stages of Leiris’s education are presented here, an education which precisely involves the ability (being voiced prescriptively by the adult Leiris to the adult) to distinguish between 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 repr´esentation d’un drame e´ tait enchˆass´ee dans la pi`ece et que ces spectateurs enthousiastes, applaudissant a` l’assassinat qui se d´eroule sous leurs yeux, n’´etaient pas les spectateurs r´eels . . . mais des spectateurs figur´es, inclus eux-mˆemes dans le spectacle. (AH –)

What Leiris eventually learns in this first chapter is that these spectacles ‘reflect’ life and can therefore be used as the basis for his own ‘representation’ of it (AH –). The young child’s 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 L’Age d’homme’s cultural representation of the self: they provide the framework for Leiris’s earliest manifestations of virility, terror and punishment. Already, then, the secondary process is generating a particular autobiographical structure from these individual instances, which are made to partake of a pre-established logic. As the following chapter, ‘Antiquit´es’ (AH –), acknowledges in a typically early metatextual moment: L’habitude que j’ai de penser par formules, analogies, images, – technique mentale dont, que je le veuille ou non, le pr´esent e´ crit n’est qu’une application. (AH )

A general body of writing is therefore established at the head of the autobiography. This can then be used to regulate Leiris’s particular

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instances of desire, by using his actual experiences of eroticism as illustrations of art history, and, more generally, of psychosocial d´epassement. In this chapter, the academic concept of antiquity is used as the structural framework for the auto-erotic stages of Leiris’s development. A r´esum´e of the chapter’s subsections will show here how Leiris produces a programmatic abstraction of the painful passage through childhood and adolescence. In the subsection ‘Femmes Antiques’ (AH –) Leiris recalls how an early masturbatory fantasy involved imagining himself as a ‘courtisane antique’. The following section, ‘Femme de Preux’, presents a homoerotic version of the same image. In this case Leiris dwells fetishistically on the details of a fight between Roland and Oliver: ‘longue et e´ paisse tunique sans doute de velours rouge; [. . .] Les sous de bronze, l’armure de bronze, la main moite comme sur une virilit´e dress´ee’ (AH ). ‘Sacrifices’ (AH –) strengthens the aura of sacred sociology: here Leiris remembers masturbating in Zeus’s temple at Olympia, which leads to the recollection of an invented childhood trinity dedicated to the nec plus ultra of transgression: , god of alcohol; , god of tobacco; and , god of masturbation. These in turn recall a later trilogy: the Virgin Mary, Joan of Arc and Vercingetorix, as eroticism for Leiris becomes heterosexual, ‘a little tainted with literature’ and consequently a ‘symbolical form’. These women are therefore collectively placed ‘under the sign of archaeology’ in the next subsection, ‘Lupanars et mus´ees’ (AH  –). The academic control which can be exerted in this way over a dangerous ‘caract`ere de violence sanglante’ leads Leiris to present the relationship between himself and his mother under the same sign in the following section, ‘Le G´enie du Foyer’ (AH –): as a result, the picture of a murderous desire felt by Leiris for his mother, as he sits, in his words, ‘moelleusement install´e sur les genoux de ma m`ere’, is restrained by the transformation of his mother into a ‘matrone antique’. This increasing mutation of dangerous individual experience into a comprehensible cultural icon reaches its apogee in the final subsection, ‘Don Juan et le Commandeur’ (AH –). Here Leiris defines himself in relation to two specific volumes for which he has a fetishistic love, both of which, significantly, came into the possession of his mother when she was a young girl: an Iphig´enie, whose versification offers the ‘roideur antique’ necessary for the structuration of subjectivity; and a Moli`ere Dom Juan, whose image of the Stone Commander provides the same ideal image of stony resistance or petrification in the face of the bloody violence of desire. In only the second chapter, then, Leiris establishes a programmatic abstraction and cultural sublation of mere event

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Texts and contexts

into projective structure. Hereafter, Leiris can achieve a controlled inscription of an ‘authentic’ subject into the reality of manhood by simply introducing further art images into the general paradigm. The chapter concludes: La tendresse que je reportai de ma m`ere a` ces livres, et de ces livres pris en tant qu’objets a` leur contenu, est de nature a` avoir renforc´e la signification que j’attribuai de tr`es bonne heure a` l’antiquit´e, vue sous l’angle du rayon interdit de la biblioth`eque de mon p`ere. Ces souvenirs livresques ont sˆurement concouru a` la production du trouble que je ressentis en d´ecouvrant l’image de ces deux h´ero¨ınes, l’une romaine, l’autre biblique: Lucr`ece et Judith. (AH )

The next three chapters derive from the biblical exemplifications of a general truth. Lucretia (AH –), Judith (AH –) and Holofernes (AH  –) embody and of course ennoble the catalogue of cuts, bites and bruises constitutive of childhood. The actual form of chapter , ‘La tˆete d’Holopherne’, continues this theme of the cut suffered by the tragic hero. Cuts occur on the level both of the text’s narrative and of its own disposition of material. There is an abrupt jump from the Nerval pre-text wherein ‘nos tˆetes roul`erent comme des boules’ to the main body of the chapter, which begins with an apparently unrelated early memory; yet the two are linked in that both are once again part of an archive of bodily experience, an intellectual d´epassement of pain: the memory in question turns on another narrative of beheading, L’Histoire sainte, in which Leiris reads of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son. But this textual cut is simultaneously sutured by drawing together the various psychological myths. The narrative follows the same pattern, as disparate recollections are assembled to form a composite autobiographical subject of representation around the image of a wounded subject. The first includes Prometheus, the dream of a devouring wolf, the Red Sea engulfing Pharaoh’s army, the ordeal endured by the Maccabees, and so on. Having established the model, the subject can now be written into its framework: we are told of his elder brother’s threat to operate on his appendix with a corkscrew; a young boy whose hand is almost severed; the screams of a woman crushed by the metro. Here, and in the rest of the chapter, the representation of self-identity as constituted by a wound is once again used to predict and explain the various contingent events of Leiris’s childhood. It closes fittingly, with a subsection entitled ‘Points de suture’ (AH  –), in which the narrator, on sustaining a head injury, immediately reacts by thinking: ‘Comment pourrai-je aimer?’ (AH ), a phrase that places him ‘sur un certain plan exaltant de trag´edie’ and

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gives him ‘la fiert´e d’avoir a` jouer un rˆole’ (AH ). This last image of the subject, as supposedly ‘celui qui a vu la mort de pr`es’ (AH ), rehearses all three of the psychological myths erected as a guiding framework for the representation of the subject’s growing theoretical knowledge of love as a tragic and violent act. The logic of the autobiographical figure has now been seemingly fully established and, indeed, rehearsed by a series of absolute archetypes. And yet, since the objects of desire dramatizing this structure are necessarily inaccessible, the framework given to Leiris’s life in these chapters has brought neither the subject nor the reader any closer to an actual confrontation with the world, even as it enumerates the fears, desires and actual wounds of the young Leiris. It comes as no surprise after all this that, when she finally appears in the text, Leiris’s real ‘initiatrice’ is given a fictional name, Kay, for her role is in fact that of tragic muse on which can be built the subject’s stereotypical and cathartic, rather than experiential, articulation. The quasi-religious relationship which takes place with Kay (AH – ) merely confirms the cultural paradigm already established around the figures of Judith and Lucretia. Kay and Leiris are part of a ‘jeunesse dor´ee’ that elevates its affectations to the status of a rite, regards itself as bandits or fauns or nymphs, and identifies with the collective sign of jazz. Within this mythology, there unfolds a miraculous relationship between Leiris and Kay, a woman who has already in her childhood displayed ‘quelque penchant pour le mysticisme’ (AH ). Their first meeting ends with Leiris suffering from an attack which he describes as an ‘horreur sacr´ee’ (AH ); their second is more successful, thanks to a theatrical travesty in which they swap clothes (AH ); and as their relationship eventually blossoms, we are told that they invent a whole mythology for themselves (AH ). Love, in short, represents ‘le seul moyen d’acc´eder au sacr´e’ (AH ). Indeed, the seeds of the eventual disintegration of the relationship are sown by this very logic, for ‘tenir le sacr´e c’est en mˆeme temps le profaner et finalement le d´etruire’ (AH ). As with Leiris’s typical process of assumption and neutralization, the double process of engagement and disengagement must be maintained here in order for the logic of the figure, raised by the secondary process, to be able to create a structure of repetition in which the stimulus can be mastered by the subject. Moreover, the physical nature of the sexual act vitiates the mystical state to which Leiris aspires, and, with the intrusion of a real Other, breaks open the symbolic structure of this autobiography, described by Leiris as ‘un domaine clos et bien a` moi dans lequel ma partenaire n’aurait pas a` s’immiscer’ (AH ). The

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subsection ‘Le Festin d’Holopherne’ (AH –) therefore immediately and tellingly transposes the final entry into manhood onto the abstract plane of the problems of representation. For the subject’s struggle for mastery is achieved ultimately on the level of the imaginary: ‘J’accordais une importance pr´epond´erante a` l’imaginaire, substitut du r´eel et monde qu’il nous est loisible de cr´eer’ (AH ). Leiris recognizes that it is above all ‘le miracle po´etique’ that grants a sense of surety or eternity to the subject of L’Age d’homme (AH ). The final acquisition of virility, far from concerning a real love (which is seen as a sort of capitulation and the abandonment of Prometheus’s pedestal), involves a mastering of his previous intellectual mauvaise foi. Having proved his virility (and recounted the death of his father), Leiris casts a corrosive gaze back over his surrealist poetry. He does not hesitate to describe surrealism’s demiurgal desire to transform the world mentally as a poor sort of mysticism, and he analyses lucidly the technical means used to achieve this anti-referential illusion: J’accordais une importance pr´epond´erante a` l’imaginaire, substitut du r´eel et monde qu’il nous est loisible de cr´eer. (. . .) Je croyais qu’au moyen des mots il est possible de d´etecter les id´ees et que l’on peut ainsi, de choc verbal inattendu en choc verbal inattendu, cerner l’absolu de proche et finalement, a` force de d´eclencher dans tous les sens des id´ees neuves, le poss´eder. (AH )

He then supplements this accurate if distinctly critical description of the aesthetics at the base of Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses with the laconic debunking of his general airs and pretensions. The chasteness which he ostentatiously displayed as part of the ascetic approach to poetic fervour was, he now recognizes, more likely due to a desire to suppress his sexual fears and obsessions. His furious belief in surrealism’s ‘poetic miracle’ had as much to do with a fear of death as any notion of aesthetic or political revolution. The sensual pleasure he took in the manipulation of language was equally used to displace any erotic activity. His famous act of surrealist bravery, when he shouted ‘Down with France’ and was nearly lynched by the public, merely to be rescued and then roughed up by the police, was in fact accomplished only with the aid of several aperitifs. He describes the idealist sense of love sustained at the heart of his surrealist ´ passion as a Utopia, ‘comme une image d’Epinal’ (AH ), a reference repeated when he mentions first encountering his future wife: ‘Une jeune fille (. . .) m’apparut tout a` coup comme l’incarnation ou le reflet de cette ´ figure d’Epinal que je nourrissais en moi secr`etement’ (AH –). Both references are highly significant given the use to which he has already

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´ put Epinal’s ‘Les Couleurs de la vie’. In all, the picture of the young Leiris consciously ‘living like a poet’ is presented with a mixture of embarrassment, 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 m’´eveillais presque chaque nuit en hurlant’ (AH ); ‘je fus pris soudain d’une crainte aigu¨e de devenir effectivement fou’ (AH –); ‘je fus saisi la nuit d’une angoisse panique’ (AH ). It is at this point of dangerous distress that we enter the final chapter, ‘Le Radueau de la M´eduse’, where, as the title suggests, psychoanalysis and ethnography emerge as the two intellectual disciplines which helped Leiris to overcome the self-destructive nature of living like a surrealist. Significantly, 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 L’Age d’homme. The end of L’Age d’homme therefore marks the completion of an apprenticeship, and an intellectual recuperation of surrealist hysteria. Leiris has ‘learned’ to rediscover his univocal self-identity: Ce que j’y ai appris surtout c’est que, mˆeme a` travers les manifestations a` premi`ere vue les plus h´et´eroclites, l’on se retrouve toujours identique a` soimˆeme, qu’il y a une unit´e dans une vie et que tout se ram`ene, quoi qu’on fasse, a` une petite constellation de choses qu’on tend a` reproduire, sous des formes diverses, un nombre illimit´e de fois. (AH )

The autobiography then ends with an epilogue composed of three dream sequences, followed by a series of footnotes dating from , of which the most significant in turn rejects the methodology of psychoanalysis in favour of an unadulterated existentialist commitment: ‘Aujourd’hui, je n’exprimerais plus cela en termes psychanalytiques et parlant castration. Au lieu d’un chˆatiment a` la fois craint et d´esir´e, j’invoquerais la peur que j’ai de m’engager, de prendre mes responsabilit´es’ (AH ). The closing appeal to existential responsibility allows Leiris’s autobiography to break through to a final self-portrait devoid of either surrealist or psychoanalytical phantasmagoria. Having painfully laid out the psychomythology culled from these theories of language in order to exemplify the cultural construction of his identity and in particular the formative forces of sexuality, Leiris can now disinvest himself from psychoanalysis as well as surrealism and avow a pure adherence to the existential principles embodied in Les Temps modernes, whose editorial board he had just joined. Indeed, Leiris appears not only to speak in

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the negative, but also to remove himself from the narrative in order to evaluate it from the illusory perspective of an extratextual present tense: ‘Aujourd’hui, je n’exprimerais plus cela (. . .)’. In one sense, it is inevitable that an existential ethics must carry out a series of prescriptions in order to achieve a singular representation and responsibility. What is ironic here is that a reflexive analysis of repression should end with a legislative instance of repression. In narratological terms, the closure of meaning which this autobiography seeks also creates a number of generic tensions. If an autobiography is a first-person discours and an objective document is a third-person histoire, Leiris’s desire to achieve authenticity leads the  footnote to create an illusory first-person histoire, in the sense that Leiris is spoken of as though he were an object, rather than the subject, of the narrative. Similarly, the homodiegetic tone is turned into a heterodiegetic outlook, in the sense that Leiris becomes a past phenomenon about whom the present narrative legislates. And lastly, the effect is to eclipse the personal, ignorant sujet de l’´enonciation with the blank authority of the sujet de l’´enonc´e whose identity becomes more formal and less crucially dependent on the utterance. The attainment of truth, referentiality and realism at the end of L’Age d’homme therefore has the effect of presenting self-identity as the dissolution of introspection within a prescriptive political statement. The reason for such a prescription of autobiography can perhaps be revealed if we concentrate on why L’Age d’homme should use and then criticize psychoanalysis. ‘Aujourd’hui je n’exprimerais plus cela en termes psychanalytiques et parlant castration.’ Leiris’s ethics of language logically criticizes psychoanalytic expression in the same way that his denunciation of surrealism focused on its misuse of language. Having used psychoanalysis to ‘liquidate’ the language of surrealism, Leiris now imposes the image of a committed intellectual in an attempt to control the unconscious released by a psychoanalytic attentiveness to language. In both cases, the tension that arises is due to the fact that the stubbornly subversive nature of the unconscious refuses simply to conform to purposeful analysis. As Freud states in The Interpretation of Dreams: ‘Words, since they are the nodal points of numerous ideas, may be regarded as predestined to ambiguity, and the neuroses (e.g. in framing obsessions and phobias), no less than dreams, make unashamed use of the advantages thus offered by words for purposes of condensation and disguise.’ The conscious use of psychoanalysis to ‘condenser, a` l’´etat presque brut, un ensemble de faits et d’images que je me refusais a` exploiter en laissant travailler dessus mon imagination’ (AH ) and so to dissociate oneself from desire,

Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography to L’Age d’homme

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therefore comes up against the active resistance of the unconscious to the goal-oriented and cathartic nature of such an intellectual undertaking. The final denegation of psychoanalysis therefore provides the solution to the problem of how to achieve a closed identity, since denegation is a ‘proc´ed´e par lequel le sujet, tout en formulant un de ses d´esirs, pens´ees, sentiments jusqu’ici refoul´e, continue a` s’en d´efendre en niant qu’il lui appartienne’. L’Age d’homme uses psychoanalysis, then, to offer a structurally reactive portrait. But the linguistic moments wherein the text’s unconscious resists recuperation also reveal a phantasmic portrait and a second-degree dramatization of the mechanics of repression. At this point, like Freud, I begin to read backwards, regressing from L’Age d’homme’s legislative final ´enonc´e to the actual dynamics of ´enonciation. I resist L’Age d’homme’s double chronology (the textual emergence of Leiris into manhood, and the metatextual progress from surrealism through psychoanalysis and ethnography to existentialism) which appeals to me on a ‘natural’ and a cultural level, and so is physically as well as intellectually seductive, and concentrate my reading precisely on resistance. It is the narrative’s points of maximum resistance, used to structure its emancipatory story, which also reveal how the drama of the subject’s entry into the symbolic order is only ever wilfully concluded, in this case by the prefatory ‘De la litt´erature’ (written later) and the concluding  footnote. I have dealt with the structural aspect of this censorship in an article. So I shall focus here on how it is in the language of self-identity that we can see most clearly this Spaltung, or splitting of the ego. The split shows up in those specific moments when language resists being fully appropriated by the self-identity that wishes to say ‘je’, that is to say in the moments of non-coincidence between the sujet de l’´enonc´e and the sujet de l’´enonciation. These moments reveal the difference between the finished subject of representation (the product of L’Age d’homme’s signifieds) and the unfinished subject-in-language (the product of L’Age d’homme’s signifiers). In other words, the unconscious. Given L’Age d’homme’s assumption and denegation of a work like The Interpretation of Dreams, it is obvious that Leiris’s own interpretation of dreams will most dramatically represent this simultaneous existence of wish and censorship. Reading a` rebours brings me firstly to the three dream sequences at the end of L’Age d’homme. Significantly, they lie outside the story of the struggle to achieve manhood, the first of them being ‘a dream of “emancipation”’ (AH ): their presence en exergue means that they signify precisely those irreconciliable elements that must be noted but expelled from the autobiographical act of L’Age d’homme. In each of these

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Texts and contexts

dreams, the chronology of ‘manhood’ is disrupted: in the first dream, Leiris is stoned to death by his spiritual father, Masson, and experiences simultaneous agony and pleasure; in the second, he becomes ‘a turban woman’  who wishes to die in ecstasy; in the last dream, ‘l’ombilic saignant’, he reveals his mistress’s ‘secret wound’ and then buries his head between her thighs, as though to re-enter the womb. These desires move in the opposite direction to L’Age d’homme’s conscious progress towards ‘the banal reality’ and ‘dead calm’ of heterosexual maturity. At the heart of this conflicting representation, ‘la femme turban’ literally smuggles in a particularly fertile network of images. ‘Dans un pays vraisemblablement colonial, participant a` un complot je fais de la contrebande’ (AH ). Leiris’s fellow smuggler is a co-participant of a political circle to which he had belonged. After a dreaming scene in a caf´e which is the rendezvous of these conspirators and smugglers, Leiris finds himself seated at the desk where he is presently writing down this dream. He has laboriously drawn a series of calligraphic signs on a large sheet of paper which becomes a cloth and then a woman’s face due to a mouth that also happens to be drawn on it. He winds the cloth around his head like a turban and, bare-chested, freezes in ecstasy. It now occurs to him that he looks like the rajah whose suicide was recounted on pp. –. His wife, in a very long white nightgown, stands beside him like a ghost, finally realizes the meaning of these accumulated signs and murmurs with unspeakable sadness: ‘Ah! c’´etait donc cela . . . ’. Still in ecstasy, Leiris dreams that there is nothing left to do now but to die. This is a stunning alternative vision of autobiography. We see Leiris literally write his own body in a way that confronts every one of the formative elements in L’Age d’homme’s psycho-realist story. Exotic self-creation and self-annihilation, autoerotism and the revelation of the ecstatically feminine Leiris, the phallic and phantasmic role of his image and the admission of denegated aesthetic and political affiliations (specifically the Rousselian ecstasy and surrealist activity of the signifier [‘suicide’]) are smuggled in and revealed to Leiris himself as the persistant chthonian unconscious at the heart of L’Age d’homme’s existentialist ‘manhood’. Confirmation of the pervasive presence of this unconscious can be found if I now locate the other previous instances of dreams in the text. Each of them is related in some way to the others, such that my backward reading reveals a complex network of alternative referential points for Leiris’s supposed psychosexual identity. Going back from the ‘femme turban’ dream, which is described as one of the last apparitions of Judith and Lucretia, I encounter a dream as the epigraph to chapter , ‘Lucr`ece

Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography to L’Age d’homme



et Judith’ (AH –), which is the first simultaneous appearance of both heroines. The latter dream is in turn connected to the Masson dream of emancipation by way of the common theme of lapidation, and equally to an earlier dream, in chapter  (AH ), via a common world of antiquity and play on the signifier ‘ravin’. This latter dream is connected in turn to ‘l’ombilic saignant’ in that Leiris again places his head between his mistress’s thighs. And at the beginning of this second chapter, ‘Antiquit´es’ (AH ), there is yet another dream of women, in which they predict the future, are dressed in long white shifts and are in fact vampires, all details which link them to the Judith-like image of Leiris’s wife (to which he played the part of Lucretia) in the ‘femme turban’ scene. Within this phantasmatic network, the repition of ‘ravin’ is particularly interesting, for it constructs another calligraphic identity in which the signification produced by Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses is readmitted to the autobiographical process. In the first dream, Leiris kisses the ‘raie m´ediane’ of his mistress and pronounces the words ‘La Guerre de Troie’, which he interprets as associated with ‘d´etroit’ and so with ‘ravin des fesses’ (AH ). In the second dream (AH –), Leiris encounters a deep ravine which he cannot cross: ‘ses parois – si abruptes qu’elles ont l’air absolument verticales – semblent anim´ees d’un mouvement constant de va-et-vient, en sens inverse l’une de l’autre’. It is Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses’s anti-dictionary which provides the common reference-point: ‘ (V entrouVre son raVin, sa ValVe ou son Vagin.)’ (MSM ). The undermining of the subject of representation by an anti-referential definition here brings into being the subject-in-language denegated within L’Age d’homme. Instead of registering only the task-oriented and legislative aspects of the latter dream (Leiris needs to cross the ravine; there is a threat of lapidation or petrification) as the ostensible narrative of L’Age d’homme would have me do, I can now read the literal inscription of Leiris’s psycho-sexual identity in the ‘calligraphic signs’ lying on the surface of the text (like the African masks and sculptures lying on the ground in the ‘femme turban’ scene, and in anticipation of Leiris’s later recognition in his essay ‘A travers “Tristes Tropiques”’ of how this literal mark of the body is a phantom representation of a repressed identity ): Voyage, Visit´ee, Vue, chaˆıne, Vrai, fˆuts, raVin, Verticales, Va-et-Vient, inVerse, Volcanique, paraˆıt, Vent, abˆıme, V´erit´e, rˆeVe. Incidentally, the circumflexes here should also be read as ‘V’s: justification for this comes directly from Leiris’s book of dreams, Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour: ‘cet accent n’´etant pas autre chose qu’un v plus petit et renvers´e’

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Texts and contexts

(N ). The entry goes on: ‘le rˆeve est arachn´een’, a significant phrase in the light of the alternative structuration of identity being established here, and, as we shall see, in the light of Biffures’s opening remarks about the subject-in-language. The last two terms encapsulate the alternative truth incised into the text by the unconscious, an insistent and complex truth that is alien to realism and responsibility, and intimately bound to sex and death. By attending precisely to the ‘misuse of language’ denegated in surrealism and psychoanalysis, we can read the dramatic ‘anderer Schauplatz’ or different scene of action in L’Age d’homme, present in dreams and those instances of the signifier beyond the control of waking ideational life. Gradually a new set of truths emerges. We can see how, beneath the consciously constructed subject as representation of L’Age d’homme’s ´enonc´e, an insistent subject-in-language which is resistant to ethical prescriptions constantly erupts in the ´enonciation. We recognize how L’Age d’homme’s denegation of surrealist and then psychoanalytic language, designed to bring about existentialist referentiality, is undone by Leiris’s total desiring investment in the language and methodology of both practices, an emanation that actually produces more of a ‘bull’s horn’ than does any conscious cultural gestation. And lastly, we can see how autobiography and psychoanalysis set up their own resistance, resurfacing as an unfinished rather than finished state, as a discourse under constant construction rather than as a history of commitment. It is not surprising, then, that Leiris’s next autobiographical volume, Biffures, will not continue where L’Age d’homme’s evolutionary tale left off. Instead, it returns to the beginning, a beginning which, as L’Age d’homme ultimately betrays, lies not in writing as conscious act of self-determination, but in language as unconsciously determining play.

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Positional play: La R`egle du jeu

La R`egle du jeu differs from L’Age d’homme in one immediately obvious respect. L’Age d’homme builds up a composite image of the subject from a relatively static position governed by the ego. The thirty-year span of La R`egle du jeu, however, is spread over four volumes, and as a result the autobiography not only charts the forces acting on the structuration of the self, but is itself profoundly affected on a formal level by such forces. This can be seen most immediately in the different organization of material in each volume, as the autobiography works towards a coincidence of artistic construction and living circumstance, only to shatter into a less ambitious ‘constellation’ in the final volume. Biffures thus has eight chapters, each one marking a stage in Leiris’s linguistic education. Fourbis has three chapters, dealing with Leiris’s attempt to engage increasingly with the world. Fibrilles collects four numbered sections under one delirious heading, ‘La fi`ere, la fi`ere . . . ’, as it seeks to fuse the subject-in-language and the world into one revolutionary ´enonciation. Frˆele Bruit survives in the wake of the crisis point and failure through which we pass in Fibrilles, offering a constellation of passages whose structural logic is given over to a ‘marvellous’ confluence of self and world, rather than to the more ambitious and willed programme of recapitulation and conclusion originally envisaged under the title Fibules. More important than this temporal phenomenon, however, is the fundamental philosophical shift which it betokens. For if L’Age d’homme’s aim is to reveal the structural determination of presence in an ostensibly cognitive and clinical manner, La R`egle du jeu begins rather with the knowledge that, as an autobiography, it is ‘un jeu a` la recherche de sa r`egle’ (to quote the bande publicitaire for Biffures) and so is actively involved affectively and sensually in the structuration of self-identity. Paradoxically, therefore, given the title of La R`egle du jeu, this autobiography’s rule of the game, in contrast to the cultural logics used to structure the self in L’Age d’homme, is that game and play are the rule of composition. This amounts to 

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Texts and contexts

more than the reintroduction of an ebullient note into a structure that anxiously seeks to bring its own centre into being. L’Age d’homme’s mythic presentation of the subject explained every event as an exemplification of momentary derivation from a tyrannical norm which was taught to the young Leiris by a powerful socio-cultural machine. In La R`egle du jeu, on the other hand, derivation is the norm. As the title and opening of Biffures make plain, bifurcation and erasure mark the first tingling, sensual moment of self-identity, and the notion of a self-intuition which lies beyond, before or after this structure of difference is openly played with as a myth. Rather than simply suffer this myth again, and so seek to inscribe a subject of representation within a ‘suite logique ou chronologique’, Leiris acknowledges in La R`egle du jeu’s alternative definition, that of ‘constellation’ (FB ), that the autobiographical identity which will perhaps have emerged by the end of the work will be one subject to a ludic elaboration that Leiris does not control. When it is finally finished, he writes, or rather when it is provisionally finished, that is to say interrupted, the game itself will have produced its own rule, an autobiographical figure that will ultimately emerge as the almost musical ground to La R`egle du jeu’s playful variations on the theme of producing self-representation. This move from a visual to a musical notion of composition explains why, towards the end of La R`egle du jeu, we can be shown that there is no rule of the game, for instead of the visually necessary fact of a final portrait, which is the ultimate presentation of a signified content, what we experience and enjoy is more the musically necessary conclusion to a signifying form, one whose rule does not transcend a fugal space of difference: Diversion, alibi, rite purificatoire: cet ouvrage dont j’attendais qu’une r`egle en e´ merge, mais qui ne m’aide ni a` faire ni a` me faire . . . Laborieusement calligraphique, cet ouvrage qui, malignement, me consume au lieu de me fortifier . . . Mesure des hauts et des bas, machine tournant a` vide, cet ouvrage qui ne m’apporte aucune maˆıtrise et dont je ne suis pas mˆeme le maˆıtre. (FB )

This move from L’Age d’homme’s synthetic and visual composition of identity to La R`egle du jeu’s syntactic and musical form of unmastered production obviously carries a range of formal and moral implications. The most striking of these is La R`egle du jeu’s relative desacralization of the self. In spite of the secular convictions of L’Age d’homme, the general conception of the subject in that book is a sacred one, borne out by a confessional tone, morally centred form and fearful reverence in the face of a select number of tragic icons. By way of contrast, La R`egle du jeu’s

Positional play: La R`egle du jeu



discursive formations, built from the structural patterns of play, may preserve an essential sense of mystery and otherness, but are not tied to the teleology of absolution. This absence of a theological interpretation of identity is reflected in La R`egle du jeu’s cultural representations. Whereas the erudite and abstract imagery of L’Age d’homme’s scenarios evokes a tragic and metaphysical dualism that places the work, for all its Freudian and ethnographic decentring of the subject, within a long tradition of confessional literature, the temporal unfolding of La R`egle du jeu, an open-ended structuration punctuated by the event and spaced out by delay, generates a social commœdia of differentiality and triangularity. If the existence of La R`egle du jeu as a phenomenon in Leiris’s life provides a ‘diversion’ from the daily grind, then, the existence of La R`egle du jeu as a moto perpetuo writing activity, or ‘machine tournant a` vide’, more importantly represents Leiris as the cultural effect of the structure of diversion, a diversion that exists from the beginning. The unlocalizable nature of identity which this represents (the lack of a nexus within the text and the lack of a tradition on which to depend) in turn affects La R`egle du jeu’s poetics. Just as chronology in L’Age d’homme is overlaid by a molecular structure which forms an autobiographical langue that explains each instance of parole within it, so the metaphysics of the self in L’Age d’homme privileges a series of cultural metaphors and a signified content. In contrast to this montage technique, whose finished product is a text which provides a model subject, both formally and morally, La R`egle du jeu’s rhizomatic ‘diversion’ situates the subject as the constantly discovered trace or effect of the textuality of autobiography. As a result, the inspirational nature of metonymy, the signifier and signifiance has a greater part to play than in L’Age d’homme in the active production of the subject as a parole whose only provisionally conceptualizable nature cannot be enclosed within a predictable single langue. As we move from archetype to arche-trace, therefore, so the language of art in L’Age d’homme becomes the art of language in La R`egle du jeu. BIFFURES

Central to emergence of the self is the changing perceptions which occur within La R`egle du jeu of the relationship between consciousness, language and the world. The first volume, Biffures, returns to the childhood already delineated in L’Age d’homme, but here the structural limits of Leiris’s human consciousness are generated by linguistic events. A true subject-in-language therefore unfolds through Leiris’s close textual

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Texts and contexts

analysis of his existence within and through language. Developing the productivity of the signifier seen in Glossaire, consciousness is here shown to emerge as the struggle to relate one articulation to another through the careful charting of bifurcations (bifurs) and erasures (biffures) indicated in the book’s title. Within Biffures, each chapter therefore marks a further stage in this linguistic education, moving from an initial confrontation between the private and the social demands that shape one’s relation to language to the recognition that autobiography attempts to reconcile these demands through the creation of a phantasmic object. The linguistic system which unfolds brings a nominalist approach to the world into contact with the idea of language as a symbolic system and with the necessity of engagement. As Biffures reads Leiris’s past in linguistic terms, as opposed to the thematic approach of L’Age d’homme, so there is a reassessment of the specific linguistic approaches to self-representation advocated by surrealist poetics and ethnographic reciprocity. Whereas these were placed in tension with one another in L’Age d’homme, Biffures has absorbed both into a new concept of subjectivity in language. Biffures’s celebration, rather than denegation, of the productivity of the signifier has the fundamental effect of displacing the chronological limits of the subject of representation in L’Age d’homme with the active unfolding of a Rousselian chain of thought. Just as Roussel had attempted, in Locus Solus and Impressions d’Afrique, to create a story from the interval between the two versions of the one ambiguous signifier, so in La R`egle du jeu Leiris initially displays self-identity as constructed from a network of signifiers. His approach to documentation will therefore lead to a constellation of similar phenomena or series of ‘´equations de faits’, as in L’Age d’homme’s collage-effect, but with the difference that the autobiography is not a narrative joining one representational image of subjectivity to another, but a discourse generated from instances of language which are seen to create subjectivity. Equally, Biffures incorporates the major lessons of ethnography. It was in the context of the Coll`ege de sociologie that Leiris first synthesized several fragments into ‘Le Sacr´e dans la vie quotidienne’, thereafter incorporated into Biffures. In recognizing the symbolic structure of language and the way in which self-consciousness is therefore dependent on the Other, La R`egle du jeu in particular retains the ethnographic aim of reciprocity. The beginning of Biffures states how subjectivity is dependent on the exchange-system of potlatch: Car pour celui qui e´ crit, toute la question est l`a: faire passer dans la tˆete ou dans le cœur d’autrui les concretions – jusque-l`a valables seulement pour

Positional play: La R`egle du jeu



lui – d´epos´ees, par le pr´esent ou le pass´e de sa vie, au fond de sa propre tˆete ou de son propre cœur; communiquer, pour valoriser; faire circuler, pour que la chose ainsi lanc´ee aux autres vous revienne un peu plus prestigieuse, tels ces boucliers des Indiens du Nord-Oeust am´ericain qui se trouvent dou´es d’une valeur d’autant plus grande qu’ils ont fait l’objet de plus nombreux e´ changes c´er´emoniels. (Bi )

Biffures therefore absorbs surrealist and ethnographic theories of language into an autobiographical form of reflection 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 R`egle du jeu shows the fundamental astonishment of the subject-inlanguage: not only Leiris’s astonishment at language, but his astonishment by language (together with the temporality and otherness revealed within language), a language which creates Leiris’s consciousness rather than being seen in a localizable way to confirm or challenge its existence. The history of the subject in La R`egle du jeu will therefore be the history of an articulation: the gradual move from an initial utterance to the full unfolding of a potentially infinite, and consequently agonistic, system of political, moral and aesthetic discourse. Biffures’s 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’, ‘Habill´e-en-cour’) into reading and writing stages (‘Alphabet’, ‘Pers´ephone’) and onwards to the increasingly artistic activities of fabulation, self-representation and metatextual reflection (‘Il e´ tait une fois’, ‘Dimanche’, ‘Tambour-Trompette’). In this way, autobiography adopts a graphological rather than biological history, placing emphasis on the ´enonciation rather than the ´enonc´e, the language of self-consciousness rather than the cultural image of selfhood. This is the most striking difference between L’Age d’homme and Biffures, and it is a difference which, as we shall see, is dramatically displayed by La R`egle du jeu’s very first sentence. In addition, the linguistic reflexivity 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’. Biffures’s autobiographical reflection on the mind’s linguistic markers transforms the Rimbaldian ‘d´er`eglement 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

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Texts and contexts

dissatisfaction with the bureaucratic objectivity of ethnography (as on Biffures, p. ). Biffures begins with the point beyond which L’Afrique fantˆome’s scientific pretensions broke down, namely with the recognition that ethnographic reciprocity not only provokes and improves selfexpression but is the actual structural condition of self-identity. Ethnography’s 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: ‘j’y trouve l’expression la plus pure de moi-mˆeme, dans la mesure o`u il m’a frapp´e par ce qu’il rec´elait d’´etranget´e . . . ’ (Bi ). We come now to the book’s beginning, which we need to quote in full. ‘ . . . ’ Sur le sol impitoyable de la pi`ece (salon? salle a` manger? tapis clou´e aux ramages fan´es ou bien tapis mobile au quelconque d´ecor dans lequel j’inscrivais des palais, des sites, des continents, vrai kal´eidoscope dont mon enfance jouait, y agen¸cant des constructions f´eeriques, tel un canevas pour des mille et une nuits que ne m’ouvraient alors les feuillets d’aucun livre? plancher nu, bois cir´e aux lin´eaments plus fonc´es, coup´es net par la noirceur rigide des rainures d’o`u je m’amusais, parfois, a` tirer des flocons de poussi`ere, quand j’avais eu l’aubaine de quelque e´ pingle chue des mains de la couturi`ere a` la journ´ee?) sur le sol irr´ecusable – et sans aˆ me – de la pi`ece (velout´e ou ligneux, endimanch´e ou d´epouill´e, propice aux courses de l’imagination ou a` des jeux plus m´ecaniques), dans le salon ou la salle a` manger, dans la p´enombre ou la lumi`ere (suivant qu’il s’agissait ou non de cette portion de la maison dont les meubles sont normalement prot´eg´es par des housses et toutes les modestes richesses soustraites souvent, par le barrage des volets, aux attaques du soleil), dans cet enclos privil´egi´e gu`ere accessible qu’aux 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 s’assemblait pour le rite des repas quotidiens, le soldat e´ tait tomb´e. (Bi )

This remarkable opening transforms all those elements traditionally associated with autobiography which are still respected by L’Age d’homme. On one level, the detailed picture of a bourgeois family interior, wherein a solitary child is seen quietly at play, reinforces the realist representation of subjectivity. But prior even to the emergence of such a subject of representation, the autobiography is transformed by the location of a subjectivity within the operations of language. The paragraph programmatically displays the double principle of bifurcation and erasure in such a way as to show how subjectivity is embodied by the phenomenological

Positional play: La R`egle du jeu



act of remembering rather than by the realist object of remembrance. The physical space in which the child’s consciousness emerges is one constructed from a series of choices (salon/salle, tapis clou´e/tapis mobile, plancher nu/bois cir´e, p´enombre/lumi`ere, etc.). The passivity displayed in L’Age d’homme’s opening realist ´enonc´e (‘Je viens d’avoir trente-quatre ans, la moiti´e de la vie’) is replaced by the activity of Biffures’s opening ´enonciation, as the geographical and biological limitations placed on a subject of representation become the graphological possibilities of a subject-inlanguage. The picture that consequently emerges is that of the autobiographical writer in gestation, for the bifurcations move us subtly from the composed image of a bourgeois childhood to the compositional gestures associated with the creation of art. The sentence shifts from the realist details of a bourgeois interior to the active inscription of imaginary loci (line  in the book), from respectful representation to desiring construction (line ), from carpet to canvas and book (lines –). From the beginning the child enjoys and manipulates this ‘enclos privil´egi´e’ like an artist composing a work, adding things, picking bits out of it, creating a kaleidoscopic presence. Leiris repeats all of this on the level of the sentence’s construction, and he adds three further cultural elements, which are blended here, rather than contrasted, as they were in L’Age d’homme: firstly, the perspective of sacred sociology, with its concentration on social ritual, significant and sancrosanct location and small ritualistic gesture; secondly, the productivity of the surrealist signifier and especially the Rousselian creation of narrative (for we realize only at the end of the paragraph and after an inevitable delay how, on the level of language, we have moved from ‘sol de la’ to ‘le soldat’); and lastly, the cultural, rather than biological, origins which in fact lie at the heart of any self-representation. This last point is evinced in the practice of language and the active research which go to make up this opening account of the self, and can be carried on to provide not only a playful version of a famous autobiographical antecedent, Rousseau’s ‘peigne cass´e’, but also a subtle allusion to the debt owed by all modern self-representation to Proust: the child in the darkened room, the soldier (recalling Golo), the kaleidoscope and the Arabian Nights, which are all glimpsed through the passage’s ‘barrage des volets’, are surely designed to recall the opening pages of A la recherche du temps perdu, as a way of confirming, from a writer’s perspective, the creation by language of self-identity. The rest of the chapter develops and complicates this idea. Upon retrieving the soldier which has fallen, the child Leiris discovers to his delight that it is not broken. He expresses his happiness with the

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Texts and contexts

exclamation: ‘ . . . Reusement!’. He is corrected, and told that one says ‘heureusement’. In this single moment, the veil is rent, semiotics revealed, and the child’s closed world frighteningly socialized. This brief chapter closes on Leiris’s recapitulation and explanation of the astonishment: Sur le sol de la salle a` manger ou du salon, le soldat, de plomb ou de cartonpˆate, vient de tomber. Je me suis e´ cri´e: ‘ . . . Reusement!’. L’on m’a repris. Et, un instant, je demeure interdit, en proie a` une sorte de vertige. Car ce mot mal prononc´e, et dont je viens de d´ecouvrir qu’il n’est pas en r´ealit´e ce que j’avais cru jusque-l`a, m’a mis en e´ tat d’obscur´ement sentir – grˆace a` l’espˆece de d´eviation, de d´ecalage qui s’est trouv´e de ce fait imprim´e a` ma pens´ee – en quoi le langage articul´e, tissu arachn´een de mes rapports avec les autres, me d´epasee, poussant de tous cˆot´es ses antennes myst´erieuses. (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 child’s cry unwittingly forces him to recognize how symbolic reality precedes and exceeds him. The long opening description at the beginning of the chapter was therefore not a mere prelude to the child’s dramatic pronouncement, but the already established existence of a (linguistic) reality to which the child’s consciousness was then introduced. Leiris the child can no longer play within a closed and prestigious world, sustained with a self-sufficient cry unencumbered by social communication. For the replacement of ‘reusement’ by ‘heureusement’ introduces the structure of consensual language to Leiris, who is henceforth literally ‘interdit’. The exuberance of ‘ . . . reusement’, a cry only of pleasure demanded and fulfilled, is inserted into a system of precise significations. 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 himself 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 L’Age d’homme sought to embody manhood. The difference between the two, however, is fundamental. L’Age d’homme’s concern to forge a finished subject, a single image presented through

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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 L’Age d’homme, the subject ultimately seeks to coincide with his representation, here the opposite occurs: self-identity arises only at the moment of non-identity, the ‘deviation or interval’ stamped on Leiris’s mind. In place of the intellectual signification produced in L’Age d’homme, 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 signifiance, ‘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. “Signifiance” is the without-endedness of the possible operations in a given field 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 first sentence, makes plain that this subject as signifiance 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: indeed, the fall of Leiris’s toy soldier and his exclamation ‘ . . . Reusement!’ can be read as secondary to, if not inconsequent upon, the book’s opening setting, a setting constructed from irreducible choices. The first 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, otherness is sustained by an irreducible and already operative ‘d´eviation’ or ‘d´ecalage’. These structural points are borne out by La R`egle du jeu’s suspensive opening. On a semantic level, the sentence’s main clause leads inexorably to a physical event, the fall of the soldier. This in turn stands as a metaphor for the chapter’s more crucial phenomenological event, the emergence of singularity with the recognition of semantics: ‘Voici que ce vague vocable . . . est, par un hasard, promu au rˆole de chaˆınon de tout un cycle s´emantique’ (Bi ). On the empirical level of reading

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Texts and contexts

the event’s content, then, the passage conforms to the structure of a detective story or the resolution of a psychological enigma: the sentence negotiates a series of preliminary choices and qualifications, and with increasing confidence localizes, clarifies and characterizes an ethnographic space. Assumed intentionality is situated by a dramatic event that opens the way to the chapter’s eventual expression of knowledge (‘une allure de d´ecouverte, comme le d´echirement brusque d’un voile ou l’´eclatement de quelque v´erit´e’ (Bi )) and a general sense of self-presence. Syntactically, the biffures of this main clause confirm this intellection: two phrases dependent on ‘sur’ (‘sur le sol impitoyable de la pi`ece’, ‘sur le sol irr´ecusable – et sans aˆ me – de la pi`ece’) and two sets of phrases dependent on a double ‘dans’ (‘dans le salon ou la salle a` manger, dans la p´enombre ou la lumi`ere’; ‘dans cet enclos privil´egi´e . . . 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, hesitant beginnings, the first parenthesis sets up two huge questions in which we are none the less given an increasing amount of information and personal involvement; the second parenthesis progresses from questions to brief differentiating descriptions; and the third more confidently provides authoritative information in a phrase almost as long as each of the large questions. The paragraph’s secondary phrases, even as they proliferate within the structure of the sentence, can therefore be read as confirming the main clause’s increasingly structural location of consciousness. On a purely syntagmatic level, however, the sentence’s main clause evidently leads not to the replacement of pre-lapsarian play by knowledge, but to the actual germination of a playful structure of potentiality and plurality. In this light, it is significant that the chapter’s conclusion describes the singular truth revealed to Leiris as a ‘tissu arachn´een’ (Bi ). Once we view the passage’s structural qualities in this, non-Hegelian, light, consciousness is seen not to pre-exist or come to dominate a materialist conception of a burgeoning world whose meaning here lies in its potentially infinite form, rather than its increasingly finite content. Instead, the purely productive nature of the passage’s playful structure, the affective rather than cerebral ‘enjoyment’ and ‘joy’ associated with these biffures, and the chapter’s climax in the revelation of a mystery rather than a certainty (‘le langage articul´e, tissu arachn´een de mes rapports avec les autres, me d´epasse, poussant de tous cˆot´es ses antennes myst´erieuses’ (Bi )), together with the sense of plurality and sociality, rather than singularity, which these qualities all suggest, point to an event which

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comes to the subject from a radical otherness. This other, which has not been predicted or accommodated by the subject or the passage, is witnessed 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 finally to be brought face to face with an event which he has not foreseen and to which he reacts with grammatical passivity (‘le soldat e´ tait tomb´e’). The open potentiality which this displays locates Leiris’s 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 ‘syst`eme subtil de distinguo’, as he earlier defined the sacred in ‘Le Sacr´e dans la vie quotidienne’ (S ). The structure of La R`egle du jeu’s opening therefore shows that the condition for the emergence of singularity is the revelation of a primary and irreducible otherness. This otherness is confirmed by the parentheses in a number of concrete ways. Their ‘`a rallonges’ effect on the structure of the sentence leads the main clause’s intellectual formulation to be physically overwhelmed by the semantically secondary nature of the world’s potentiality and plurality. The main sentence’s attempts to establish a metaphor of consciousness are dominated by the size of the metonymic interruptions: the first parenthesis, consisting of ninety-seven words, occurs after the main thesis has advanced by no more than seven words; the second interruption, seventeen words long, is once again larger than the ten words given by the resumed main phrase; and the final parenthesis, 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 phrase’s 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 intentionality’s structuring powers, the main clause contrasts poorly with the parentheses from a grammatical point of view. The first three parts of the main phrase are structured by an extremely elementary and repetitious use of basic prepositions, nouns and conjunctions, flavoured only by two adjectives, both of which significantly relate to harsh and impersonal judgement. Only in the final, 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 final inclusion of two verbs which, while suggesting a sense of coalescence (‘renfermait’, ‘s’assemblait’) 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 final part of the main phrase with the main question of the first 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 first parenthesis, but the latter contests the dead hand of the former’s move to totality with a potentially infinite 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 specific sense it is in the parenthesis that we first obtain the basic traditional grammatical constituents of an autobiography’s beginnings: the first-person noun and personal pronoun, the noun ‘enfance’, and a verb of inscription (‘j’inscrivais’) together, significantly, with further verbs relating to enjoyment and addition, and nouns relating to books and construction. Even grammatically, then, autobiography can be seen to originate here in a parenthesis of potentiality and otherness rather than in the supposedly central and self-sufficient expression of self-presence. And even this structural tension is predicted in the first parenthesis, which itself engineers a constant play between a fixed, 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 clou´e’ is contrasted with a ‘tapis mobile’, and while the three words of the former’s qualifying phrase at best can offer ‘ramages fan´es’, the latter throws up a forty-word paean to the ‘vrai kal´eidoscope 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 fluff out of the cracks. The innocence of such activity itself stands in playful contrast to the signification of this opening passage. La R`egle du jeu begins by happily displaying how the subject originates in diversion and is structured by diff´erance. The supposed first event of intentionality, whose climax is self-expression, is immediately seen to depend on a prior space of deviation or interval. Autobiography’s first presence is not that of a subject or an object, a self or a world, intention or intentum; it is that of

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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-sufficiency). 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 s´emantique’ and a fundamental ‘r´ealit´e . . . commune et ouverte . . . , partag´ee . . . , socialis´ee’ (Bi ). There is both nostalgia and exuberance in this ethnographic recognition. 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 mythical first moment of knowledge, ‘l’´eclatement de quelque v´erit´e’ (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 reflected 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 prediscursive state of pure feeling) and the fertile, overflowing 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 subject’s historicity. The event stands, rather, as a metaphor of the structural condition of the present ‘je’ of autobiography, one that results dramatically from a combination of recollection and protension, loss and projection, memory and learning. The flow which this suggests indicates how ‘ . . . Reusement!’ acts finally 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 configuration or ‘interjection’ of the subject’s disposition. Function and diachrony therefore both form the structural heart of subjectivity, and generate a first moment of non-intentionality and duration.

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Texts and contexts

‘ . . . Reusement!’ demonstrates, then, how autobiography’s rule of the game is an infinite signifying form originating in the other rather than a totalizing signified content posited by the ego. The final ‘truth’ and ‘mystery’ facing Leiris at the end of the episode is therefore the simultaneous sense of impossible freedom and impossible responsibility generated by this first event. In the rest of Biffures the self-proclaiming centre of autobiographical structure, namely the idea of the subject as a controlling and reducing identity, will represent itself as charting this revelation of the structure of structure, the subject’s own (double) structuration. The representation of such a double bind therefore involves the continued 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 represents something as such; instead, each one embodies a further defining event in which the autobiographical subject finds himself in a heterogeneity without ontological foundation. Most significantly, then, each impossible object is also primarily an ambiguous name.   In subsequent chapters, Leiris learns the complexities of significant names encountered in childhood: ‘Clairet’, ‘Blaise’, ‘tetable’, ‘Mo¨ıse’, ‘Sa¨ul’. Each acts as a productive m´econnaissance 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 subject’s position within a discursive formation rather than in the nature of the world. It is ‘Alphabet’ which shows this most clearly. Leiris’s early education centres on a reading of Genesis, and he is fully aware of the pedagogical and ideological reasons behind the choice of text: Gen`ese: modelage de la nature et de l’homme dans leur prime jeunesse; peut-on rˆever lecture plus astucieusement appropri´ee au tout premier modelage de l’esprit d’un enfant que cet A.B.C. si antique et si fruste de l’enfance du monde? (Bi )

In particular, this ‘Histoire sainte’ places each proper noun in a divinely established structure of hierarchy and development. This squares

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perfectly with the general pedagogical aim of the programme to which he is subject, which involves being able to recognize the place of one’s own name through the ability to name all other things: ‘la cruelle conquˆete de ce moi qui devait d’abord se perfectionner dans l’art de nommer les choses’ (Bi ). But as Leiris reads through the divine ordering of names, Ca¨ın, Mo¨ıse, Esa¨u, Sa¨ul, the m´econnaissance thrown up by the dieresis exposes the biffure that exists within the elocutionary affirmation of a stable pronominal identity. Leiris confirms that what is at stake is therefore not just the nature of the name, but the very identity it produces: ´ Echangeant ‘Moisse’ pour ‘Mo¨ıse’, j’´eprouvais un vertige, parce que ce n’´etait pas seulement un mot qui se d´efaisait, mais une partie des choses qui se m´etamorphosait, un changement subit d’identit´e qui, dans la personne mˆeme du proph`ete, s’op´erait. (Bi )

Education’s attempt to perfect an intentional structure in Leiris comes up against his awareness of the ‘ramifications’, ‘d´ecalage’, ‘´ecart’, ‘l´esion’ and ‘r´esonances diverses’ existing at the heart of the Mo¨ıse/Moisse biffure (Bi ). It is this latter field that will dictate what Foucault has called ‘son lieu et sa loi d’apparition’. One of the best examples in ‘Alphabet’ of such a place and law of ´ u’ (Bi –). Leiris recalls emergence is encapsulated in the name of ‘Esa¨ how Jacob buys the birthright (‘le droit d’aˆınesse’) of his elder brother, Esau, for a plate of lentils, and fools their blind father into obtaining the blessing traditionally conferred on the elder son by using an animal skin (‘peau de “bˆete” ’) to imitate his brother’s hirsutism. The word ‘bˆete’ not only confers a bestial character on Jacob in Leiris’s eyes but also reminds him of ‘Bethl´eem’, the place where the child Jesus, born in a stable, was surrounded by beasts, ‘entre le boeuf et l’ˆane’. ‘Le boeuf ’, moreover, is just as much a dish (beef ) as an animal for Leiris, and as such recalls the plate of lentils; while the female version of ‘ass’, namely ‘ˆanesse’, echoes ‘birthright’ or ‘aˆınesse’. All of this takes place, of course, at Christmas, ‘No¨el’, another word with a dieresis, whose two dots not only recall ‘le boeuf et l’ˆane’ but equally resemble ‘deux pointes de glace’ (since in France it is cold at Christmas) or ‘une paire d’´etoiles’ (one for the Three Wise Men, one for the shepherds). In containing and releasing all of this, ´ u’ functions as a ‘m´ecanique de pr´ecision’. therefore, the dieresis of ‘Esa¨ In relating this latest exemplary tale from Genesis, Leiris makes plain in general terms here how the story of Esau and Jacob is used to inculcate fundamental bourgeois moral values regarding sin, deception and respect for authority. What is interesting once again, however, is that the biffures which elements of the story undergo in the course of its integration

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Texts and contexts

into Leiris’s bourgeois childhood, and the signifiance which particular details take on, transform the moral tale in both narrative and structural terms into a clear exemplification of the distortion, dissimulation and usurpation at the very heart of an order designed to confer legitimacy on a name. ´ u’ was inextricably Leiris now goes on to tell us that the name ‘Esa¨ linked in his childhood with two items of furniture. These were owned by his elder sister, a ‘soeur aˆın´ee’ who in reality was a first cousin raised as a sister within Leiris’s family, her presence therefore marking a fundamental dissimulation with regard to domestic birthrights and hierarchies. The two pieces of furniture were a chest (‘un bahut’) and a mirror-fronted wardrobe (‘une armoire a` glace’), the first ´ u’ via the hiatus ‘a-u’; homophonically linked in Leiris’s mind to ‘Esa¨ the second also (erroneously) called a ‘bahut’ by the young Leiris. In this ´ u’ takes on a number of physical qualities associated way, the word ‘Esa¨ with the furniture: the smell of pitchpine, the creak of the wardrobe door, the momentary flash of the mirror as the door opens and closes. Leiris’s concluding description resembles an instance of ‘le sacr´e dans la ´ u’ with the vie quotidienne’, in blending the religious dimensions of ‘Esa¨ objects of a bourgeois interior to create another heady biffure in which the clear intentional structure of self-consciousness, nominal identity and pedagogy melt and merge into a confusing sensuality: Chose mobili`ere – a` l’´eclat de miroir ou au luisant de vieux bois satur´e ´ u est, par nature, chose d’´eglise, puisque tir´e de la d’encaustique – le nom d’Esa¨ Bible, et (comme celui d’Isa¨ıe, son homologue a` peine transpos´e, il rec`ele en sa blondeur ligneuse un peu du buffet d’orgue. Un certain parfum d’encens, aussi. Ces redondances de fum´ee, orchestralement, se mˆelent aux volutes de la grande biblioth`eque tapageuse, surcharg´ee de moulures dont chacune, au moment de la messe, exsude une cire de musique quand s’ouvre tel ou tel de ses multiples registres. (Bi )

The ‘m´ecanique de pr´ecision’ operated by Esa¨u’s dieresis ironically generates an overloaded structure, in which the subject’s place and law of emergence is created from transposition and dissimulation operating on several simultaneous levels. The name of Esa¨u manages to bring together into one structure: the biblical and the bourgeois; the physical and the metaphysical; the natural and the cultural; the playful and the solemn; the male and the female; the fixed and the movable; the written and the experienced. The overriding impression created by the ‘m´ecanique de pr´ecision’, however, is one of the subversion of pedagogical structure:

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the alphabet is dramatized and subsumed (‘aˆınesse’, ‘ˆane’, ‘ˆanesse’, ‘armoire’, ‘bahut’, ‘bˆete’, ‘Bethl´eem’, ‘boeuf ’); the mechanisms of both nature and culture are appreciated above all aesthetically; parochial knowledge and law are undercut by an immersion in and sensual enjoyment of ignorance, sin, foolishness and error. The voluted redundancy of the whole offers a parody of the Bildungsroman which constructs its hero as a form of positional consciousness, while the immediate or non-reflective consciousness of self which might still lie behind the narrative is revealed at best to be an emptiness even in what Sartre would call its nihilation of the things around it but which here is better viewed as its necessary and originary participation in an already existing biffure. The structure of the ´ u’, therefore, by which I mean both the structural productivname ‘Esa¨ ity generated by its dieresis and the situated yet free autobiographical identity lying behind the name’s misapprehension and subsequent creation of a personal history, disposes of Leiris in both senses of the term: Leiris is not portrayed directly, but instead he registers everywhere as a taut membrane or resonating chamber, receiving and transforming the noise of relations. All the subsequent names in Biffures bear out this structural representation of consciousness and the convoluted lines it creates: ‘Sa¨ul’ is described as having ‘l’ext´erieur de la force’ but remaining ‘creux a` l’int´erieur’ (Bi ); while ‘Pers´ephone’ represents ‘tout ce qui est feston, volute, guirlande, enroulement, arabesque’ (Bi ). In all these cases we note one further impression: it is as if each nominal identity conjured up a vast, attentive autobiographical ear, within whose waxy channels and inner chambers the strangeness of the world reverberated prior to being introduced as a transposition of experience. In this respect, it is particularly fitting that Biffures’s final object and significant name, ‘Tambour-trompette’, should so readily suggest this simultaneous sense of registration and projection with its combined drum and trumpet. Equally, this double model can register its own productions (the drum’s membrane resonating in reaction to the trumpet), in other words, can permit a commentary on its own representations. As such, this figure marks the point at which Biffures’s dualist world gradually gives way to the more socio-historical situations of Fourbis. This is anticipated in Biffures’s closing chapters, the last of which is ‘Tambour-trompette’. Here the book comes full circle in opening with a reaffirmation of the playful happiness experienced by the child in ‘ . . . Reusement!’ – indeed, the similarity extends to the reappearance of the original lead soldier in the guise of Roland and Coriolanus. And once again, this sense of happiness is epitomized in the production of sounds

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Texts and contexts

or fragments of words used to express the child’s keen sense of pleasure. This playful production coalesces in the impossible combinatory object of the ‘tambour-trompette’: Combinaison de la trompette et du tambour, objet unique produisant a` lui seul les deux sons, tambour d’Arcole laissant jaillir au contact des baguettes, en mˆeme temps que la cascade bien rhythm´ee des coups, une sonnerie comparable a` celle du cor de Roland mais plus haute et plus gaie, jouet-surprise dont l’int´erieur semblait secr`etement pourvu d’un astucieux m´ecanisme faisant de ce corps cylindrique pareil a` celui de tous les autres tambours le r´eceptacle d’o`u pointait la voix acide d’un instrument de cuivre, tel fut le ‘tambour-trompette’ dont j’eus envie assez longtemps, allant peut-ˆetre jusqu’`a le chercher (mais en pure perte) dans les catalogues d’´etrennes. (Bi )

Not only does this double drum and trumpet clearly suggest the ear and voice (as in ‘la voix acide’), but the unique and hypothetical nature of the ‘tambour-trompette’ makes it a fitting emblem of the autobiographical identity to which Biffures is vainly devoted. Leiris’s desire to be like this perfect instrument is clearly seen in his subsequent description of an even more marvellous toy – a ‘carte postale disque de phonographe’ – which he has never been able to rediscover. The supposed nature of the object and Leiris’s musings on the significance of this phantasmic emblem point very clearly to the character of the ultimate autobiographical object in Biffures: Leiris himself. Like the ‘tambour-trompette’, the ‘carte postale disque de phonographe’ has a double nature, and one that even more clearly offers an emblem of the double autobiographical task of recording and relaying an individual voice. It is known to Leiris only through hearsay and as such possesses an ideal purity and price that no ‘fallen object’ can obtain in the realm of real sense-impressions. It perhaps has been dreamed up precisely because of Leiris’s tendency to reduce several things into one while seeking to retain the option of ‘bifurcating’ towards one or other of this new object’s potential uses. And lastly, it is perhaps simply the most desired for having been the longest denied, in which case it has been erroneously elevated to the status of holy grail. All of these statements regarding the ‘carte postale disque de phonographe’ offer, of course, a highly suggestive commentary on the nature and status of Leiris himself, who is the real and ultimate autobiographical object in Biffures. Thus the ‘obsessive’ search for an ‘objet connu, e´ gar´e pour un temps et que je souhaite ardemment retrouver. Rˆeve de pur d´esir [. . .], pi`ece unique perdue au milieu d’une collection’ (Bi ) which focuses on increasingly unreal and symbolical toys brings forth ‘the most insistent of his childhood dreams’, the phantasmic presence of Leiris’s own identity:

Positional play: La R`egle du jeu



Et quand je proc`ede a` cette chasse qui n’aboutit qu’`a des raptures d´ecevantes (maigres fantˆomes de r´ealit´es toujours en retard sur moi-mˆeme et circulant d´ej`a parmi des ruines a` l’instant o`u j’´ecris), je reproduis, transpos´e sur un plan abstrait, la quˆete que dans mes rˆeves comme dans la vie courante je fais si souvent d’un objet. (Bi )

Leiris’s failure to find the absolute, impossible object leads to the intermediate manipulation of real and banal objects: ‘manier des objets, faute d’avoir trouv´e l’objet.’ (Bi ). The implications of this statement for the construction of autobiographical identity are confirmed when Leiris goes on to assert that the common desire underlying each manipulation is the establishment of a ‘traffic’ between the world and the self, and concludes: Dans un sens oppos´e, mais de mˆeme nature . . . , l’acte d’´ecrire un livre et de le publier: . . . battre monnaie de ma propre chair et produire cet objet qui sera mon gage de vie. (Bi )

In addition to this open recognition, then, that the child’s manipulation of objects, including language, the presence of absolute, impossible objects and the function of the name as a simulacrum of self-consciousness are all dramatic versions of the structural creation of autobiographical identity in Biffures. Leiris now interprets the spiralling paths associated with the impossible objects and productive names in more directly autobiographical terms: Cette voie que je suis, me fiant a` ces lignes comme a` des guides qui doivent me conduire vers un pays o`u tous les eˆ tres me paraˆıtraient plus vivants, est-elle vraiment la bonne? Ou n’est-elle pas plutˆot un fil trompeur qui s’enroule et s’emmˆele, m’´eloignant finalement du point vital que je voudrais atteindre au lieu de m’y mener apr`es quelques in´evitables lacets? (Bi )

The ‘je’ caught in this labyrinth is itself the ‘tender and unattainable’ ultimate object of a structure of generalized reference. The structural implications of this self-questioning, in which the object of inquiry is an impossible goal, and the logic of the ‘tambour-trompette’ or the ‘carte postale disque de phonographe’, in which reception and representation are inextricably bound up with one another, lead this chapter now to chronicle several critical reactions to the previous chapter ‘Dimanche’, provoked by its first appearance in Les Temps modernes. The endlessly deferring structure of self-inquiry which this procedure betokens, a structure in which reception and representation occur together, leads in turn to an extended series of characterizations of Leiris’s literary enterprise that now openly stresses the constructed and structural nature

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Texts and contexts

which we have already seen at work. Leiris’s own earlier productions are therefore reviewed as a ‘corpus’ (Bi ), a simulacrum designed to uncover the ineffable (Bi ), a ritual (ibid.), a compendium (Bi ), a ‘puzzle de faits’ (Bi ), the result, in short, of ‘un obscur app´etit de juxtaposition ou de combinaison, analogue sans doute a` ce qui me faisait trouver si attirant, quand j’´etais tout petit, un objet composite tel que le “tambour-trompette” ’ (Bi ). Leiris gradually emphasizes more and more the nature of these compositions: the desire to ‘confront, bring together and establish liaisons’ results in a series of technical ‘engrenages’, ‘liaisons’ and ‘transitions’ (Bi ), building into ‘une sorte de r´eseau’ or ‘noeuds de faits, de sentiments, de notions’ or ‘un abondant lacis de traits’ (Bi ). One of the more amusing features of Leiris’s description of the burgeoning nature of these structures, in fact, is the way in which his list of features itself expands to become a thesaurus of connectivity: ‘relier, cimenter, nouer, faire converger . . . , grouper . . . , entasser, rassembler, rattacher, . . . manipuler . . . , tenir et fa¸conner . . . , amasser . . . ’ (Bi –). The irony, however, is that precisely as this list of transitive verbs proliferates, Leiris becomes more fully aware of how the positional play of the biffure controls him more than he controls it: ‘situation absurde du litt´erateur qui voit se transformer en boulet ce qu’il avait choisi comme devant eˆ tre son jouet ou l’instrument de sa lib´eration’ (Bi ). As ‘Tambour-trompette’ draws to a close with a number of such metatextual statements (which ironically point to the work’s non-finite and autonomous structure), the combinatory nature of the ‘tambour-trompette’ resurrects two final polarities commented on earlier. The first involves the ambivalent coexistence of exuberance and nostalgia, here experienced as the unresolvable tension between the joy inherent in the active verbs of collation and the resignation inherent in submission to the tedious task of collating. The second involves the fundamental difference between the conception of the self as a signified content and the presentation of the subject as a signifying form. Instead of concluding by reviewing the autobiographical self of Biffures as the signified content of a logical, progressive and now complete prose narrative, confirmed by self-presence and culminating in silence, Leiris presents a subject spaced out functionally and indexically across a field of generalized reference, propelled by the other and provoking an endless line of song. Song and the other are therefore credited as the ground and accompaniment to those moments when Leiris has been truly alive:

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Dans ma quˆete d’un gage d’accord je n’aurai nul profit a` mettre ma plume au rancart si le passage d’une conduite bavarde a` une conduite taciturne ne signifie pour moi rien autre que le remplacement d’une certaine fa¸con verbeuse de se baratter soi-mˆeme par une autre fa¸con tout aussi complaisante et encore plus confin´ee, priv´ee qu’elle est mˆeme du semblant d’issue que repr´esente le soliloque. Mais quelles montagnes a` remuer pour que, e´ loign´e tout autant de la bouche herm´etiquement cousue (reine du quant-`a-soi) que de celle qui d´evide intarissablement son monologue, j’en arrive a` formuler un chant qui fasse son chemin hors de moi et soit comme ces airs dont furent accompagn´ees certaines minutes de ma vie que j’estimai cruciales! (Bi  –)

As a final example of the productivity being suggested here, Leiris offers a number of closing images of mechanical musical instruments (‘une vieille boˆıte a` musique . . . , un piano m´ecanique’ (Bi )), neatly moving from their status as toys to their presence in different cities of the world (London, Barcelona). This move offers the final commentary on the journey travelled by Leiris, as part of a signifying form, through Biffures. In the course of this educational journey, which I have followed in terms of the name, what unfolds is a positional play in which autobiographical identity is shown, internally as well as externally, to exist from the beginning within a relation of difference, or a biffure. The name provides an immediate and dramatic representation of this fundamental heterogeneity, given its normally assumed function of specification. In Biffures the name itself is thus already an unstable identity within a fluctuating discursive formation, and as such is relational, grounded in play, and productive of a general economy of dissemination. The subject emerges from this as a simulacrum of identity and a non-intentionality in duration, rather than as a pure nominal identity merely represented in time. This irreducible effect of relationality means that the name is not a point of origin for autobiography any more than it can mark its destination. It is with this lack of distinction in mind that Leiris can only interrupt his journey through Biffures, on the final page of the book, like a locomotive ‘en rase campagne, apr`es avoir lach´e une bord´ee de coups de sifflet’ (Bi ). The machine-like productivity of La R`egle du jeu does not stop here, however, even if one kind of journey is complete. For while the abstract and idealist spaces of difference in Biffures have been negotiated, Leiris has yet to enter into the large structures of history which are looming ever closer in the book’s final chapter. This entry into the structure of history occurs in the next volume, Fourbis.

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Texts and contexts  ‘Dimanche’

The shift from Biffures’s dualist structure of subject and language into Fourbis’s dialectical interaction of individual and group is anticipated also in Biffures’s penultimate chapter, ‘Dimanche’. First published in Les Temps modernes, its reception is in part the subject of the final chapter ‘Tambourtrompette’. Together, these two chapters’ existential ethnography of the significance of the bourgeois Sunday, and subsequent metalinguistic analysis of the reactions to the piece, shift La R`egle du jeu’s 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 significant themes which will form the guiding obsessions of Fourbis: death, authenticity and full communication. These first 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 towards the Other in a structure of surpassing constitute the specific praxis of Fourbis, but appear already in prototype in ‘Dimanche’. As is so often the case in La R`egle 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 Leiris’s earliest orisons), far from encouraging a cabbalistic loss of self, becomes the meaningful expression of a ‘r´eunion c´er´emonieuse’ (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 locution’s secular banality: Plates atteintes au langage, comme a` seule fin de constituer un argot dans l’usage limit´e duquel quelques-uns se sentiront solidaires; jeux de mots qui ont pour but moins de faire rire que de se reconnaˆıtre, a` la mani`ere d’initi´es, entre membres d’une mˆeme famille; locutions purement conventionnelles autour desquelles l’accord des usagers se scelle, si fermement qu’il se montre encore efficace et que je ne puis songer aujourd’hui a` l’une quelconque de ces mis´erables plaisanteries sans eˆ tre e´ mu (et confus de mon e´ motion) d’ˆetre ainsi d’un seul coup plong´e dans une vieille franc-ma¸connerie familiale. (Bi )

From this a chain of recollections builds into a more consciously socioeconomic analysis of Leiris’s formation. The religious and the secular coalesce in the child’s telling prayer: ‘Mon Dieu, je vous remercie d’avoir fait nommer mon p`ere fond´e de pouvoirs’ (Bi ). Recognition of this

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‘primacy’ of the father is symbolized by the gold watch, gold chain and ‘porte-or’ which are passed down to Leiris, all of which he gradually pawns off in order to keep up appearances drinking cocktails with the other young snobs of the ‘jeunesse dor´ee’. This in turn recalls a brush with the law during the Occupation years, when Leiris was apprehended for drinking out of hours in ‘La Rhumerie Martiniquaise’. As becomes normal in the latter stages of Biffures, therefore, the zigzag of memory begins with the reality of language, but leads less to linguistic contingency than to political reality. This ‘r´ealit´e de la police’ (Bi ) situates Leiris within the complex structures of class relations, racism, colonialism, war and law enforcement, as well as the more immediate experiences of selfexpression, family circumstances and peer pressure. Throughout the rest of the chapter, the structure of capital therefore occupies the pedagogical and situating role held in ‘ . . . Reusement!’ by the linguistic biffure: money is initially the object of play for the child Leiris, becomes used by his bourgeois family as a signifying system capable of differentiating between good and bad, and eventually is recognized by the adult Leiris as the ubiquitous, universalizing and alienating agent of equivalence that all too easily can permeate even the autobiographical endeavour, a fact he neatly emphasizes: C’est moi tel que je suis – et non un e´ tranger – que je vise a` faire accepter. A rien ne servirait d’user de fausse monnaie pour le r`eglement de ce compte, a` rien ne servirait de tenter de donner le change: il me faudra, litt´eralement, payer de ma personne si j’ai conclu ce march´e qui est commerce avec moi-mˆeme autant que transaction avec autrui. (Bi )

This form of commodification not only explains some of Leiris’s obsessions (his meticulous attention to dress, his uneasiness in the presence of the other’s gaze), which lead him to fluctuate between a tendency to petrification (‘quoi d’´etonnant a` ce que l’´edification de ma propre statue soit devenue le but conscient (et ici mˆeme avou´e) de mes tentatives litt´eraires?’ (Bi )) and the desire to avoid any fixed identity (‘le d´esir que j’avais depuis longtemps de rompre mon horizon, tentative d’affranchissement’ (Bi )). It also provides painful new insights into the reality of social structures: the chauffeur of a wealthy banker dies through the latter’s demand for speed (Bi ); a family maid is dismissed and subsequently drowns herself (Bi –); the relationship between wealth and antisemitism is revealed (Bi ). Recognition of these social structures also obliges Leiris to articulate his existential project and so situate himself in history. An extended explanation of his ‘career track’ therefore unfolds in

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Texts and contexts

tandem with a chronological series of significant socio-historical events and figures designed to mark stages in a writer’s political engagement: D-day, liberation, Picasso’s adherence to the Communist party, the founding of Les Temps modernes, Sartre, Camus, Malraux, a memorial service for Jacob, news of the death of Desnos. On to this historical thread, Leiris now readily beads the personal history of his emergence as a writer, jettisoning a prophetic and inspirational conception of language (‘je suis bien loin de l’´epoque o`u je voyais dans l’acte d’´ecrire quelque chose de sacr´e’ (Bi )) and accepting that the conditions and regulations of the ‘orni`ere commune’, including, ironically, the fact that he has literally become a Sunday writer, constitute the social structure or ‘vie r´egl´ee’ from which Leiris must forge his project. Typically, Leiris undercuts the pedagogical structure imposed on the child and played with throughout Biffures by referring to such a career projection as an end-of-term report. But this report, which fittingly asserts that Leiris’s path to literature has above all been the effect of a series of negations, finally records the repressed knowledge at the heart of the bourgeois Sunday and the logic determining both the ‘besoin de n´egation’ (Bi ) and ‘cette statue que je pr´etends e´ difier’ (Bi ). This knowledge involves a recognition of the real centre of autobiographical structure, a centre which creates a future absolute that drives the text as project and generates the ‘suite d’infimes entreprises’ or distraction as primary structure, namely the apprehension of death: ‘en avant de moimˆeme. Vivant ma mort’ (Bi ). The chapter concludes by noting the end of the second world war, a cessation that robs Leiris of intermediate goals or substitute contests. The permanent possibility of non-being that conditions all structures concerning being must now be faced by Leiris. This event is the starting-point for Fourbis. FOURBIS

It is significant that two-thirds of Fourbis was originally published in Les Temps modernes. For an existentialist morality dominates La R`egle du jeu’s second volume which leads to an attenuation of Biffures’s nominalist celebrations and a reaffirmation of the poetics and ethics explicated in ‘De la litt´erature consider´ee comme une tauromachie’. The fact that Fourbis takes its cue for this from Biffures’s closing pages, however, is borne out by the stark enunciation of the book’s aims in the ‘pri`ere d’ins´erer’: ‘Apprivoiser la mort, agir authentiquement, rompre le cercle du moi’. These themes form the basis of Fourbis’s three chapters: ‘Mors’ reveals

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death, not language, to be the bedrock of consciousness; ‘Les Tablettes Sportives’ presents the language and imagery of courage and authentic behaviour, from the child at play to the adult at war; ‘Vois! D´ej`a l’ange . . . ’ brings these themes to a single focus, as Leiris transcribes the relations he entertained with an Algerian prostitute, Khadidja, while he was stationed as an NCO in Africa during the ‘drˆole de guerre’. The existential necessity of obtaining truth, realism and authenticity, already seen to govern self-representation in L’Age d’homme, now obliges Leiris to ‘wake up’ from the incubatory (pre-war) period covered in Biffures and spend the opening pages of ‘Mors’ correcting in a factual way some of the first volume’s linguistic speculations (Fo –). Death is now seen as the first reality, one that underwrites supposedly free positional play. Behind potentially playful terms like ‘ . . . Reusement!’, the young Leiris now hears a more basic sound: the fearful static of pure facticity, pure ‘il y a’, to use Levinas’s term for existence without existents. This ‘absolute lack’ or ‘original defect’, provoking a visceral fear, can be indicated only as a pure, meaningless presence lying beyond the language of consciousness: Isol´e insolitement e´ veill´e quand tout le reste est (ou paraˆıt) endormi. Vertige de celui qui croit eˆ tre parvenu a` contracter (ou nier) le temps. Regard sur une immensit´e en vase clos, au sein de ce monde a` l’envers qu’est le monde souterrain. Joie d’avoir jou´e les Daniel descendus dans la fosse et revenus sans blessure du commerce des lions. (Fo )

Fourbis’s opening recognition of facticity, ‘le simple fait d’ˆetre l`a’, in Sartre’s terms, was perhaps already implicit in Biffures’s linguistic presentation of a certain contingency, but here it openly involves a fundamental revision of the oracular status accorded language in La R`egle du jeu’s first volume. Each image suggested by the word ‘mors’ returns Leiris to a vertiginous intuition of pure existence which exists apart from any consciousness expressing itself as ‘reusement’, and so to the knowledge that his self-expression can at best run up against this immutable truth ‘en vase clos’. The context for language-use has also changed. The contingency of the body revealed by the child’s apprehension of death and his consequent anxiety at the beginning of ‘Mors’ removes the figure of Leiris from the abstract space of linguistic revelation witnessed on the level of writing in Biffures. Now it represents his consciousness on the level of a series of concrete and coenaesthetic situations, to which Leiris reacts with an ‘angoisse inexprimable’ (Fo ), and which is dominated by an existential act represented here as the fraternal bravery of Daniel in the lion’s den. As in ‘De la litt´erature consider´ee comme

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Texts and contexts

une tauromachie’, the play of pure language is once more dominated by the rule of pure existence, and the referentiality restored to language by the assumption of facticity is again immediately related to the moral choices to be made in time of danger, and above all war. Fourbis’s second chapter, ‘Les Tablettes sportives’, can therefore also be read as a revision of Biffures. Leiris’s positional play with his soldier was primarily a linguistic education in the first volume. But Fourbis’s sociological review of Leiris’s real situation as a soldier during the ‘drˆole de guerre’, and of the childhood heroes which act for him as ironic prototype, now gives a very different emphasis to language acquisition. The young child is presented as learning the special vocabularies associated with heroism, in a way that heralds the direct emphasis placed by the adult Leiris on human communication as an act of fraternity. The guiding word ‘fraternity’ itself, and the referential and unambiguous communicability it represents, will now assume the inspirational powers previously associated with poetically ambiguous signifiers: ‘Le mot  E´ . . . est donc peut-ˆetre pour moi le plus vivant’ (Fo ); ‘ “Fraternit´e”, certes, est l’un des mots les plus e´ mouvants’ (Fo ). The moral injunctions of ‘De la litt´erature’ resurface through this guiding signifier, and the realism demanded (‘realism’ is also a key term in Leiris’s anti-colonialist writings of this period) presents language once more as being primarily a moral act tended towards the Other, rather than a poetic act of self-discovery: Selon quelles modalit´es devrait eˆ tre v´ecue cette fraternit´e? [. . .] je devrais alors travailler a` faire passer en actes ces id´ees, et certainement e´ crire, e´ crire encore, pour les formuler de fa¸con toujours plus claire, plus communicative, plus convaincante. . . . (Fo )

A committed autobiography henceforth will be devoted less to the creation of a heroic self-portrait or a linguistic transcendence of facticity and more to the transformation of language into a living link between a community of correspondents. It is this generous ´enonc´e, rather than a glamorous ´enonciation, which now creates self-identity. Two important qualifications emerge at the end of this chapter, however: Leiris recognizes the oversimplification involved in contrasting efficacity of communication with stylistic brio – even his childhood sporting heroes taught him that the two go together, especially in terms of the response which an action can solicit; and he also acknowledges the desire to be loved that persists at the heart of any supposedly selfless act of solidarity. Both of these qualifications have implications for the writing of the self in general: they remind us that self-consciousness and the intuition of one’s own

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facticity, however ‘realist’, can be presented authentically only in affective rather than purely cognitive language. And they equally determine the presentation of the specific act of solidarity in Fourbis’s final chapter, ‘Vois! D´ej`a l’ange . . . ’. Here Leiris’s attempts to be authentic and loved culminate in his relationship with an Algerian prostitute, Khadidja. The context of the episode (Africa, war, communication only via the body) certainly emphasizes the general themes of engagement, anti-colonialism and facticity. But even more noticeable is the opening presentation of this affair. The traditional storyteller’s formula, ‘Et cric! Et crac!’, introduces and periodically punctuates the love story, so placing Leiris’s identity firmly within a communal language of mythic authenticity, rather than echoing, say, the language and the iconography of convulsive beauty used to represent the pathological love story of Aurora. This chapter, like the others, involves a practical revision, by way of engagement, of Biffures’s abstract linguistic education. The fabular approach is an existential enactment of the academic explorations of Biffures’s ‘Il e´ tait une fois’; while the early formal play on biblical names, such as Moses and Saul, signifiers of a purely cultural reality in Biffures, is now grounded in a concrete, affective situation by the way in which Khadidja embodies everything inherent for Leiris in the word ‘Rebecca’, a word that perhaps would be his version of the formula ‘Et cric! Et crac!’. Through this ‘living myth’, then, of passionate sexual relations with Khadidja, Leiris makes plain that he has achieved or seeks to achieve ‘rien sinon la communication avec autrui, sous sa forme litt´eralement la plus nue’ (Fo ). If this were simply a celebration of a genital accession to the ‘r´ealit´e derni`ere’, it would represent the most bathetic, bourgeois and colonialist form of engagement. But the ‘ephemeral conjunction’ of their two destinies is saved by stylistic authenticity: not only is the episode movingly depicted, but Leiris’s love for Khadidja provokes a direct recollection and reassessment of his previous identities within language. The best and most amusing example of this is when Leiris recalls one of his own early pieces of lyrical erotica, and offers a running commentary on it. For example: La bouche veut s’humilier, ou d´echirer. Il n’y a plus de douceur ni mˆeme de puret´e. Nous ne voulons (quand ‘je ne veux’, n’engageant que ma propre personne, eˆut seul e´ t´e conforme a` la v´erit´e) plus le parfum marin des algues (qui auraient e´ t´e mieux dites ‘varechs’) mais l’odeur des chairs en rut. (Fo )

Leiris’s constant attention to language and technical details, in addition to the presence here of an existential concern for engagement, offers an ironic rereading of an embarrassingly idealistic presentation of a young poet’s

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Texts and contexts

sexual achings. The scene is further enhanced and related to Khadidja’s role as authentic lover by the contextual significance given the piece: the extract begins immediately after Khadidja pronounces ‘ francs’, the agreed price to be paid to her for having just masturbated him to the point of his ejaculation, and ends when she again speaks, this time to utter the peremptory command: ‘Enl`eve ta culotte!’ (Fo –). But, as Leiris made plain at the end of the previous chapter, his intention is not to contrast a true, ‘realist’ portrait with a false, lyrical one. Rather, in recognizing that lyricism and the desire to be loved remain at the heart of an existential situation, Leiris presents his involvement with Khadidja as the true and authentic culmination of his earlier poetic aspirations. As a poet, he has finally opened up to the Other in his lyrical relationship with Khadidja, and in this way poetic language itself has gained new credence. It is for this reason that an autobiography which has struggled to achieve existential authenticity in the face of death can conclude by drawing an analogy between Leiris’s relationship with Khadidja and the doomed passion of Radames and Aida, expressed at the end of Verdi’s opera as a lyrical triumph over immurement. For Leiris, existential reciprocity may be experienced only in a situation that threatens annihilation of the self; but the expression given to ‘human accord’ is still a lyrical assumption of facticity, a passionate act of communication in the face of inevitable death. Committed t´emoignage, therefore, is still expressed in terms that are metaphysical, imaginary, negative and aesthetic: Vedi? . . . di morte l’angelo Radiante a noi si appressa . . . chantent suavement Radam`es at A¨ıda, presque joyeux quoique a` demi morts d’asphyxie dans leur caveau fun`ebre; comme si, au sein des t´enˆebres o`u l’amour les illumine, ces deux amants – tels que jusqu’`a pr´esent, toutefois, on n’en a gu`ere recontr´e hors les romans et op´eras – imaginaient sous l’aspect e´ clatant d’un unique archange cette brˆulure qu’A¨ıda aura e´ t´e, du moins, pour Radam`es et Radam`es pour A¨ıda. (Fo )

Though ‘Vois! D´ej`a l’ange . . . ’ may superficially appear to conclude with a celebration of a colonialist liebestod in the face of a grim political reality, the implications of the chapter and its closing lyricism for the subject’s position in such a structure run much deeper for Leiris. With Khadidja, he abandons neither poetic transcendence nor political consciousness but attempts to take both to an absolute pitch of d´epassement. This totalizing movement, which seeks to achieve a fully affective form of political consciousness, leads inevitably in terms of history to the poetic fervour of

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revolution. This further stage in the analysis of the structures governing the subject is dramatized in Fibrilles. FIBRILLES

This ambitious attempt to reconcile the fundamental tension between poetic transcendence and existential authenticity reaches crisis point in the next volume, Fibrilles. On the level of physical and intellectual content, the connections between the two volumes are very strong. A suicide attempt is recounted in Fibrilles as being the direct result of the critical success of Fourbis and the depression which that success provokes. And where the action in Fibrilles is largely situated in China, as opposed to the Africa of Fourbis, the anti-colonialist and revolutionary form of engagement which Leiris wishes to live out in both volumes is the same. This general attempt to bring together poetic introspection and existential commitment is facilitated by a change in Les Temps modernes’s policy towards poetry: from  on, when Sartre published ‘Orph´ee noir’, poetry was no longer regarded existentially as the absolute valorization of failure, as it had been viewed by Sartre in Qu’est-ce que la litt´erature?, but became recognized as creating (especially in the context of n´egritude) the necessary form of subversive engagement with an alienating language. Leiris himself, whose view of poetry was never as reductionist as that of Sartre, and who was already a colleague and friend of Aim´e C´esaire, introduced numerous black poets to the pages of Les Temps modernes, certainly from , and possibly from , onwards. But in Fibrilles itself, the irreducible tension involved in the attempted reconciliation of poetic authenticity and political authenticity brings his moral excoriations to an unbearable climax. This growing tension is suggested in the collective title given to Fibrilles’s four sections: ‘La Fi`ere, la fi`ere . . . ’, a phrase recalled from a childhood book about pirates that exemplifies the feverish rantings of a hero who has diced with death in exotic locations. The pri`ere d’ins´erer to Fibrilles announces how Leiris discovers, in the course of the work, that the integration of articulation and action into one poetic state of being in fact forms ‘un tout non analysable’. This phrase in reality encapsulates two moments, for it is only after Leiris attempts to approach the totalization of history with the (unsuccessful) desire to live within permanent Revolution, that he reflects on and dismantles the pretensions of a poetic and political programme that seeks to totalize reality. Central to this totalization is the representation, in Fibrilles’s first section, of Leiris’s literary output to date as the subjective

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Texts and contexts

movement of permanent revolution. So strong is the urge to inscribe himself into this teleology that he includes notes made in  such as ‘une esp`ece de r´evolution se produit en moi’ (Fi ) and emphasizes the pathological and evasive elements associated with his surrealist (Fi ), ethnographic (Fo ) and psychoanalytical (Fo ) experiences. Inevitably, he once again rewrites the original playful moment of ‘ . . . Reusement!’, this time reinterpreting the toys, songs and happiness of childhood as anticipations of the perfect revolutionary society which he experiences for five weeks in China. This reflexive structure is also epitomized by the running commentaries which Leiris provides for a series of key phrases or passages related to China and communism (Fi , , , etc.; phrases to which he will return in the third section of Fibrilles). These rewritings are all designed to confirm the perfectly harmonious structure which he sees embodied in revolutionary China, one in which the linguistic dualism of Biffures is overcome by the simple word ‘L´enine’ (Fi –), and the union of self with other, desired in Fourbis, is finally achieved: Jamais a` un degr´e aussi haut que lors de ma d´ecouverte de la Chine, je n’ai vu une contr´ee o`u aspects naturels, faci`es des choses fabriqu´ees et ext´erieur des gens semblent unis par une complicit´e allant au besoin jusqu’`a se mat´erialiser en une harmonie visible. (Fi )

This ‘fabulous harmony’ even affects the structure of Leiris’s reaction to the Chinese national festival, which he chooses to describe in musical terms (allegro, allegretto, da capo). Despite the fact that ‘no solution of continuity’ (Fi ) appears to distinguish between creature and object in the wonderful chain of harmony which this Chinese world has created, however, the mere persistence of Leiris’s intellection (in the form of tensions revealed through misunderstanding, as in the case of the unquestionable perfection of ‘la construction socialiste’ (Fi –)) breaks this closed structure of complete self-comprehension and leads Leiris to express increasing dissatisaction with the repressive strictures of even this ideal community: Toute fond´ee qu’elle soit sur des r´ealit´es sociales et non sur des nu´ees religieuses, une telle communaut´e n’en est pas moins fluide, car ce monde-l`a lui aussi poss`ede ses th´eologiens qui ont tˆot fait d’excommunier ceux qu’ils regardent comme h´er´etiques. (Fi )

At the height of his ‘recension chinoise’, therefore, Leiris records a series of dreams which present a theatre of anxious anticipation featuring, among other things, a frightful cliff-face and the imminent collapse of

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an ‘´etonnant chapelet de constructions vertigineusement accroch´ees a` des hauteurs diverses’ (Fi ). As Leiris’s ideal structure of revolutionary harmony begins to crumble, an ambiguous series of spaces starts to emerge, at the heart of which Leiris perceives a silent and vaguely threatening void (Fi –). Leiris’s mood darkens. He comes to regard the revolutionary capacity of the writer as a myth and his experience of China as an ‘exotisme enfantin’ (Fi ). The favourable critical reactions to Fourbis which greet his return to France serve only to darken his mood further, by paradoxically linking him once more to the idea of death (Fi ). Seemingly deprived of either political or poetic transcendence by this double disillusionment, then, Leiris falls from admiration of the glorious ‘construction socialiste’ into the banal vortex of bourgeois depression, moving now without any guiding rule from one circumstance to the next, as though in a ‘bad farce’ (Fi ), towards an overdose of sleeping pills. A melodramatic structure of chaos and depression is what has resulted from the desire to live the totality of the ideal revolutionary society. Leiris’s subsequent convalescence presents yet another version of the child’s mythic original moment in ‘ . . . Reusement!’ With the collapse of the total structure of Revolution, an entire new person must be constituted: Quant a` la structure mˆeme de ma personne (fondation de tout l’´edifice que sur le mode ou non du chˆateau en Espagne il me fallait bˆatir a` neuf ), plusieurs jours furent n´ecessaires pour qu’elle achevˆat de se remembrer, tant l’avaient bouscul´ee ma longue p´eriode d’inconscience et les diverses drogues dont j’´etais satur´e. (Fi )

Beginning with an almost physical rebirth (Fi ), Leiris is as helpless as a child, open to every new image (Fi ). In this semi-conscious ‘chaos’, where he himself is the ‘toy’ around which a new complex of structures will unfold, a very different series of unwilled representations arises, whose common factor is their theatrical presentation of a bourgeois as opposed to revolutionary identity. The somnolent Michel Leiris firstly becomes a couple of highly snobbish English writers, one male, one female, with whom he identifies alternately. This gives way to a number of familial incarnations, chief among them being a dilettante cousin, Louis, who dabbled in the theatre, and his aunt, the Belgian singer Claire Frich´e (described as Tante Lise in L’Age d’homme) who specialized in heavy, ornate roles such as Salom´e, Elektra, Carmen and Tosca. What these wholly bourgeois and superannuated couples reveal to Leiris is the

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Texts and contexts

pre-history of his revolutionary project, one that contradicts architecturally, ideologically and affectively the conscious identity of a committed poet towards which he had striven: Ce qu’ils portaient ainsi comme une richesse de contrebande, ce n’´etait pas la vie artiste telle que j’ai pu l’imaginer lorsque j’ai pris a` coeur d’ˆetre un po`ete, mais un pan beaucoup plus archa¨ıque de ma vie v´ecue: celui qui, par-del`a les splendeurs dont m’avaient primitivement e´ bahi le pont Alexandre III (comme dor´e sur tranche) et le carosse du comte de Chambord (rutilant a` l’´egal du nom de son royal propri´etaire), me permit d’entrevoir ce monde a` part que le petit mot ‘art’ sert a` poser comme un tout, bien qu’inapte a` r´esumer la fantastique diversit´e de ses prestiges. (Fi )

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 d’atonie et de repli’ to which his phantoms have now led him. He is capable of recording more brutally than ever the sociohistorical events that condition his existence (‘Crise au Laos. Tentative de d´ebarquement contre-r´evolutionnaire a` Cuba. Putsch militaire en Alg´erie, heureusement avort´e apr`es 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 reflection 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 alternative structures of history have offered him the possibility of going beyond the confines of the self in a shamanistic or scientific way. Of the latter, Chinese experience, Leiris now judges Marxism–Leninism 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 d´epassement is Leiris’s perception of time

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itself, as his ability to view these periods from which he now feels disengaged leaves him, rather like the narrator near the end of A la recherche du temps perdu, ‘situ´e dans le temps mais d´ej`a 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 cˆot´es entre lesquels je me sens partag´e, formuler une r`egle d’or qui serait en mˆeme temps art po´etique et savoir-vivre’ (Fi ). This analysis is anticipated by the reiteration (Fi , , ) of key phrases used in section  (Fi , , ) to relocate Leiris’s project within the structure of revolution, and in itself obviously represents a further stage in the endless spiral of autobiographical reflection. But Leiris’s analysis of this ‘morale de la parole’ (Fi –) reveals the contradiction in terms involved in seeking to establish and fulfil 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 d’un art de l’autobiographie’ (Fi ). Section  of Fibrilles concludes, then, with a double self-definition, wherein Leiris attempts and fails to find ‘the rule of the game’ of the autobiographer’s moral position but simultaneously characterizes this failure as the shell or structural outline of the genre of autobiography. This works in tandem with the following, final section’s 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 significant approach of Frˆele Bruit, a volume that acts primarily as an open comment on the architecture and operational procedures of autobiography as an enunciative modality. F R Eˆ L E B R U I T

It is significant that the provisional title, Fibules, was dropped in favour of the more modest Frˆele Bruit: taking its cue from Fibrilles’s conclusion that it is futile to search for the rule of the game, Frˆele Bruit makes no attempt to link up its various reactions to the world in order to form a large intellectual programme. What links exist are deliberately elemental and left loosely interspersed as leitmotiv: fire, death, a word here, an action there. This calm constellation of prose poems stands in stark contrast to the feverish discourse of Fibrilles and represents on a formal level both the

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Texts and contexts

ethical decision to ‘accepter des choses’ (FB ) and the poetic decision to opt for ‘une mani`ere plus incisive: explosion d’aphorismes, phrases ou petits groupes de phrases qui disent beaucoup en peu de mots et maintiennent a` l’incandescence la mati`ere mise en oeuvre’ (FB ). If the philosophical structure of Fourbis and Fibrilles owes most to Hegelian marxism, the philosopher of Frˆele Bruit’s ‘table rase’ is above all Nietzsche: Comme nitchevo, le nom de Nietzsche fait songer a` une table rase d’un ordre assez particulier: . . . une totale mise a` ras, afin qu’il ne reste pas pierre sur pierre et que la phrase soit nette pour tout recommencer. (FB –)

Frˆele Bruit’s rebeginning is therefore designed to be yet another rereading of Biffures’s opening pages. Instead of displaying an original tension between language and world, Frˆele Bruit recognizes that ‘merveilleux, po´esie, amour, n’existent que si je m’ouvre, sans marchandage, a` quelque chose – e´ v´enement, eˆ tre vivant, objet, image, id´ee – que mon d´esir d’illimit´e coiffe d’une aur´eole durable ou momentan´ee’ (FB ). The key word here is merveilleux, which is discussed at length in the book’s largest section (FB –). Instead of seeking to achieve authenticity by forging intellectual links between poetics and ethics, Leiris indicates how Frˆele Bruit will record those happy points of rapprochement between the merveilleux ‘inscrit dans les e´ v´enements’ and the merveilleux which is ‘cr´ee´ par l’imagination’. This looser rule of the game allows Frˆele Bruit to register a multiplicity of miraculous moments in the real world: ‘merveilleux a` l’´etat brut, merveilleux distill´e . . . Merveilleux a` couper bras et jambes, merveilleux sans virulence . . . Merveilleux absolu, . . . merveilleux relatif ’, and so on, while recognizing that each of these moments relies on his imaginative reaction, and is therefore ‘une merveille mienne, . . . merveille a` mon image, a` mon e´ chelle . . . , et qui n’est donc merveille que dans le rˆeve que j’en fais’ (FB ). This last point does not betoken a new sense of ecstatic solipsism: on the contrary, this wondrous sensation can occur only when the habitual limits of the self are overrun. As Leiris puts it on a page that deserves to be quoted in full: ‘Pour qu’il y ait pleinement , [qu’un] autre vive l’exp´erience avec moi . . . Que je fasse partie d’une collectivit´e qui la vit’ (FB ). This opening up to the merveilleux can be dramatized in several ways: ideally, concretely, panoramically, utopically (FB –). It can equally be generated by the simplest of linguistic means: several sections are no more than a celebration of clauses (comme, quand, si, ni), styles (as in a highly amusing section offering a man’s dying words in alternative styles: style Rigaut, style bravache, style Harpagon, style courtois, and so on),

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and even words beginning with particular letters, or indicating a common material (literally, in the case of the terms ‘homespun’, ‘handwoven’, ‘thornproof ’, ‘sharkskin’ and ‘herringbone’). Interspersed with these formal emblems are events in the world which are often loosely related: imagining himself in the third person as a Roman senator leads Leiris to an evocation of Gaul, warriors and Gods, to washing hands in the manner of Pilate which in turn evokes Lenin’s dictum about getting one’s hands dirty and thence the line from Faust that in the beginning was action, and so on. This continuing desire for an ‘accord total’ (FB ) allied to an accommodating rather than prescriptive structure leads paradoxically to a successful simultaneous presentation of ‘art, l´egende, r´ealit´e’ (FB ) even as Leiris admits to being a complete failure as a writer, a rebel, a lover and a traveller (FB ). Some of this is due to those elemental themes which I indicated earlier, such as the colour red, which can link poetry, revolution and damnation in a general, overarching way. A related achievement is also the manner in which a powerful apocalyptic vision in this final volume of La R`egle du jeu gradually emerges from a slow convergence of scenes: Faust, Don Juan, the gates of Hell, Dresden, Paracelsus, ‘une esp`ece de diable vert [qui] crache le feu’, and so on. And the general nature of such affiliations also means that the three previous volumes of La R`egle du jeu need not be denigrated, but instead can be vaguely integrated into Frˆele Bruit’s endorsement of poetry and revolution (‘ “Po´esie”, “R´evolution”: mots vagues comme tous les grands mots’ (FB )), its general desire to join poetry to social commitment, and its non-ironic use of authentic heroes such as Don Juan or Faust, Nietzsche or Orestes. One of the best specific examples of this accommodating approach at work comes when Leiris analyses a single phrase from one of his dreams: ‘Ici fruit a` la tˆete se dit: l`a on s’enlise’ (FB ). It is significant that three interpretations are proposed. The first privileges the inner life of the immortal imagination over a fatal, external reality. The phrase is therefore interpreted as follows: at this moment of speaking (ici), the products of my imagination ( fruit a` la tˆete) which take shape in the form of words (se dit) speak of an external site (l`a) where the subject is threatened (l`a on s’enlise). But the shortcomings of this interpretation are soon revealed. According to Leiris, since ‘fruit a` la tˆete se dit’, the reflexive nature of the verb equates the ‘ici’, interpreted as the inner sanctum of the self, with the ‘l`a’, any external threat, and therefore allows them to be interchangeable. The first realization, then, is that the fruits of the imaginary are indissolubly linked to the reality out there, together with its very real threat of death. But as the latter is legion, Leiris comes to question

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the sharp distinction made between it and the predicating subject and eventually offers a second interpretation of the phrase which runs as follows: the dark region whence this voice speaks to me (l`a), and the field of conscious reasoning (ici), come together in language (se dit), and in this process ‘I’ come unstuck. The adage has thus undergone a complete inversion of meaning: the danger lies in language, not in life. This is startlingly similar to Lacan’s work on ‘Wo es war, soll Ich werden’. But this conclusion is in turn rejected, since it is still felt by Leiris to rely on a series of theatrical oppositions manifested under various guises, a puerile Manicheism wherein Good is here, Evil there, to the exclusion of all dialectic. The third definition, then, resulting from a dissatisfaction with the two previous attempts, offers the apparently banal message of a warning against baroque over-sophistications in word and deed. The paraphrase becomes: intellectual and moral over-sophistication for which I have too much indulgence is to be judged a vain exertion. Here the question of the subject in language is to be placed ‘back to back’ with the desire in social terms for an active engagement, without playing one off against the other. This final appeal, then, is to what can be called in every way common sense. Yet this desire to move beyond the previous volumes’ oppositional schemata to a sense of accommodation is in no way tantamount to inertia. On the contrary, it still operates as a form of d´epassement, for it preserves and overcomes the nominalist, realist and revolutionary formations of identity in the three previous volumes. But there is a greater concentration on and enjoyment of the autobiographical process of structuration as opposed to the synthesizing goal of a total autobiography as product. Enjoyment, indeed, very much comes to the fore in this final volume which, given its more journalistic recording and juxtaposition of sense-perceptions, allows a materialist conception of the subject to emerge unencumbered by the burdensome struggle to achieve totality. Consequently, though Leiris emphasizes what a failure he is (FB ), the desperate nostalgia which might have existed for the impossible totality has become a much more generous and affectionate space which still incorporates the dialectical process (‘Mais je dois, une fois de plus, biffer apr`es avoir avanc´e’ (FB )) but has deliberately moved autobiography beyond a bitter and closed logic of conflict. It is perhaps in this sense that Sartre and Nietzsche are combined in a closing volume that seeks to find the ‘total harmony’ linking art, legend and reality in a non-synthetic manner. From the nominalist mysteries of Biffures right through to Frˆele Bruit’s closing reference to what has not been, or could

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not be, presented, the autobiography remains, to use Sartre’s words, an ‘ambiguous object’. It thus maintains a necessary and non-repressive relation to the other, operating to the last on the level of non-savoir. The occasionally modest subject-matter and serene tone of Frˆele Bruit belie its real importance, therefore. On the level of signifying form rather than signified content, it stands as a fitting final exemplum of the play of difference which has remained the place of subjectivity throughout La R`egle du jeu. Whether this subjectivity has been traced as a name or other textual effect, or as a situated yet free agent in history, or as the rule of autobiography’s game, the structure of being in all four volumes has remained open to the other which is that difference, an other that constantly reformulates the unanswerable question regarding the rule of the game. In continuing to respond to that question, Leiris has had to balance the desire to break the solitude of suffering against the autobiographer’s ultimate desire to achieve pure singularity. This game is brought to the highest point of speculation and undecidability, beyond the boundaries of both the text La R`egle du jeu and the supratextual solitude deriving from the knowledge of mortality, in the designedly modest and unfinished nature of the posthumous Journal.



Secreting the self: Journal –

On first reading, Leiris’s posthumously published Journal – resembles a massive collection of ´ebauches that helped produce the eventual autobiographies which we have already read. This circuitous relation tends to create a combined sense of confirmation and destabilization, a lulling d´ej`a lu unsettled by a vague Unheimlichkeit. This occurs above all when we read the record of a physical or linguistic event that is to be elaborated later in a work which we have in fact already encountered; the chronology of our ‘Leiris’ is suddenly contradicted by Leiris’s most intimate voice. Thus, for example, we encounter the  Fourbis’s Khadidja at the physical rather than textual moment of her meeting, in  ( J ); or we find that the ‘Derni`eres paroles’ section of the valedictory Frˆele Bruit of  (FB ) was in fact written in  ( J –). One’s first reaction, I feel, is unconsciously to neutralize this potentially disruptive effect. Rather than opt for estrangement, so allowing the Journal to overturn ‘Leiris’ and become the matrix of a somehow new and original reading, the instinct is surely to absorb the journal’s entries into the framework of the established ‘Leiris’, assessing them consequently as the raw material for a later but already familiar performance. The journal itself encourages this view in its self-characterization as formless and unfinished. Thus we read at one point: Esp`ece de ‘mot d’auteur’, comme j’en ai – malheureusement – laiss´e glisser quelques-uns dans ce journal, en principe non destin´e a` la publication, mais dont je compte pourtant qu’il paraˆıtra post mortem (--). En v´erit´e, et c’est l`a mon excuse, ce journal est devenu une esp`ece de ‘fourre-tout’, contenant a` cˆot´e de notes de journal au sens strict, des notes de travail: marginalia, projets, id´ees a` d´evelopper e´ ventuellement, etc. (--). ( J ).

Typically, this description confirms the Journal as preliminary or supplementary, rather than original or essential, through its technique and context as well as its content. For this self-description comes belatedly 

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(in ) in a double footnote which itself refers back metatextually to an aphoristic remark recorded the previous year on the  April , after which the following entry is for the  June: the glaring omission in our eyes is of course any reference whatsoever to May . More generally, the diachronic nature and massive temporal span of the journal reinforce this dependent status. The overall effect of a generic and stylistic non-differentiation, which the above quotation itself embraces, presents any individual vision of aesthetics (such as the  view that rapid execution is a necessary hallmark of a revolutionary work ( J )) or politics (such as the  half-hearted defence of Stalinism ( J )) or art (such as the marked interest in opera during the late fifties and early sixties) not as the magnificently pure impulse of a Fibrilles, say, but as a tentative testing of possibilities that almost inevitably demands qualification or even contradiction, provided it has proved to be of any consequence at all. So although the volume actually displays a persistent concern with the true autobiographical metaphor or radical image (to be generated either in the form of a patiently constructed ‘bilan’, ‘ouvrage’, ‘autocritique’ or ‘autobiographie’, or, more felicitously, in some more immediate and magical manner, via, for example, a perfectly encapsulating title,) its general architecture and dynamics, which are those of a non-finite series of entries subject at best to recantation or reworking, seem endlessly metonymic or rhizomatic. The Journal may be the most original written Leiris, yet in terms of its own content, form and context, it is most readily appreciated as the partial or paradoxical version of a ‘Leiris’ resolved elsewhere. The fact that this resolution never definitively takes place anywhere in Leiris, and that a dynamic of instability productively sustains every one of his major works, does not overturn the initial perception of the volume as being primarily derivative. But once this initial reading has been negotiated, the volume as a whole turns this sense of being primarily derivative back against the established ‘Leiris’ (rather like the way in which after only twenty pages the journal offers a ‘coup d’œil r´etrospectif ’ ( J )). The content of ‘Leiris’ is for evermore changed with the journal’s intimate additions or exclusions. The evolution of ‘Leiris’ is shifted by the new chronological relations revealed. The official Leirisian tone, marked above all by a sophisticated language and sinuous phraseology, is shown to be the transformation and perhaps occlusion of an often prosaic and perfunctory record enlivened more often by the social round than by spiritual intensity. The view of Leiris as an exemplary organizing conscience is also shaken by the journal’s sporadic existence in the present, and the

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precedence this often gives solely to self-absorption or banality over what proves to be of historical significance. It is true, of course, that a mark of the major autobiographies’ authenticity is precisely the degree to which their original inspiration or real referent is the inner impulse or fait divers rather than the ideologically endorsed grand event. But this tense interaction is often unexploited in the Journal, or at best is suggested by a later addition, in the form usually of a footnote, which itself indicates the constructive starting-point of the autobiography. Thus, in the wake of the African cure, for example, Leiris’s entries for  disappointingly refer only twice and obliquely to Fascism ( J , ), these passing references on both occasions providing merely a context for an obsessive and somewhat pathetic return to his depression concerning his lack of virility. And lastly, the journal’s blurring of generic boundaries, with its undifferentiating resemblance to a diary, an ethnographer’s notebook, a prototype autobiography and a simple scrapbook, together with its uncertain, unfinished and posthumous message and the ambiguous status which this creates for any supposed addressee, return the patiently crafted resolutions of the Leirisian œuvre at once to the massive m´eli-m´elo of unabstracted life. The Journal can be viewed as less than a work, then. It can never present its subject, itself or its communicative transactions as fully accomplished, since it does not firm up the distinction between interiority and exteriority: within the volume, identities remain caught in the ebb and flow of intimacy and exteriorization; in the context of the whole of Leiris’s output, the text is equally undifferentiated, acting as the germinating environment for a work that comes to supersede and even predict it. By the very same token, however, the Journal can also be considered more than a work, for through its posthumous appearance it reabsorbs the emerged ‘Leiris’ (and his actualized addressee) into the textual matrix from which they had been generated. I shall return to the gendering implicit in Leiris’s resolutions and in his critical reception which the Journal’s nature and position help to highlight, but for now we can say that the Journal reinvaginates the whole of Leiris. In either case, the overwhelming characteristic of the journal is that of non-finality. It lacks the resolute entelechy which, in Alain Girard’s words, would confer on an intimate work ‘son fini et son e´ clat’. Its focus on the present, combined with its size and its primarily derivative status, combine to defeat any intellectual or spiritual synthesis. As late as , Leiris notes: “N’est-il pas outrecuidant de se regarder comme “un homme fini” quand, en fait, on n’a jamais vraiment commenc´e?’

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( J ). As the quotation suggests, the only definite body to emerge over time in the journal is that of temporality itself, within which events are weakly essentialized as the unity of the diverse. Yet even here this body remains unrefined or unfinished: as Jamin’s presentation notes ( J –), the journal’s composition from several cahiers generates overlap; while at the same time there is no entry for , and one-page entries for several other years. Partly as a consequence, no ideological, historical or institutional resolution comes to dominance, though many are hopefully recorded at the moment of their first emergence, as in the case of Cuba ( J –). What time engenders, instead, is a questioning of that very sense of hope, in terms both of the motivation of the subject and of the actual content of its object. A week after Aragon’s death, Leiris notes of that writer’s committed hope: ‘il n’y a pas eu fid´elit´e a` une id´ee, mais fid´elit´e a` une e´ glise (dont pourrait-on dire m´echamment il avait besoin pour sa gloire).’ ( J ); and he muses the following year: ‘Je puis dire que jadis j’esp´erais. Mais qu’est-ce que j’ “esp´erais”? Je ne saurais le dire . . . Or je serais incapable de dire ce qu’autrefois j’ai attendu au juste du surr´ealisme non plus que, plus tard, de l’existentialisme’ ( J ). This temporally produced ironization of ideological explanation also shows up in more abrupt ways, as when Leiris records how at a dinner party they discuss the litany of characters and events passing for history which they had been taught at school ( J ), or when he half-seriously develops the ‘mystical meanings’ of hot and cold into a schematic table of correspondences ( J –), or when he draws up a calendar for the period – wherein the perfunctory terms ‘mobilization’ and ‘armistice’ are superseded by the more crucial markers ‘premier bac’, ‘imperm´eable d´egoˆutant’, ‘deuxi`eme bac’ and ‘r´ev´elation e´ rotique’ ( J ). Later, as this resistance to the temptations of historical schemata finds its way into Leiris’s own productions, the Journal reflects an interest in non-finite artistic forms: opera buffa, happenings, free jazz ( J –); these examples, from , show Leiris’s concern to follow the authentic artistic form that accommodates the political mess of May . The journal itself enacts these lessons with its proliferation of form and register, from simple collage through recorded correspondence to an additional carnet de citations, each one of these deferring to the authority of an Other and so reinforcing a non-finite structure. And in a related manner, we can observe in Leiris’s work as a whole how this non-totalizing approach belatedly becomes exemplary, such that from having been somewhat dismissively referred to in Biffures as an ‘album de souvenirs, keepsake, bien plutˆot que journal ou recueil de pens´ees’ (Bi ), the Journal’s reactive

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nature becomes the model for Frˆele Bruit’s deliberately inconclusive conclusion to La R`egle du jeu. The journal’s non-finality is, then, a massive confirmation of the ultimate triumph of heterogeneity, or the inevitable return of pure clutter in the whole of Leiris, against which his repeated attempts at schematization have struggled in (productive) desperation. This doomed struggle against the swamping of interiority by heterogeneity does, of course, result in one overriding sense of finality: the possibility of non-being. I discuss later how Leiris’s autobiography is fundamentally a thanatography. This consciousness of death is at least as present in the Journal as in the rest of his work. This is in part due to the absence of a grand redemptive or transforming scheme. But, equally, the journal’s standard procedure of bearing personal witness to chronological change automatically gives increasing space to the accelerating deaths of others (a process which, of course, underlines the continuing presence of Leiris). A litany of deaths, involving virtually every major artist of Leiris’s generation, occasionally climaxes in a frenzied simultaneity (six deaths on page , a further six on page ). The violence of the listing reflects the anguish with which his colleagues’ disappearance places his wife and himself ‘en “premi`ere ligne” ou (comme on dit aussi) “aux premi`eres loges” pour la sinistre farce de la mort.’ ( J ). The farce is all the more total for the fact that his necrological testimony as an autobiography inscribes the moment when he in turn will become ‘mati`ere a` n´ecrologie’ ( J ). That moment in particular will deploy the technical effacement which lies at the centre of Leiris’s autobiographical practice: ‘Mourir, c’est voir – ou plutˆot ne pas voir – biff´e d’un [—— coup] trait de plume tout ce qu’on croyait avoir v´ecu.’ ( J ). In a further complication, the defeat of technique for Leiris comes to describe not only the inevitable advent of death but the ultimate indicator of art: in a communist society which has dispensed with selection, he writes, artists will persist as the exception since ‘leur travail, au lieu de ne concerner que la vie . . . met en jeu la mort ou, tr`es exactement, tout ce qui se situe en dehors de la sph`ere de la vie utile, – autrement dit: tout ce sur quoi les techniques qui s’apprennent n’ont pas de prise’ ( J ). Non-being therefore describes the rule of the game, an idea which Leiris figures geometrically and metatextually by repeatedly referring to Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia (or Urn-Burial) of . Leiris had begun a translation of this denunciation of the ‘irregularities of vainglory’ as early as , and he includes in a  entry ( J ) his translation of Browne’s line: ‘Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle must conclude and shut up all.’ Notwithstanding

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Leiris’s loose rendering of it, it is telling that the author of Glossaire should have retained the moment when Browne is alluding to the literally inscribed character of death (namely the Greek letter theta, ), so-called by Browne since it is the first letter of thanatos. Later, in the year of Biffure’s publication, Leiris retrospectively spells out the phenomenological significance of this mortal circle for his whole work: Quelquefois, je regarde quelle e´ paisseur de pages s´epare le point o`u j’en suis, dans ce cahier, du fragment de traduction des Hydriotaphia que j’avais copi´e a` la fin quand je ne le destinais pas encore a` la tenue d’un journal intime. Caract`ere, bien entendu! symbolique qu’ont pris pour moi ces pages consacr´ees maintenant aux pierres tombales figurent dans ce qui constitue maintenant les derniers feuillets d’un cahier o`u sont not´es, au jour le jour, des d´etails de ma vie: il semblerait que l’ e´ paisseur de pages qui m’en s´epare encore est la mesure exacte du temps qui me reste a` vivre. ( J ).

If the notation of this consciousness is the writer’s traditional victory over mortality, the brute interruption of deaths into this text, of which Zette’s is the most dramatic ( J –), shatters the illusion of poetic sublation. The thematic and formal non-death around which the journal revolves makes ‘Leiris’ essential only in his unfinishedness. This is something which Leiris occasionally tries to make emblematic of an authentic existence, as in the excited narration of the liberation of Paris, or when justifying his affair with ‘L´ena’ on the grounds that his life is ‘toute construite, trac´ee, fix´ee. Droit vers le mar´ecage de la mort.’ ( J ). But less controllably, it is part of that cyclomythic rhythm to which diaries are fated according to Pontalis, and which are inevitably ‘illusory’ and ‘disappointing’. The ‘Leiris’ of the Journal can never be given definitive virile or artistic definition. Instead, as we have noted, ‘Leiris’ is an unresolved if narratologically necessary effect of the journal’s real subject, which is temporality. This obliges us to look at the reception of the Journal. Its primarily derivative nature led some to review it merely as a massive footnote to an œuvre. Other reactions, however, acknowledged obliquely how the juridico-political contract of reading underpinning so much criticism of autobiography, from humanist moralism to the liberal capitalism of speech–act theory, was here placed in abeyance by the intervallic construction and agonistic judgement of ‘Leiris’. At least three ‘laws’ of communication were appealed to by specific reactions in order to deal with this problem of identity: the logic of the secret; the existence of the addressee; and the gendering of identity. The first is essential to the

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humanist vision, the second to speech–act dynamics. The last is often assumed by both. I shall look at each in turn. Secrecy and confession go hand in hand. Alain Girard writes at the beginning of Le Journal intime: Tout se passe comme si leur œuvre n’avait pas e´ t´e leur but unique. Elle n’´epuise pas a` leurs yeux leur secret, qu’ils brˆulent de d´ecouvrir enfin et de livrer au dehors, comme si leurs autres e´ crits ne portaient pas un t´emoignage suffisant d’euxmˆemes, . . . non pas mat´eriaux pour un travail futur, mais e´ clairs qui passent, susceptibles d’apporter la r´ev´elation attendue.

Jean Rousset, in a well-known book on Le Lecteur intime. De Balzac au journal asserts that ‘la clause du secret figure explicitement . . . dans l’acte qui ouvre ou scande le journal’. Secrecy is indeed key to Leiris’s general interests, providing a logical link between his autobiographical revelations, his ethnographic examination of ritual and secret language, his enthusiasm for the work of Rousset, his favourite operas, and even his love of bullfighting. But it is presented differently by a range of critics. At one extreme, Blanchot views this dimension of Leiris’s work as a form of Orphic phenomenology: ‘il y a quelque chose a` dire qu’on ne peut pas dire . . . , une lacune, un vide, une r´egion qui ne supporte pas la lumi`ere parce que sa nature est de ne pouvoir eˆ tre e´ clair´ee: secret sans secret dont le sceau rompu est le mutisme mˆeme.’ This vision of being makes the secret not simply an effaced circumstance, but the inherent and impossible destiny of self-writing. Representing this more concretely as the classic structure of the detective story, Fran¸cois Bott in Le Monde viewed the secret of the Journal as something Leiris had ceaselessly tried to extract from himself: ‘Certaines personnes ressentent comme une promiscuit´e l’obligation de vivre avec soi-mˆeme. Alors, elles e´ crivent des autobiographies pour forcer les secrets de ce partenaire tr`es intime, qui les incommode et les intrigue. C’´etait la principale occupation de Michel Leiris.’ For Bott, then, the Journal’s ‘secret du secret’ is its own evasive heart, Leiris’s unisolatable sense of self-identity. At the opposite extreme to this notion of a blind secret of becoming, the journalistic presentation of the Journal’s scandalous content is typified by Maurice Nadeau in Quinzaine litt´eraire: Lui, qui, publiquement, avait pris le parti de ‘tout dire’, ne reculant pas devant l’impudeur, non seulement n’aurait pas ‘tout dit’, mais aurait r´eserv´e pour la post´erit´e des ‘secrets’, qui ne pouvaient qu’ˆetre inavouables.

The unspeakable secrets in this reading were the hitherto deliberately withheld facts that Leiris had had an affair with H´el`ene Gordon (named ‘L´ena’ in the Journal, no doubt after the heroine of Conrad’s Victory;

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critics enjoyed noting the homophonic relation between Gordon, Dogon and Godon, the last being the maiden name of Leiris’s wife Louise, or ‘Zette’), and, even more shockingly, that Zette had not in fact been the younger sister of Lucie, the wife of the cubist art-dealer Kahnweiler, but in reality her illegitimate daughter. Seeking to balance out these Blanchotian and bourgeois extremes, with their structural and salacious reading interests, Jean Jamin and Denis Hollier carefully chose to characterize Leiris as ‘l’homme du secret discret’. The term discretion itself acts here discretely, indicating both middle-class mores and underlying patterns. Thus Jamin calls Leiris ‘quelqu’un de profond´ement correct’ and Zette’s illegitimacy ‘un secret de famille’ (p. ). But he prefaces this with the view that Leiris was interested in the role of the secret less for its content than for ‘l’affirmation de sa nature de secret’ (p. ). The secret therefore had a positive functional and metaphysical value: ‘il se trouvait au fond, avec ce non-dit, tel un poisson dans l’eau’ (p. ). As the secret must of course remain secret for it to operate in this positive way, it is not Leiris but Jamin who, in his capacity as editor of the Journal, permits himself to reveal in his ‘Pr´esentation’ that Zette was illegitimate ( J ). Noting that Leiris nowhere ever revealed this fact, that the dissimulation was ‘d`es lors endoss´ee et int´erioris´ee’ ( J ), he then speculates that this interiorized secret generated Leiris’s entire interest in totemic relations and the productive mensonge of names, in the ‘ajustement de sens et de mots’, from Aurora on ( J –). He also audaciously reinforces this relation established by him between the secrecy shared by journal and marriage by revealing firstly that Leiris kept his manuscripts, books, correspondence and cuttings in the apartment room called the ‘lingerie’ ( J ), and secondly that the journal itself was kept in a writing-table to be found in the bedroom, ‘un endroit on ne peut plus intime’ ( J ). According to Jamin, this kept writer and author symbolically separate, the first investigating (in) the intimate space of the conjugal relation, with its dreams, secrets, shortcomings and nakedness, the second cleaning up and tidying away the ‘dirty linen’. The conclusion is that Leiris’s books are ‘blanchis, amidonn´es, issus de pages ratur´ees, biff´ees, frois´ees, e´ crites dans sa chambre’ ( J ). The huge charge, elegantly put, is that Leiris’s work is fundamentally a whitewash. As Leiris’s literary executor, Jamin’s use of the logic of the secret is crucial. His immediate ethnographic analysis exploits social taboo and structural signification in order to present the Journal as a fundamentally important text, one that nurtures narrative for the mature autobiographies but also and more radically influences their material and methodologies through the productive displacement of its repressed secrets. On a less direct level, though, Jamin does two

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further things. In glossing ‘la clause du secret’ which he himself has supplied (he readily affirms in the interview that ‘ce journal est tout sauf un journal de confessions ou d’aveux. Point de r´ev´elations ni de ragots’ (p. )), he effectively writes and then signs his own contract with the text. Since a secret cannot exist in the absence of an at least potential addressee, his presentation affirms his own pertinence in the face of what would otherwise be a journal intime’s nullification of his significance. Secondly, in completing a right-hand/left-hand ethnographic structuration of Leiris’s social identity (one which Leiris himself in other contexts might well have produced) by exposing the fact of Zette’s illegitimacy, he encourages the heterosexual personification of the secret generally assumed by the immediate critical reception of the work. The crises of identity arising in Leiris from the tensions within and between normative and transgressive practices become gendered (and banalized) as the difference between marriage (Zette’s secret) and adultery (here L´ena’s secret). Jamin then further develops this heterosexual model by allegorizing the movements and locations of Leiris’s intimate writings as a form of bedroom farce. These two self-preservatory desires inherent in the Journal’s critical reception need now to be examined. At various crucial points in the journal, Leiris presents his wife as his primary addressee. One of the most direct of these moments is the entry for  July : ‘Je sais, maintenant (et c’est a` peu pr`es entendu entre nous), que ce cahier lui est destin´e, comme une sorte de testament. Que va-t-il en r´esulter quant a` sa r´edaction?’ ( J ). It is significant, if understandable, that these admissions are prompted by periods of crisis involving absence and possible annihilation. For as Leiris’s above question indicates, what is at stake is a discursive as well as existential realization. Leiris the diarist needed the absent eye and ear of Zette, and in a double sense: if a circumstance such as war placed her existence in jeopardy, Leiris’s journal also actively absented her in order to fulfil its own drive. As Jamin tells us, the journal does not speak of Zette’s illegitimacy and was never read by her. In keeping with the nature of a drive, this predication of the subject on the absentification of the female other is a general feature of Leiris’s work rather than a particular treatment of Zette. One is reminded of the statement in L’Age d’homme: ‘Je m’adresse ici a` cette femme uniquement parce qu’elle est absente (`a qui e´ crirait-on sinon a` une personne absente?)’ (AH ). The probable object of this observation – the woman called Kay in L’Age d’homme and Daisy S . . . in the Journal – is in fact confused in Leiris’s dreams with Zette ( J ). Nor is his wife immune to the mythological abstractions

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performed on real women most clearly in L’Age d’homme. As the journal bluntly puts it: ‘Quand je suis avec Z[ette], je la r´eduis automatiquement au plan social. Seul, elle me devient mythologique’ ( J ). This ambiguous treatment of the supposed main addressee was preserved, perhaps unwittingly, by certain critical reactions. I have noted how it was Jamin who exposed Zette’s illegitimacy and, as it were, illiteracy. In revealing these secrets, he seems unconsciously to wish to substitute his academic activity for her mythological silence. In a less involved mood, Francis Marmande, in Le Monde, asks for whom the journal was written and immediately gives an answer which seamlessly adds impotence to adultery and illiteracy: ‘pour qui? logiquement, pour Z., la compagne de toujours qui ne le lira jamais, le t´emoin de vie avec qui il va, une ann´ee, en , l’ann´ee inond´ee du nom de L´ena, jusqu’`a cette m´echancet´e qu’il nomme “la m´echancet´e de l’impuissance”.’ Elsewhere, in more elegiac tone, this association with impotence is replaced by one with death: ‘He never failed to address himself to Louise, his first destinataire [addressee], whose recent death had divided her from a work which would thereafter be regarded as a “longue lettre a` cette coutumi`ere et tendre confidente, sa compagne au clair regard”.’ These characteristics duplicate the ambiguities of Leiris’s designation. Both Leiris and the critics isolate Zette’s function in order to establish a reading relation for themselves. To this end, both associate her with silence, incommunicability, failure and death. And, in a subtle reactive twist, the process whereby Leiris writes by preserving and annulling Zette’s ‘secret’ as a silence at the heart of a secret work becomes the pretext whereby the critics write by laying bare such discretion in their exposure of the Journal. In both cases, moreover, what is not indicated is the enormous and regenerating group of occasional addressees, whose recognition would shift the focus away from the tragic and differently dramatic formation of a social self in the journal. A great deal of the text is the record of conversations, dinnertable discussions and more abstract intellectual disagreements, out of which Leiris discovers his own position. Many entries revolve around the dynamic phrase: ‘Je raconte a` . . . ’. On one page alone, Leiris notes a conversation with Artaud, the resumption of his analysis with Borel, and his reaction to Marie Bonaparte’s reaction to L’Afrique fantˆome ( J ). A series of addressees, such as Jouhandeau, Bataille, Colette Peignot, Sartre, and so on, provide the necessary pretext for his artistic and political reappraisals. In more general vein, he progressively reviews surrealism ( J ), ethnography ( J –) and existentialism ( J  –, ) in order to clarify and adjust his own position. Grammatical recognition of

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the other, marked by the vocative ( J , ), goes hand in hand with a linguistic debt, marked by the adoption of a recognizable vocabulary (for example, that of Sartre: J , ). At its largest, this becomes the incorporation of whole sections of books by other authors which obviously offer an oblique portrait of Leiris ( J –). Lastly, the partial e´ bauches of those works published in his lifetime, the revisions to his own footnotes, the practice of collage, and the appended ‘Carnet de citations’ ( J –) demonstrate clearly the formative influence of many addressees deep within the journal’s private testimony. They personify, in fact, the ‘rituals of destination’ or address, to adapt Calle-Gr¨uber’s critique of Rousset, that precondition the journal as writing, and without which Leiris would not be able to define any interiority or formulate any secret clause. It is remarkable how these characterizations of the Journal’s mode of communication and reserve are all gendered and indeed heterosexualized. They are typified by another review in Magazine litt´eraire, this time by Aliette Armel. Here the problems of identity and projection are openly resolved as manifestations of the one enduring heterosexual relationship. Zette is described as the journal’s main character and vision, its centre and destination, its essential myth and reference. She (and through her the reader) is also the person from whom Leiris can hold no secret: ‘La fa¸con dont elle est cit´ee dans la proximit´e imm´ediate des autres relations f´eminines de son mari laisse supposer qu’elle n’en ignorait rien.’ Such engendering is deeply cultural rather than simply conspiratorial. This is presumably the reason why, at a more abstract level, B´eatrice Didier can describe the journal intime as a ‘lieu du repliement sur soi, du refus de l’exogamie, . . . un univers incestueux’ (p. ), adding that the writer is ‘prot´eg´e dans cette prison matricielle’ (p. ) which nurtures a vocation that is ‘admirablement f´econde’ (p. ). And, of course, Leiris himself continually dramatizes the quest for identity in such sexual terms. Within the pages of the journal, the affair with L´ena is the most striking of these instances. Having returned from Africa and interrupted his analysis with Borel, Leiris spends approximately four months in an adulterous relationship through which he seeks aggressively to make heterosexual passion the conventional resolution to the anxieties of identification. The object of his attentions, L´ena, will act as accomplice in his attempt to escape ‘l’inanit´e d’une vie sans amour’ ( J ). This presumably means that the heterosexual identity of the man in love is not considered inane, an idea unfortunately contradicted for an objective reader by his initial

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coyness (‘Sera-ce . . . , dont je ne sais pas encore si c’est quelqu’un de bien ou mal?’ ( J )) and subsequent enthusiasm: ‘L´ena et sa gaˆıt´e. L´ena et sa tristesse. L´ena et sa frivolit´e. L´ena et son mari. L´ena et ses amis. L´ena et ses amours. L´ena et son ennui. L´ena et ses impossibilit´es’ ( J  –). A crucial feature of this passionate resolution for Leiris is the wilful overturning of his intellectual and aesthetic standards: he sheepishly notes that L´ena does not like Nerval, adding ‘sans doute est-ce une le¸con et dois-je la m´editer’ ( J ); conversely, she does like P´eguy and Anatole France ( J ), Hamsun, Hemingway and Le Grand Meaulnes ( J ). It is telling in this context that the affair’s duration is demarcated by Leiris’s own books, beginning in the aftermath of L’Afrique fantˆome and concluding with the start of L’Age d’homme’s production ( J ). Taken together, these details indicate how the desired destiny – to be a real rather than a reflexive man – is itself part of a long literary process of self-construction. Far from representing the dissolution of crafted introspection, ‘L´ena’ is one point in a play of positions running from Louise to L´ena, Godon to Gordon. It is from the proliferation of metaphorical and metonymic possibilities thus generated that a narrative of bourgeois heterosexuality in search of its ends comes into being. The episode with L´ena is therefore best read not as an isolatable extreme in a binary logic of domestic secrets, but as just one attempt, of a deliberately artless kind, to break out of the prison-house of introspection and achieve authentic exteriorization. (Attempting to do so via a bourgeois affair and a secret diary also reflects faithfully, of course, how such an idea precludes its own actual realization.) This potential passage from interiority to exteriority, from consciousness to the act, is consistently gendered in Leiris. It reaches perhaps its most sustained expression in the journal’s entries for the period surrounding the second world war, where Leiris manages to incorporate problems encountered in his ‘secret’ relationships with Zette and L´ena into more open existential and aesthetic concerns. Thus Leiris’s  ruminations on his impotence with Zette refer at once to his fear of old age and war ( J ) and, shortly afterwards, to the relation between exteriorization, writing and manliness: A la fois envie de sortir, de voir des gens, et envie de me replier. Incapable d’agression: incapable de prendre une femme . . . A cause de ce manque de virilit´e, je ne peux mˆeme plus e´ crire. Comment Le Rouge et le Noir me montre avec acuit´e mon erreur: dans l’amour j’ai toujours cherch´e le bonheur, jamais la puissance et la domination. J’ai

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toujours recherch´e un e´ tat dans lequel comfortablement m’installer, jamais une aventure, un drame, un acte. C’est a` cause de ce manque de courage que je me m´eprise. ( J )

The following affair with L´ena will therefore hopefully flood 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: ‘C’est donc entre ce double processus de r´epulsion et d’attirance que se joue tout le drame’ ( J ). This determination explains the proto-existentialist characterization of the affair: the irruption of L´ena’s physical presence into his cerebral world, his (literary) desire to become a ‘grand costaud genre Hemingway’, his Roquentin-like reflections: Je ne prendrai pas d’autre demi de cette bi`ere fran¸caise que je n’aime pas. Ce qu’il faut maintenant c’est appeler le gar¸con, payer, me lever, partir. Demain – ou quelque autre jour si demain je ne puis pas – j’irai dans un autre caf´e et je continuerai. Puis, il y aura L´ena qui rentrera. A ce moment tout se d´ecidera et je saurai peut-ˆetre enfin si pour toujours je dois me comparer a` une quelconque bestiole prisonni`ere d’un mesquin parall´el´epip`ede de verre. ( J )

From this point on until , apprehensions of war, which mark the beginning and end of each year in the journal, combine with a developing programme of artistic authenticity, of which Picasso’s ( J ) and Peignot’s ( J ) approach to poetry are the models. The result is a new ‘base de r´epresentation’, a virile self-image whose performance is the antidote to the elevation of the ‘inner’ world by surrealism and psychoanalysis ( J –). This ‘heroic myth’, which recognizes the ‘truth’ of such expressions as ‘ “ne pas bander” ’ and ‘ “ne pas avoir de couilles” ’ ( J ) will arrest Leiris’s devirilization (‘Muscles mous, tˆete molle, sexe mou’ ( J )), and allow him to ennoble his death ( J ) through the catharsis not of confession but of the act ( J ). This determination leads, in the Occupation period, to a serious politico-aesthetic split with Bataille which focuses precisely on the relative merits of an inner or outer life. Bataille’s position is resumed as ‘ “Ce que j’ai toujours compt´e pour l’essentiel rel`eve de ma vie int´erieure; je n’ai pas a` me soucier de ce qui est ext´erieur a` moi (sic)” ’, against which Leiris argues: ‘quoi qu’en disent les B[ataille], et autres partisans d’une mystique, po´etique ou non, mais a` coup sˆur de tout repos – je suis d´ecid´e a` me raidir’ ( J –). These Sartrean and sexual terminologies achieve their finest hour in the Liberation period, where Leiris’s entry, written up later, reflects in its eventful and extroverted narration the living-out of the act and the dissipation of intellectual repli. He adds the telling postscript:

Secreting the self: Journal –

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Retomb´e, avec la Lib´eration, dans mon marasme d’autrefois. A croire que ceux qui disent que les n´evropathes se sont mieux port´es pendant les quatre ann´ees d’occupation, ont raison. ( J )

If we really need to place the domestic secrets known as Louise and L´ena 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 influence of Melville’s Pierre, a translation of which Zette had sent to him in , during his mobilization in B´eni-Ounif. His claim, supposedly substantiated in letters to his wife, is that the novel gave Leiris an inspiring literary model for an oblique, structural exposure in Biffures of Zette’s secret status. It is certainly true that Pierre presents complex familial relations. 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 fianc´ee 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 decipherment, with social mores and correctness, with the signifying properties of words and names (p. ), with the power of the written word in however insignificant 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 Pierre’s 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 text’s stifling drama. This elaborate encrypting recalls in turn the work of Raymond Roussel, one of Leiris’s acknowledged mentors. According to Foucault, who constantly emphasizes the link between Roussel and Leiris and argues at one point that the latter sought to preserve the former’s 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 Journal’s intimacy: like Comment j’ai ´ecrit certains de mes livres, the Journal can be viewed as ‘secret and posthumous’, hiding as

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Texts and contexts

much as it reveals, in the specific context of homotextuality. In Foucault’s 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 signifies that one must look further and in greater depth’ (pp. –). And in the Postscript to the English-language edition, he adds: ‘Between cryptography and sexuality there is certainly a direct relationship’ (p. ), affirming 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 presented the Journal as implicitly heterosexual. Leiris himself has contributed, 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 influence in the context of the Journal, where the exposure of the secrets dictating Leiris’s writing has reinforced the secrecy of a constituent homographesis. The work of homographesis has been explained 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 concentrates on homosexuality’s textual or semiotic overdetermination. As with any figural logic, this results in metaphoric and metonymic manifestations. 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 fixed system of identity results in homosexuality coming to signify ‘the potential permeability of every sexual signifier – and by extension, of every signifier 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 Leiris’s biffural logic, a close attention to the specific dimension of homographesis in the Journal brings out at once how the rhetorical and formalist mechanism of secretion and exposure deployed by Leiris and critics is propelled in part by the homographic diff´erance that remains ‘secreted but inaccessible inside’ the text.

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The Journal’s 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 first of  endnotes also by Jamin. This one informs us that Leiris tore out the first pages of manuscript number one, and erased (‘biff´ees’) the subsequent five lines to such a degree that they became ‘ind´echiffrables, de sorte qu’il n’est possible de dater pr´ecis´ement 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 bˆetes’. 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 li´ee a` la dualit´e des sexes. Un homme qui serait a` la fois mˆale et femelle, et capable de se reproduire seul, ne mourait pas, son aˆ me se transmettant sans m´elange a` sa post´erit´e. La haine instinctive que les sexes ont l’un pour l’autre vient peut-ˆetre de la connaissance obscure de ce fait que la mortalit´e est due a` la diff´erentiation des sexes. Rancune violente, balanc´ee par la tendance a` l’unit´e – seul chiffre de vie – qu’ils tentent de satisfaire par le co¨ıt. ( J )

We can see that the entry’s real concern is with the inevitable death caused by heterosexual recognition and activity, the instinctive hatred which this obscure knowledge produces, and the specific magical ideal of total sexual union within one man’s body. Turning now to the journal’s  entry, we find 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 film 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 vanit´e, que je me conduisais – ou tendais a` me conduire – a` l’´egard de mes amis comme Dorian Gray a` l’´egard de Sibyl Vane’ ( J ). To this he adds a complex literary context: Cˆot´e Dorian Gray de tout un aspect de Jouhandeau: Xim´en`es Malinjoude, L’Amateur d’imprudence, Astaroth. Cf., e´ galement, ce que Proust dit du cˆot´e “Haroun alRachid” de Charlus, quant a` son noctambulisme sp´ecial. Tout ceci, remontant au prince Rodolphe des Myst`eres de Paris et mˆeme a` Restif de la Bretonne.

The ostensible link between these disparate writers is arguably a refined individual’s semi-detached observation of society, but once we add to this

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Texts and contexts

ad-hoc tradition the  entry, the sexual charge within each disjunction 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-mˆeme et qui ne serait pas moyen de garder sa jeunesse.’ So the journal’s 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 unacknowledged model for Biffures’s self-portrait. Between this new text, and Jamin’s proposed model, Pierre, of course, the link is the cryptography of a homosexual secret. Given the intricate nature of Leiris’s 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 ‘cˆot´e 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 example, 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 first and most influential assessments of the contemporary field produced after the war, and also largely contemporary in its revisions with the central volumes of La R`egle du jeu, places Jouhandeau in the negative category of ‘unclassifiable outsiders’ (p. ). Once this seemingly innocent view is adumbrated, however, an astounding homophobia 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 Jouhandeau’s ‘mystique de l’enfer’ to a professorial final 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 effacement makes Jouhandeau’s position at the head of Leiris’s list all the more significant. It is easy to trace both Jouhandeau’s formative presence in Leiris’s life up to the production of L’Age d’homme, and Leiris’s 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 Jouhandeau’s disappearance represents a more authentic level of secrecy, one to which the Journal seems actively dedicated. As a signifier

Secreting the self: Journal –

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of homographic difference, ‘Jouhandeau’ reveals an aim which runs contrary to that of an autobiographer’s 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, Leiris’s allusions become mystical, lyrical and poetic: Mercredi  a` jeudi  mars Nuit chez Jouhandeau. Le “starets” (P`ere Laberthonni`ere). “Quand nous levons la tˆete, le ciel nous bande les yeux” (Andr´e Breton). ( J ).

The relationship is brief and to the death. The following days register: ‘Puret´e de la haine’ ( J ), ‘Le meurtre spirituel’ ( J ), ‘Liens de l’inimiti´e’ ( 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 simply 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 Jouhandeau’s homosexual presence. Read more positively, it is one of many gestures manifesting how ‘Jouhandeau’ becomes an influential homographic signifier in Leiris’s self-construction. Pursuing the negative side first, 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 gˆene dont je me plains est apparue sous forme de gˆene physique (douleur et contraction anormale d’un des testicules) apr`es une aventure d’ordre p´ed´erastique relat´ee dans le cahier jaune (fin mars-d´ebut avril ). ( J ).

This detail is also mentioned in the closing sections of L’Age d’homme. 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 d’une grande fatigue, apr`es plusieurs nuits presque blanches pass´ees a` vaticiner sur un plan ind´ecis – entre la passion, le mysticisme et le lyrisme – avec l’ami homosexuel dont j’ai parl´e 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

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Texts and contexts

where he was drinking ‘en compagnie d’un ami plus aˆ g´e et p´ed´eraste’ (AH ). A violent scene ensues during which the companion scratches the woman’s face, following which Leiris sees him home and then sleeps with him ‘apr`es avoir humili´e ma bouche et la sienne dans un r´eciproque e´ garement’ (AH ). Having relocated this absent event of the secret journal by, ironically, rereading a public confession and virile programme such as L’Age d’homme, we can begin to appreciate the subtle written strategies employed within the Journal itself in order to suppress the event’s aesthetic implications. Firstly, the relationship’s 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 po`ete’ ( J), ‘un [———– mystique] chr´etien’ ( J ), and someone for whom ‘[L]e mysticisme catholique est la forme conventionelle qu’il a choisie pour l’expression de son lyrisme’ ( J ). At the same time, Leiris takes his distance, so that the denigration of Jouhandeau acts as the affirmation of both Leiris’s physical innocence and his artistic superiority. Thus Jouhandeau is ‘[p]as po`ete: son lyrisme n’est jamais qu’une d´eclaration d’amour ( je le sais – car la seule fois que j’ai voulu me transporter avec lui sur le plan lyrique, cela a tourn´e en d´eclaration d’amour)’ ( J ); and we are told that whereas Jouhandeau is ‘iconoclˆatre’, Leiris and his friends are ‘iconoclastes’ ( J ). Leiris’s break with idolatry is quite literal in this context: endnotes by Jamin tell us that a comment on the ‘p´ed´erastie du professeur’ ( J ) and two large sections which reflect 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 specific recommendation to himself: ‘Supprimer tout ce qui me lie: souvenirs, f´etiches de toutes sortes . . . Brˆuler tout derri`ere soi’ ( J ). Henceforth, this virile determination results in a silence surrounding Jouhandeau’s 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 v´eritable “inversion” de Jouhandeau: faire de la p´ed´erastie le prototype du Mal alors que l’antis´emitisme est regard´e 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 Jouhandeau’s funeral:

Secreting the self: Journal –

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Oui, malgr´e son talent ind´eniable d’´ecrivain stricto sensu (encore que le classicisme de sa langue soit assez proche d’un acad´emisme), fait aujourd’hui figure d’homme incroyablement narcissique qui durant toute sa vie est pass´e a` cˆot´e de tout, ne s’int´eressant gu`ere qu’`a ses petites histoires d’alcˆove ou de famille et se pr´eoccupant seulement de les transformer litt´erairement en bijoux. Plus m´echamment: un homme qui parlait de “mal” a` propos de son homosexualit´e, mais n’a jamais jug´e bon de battre sa coulpe a` propos de l’antis´emitisme auquel il avait temporairement c´ed´e (--). ( J ).

We can see that, as the erasure of Jouhandeau becomes more general, complex processes of rearrangement, realignment and reinvention become more operative. This replaces an initial reactive erasure with a politico-cultural containment. At later points in the text, Jouhandeau’s presence becomes thematized and his significance neutralized within a web of overdetermined relations. In , Leiris records: ‘Zette perd l’anneau en corne de buffle (qu’Asammanatch m’avait donn´e a` Gondar), anneau qu’elle portait au poignet avec une chaˆınette d’or que m’avait donn´ee, il y a plusieurs ann´ees, Jouhandeau’ ( J ). In , he notes: ‘Vendredi dernier, le Castor saoule chez Gallimard o`u se fˆetait le prix de la Pl´eiade. Je lui tiens le front pour l’aider a` vomir. Autres personnages dont je me souviens avoir ainsi tenu le front: Colette Peignot et, probablement, Jouhandeau et Zette’ ( J ). The entries have much in common. The former is evocative of the fate of Khadidja’s gift of the ‘Croix du Sud’ (to which the journal alludes on page ) at the end of Fourbis (Fo ); the latter is mentioned on the previous page of Fourbis, where Leiris recalls (for the second time) holding the head of Colette Peignot as she vomited. The two incidents moreover form part of the one permitted version of the mystical passion which has survived beyond the period of conscious realist suppression: thus, on the same page of Fourbis (Fo ), Leiris narrates how he had hoped to take the Croix du Sud to his grave, and had observed Peignot on her death bed make a reverse sign of the cross. This deathly turn recalls Leiris’s previous recollection of holding Peignot’s head, where he specifies that it was a gesture he had repeated unconsciously ‘[p]our dire adieu a` son cadavre’ (Fo ). As part of this farewell, Leiris permits himself a hesitant and self-denying characterization of his friendship for her: ‘moi qui – sans eˆ tre un homosexuel – regarde l’amiti´e comme une esp`ece d’amour et suis probablement – quelque d´egoˆut que j’aie pour la sublimit´e des amours platoniques – l’homme des amiti´es f´eminines plutˆot que celui de la passion’ (Fo ). This homosexual denial permits us lastly to observe how both instances involve the absorption and

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abstraction of Jouhandeau’s physical presence into symbolical and institutional networks, whose effect is to turn transgressive practice into normative status. In the  reference, Jouhandeau occupies a discreet position in an ethnographic and marital circle, symbolized ambiguously by rings and chains, whose significant events are the end and loss of quasi-sacred relations: the loss of a ring between husband and wife; the loss of a talisman from his chief interpreter-informer in Ethiopia, a gift he had already given up to his wife; the loss of his link with Ethiopia, the official event of that morning being an examination marking the end of his Abyssinean studies; the loss of a ring hanging from a chain given to him many years before by Jouhandeau, which gift he had also given up to his wife and which itself may or may not be lost. These relations henceforth survive only invisibly within the significance which Zette has in the eyes of Leiris, that of the person through whom even the symbols of transgressive practice have been lost. What remains instead is a heterosexual and professional attainment of the death-drive. Equally, in the  reference, the gesture which may well have immediately preceded Leiris’s sexual act with Jouhandeau is now part of the (‘disgusting’) sublimation of passion into a ‘feminine friendship’ whose specific pretext for intoxication is the scarcely transgressive Pl´eiade awards and whose permitted practice in general is almost completely literary. This determined secretion of Jouhandeau’s significance, as evidenced by these later appearances, obliges us to note the impulse to repress rather than, as is more commonly assumed, to reveal that is inherent in the fiche-based approach of Leiris’s ethnography and autobiography. But the biffure operated on Jouhandeau also allows him to remain, of course, as the fantasmatic and unacknowledged detail through which jouissance continues to be attained and preserved within respectability. As Barthes has often commented, it is the secreted force which generates the symbolic representation. If we turn to the productive effect of ‘Jouhandeau’, therefore, we can see at once how the repressed event creates writing. Moreover, the wide range of transforming mechanisms, of the typically metaphorical and metonymic variety, which are set in play contributes strongly to the emergence in Leiris of a true autobiographical practice. This homosexual abgrund of autobiography obviously challenges the influential view that Leiris’s marriage (and hence by implication his heterosexual self-determination) marks the birth of Leiris the autobiographer.

Secreting the self: Journal –



Returning to the row of dots marking the repression of the homosexual act, we see firstly that the framing hereby created out of the rest of that day’s entry in itself serves to indicate the now defaced portrait and to initiate an oblique, writerly representation. The gap is followed at once by the recurring indicator of homotextuality and false portraiture which we have already noted: ‘Je serai toujours avec mes amis comme Dorian Gray avec Sibyl Vane’ ( J ). And it is preceded by the recording of an incomplete narrative, entitled ‘Le Lycanthrope’ (in homage to P´etrus Borel), whose formal, grammatical and narrative particularities have obviously influenced Le Point cardinal and Aurora ( J ). The connection with the latter is particularly telling: the first-person voice of ‘Le Lycanthrope’ closely resembles Aurora’s ‘Damocl`es Siriel’, which is, of course, the mirror-image and inversion of ‘Leiris’. For this reason, it is interesting how Leiris stresses that he is merely copying out, ‘`a titre documentaire’ ( J ), a text already written the previous summer, since several details seem to offer a narrative absorption of contemporary circumstances relating to his liaison with Jouhandeau. The opening of the mini-narrative’s second section, ‘C’est en sortant du bar du Crabe que j’eus l’id´ee premi`ere de l’assassinat’ ( J ), echoes a twice-recalled quotation of Rimbaud’s ‘Voici le temps des assassins’ recorded only a few pages earlier ( J ) and referring obviously to his battle of wills with Jouhandeau. Similarly, a singular detail (significantly a factual rather than fanciful one) from the second quotation: ‘ rue Blomet ou le Club des As de Pique (Masson, Limbour, Tual, moi), “ . . . le temps des assassins.” ’ ( J ), recurs in the third section of the apparently earlier story: ‘Je regardais stupidement le paquet qu’elle m’avait donn´e et vit [sic] qu’il e´ tait orn´e d’un as de pique’ ( J ). In addition, several elements in ‘Le Lycanthrope’ echo Jouhandeau’s Xim´en`es Malinjoude, a work that was completed only during Pentecost , was dedicated to Leiris, and is in part an obvious and highly diabolical portrait of Leiris’s ‘cˆot´e Dorian Gray’ (as Leiris later indirectly acknowledges). Beyond the general intertextuality of their spiritual Gothic, reflected in each tale’s fantastical journey through cruelty and massacre, there are concrete links: the respective heroes cultivate cruelty from childhood ( J ; XM ), scorn their contemporaries ( J ; XM ), bite or mutilate rather than kiss or embrace ( J ; XM –), and die transformed into light ( J ; XM ); while the Rimbaud quotations in ‘Le Lycanthrope’ are closely echoed in Xim´en`es’s statement ‘Voici l’heure de l’Assassin’ (XM ). It is very tempting, therefore, to read the description of Xim´en`es’s secret desires



Texts and contexts

and fears as also referring to the Leiris here portrayed only through his parergon: Une voix int´erieure lui souffle qu’il cherchait par l`a a` e´ touffer quelque voix plus int´erieure qui eˆut bien voulu le faire entendre, s’il se fˆut repos´e un instant pour l’´ecouter . . . Quand il agissait, il ne faisait que r´eagir, tantˆot contre un d´esir poignant, sauvage, aveugle, encore a` demi inconnu, qui montait, brid´e de ses entrailles, tantˆot contre un absolu qui, descendu trop vite des splendeurs de son intelligence, eˆut risqu´e d’illuminer par surprise ce d´esir obscur. (XM –).

It is as a reaction to the unwitting illumination of a dark desire that we can therefore read the rapid proliferation henceforth of the texts and strategies that are recognized as the early Leiris. In urgent counterpoint to his ‘adventure’ with Jouhandeau, Leiris sets up a reactive, indeed openly repressive, self-portrait. He begins by referring to the ‘adventure’ in the future perfect before penning a preface for Simulacre, his first printed book ( J –). Leiris had signed the contract for this work on  June , the day after he had noted: ‘Supprimer tout ce qui me lie: souvenirs, f´etiches de toutes sortes . . . ’ ( J ). And the unused preface itself notes, like an abstract acknowledgement of the concealment and inference of Jouhandeau at work here: ‘De la double connaissance du poids et de l’ordre des mots, nous pourrons donc, par le calcul, inf´erer l’existence de mondes invisibles (les Id´ees innomm´ees, – que la raison n’est pas directement capable de r´ev´eler)’ ( J ). He then immediately offers a ‘coup d’œil r´etrospectif ’ which also concerns a lack of open admission ( J ), before continuing with a ‘bilan de ma vie sentimentale’, each of whose four subsections contributes to an aggressively yet abjectly heterosexualist Bildungsroman: ‘idioties pour des putains [;] je n’eus pu tirer nulle vanit´e de l’avoir pour maˆıtresse [;] [s]tupide tentative de mariage’ ( J ). This he follows at once with the richly ambiguous remark: ‘Jouhandeau avait raison lorsqu’il me disait: “Tu n’oses pas aller au bout de tes d´esirs” ’ ( J ), before following with a long passage ( J –) which is recalled at the head of chapter  of L’Age d’homme (AH –) and which includes the line: ‘Comment oserais-je me regarder si je ne portais pas soit un masque, soit des lunettes d´eformantes’ ( J ). This in turn is followed by the reproach: ‘J’ai fait plus de mal a` Jouhandeau qu’il ne m’en a fait’ ( J ) This dialectic generally informs the chronology of Leiris’s sexual life as revealed in the Journal, such that Louise and L´ena supplant Jacob and Jouhandeau who themselves were the intellectual and sexual antithesis of Daisy S. But, more crucially, it underpins the emergence of the autobiographical. The biffure of the

Secreting the self: Journal –



homosexual is thus homotextually influential, however much Leiris seeks to place the adventure within the period of non-writing: ‘Notre aventure sera d´eroul´ee dans le temps compris entre la correction des e´ preuves des Pincengrain et la parution du volume’ ( J ). Evidence of this influence emerges if we focus on the textual effect when Leiris’s relationship with L´ena comes to an end and he seeks to continue by presenting it as the ‘entre-temps’ of writing. A recognizable protoype of L’Age d’homme’s opening is immediately recorded ( J ), closely followed by a further oblique reference to Dorian Gray: ‘Je suis un point qui se d´eplace le long d’une ligne. La glace casse, c’est la mort; le portrait est fini’ ( J –). The following month sees the resumption of his analysis with Borel and a resistance to both psychoanalysis and the novel since neither retains the mythical ( J , ). Following a dinner with Jouhandeau, Leiris then notes as an ‘Appendice’ those passages in Jacob’s L’Homme de chair et l’homme reflet ( J ) and Jouhandeau’s Xim´en`es Malinjoude ( J –) which obviously exploit an oblique portrait of Leiris. Of the latter, two details are particularly striking. The first is that Jouhandeau’s  portrait has obviously become engrained in the  prototype opening of L’Age d’homme. This influence goes beyond Leiris simply recollecting portraits at this moment. Leiris’s self-description: ‘j’ai honte d’une fˆacheuse tendance aux rougeurs et a` la peau luisante. Mes mains sont maigres, plutˆot velues, avec des veines dessin´ees. J’ai les jambes trop courtes pour mon torse, les e´ paules trop e´ troites pour mes hanches’ ( J ), has obviously incorporated Jouhandeau’s description of Xim´en`es: ‘Le corps e´ tait moins beau que la tˆete dont le trop d’ampleur faisait paraˆıtre l’´epaule [´etroite] et le bras velu un peu court. La main d´emesur´ee, rougie par le sang a` fleur de peau et vein´ee de cordes bleues, presque toujours moite et griffue’ ( J ). The other striking detail concerns the section which Leiris has cut out of the description of Xim´en`es. Immediately before the beginning of Leiris’s second quotation ( J ), Jouhandeau had written: Xim´en`es, depuis sa treizi`eme ann´ee, s’adonnait a` une coquetterie, chez un homme, chez un homme robuste et a` cet aˆ ge, bien e´ trange, surtout dans une ville de province, a` une coquetterie qui int´eressait particuli`erement son visage et ses mains. (XM )

The passage dropped by Leiris after ‘Il poudrait son visage . . . ’ had continued: . . . et ses mains; il se passait du rouge aux tempes, sur les l`evres, et il peignait ses ongles attentivement comme des griffes de Chim`ere. Les poudres pr´ecieuses dont il se servait, t´enues a` l’infini, ocres, saumon, soufre, dans lesquelles il broyait



Texts and contexts

quelques atomes d’or, ses fards, ses parfums, lui venaient directement d’une maison de prostitution sacr´ee du Pandjab. (XM )

Within the paragraph break occurring near the bottom of the page in the Journal ( J ), Jouhandeau had actually added: ˆ [I]l e´ tait l’unique ‘amant’ de ‘l’Etre’, l’amant de Dieu nu qu’il poursuivait, nu lui-mˆeme, dans l’ombre des choses comme derri`ere un buisson pour l’y e´ treindre ´ et l’´etouffer. Oh! le terrible amant de Dieu! Etait-ce pour ‘tenter Dieu’? C’´etait pour Dieu seul que se grimait Xim´en`es. (XM ).

And where Leiris breaks off again at the bottom of the page ( J ), Jouhandeau had continued: [A]pr`es des ann´ees d’humiliation et de renoncement devant lui, il avait admis une bouche en d´elire a` toucher ‘pour la premi`ere fois et la derni`ere’ affirmait-il, sa bouche hauteine, parfum´ee et peinte. (XM –)

It is obvious that Leiris has quite simply desexualized Jouhandeau’s mythical portrait of him, and in particular has sought to erase all reference to homosexual travesty in general and his sexual act with Jouhandeau in particular. The pertinence of the excised passages, with their indications of feminization, coquettishness, spiritual passion and homosexual role-play, can be brought out by recalling here Leiris’s entry for the day before the recording of ‘Le Lycanthrope’: La nuit derni`ere, j’ai tent´e le meurtre spirituel de Jouhandeau. Il a e´ t´e plus fort que moi: ‘Tu ne pourras jamais m’empˆecher de t’aimer’ m’a-t-il dit. Ma forme de vengeance: jouer le personnage que l’on veut me faire jouer, mais d’une fa¸con toute diff´erente de celle que l’on attendait {Ex.: si l’on veut faire de moi une femme, je deviendrai femme mais en empruntant uniquement ce qu’elle a de diabolique: coquetterie, horrible ing´eniosit´e pour d´ecouvrir les paroles qui peuvent faire le plus de mal.} ( J ).

As we have seen, what has not been suppressed has been absorbed into L’Age d’homme’s virilization and petrification of self. Here it is significant that Leiris records how Jouhandeau reproaches him for L’Age d’homme’s abstractions, confesses that Jouhandeau is right to hate the book’s egotism ( J –), but attempts to justify its approach as a ‘liquidation’ and ‘cette volont´e de se d´epasser . . . qui est le signe de sa valeur po´etique [mais qui] n’a pas a` prendre n´ecessairement une forme po´etique’ ( J ). The formulation encapsulates what was to become, of course, the central plea of the preface added to L’Age d’homme for its republication in . It therefore demonstrates once more how Leiris’s

Secreting the self: Journal –



biffure of the homosexual portrait has generated a subterranean homotextuality, with its own covert and highly influential addressee. It is clear on examination that the homosexual apprenticeship concealed within the Journal is more profoundly operative than those heterosexual secrets of L´ena or Louise which criticism is happy to endorse. We can see also how the homosexual persists as a negative grounding in Leiris’s most accomplished work, underlying, for example, the resolute heterosexualization of L’Age d’homme’s form, content and prefatory programme. More generally, it is evident that Jouhandeau’s significance really lies in the permeability and instability which, as a signifier, it is capable of releasing into the text. Its determined erasure therefore exposes 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 Leiris’s 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 Leiris’s writing. Similarly, if we attend to the journal’s 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 œuvre, 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-finitude, heterogeneity, and repression rather than revelation, and so to revise our reading of Leiris’s 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 Leiris’s writing, namely the obsession with self-presence. What we need to do now, therefore, is to supplement our chronological assessment with a specific examination of the thematics of Presence in Leiris.

 

The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu



Excess of joy: the beginnings of presence in ‘ . . . Reusement!’

‘Nearness and presence, not the magnitude of separation, is what is essential.’ Heidegger’s remark could stand as a definition of the guiding obsession of autobiography. Just as Western philosophy since Plato, according to Heidegger, has been grounded in parousia, or permanent selfpresence, so the classical metaphysical origin and aim of autobiography is arguably the desire to confirm the autobiographer’s ‘being in the sense of already-thereness (presence)’. In this regard, phenomenology, with its insistence on a descriptive philosophy of pure experience, based on pure subjectivity, offers a particularly interesting parallel to the autobiographical quest for self-presence. Husserlian phenomenology regards self-consciousness as taking place in an immediate and internal instant. In this light, autobiography is a secondary event, one whose representation merely confirms an absolute primary consciousness existing prior to reflection. From this first, essential, ahistorical point of self-intuition, one thereafter comes to speak of subject and object. It is this sense of pure presence which Derrida, in the spirit of Heidegger’s (and Levinas’s) destruktion of Husserl, deconstructs in his essay ‘La Diff´erance’. Derrida posits presence, ‘la forme matricielle absolue de l’ˆetre’, as in fact always being a determination and an effect within a system of diff´erance. This system, moreover, does not view consciousness and effect or determination simply as opposites: that, according to Derrida, would be still ‘to operate according to the lexicon of that which is de-limiting’ (p. ). Diff´erance, then, has no essence: it does not appear as such, but threatens, instead, ‘the authority of the as such in general, of the presence of the thing itself in its essence’ (pp. –). Given its function, the term diff´erance cannot be satisfactorily defined other than by its contextual work. But we have already seen it operate in the technical features of Leiris’s autobiography. The opening pages of La R`egle du jeu reveal not only the desire to confirm the subject’s ‘nearness and presence’ but also the diff´erance inherent in the language and 



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

structure of self-representation. (Representation is one of the terms Derrida uses to describe the deferring action of diff´erance). From the very beginning of ‘ . . . Reusement!’, self-presence is revealed to be the determination or effect of an already existing linguistic biffure and an irreducible structural ‘d´eviation’ or ‘d´ecalage’. And as the autobiography progresses, far from reaching the point where representation becomes finally superfluous or supplementary to an instantly self-confirming consciousness, La R`egle du jeu constantly shows how its rule of the game, the absolute presence assumed and quested as ‘already-thereness’, at the heart of self-representation, is at best the determination and effect of the autobiographical game’s own temporal process. By the same token, La R`egle du jeu’s autocritique, which in reassessing and realigning the origins and ends of Leiris’s autobiographical practice attempts to regain the essential nearness and presence occulted by the imperfections and screens of representation, has the effect, as we saw in Fibrilles, of further accentuating not only the inadequacy but also the irreducibility of that representation. Once La R`egle du jeu begins, therefore, it is already too late: the foreignness of representation intrudes immediately on the autobiographical ideal of a silently self-reflecting parousia, an ideal that in itself can be known to exist only by virtue of the sign. La R`egle du jeu’s whole struggle to reduce the magnitude of separation, including the attempt to reduce the status and temporality of the sign to that of the interregnum, inevitably confirms, in the writing of the text, the irreducibly metaphorical relation within self-presence, and the primordial biffure and d´ecalage already there in ‘already-thereness’. Perhaps the most radical feature of Leiris’s work, then, is not simply the representation of self-presence. Instead, it shows how the impossible goal of autobiography, whether it be the continuous confirmation of a permanent self-presence, or the reappropriation of an inevitably lost presence, flows from and feeds the fundamental paradox that representation precedes presence. As ever, this is graphically illustrated by ‘ . . . Reusement!’ ‘ . . . ’ 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 first 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 selfcontained play. Leiris’s reaction is to express his relief, to send up praise, an imperfect hallelujah or neume. This first act of self-expression, grammatically imperfect, points to two already existing perfections: that of the self behind the expression; and that of the potential pure, absolute vocative of the exclamation, turned to an addressee who is not Augustine’s God (the object of the Confessions’ opening praise) but is the listener within Leiris himself: ‘Il n’´etait pas cass´e, et vive fut ma joie. Ce que j’exprimai en m’´ecriant: “ . . . 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 permanent 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 confirmation of self-presence and draw no attention to themselves as such. The scene confirms that Leiris is. What joy. Such a play, however, is conceptually impossible other than as an already lost and fervently desired represented ideal. La R`egle du jeu does not begin, therefore, by showing that Leiris is. It begins, rather, with the linguistically and structurally necessary knowledge that to show that Leiris is is already to indicate the ideality of pure self-presence. The autobiography therefore opens with a complex temporal and spatial differentiation which will permit the first 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 d´epasse, poussant de tous cˆot´es ses antennes myst´erieuses’ (Bi ). The supposed first moment of pure self-intuition at the beginning of La R`egle du jeu is therefore in fact preceded by the acknowledgement within presentness 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 R`egle du jeu, a fact which autobiography and its sequential nature can only serve to emphasize, even as the paragraph’s single sentence acts as an attempt to reduce the other of temporal and spatial difference opened up within representation to a unique point of presentness. As a result, Leiris’s identity is now



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

and simultaneously seen to be indissociably related to an otherness, a foreign intrusion that generates the first 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 confirm an unbreachable presence is a reappropriating repetition of the real violence done to the nontemporal and nonspatial sphere of self-presence which is the autobiography’s impossible ideal, impossible because the commencement of the autobiography 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 containment 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 differentiation between childhood and adulthood which the temporal and spatial preliminaries of ‘ . . . Reusement!’ bring about by the chapter’s conclusion, introduce the idea of negativity into pure play, a negativity well represented by the broken ‘ . . . Reusement!’ However, this is not how La R`egle du jeu begins, either. This incubatory scene, in which Leiris’s 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 first sign, a representation of the mastery of negativity within a structure of presence and absence. The fall of a toy and the willed reaffirmation of the toy’s undamaged state is an appropriate first representation of how, through autobiography, being is, again. It is at this point, in fact, that consciousness begins in La R`egle du jeu: presence is restored and reappropriated by this primary autobiographical moment, primary in the sense of marking the beginning of representation. If the first 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 e´ cri´e: . . . “Reusement!”. L’on m’a repris.’ (Bi )), is revealed by language, showing that ‘it is in words and language that things first come into being and are’, then this third stage is the philosophical moment, the reasonable use of words in thinking, which can recognize, dialectically, 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 first 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 R`egle du jeu’s 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. Autobiography 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 R`egle du jeu completely and impressively dominates its linguistic form, returning its revelations to the service of the sign. This is further assured by all the cultural resonances of the scene, each of which confirms ‘ . . . 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 R`egle du jeu’s representation of presence ultimately makes appeal. (This also further illuminates the role of biblical exegesis in ‘Alphabet”s representation of Leiris’s early education.) These cultural forms of repetition and reappropriation indicate how the pure presence of play is being regained by Leiris via his repetition 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 syntactic 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 Leiris’s joy both as feeling and as expression, several repetitions of the ‘reprise’, and, of course, the repetition of the child’s 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 d´ecalage which are figured by



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

the scene as already operating within the law and structure of the first sign of self-presence. La R`egle du jeu does not begin, therefore, with the dialectical manipulation of nonpresence by representation in order to confirm the original ideal of self-presence through a self-effacing act. What exists even prior to this beginning is the already operative biffure and d´ecalage whose temporal and spatial nature is not definable as a modalization of presence. The constantly attempted nowness of La R`egle du jeu’s opening, 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 first 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 different and beyond definition, 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 d´ecalage 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 autobiography’s game, the first and necessary limitation with which to effect self-presence. For the aboriginal structure and time of biffure and d´ecalage cannot be represented as such. They can only be revealed in the course of autobiography’s mise-en-sc`ene of childhood and a coming into presentness. At its most radical level, therefore, La R`egle du jeu’s opening shows up the preoriginal biffure and d´ecalage 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 autobiography’s opening, an opening of the absolutely other which does not simply offer an origin of nonpresence subsequently 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 inconceivable 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 metaphysically as the excessive effect of a biffure and d´ecalage 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 first emergence of presence, time and representation from a moment subsequent to self-presence: ‘l’esp`ece de d´eviation, de d´ecalage qui s’est trouv´e de ce fait imprim´e a` ma pens´ee’ (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, beyond anything conceivable as an autobiographical project, La R`egle du jeu once more shows how representation precedes presence, in revealing within the metaphysics of self-presence the workings of an unthinkable primary biffure.



Organs of learning: sensing presence in Biffures

Biffures’s beginning shows, then, how consciousness begins with the biffure of a pre-original biffure. Representation has to stabilize an absolute vertigo in order to bring into focus a point of origin for its own operations. The emerging into the light of an original, pre-expressive state of Being therefore involves a first, predetermining response to the potentially endless biffure of identity. It is this first response which the phenomenological drama of La R`egle du jeu’s opening then re-enacts in the child’s response. Each of these responses is designed to promote or confirm presence, and turns the dark chaos of vertigo into the sublime ideality of ecstasy. In each of these responsive gestures, the biffure is given and becomes a first and meaningful moment. In order to conceive of autobiography’s beginning, the preoriginal materiality of the biffure is therefore silently erased in favour of an original ideality of a visual, oral and aural coming into presence. But as the original expression, ‘ . . . Reusement!’, has shown, the figures that are asked to operate from the beginning in a neutral and invisible manner in order to represent an original coming into oneself simultaneously throw up, in La R`egle du jeu’s configurations, a prefigural alterity within the immediate relation to itself of presence. This alterity persists in standing before and beyond reappropriation, constantly holding open the metaphorical gap in consciousness, and making visible, audible and legible the normally effaced operations of the organs of self-representation. It is therefore these organs which embody the whole drama of presence in Biffures’s opening pages. On the one hand, Leiris sees, exclaims and hears himself in an ideal advent of the autobiographical subject. On the other hand, Leiris is seen, ‘exclaimed’ (in the sense of being answered and constrained: ‘interloqu´e’ (Bi ); ‘interdit’ (Bi )) and heard in a realist situating of the narrative’s innocent hero. In neither of these cases, the one displaying a confident interiority and the other an equally solid exteriority, is the presencing effected by the organ 

Organs of learning: sensing presence in Biffures



realized at first as being other than natural, automatic and dependent. Here the event takes place with no analogy (in the complete specularity of an ideal subject seeing himself hearing himself speak) or with nothing but analogy (in the complete objectification of mimesis). In each case, the organ acts for self-presence, and the metaphorical operations of representation, whether completely internal or external to consciousness, are assumed by autobiography’s metaphysics. La R`egle du jeu begins with seeing. In spite of the vocal affirmation that marks an obvious break for self-presence and gives the first chapter its title, the first organ is the eye. Leiris sees (himself ), and is seen doing so. Discerning seeing is seen. In this way, the primary vision of the book both confirms the already-thereness of the subject, and begins at the point at which this general epiphany descends into mere optics. The revelation of Being, and the appearance of such a permanence, emerge at the same moment in autobiography, and makes the former the impossible goal of the latter. This is also reflected in the grammar of the opening paragraph: instead of a first-person description in the present, the subject is beheld as a personal pronoun, an indirect object and the subject of a reflexive imperfect, and then a pluperfect, verb, none of which appears in the main clause. This exclusion may well suggest the permanent standing of Being behind this first visual act, but it also has the effect of emphasizing how autobiography’s first visualization of the subject inevitably involves the biffure and d´ecalage of a general epiphany of Being, in which light forever (and never) sees (itself ), into the dramatic oscillations of existence and nonpresence. Once again, the fall of the soldier, the first observed event to follow from the advent of vision, can be seen to mark a fitting opening for autobiography: it embodies existentially and grammatically the fall which brings presence into self-representation, and a prelapsarian ecstasy and potential visualization, which Leiris can later suggest pre-exist this first event (‘Peut-ˆetre m’´etais-je d´ej`a extasi´e . . . Peut-ˆetre avais-je d´ej`a fix´e mes yeux.’(Bi )), into the first eye-opening moment of knowledge. The book begins, then, with vision, and while the first appearance of the autobiographical subject inevitably involves a doubling, the goal is here to use a metaphorics that sees everything but itself in order to effect a maximum proximity and the effect of pure presence prior to any articulation. This seeming coincidence between the idea of presence and the seeing of self-presence, however, cannot disguise the biffure which the visualization of Being dramatizes. From the moment that the autobiographical I emerges into the light in order to mark itself as its own source,



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

from the moment that vision is seen, an original metaphoricity within the subject has already been established. This irreversible condition, in which the seeing of self-presence already contains a trope, leads on inevitably to the language of presence. Vision and voice are linked from the beginning of La R`egle du jeu, the latter naturally and logically confirming the discoveries of the former: ‘Il n’´etait pas cass´e, et vive fut ma joie. Ce que j’exprimai en m’´ecriant: “ . . . Reusement!” ’ (Bi ). In terms of autobiographical emergence, this single event concerns not the state of the soldier, but the fact that one is there (visible) and one says so. This phonic presence also has the advantage over being seen that it seems to obliterate the doubling inherent in visual representation: no objectification intrudes on the immediacy of Leiris’s exclamation. As with vision, the metaphorical operation involved in this self-confirmation (‘en m’´ecriant’) speaks everything but itself, everything but the space and time which Leiris’s spirit traverses in order to carry his joy back to himself or itself. The suspenseful prelude to this moment merely serves to emphasize the unmediated purity and immediacy of this translation of sensation into representation, a gesture which contains no internal divisions or erasures. Even the subsequent realization that it is language which has brought the visualization of Being into being, and that voice therefore precedes vision, if anything simply reinforces the absolute originality of the vocal gesture with which identity recognizes its existence in ‘ . . . Reusement!’ This tropeless translation, in which a clean and immediate rendering of consciousness is conveyed to itself, even more than vision represents the autobiographical ideal. Self-presence exclaims (itself ). Analogy may follow, but no metaphorical gap or interval exists within this initial autobiographical intimacy. Yet my whole previous analysis of this scene has shown how it is precisely in this linguistic moment that the absolutely original biffure at the heart of identity most powerfully presents itself, perhaps because this phonic presence is so central to the history of autobiography. In the very instant in which a ‘pure’ and ‘magical’ presence is articulated, Leiris is devastated by the revelation of the fundamental strangeness at the origin of consciousness. Consciousness envisages a pure and magical presence, only to see and hear in the instant of utterance the insectile presence of its own absentification. Even more powerfully than the supposedly neutral and abstract emergence into the light of Being, La R`egle du jeu’s original vocal presentation of presence shows how the autobiographical source, far from preceding the later, cultural work of metaphor, is itself the effect of a turn of speech, a biffure already within the origin.

Organs of learning: sensing presence in Biffures



The immediacy of phonic presence is therefore equally the result of an irreducible metaphorical obstacle. This obstacle grows with each passing page and gradually takes on the image of a screen that divides self-projection from immediate selfreception and upon which the simulacrum of presence is therefore at best projected. The conclusion to the third chapter, ‘Habill´e-en-cour’, reads the rule of the game for which the autobiography is searching as a flickering series of hieroglyphs, ‘zigzags d’´eclairs inscrits sur un e´ cran qui n’´etait ni nuit ni jour’ (Bi ). The fifth chapter, ‘Pers´ephone’, constantly returns to this metaphor of a self-conscious practice attempting to burst through the screen separating it from its own pure nature: Je continue a` aligner des phrases [mais] les mˆemes e´ crans me s´eparent de la r´ealit´e . . . , j’´eprouve trop souvent l’impression affligeante d’ˆetre s´epar´e de la nature par une multiplicit´e d’´ecrans . . . , mes phrases [se r´ev`elent] comme une s´erie d’´ecrans, qui s’interposent entre mes id´ees et moi . . . , de mˆeme que trop de sensations accumul´ees, . . . loin de . . . repr´esenter autant de d´ebouch´es sur le r´eel sont des halos qui l’embuent ou des membranes qui m’en s´eparent. (Bi –)

This last image of a membrane-like screen, however, offers an organic reappropriation of the separation within the act of self-representation and suggests a potential location for an immediate self-presence within the body which can avoid the metaphorical gap of visualization and vocalization: the ear. If the voice reduces the objectification of visual representation only to raise a linguistic biffure, then perhaps the completely intimate hearing of oneself against the inner membrane avoids both the linguistic and the visual external split. Between the commencement of the cry ‘ . . . Reusement!’ and the objectifying reception of the expression lies an ideal aural registration of one’s own presence that is implicit in the reflexive verb of expression: ‘Ce que j’exprimai en m’´ecriant: “ . . . Reusement!” ’ (Bi ). Within the endless round of this present participle, a pure resonance of presence can take place that is prior to the deviations and intervals, erasures and multiplications inherent in the visual and vocal event. Within this intimate circuit, the ear precedes the voice as the organ of self-acknowledgement, and manages to represent a pre-metaphorical purity of relation within self-presence which the imperfection of the eventual articulation hopelessly fails to match.The silent and hidden nature of this membrane makes it all the more assured and original as the true and analogy-free organ of self-presence. Unlike the eye or the voice, the ear has not required a dramatic entry into the autobiography: like the true ideal of Being, it has been there, open,



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

passive, unanswering and all-registering from the beginning. With the recognition of the inevitable metaphorical gap screening self-presence in its visual and vocal forms, perhaps the ear’s membrane can paradoxically represent the autobiographical dream of the successful joining of consciousness to nature. This question of aural presence is illustrated by the whole of the ‘Pers´ephone’ chapter, as its conclusion makes plain: Pers´ephone, puits art´esien plant´e dans l’´epaisseur de la nature et r´ev´elant les secrets souterrains sous les esp`eces d’un jet roucoulant ou suraigu, serais-tu vraiment ce jaillissement, oˆ Pers´ephone! ou ne le deviendrais-tu qu’au hasard seul d’une m´etaphore? (Bi )

‘ ´ ’ The chapter opens with a visual and vocal recognition of the conditioning detours of identity. Leiris scrutinizes and describes the social and geographical details of his new address,  bis quai des Grands-Augustins, and views himself in his new study ‘o`u – avec force d´etours, retours, ratures, biffures, bifurcations diverses – pr´esentement j’´ecris’ (Bi ). What this writing itself also affirms is the intersubjective nature of the ‘je’ and the impossibility of a pure and unaffected vocalization of self-presence: ‘qu’est-ce qu’un je – un je unique et isol´e – 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 affirming that certain experiences offer a pure presentation of Being, and places these moments under the sign of ‘the floral and subterranean name of Persephone’ (Bi ). The examples which Leiris provides of the spiralling nature implicit for him in the name constitute one of the most famous passages of La R`egle du jeu, and include the following: La feuille d’acanthe qu’on copie au lyc´ee quand on apprend a` manier tant bien que mal le fusain . . . l’h´elico¨ıde inscrite sur la coquille d’un escargot . . . le simulacre infect qu’une l´eg`ere pression des doigts tire d’un ‘p`ere-la-colique’, les jaspures e´ tal´ees sur les tranches de certains livres reli´es . . . les circonvolutions c´er´ebrales . . . la conque d’une 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



fingers), consciousness (‘cerebral circumvolutions’) and the ear. In effect, the spiralled name of Persephone attempts to overcome the original movement of the biffure and d´ecalage by locating it as a visual shape and a sonic roar within the conch of the ear. The name ‘Pers´ephone’ itself furthers this link between a metaphysical circuit and the actual organ of the ear: on the level of the cultural signified, 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 signifier, 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 ear’s 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 announces a presence. This ‘cartilaginous cavern’, an ear with the latency of the voice, directly linked to nature (Persephone’s myth is normally interpreted 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 subterranean 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 fin de compte, deviennent le lieu g´eom´etrique o`u se rejoignent divinit´e chtonienne, insecte perceur de noyaux, matrice o`u se forme la voix, tambour que chaque bruit vient frapper de sa baguette d’air vibrant; les cavernes: obscures tuyauteries plongeant au plus secret de l’ˆetre pour conduire jusqu’`a la cavit´e toute nue de notre espace mental les bouff´ees – de temp´erature, consistance et agr´ement variables – qui se propagent en longues vagues horizontales apr`es eˆ tre mont´ees tout droit des fermentations du dehors. D’une part, il y a donc le dehors; d’autre part, le dedans; entre les deux, le caverneux. (Bi )

The original cavernous space of the ear in ‘Pers´ephone’ has by now expanded to incorporate the throat and the entrails, all of which is ‘charg´e de vibrations qui ne sont que les exhalaisons dont il s’est impr´egn´e durant



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

sa p´eriode 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 immediately 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 figure of speech to what cannot by definition 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. ‘Pers´ephone’ 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 astonishingly 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 membrane, moreover, exteriority and alterity are inevitably figured, if only as the experiences to which the tympanum fearfully remains open (‘l’on peut s’inqui´eter a` l’id´ee du tympan, membrane fragile menac´ee d’ˆetre trou´ee’ (Bi ). This membrane, meanwhile, is busy distorting, amplifying, 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 l’ineffable, la ligne m´elodique se pr´esentant comme la traduction, en un idiome purement sonore, de ce qui ne pourrait eˆ tre dit par le moyen des mots’ (Bi ). On the one hand, then, Leiris’s 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 amplifications, 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 first appropriation of the ear takes the form of an evocation, in ‘Pers´ephone’, of a childhood phonograph. 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 produces: it supplements the mystery insubstantially framing the voice with the mystery of the machine’s disembodied reproduction of the recorded sound. In this way, ‘c’est avec un myst`ere presque pur qu’on 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 d´efinition a` toute esp`ece d’analyse’ (Bi ). This marvellous mechanism, which has the significantly 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, Leiris’s representation of the mechanism of aural being also restores presence and purity of intention 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 child’s 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, Leiris’s 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 presencing which had taken place in the original night of the cartilaginous passage: Assez longtemps – trace, peut-ˆetre, d’un phantasme auquel j’avais cru comme a` une r´ealit´e positive alors que je n’´etais pas encore initi´e aux mysteres de l’enregistrement? – il me fut impossible d’´ecouter un air chant´e, tel qu’un duo par exemple, reproduit au phonographe, sans me repr´esenter aussitˆot les deux voix, qui alternaient et parfois se mˆelaient, comme issues de deux cr´eatures minuscules se tenant debout dans la nuit de ce corridor. (Bi –)



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

The second cultural appropriation of the ear takes place in the following chapter, ‘Il e´ tait une fois . . . ’. The chapter actually opens with a definition of its own heading: ‘Il e´ tait une fois . . . ’ (de toutes ces locutions, il est vrai, la plus vague, celle qui ne se r´ef`ere mˆeme a` nul pass´e pr´ecis), formule traditionnelle e´ voquant des temps en marge de l’histoire et que nous connaissons elle-mˆeme de si longue date pour l’avoir lue ou entendue, maint et maint jour de notre enfance, au commencement d’un conte. (Bi )

The phrase encapsulates the whole teleology of presence already witnessed in the move to the ear. It designates the immediate eruption of a magical presence whose origin and justification lie not in the specific external events of history but in the already traditional internal recognitions existing within the listening child. The appeal to a fairy-tale formula by autobiography here locates Leiris, simultaneously a spectator and a protagonist, within a generalized aural movement, one that is always designated to convey on both individual and communal identity a total sense of proximity and immediacy as yet undifferentiated by the cultural screen of metaphor. As soon as Leiris begins this chapter, however, the cultural screen is precisely what is depicted. His first attempt to find an image of himself that would act both as the object of the phrase and as the origin of its emergence leads him in a circle back to the point at which the phrase demands writing: in Revoil B´eni-Ounif, during the ‘drˆole de guerre’, Leiris the soldier purchases a block of writing paper on which is printed in archaic script the phrase: ‘Il e´ tait une fois’ (Bi ). Leiris attempts none the less with this phrase to forge a pure latency for himself as its object. Beginning the next paragraph with a further reiteration of the phrase, he expresses the desire that such a phrase might transform the mere chance which has led him to the edge of the Sahara into a form of destiny. But such an unquestionable presence is thrown into doubt precisely by the permanent suspense into which the absent object of the sentence is put. In the light of this, the state of ‘tout ou¨ıe, toute oreille’ (Bi ) in which the object finds itself confers on the autobiographical object not an undifferentiated immediacy of identity but an anxious sense of indetermination. This leads Leiris to recognize that the phrase has been wrongly analysed in itself as an object, when in fact what it really signifies is the nature of the person whom it has affected: ‘Ce qui ´etait une fois, c’est l’enfant que je fus, a` qui l’on contait des histoires commen¸cant par Il ´etait une fois . . . ’ (Bi ). The sense of hearing as source of the child

Organs of learning: sensing presence in Biffures



still remains in this formulation, but a split is now openly acknowledged as the adult Leiris hears the phrase anew in order to observe the child Leiris as autobiographical object. This in turn, of course, leads to a similar creation of an adult Leiris, the adult who purchased the writing paper and who would round off the fairy-tale phrase as: ‘Il e´ tait une fois un soldat coiff´e d’un calot sous le soleil d’Afrique et ce soldat s’appelait Julien-Michel Leiris; une boˆıte de papier a` lettres lui appartenant, sur laquelle e´ tait e´ crit: Il ´etait une fois . . . ’ (Bi ). The biffure of representation is now fully emerging, as the images of Leiris emanating from an original, premetaphorical aurality proliferate in number and obliterate, postpone and distort one another. Leiris fluctuates between the desire to touch a pure presence in evoking the paraphenalia – books, belt, etc. – which made up the image of soldier, and an amused denunciation of the ridiculous mimicry involved in such a costume drama. But after a long search through other equally mythical locations in his past – Viroflay, Auteuil, Montmorency, Saint-Pierre-l`es-Nemours – whose sonorousness matches the potentiality of presence in ‘Il e´ tait une fois . . . ’, he is forced to recognize the inevitable temporal gap which the phrase opens up within the autobiographical subject, even as it aims to present this split identity as an immediate, nontemporal, aural object: ‘l’enfant que j’avais e´ t´e et que je ne serais plus jamais . . . , le civil que j’avais cess´e d’ˆetre et que je n’´etais pas certain de redevenir un jour.’ (Bi ). In between the lost pretemporality of the child and the unfulfilled potentiality of the adult, time emerges, a time, as he says, to which he must become accommodated, but equally a temporality that exists already as an internal division within the autobiographical figure. It is in this light that the chapter’s conclusion is a fitting one. Leiris offers the most ancient, intimate and nostalgic image of himself which he can conjure up as the ultimate object for the fairy-tale phrase: ‘Il e´ tait une fois . . . ’. He is three and a half years old, and is being held in the arms of his mother in an empty room of a warm, dark, dusty summer villa. He feels warm, calm and secure. ‘C’est, sans doute, en e´ gard a` cette anciennet´e-l`a que je suis toujours rest´e bouche b´ee devant les choses qui semblaient me dire: “Il e´ tait une fois” ’ (Bi ). This return to the womb at the close of the chapter is touching in part because of its final attempt to restore an image of the matrix as an absolute source of presence, and in part because its tenor quietly acknowledges the unachievability of this ‘prehistoric’ time for self-presence, whether postulated visually, vocally or aurally. A few pages prior to this fitting closure to the phrase ‘Il e´ tait une fois . . . ’ and its search for a pure aural source, Leiris drew up a list of the alternative



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

accommodations of time which he can now offer in the hope of finding an external, if not an internal, common denominator. He notes that he can reassemble his lived past in the hope that he will be able to trace a less ephemeral figure for himself; or he can project himself into a future intemporality in the guise of a mythic hero; or he can renounce such narcissistic contemplation altogether and act to try and change the times in which others are living by doing something with his own present time. It is highly significant that in this late passage of the chapter, Leiris seeks to salvage a purity of presence in the present by turning away from the organs of self-contemplation in order to act on time itself. If temporality must ineluctably be recognized as already inhabiting the interiority of self-presence, and if all attempts to close this gap by finding a pretemporal and premetaphorical state of Being have returned to this same internal biffure, then perhaps a dramatic effect of pure presence can be restored by an authentic action carried out by a being in the world. Pure presence as pure event.



The act of union: being-in-the-world in La R`egle du jeu

We have already reviewed earlier how La R`egle du jeu moves from its opening nominalist celebrations to a sense of communication embodying an existentialist morality. This logic inevitably reflects 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 possibility 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 intemporal 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 articulated in the second volume’s desire to ‘transformer le verbe humain en un vivant trait d’union avec les auditeurs’ (Fo ) suffices 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 fulfils 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 one’s self, a state in which one is not detached from the world or isolated as a free-floating I, but bonded to the Other (and intimately to one’s 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 solicitous 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 reaffirmed and permanently present event of Being. With resoluteness, Being is a pure event, one that 



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

purges any notion of an internal biffure through its affirmation of the integrity and authenticity of the event. If resoluteness fulfils itself, however, by the same token the pure event of being is conceptually impossible. It cannot be lived and known simultaneously. From the start, it is necessarily compromised by representation. Leiris’s 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 gratification. 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 represents 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 appropriation not present to itself, even though tending permanently towards death as its ‘ownmost possibility’, to use Heidegger’s 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 autobiographical representation of authentic self-presence must necessarily reside in an intermediate space, one in which a presence flickers, within a general field of dull inauthenticity, as a series of dramatic realizations. The representation of one’s ownmost possibility requires this dramatic focusing of time, if resoluteness, authenticity, and the true autobiographical 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 Augustine’s 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 Rˆeveries du promeneur solitaire. In phenomenological and existential terms, such a particular scene of falling betokens the general condition of falling. The latter is a definite existential characteristic of Dasein itself. In Heidegger’s view, ‘an existential mode of Being-in-the-World is documented in the phenomenon of falling’.

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

The condition of falling, and the event of a fall, carry all the paradoxes of authentic presence within themselves. On the one hand, falling reveals an essential ontological structure of Dasein, in Heidegger’s view. On the other hand, the fall, through which being in the world, authenticity and resolution are realized, must be experienced as an unexpected, and therefore unnecessary, event, this unexpectedness, indeed, being the necessary guarantee of the event’s authenticity. On the one hand, the resoluteness 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 one’s own facticity is a presentation of one’s present constructed from a reappropriation of one’s past and a projection of one’s possibilities. Therefore ‘resoluteness gains its authenticity as anticipatory resoluteness’. On the other hand, however, the incident of a fall exists as a necessary disappointment 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 absentification 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 Leiris’s works which reveal an autobiographical presence. In Aurora, Leiris’s desire for an ‘inaccessible purity’ and his horror of ‘fixation’ (A ) generate an obsessive confrontation with death in which the hero (epitomized by the anagrammatic character Siriel) suffers repeated dismemberment and revivification 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 L’Afrique fantˆome a first, 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 ethnographer’s true fall, a fall that comes with the gradual emergence of Africa’s true significance for the disillusioned ethnographer. His jaded voice may announce: ‘voici enfin ’, la terre des ◦ a` l’ombre, des convois d’esclaves, des festins cannibales, des crˆanes vides . . . ’ (AF ). Yet Africa persists in existing even beyond



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

this image of Europe’s death. By resisting both scientific analysis and surrealist immersion, Africa’s phantom forces Leiris to confront what lies beyond the ethnographic muse. Like Aurora, Africa acts as a disclosure to Leiris of the impending possibility of his own distinctive death. In Africa, therefore, Leiris resolutely flees a European death in order to realize his own authentic Being-towards-death. In L’Age d’homme a series of falls dramatizes the entire virile falling of the young man into manhood. 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 Heidegger’s words, a ‘Being-towards-theend’: ‘Comment pourrai-je aimer?’ me disais-je, sentence qui m’emplit tout entier, montant de mon coeur a` ma tˆete, et sous le coup de laquelle j’aurais certainement d´efailli, si par sa formulation mˆeme je ne m’´etais senti plac´e sur un certain plan de trag´edie, ce qui me donnait et la fiert´e d’avoir a` jouer un rˆole et la force n´ecessarire pour le tenir a` peu pr`es correctement. (AH –)

But it is in La R`egle du jeu that the experience of the fall is most fully represented, for it combines Aurora’s drive for epiphany, L’Afrique fantˆome’s sociopolitical melancholy and L’Age d’homme’s psychoanalysis of the bourgeois sacred. And yet again we find that Biffures’s 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 R`egle du jeu’s opening scene have highlighted 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 first scene provides the opening authentic event of Being. In this eventful form of presence, the undercutting effect of the biffure is dramatically dominated by a primary appropriation. 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 field of possibilities.

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

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 first 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 finitude. In a primary clearing or opening which sets in question but is not in itself questioned, La R`egle du jeu’s beginning represents the first autobiographical moment as being the questioning of the truth of Leiris’s 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 confirmed, rather than undone, by the linguistic and structural representation of the event. The first sentence’s gradual emergence now resembles less the presence of an already established biffure than the authentic 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 autobiography its basis and validation. ‘. . . Reusement!’ is therefore the authentic grasping of Leiris’s fall into time. The fall of the toy soldier, and the grasping of the event by representation, are therefore intimately related in terms of authentic presence. The significance of the toy lies in its belonging to Leiris: ‘L’essentiel n’´etait pas qu’un soldat fˆut tombe . . . , c’´etait qu’il y eˆut quelque chose m’appartenant qui fˆut tomb´e’ (Bi –). The significance of the toy’s fall therefore lies in Leiris’s struggles literally to grasp, handle and manipulate this event of falling which belongs to him, including on the level of a writer’s apprenticeship: Un soldat vraisemblablement fran¸cais. Et qui e´ tait tomb´e. Echapp´e de mes mains malhabiles, encore inaptes a` tracer, sur un cahier, mˆeme de vulgaires bˆatons . . . L’un de mes jouets, du fait de ma maladresse – cause initiale de la chute – se trouvait sous le coup d’avoir e´ t´e cass´e. . . . Rapidement je me baissai, ramassai le soldat gisant, le palpai et le regardai. Il n’´etait pas cass´e, et vive fut ma joie. Ce que j’exprimai en m’´ecriant: ‘. . . Reusement!’. (Bi –)

The utterance of this term marks an intellectual grasping whose triumph immediately suffers the first of an obviously endless series of revisions and further graspings. Leiris falls from a mythical fulfilled temporality into a grasping of ‘l’existence ext´erieure a` moi-mˆeme et remplie d’´etranget´e’ (Bi ). ‘Strangeness’ here expresses the realization that the falling and grasping of what belongs to Leiris is in fact permanent and



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

continuous. But the grasping of the fact that the event of falling is essentially what belongs to Leiris equally marks the successful existential opening of the autobiography. From now on, Leiris knows that, like his first word, he is part of ‘a whole sequence of precise significations’ (Bi ). It is the falling of what belongs to him, as well as the word which represents his living on in the knowledge of this event, which assumes ‘une allure de d´ecouverte, comme le d´echirement brusque d’un voile ou l’´eclatement de quelque v´erit´e’ (Bi ). In this first event of appropriation, then, it is ultimately Leiris himself who is the potentially damaged soldier (given which it is not surprising that he reappears as a soldier in the ‘Tablettes Sportives’ section of Fourbis). The literal and intellectual grasping of the soldier’s fall is an outward-projected grasping of self-presence. This is not to say, of course, that this first event of an existential consciousness represents the self completely as an object of reflection. On the contrary, what is grasped from the beginning is precisely the disruptive strangeness at the heart of the self ’s falling nature, and the inadequacy of the autobiographical attempt to fuse reflective consciousness and reflected identity into some glorious totality. Leiris’s grasping affirms and in fact intensifies the gap between these two elements of a pure and primary intra-subjective process. But it is the very resoluteness with which this falling short is grasped which appropriates and so appears to dominate what has previously seemed an inevitable biffure. This resoluteness is what defends Leiris’s consciousness in fact from being completely overwhelmed by a primary attack, an attack experienced first of all affectively. The interruption of Leiris’s joy (Bi ) and his feeling of vertigo (Bi ) therefore only last for a brief moment, to be replaced by the already intellectual grasping of consciousness as strangeness and as a perpetual attempt at seizing what really belongs to it in order to confirm that it is falling but not broken. (This appropriation of a primary inter-subjective relation, via the idea of strangeness, is suggested not only in an opening mise-en-sc`ene which presents consciousness as constructed from a drama of freedom and inertia, activity and passivity, but also in the terms which Leiris associates with the interruption of joy and the sensation of vertigo: ‘interloqu´e’ (Bi ) and ‘interdit’ (Bi ) respectively. Read literally, these words directly state the inter-subjective nature already existing within a particular consciousness.) Existentially, then, self-presence is grasped at the beginning of Biffures in a first event of Being, one in which both internal and external divisions appear to be overcome. In relation to interiority, this event and its

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

validating resoluteness appropriate the notion of a preoriginal biffure by presenting the simultaneous appearance of identity and difference as the occasion for the grasping of authentic existence. In relation to exteriority, the tranquillization, interdiction and fear in the face of law represented both linguistically and structurally by the bourgeois conditions laid down for the subject’s emergence within the text, are transformed by Leiris’s attitude into the authentic anxiety of a face-to-face encounter with the possibility of one’s own non-being. This possibility is what charges the whole of the first chapter: it is in anticipation of an ultimate impending event to be faced, that of final non-being, that existentially the autobiography begins. In this light, the preoriginal biffure becomes primary and positive, absolute and appropriated, as the possibility of authentic existence is seized. In order for this possibility of authentic self-presence not to be failed, however, it will immediately have to be tested as an event in history. Such a test will disclose and reaffirm Leiris’s whole potentiality for being. This authentic event takes place in Fourbis’s ‘Les Tablettes Sportives’. ‘  ’ As the title of the chapter implies, ‘Les Tablettes Sportives’ re-presents ‘. . . Reusement!’ ’s original personal drama of play as the more social activity of sport. This shift of approach, which ties in generally with Fourbis’s 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-first 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 Leiris’s 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 emphasize 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 unhistorical immediacy of ‘. . . Reusement!’ ’s cry, permits Leiris to frame the chapter’s central moment of socio-political self-presence with a general series of false or inauthentic engagements with history, such as those which constituted his experiences of the ‘drˆole de guerre’. And lastly,



The quest for presence in La R`egle 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 negotiate and expose) himself with the image of a timorous player who comes to embrace the game’s risk in an intoxicating moment of direct physical self-presence (an experience of his ‘position in the system’ which, given the sporting allusions, is fittingly confronted while seated on a bicycle). This authentic event occurs when Leiris is caught in a crossfire during the Paris Occupation (Fo  –). Significantly, it is framed by two parodic or inauthentic versions of being in the firing line. The first of these is presented as a running joke on the subject of Leiris’s pusillanimous if fraternal participation in the activities of an artillery battery stationed in North Africa during the ‘drˆole 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 ‘Pers´ephone’) and a distant flock of sheep, one of which is actually blown into the air. Unfortunately, however, his commanding officer presents him with a ‘coup d’honneur’, which entails actually detonating a cannon himself, a privilege he dare not refuse. Leiris’s fear delays this ‘engagement’ until one of their last sessions when, having finally accomplished the action, he immediately begins to experience a certain disappointment for these ‘jeux militaires qui n’ont e´ t´e pour moi qu’une com´edie toute ext´erieure’ (Fo ). The fear preceding this ‘initiation’ now gives way to the sensation that his ‘intact body’ is still that of an ‘impub`ere’. Nor does he find an authentic, virile being-unto-death later, during the triumphal procession of the Free French along the ChampsElys´ees 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 d’honneur’, this incident amounts merely to an ‘interm`ede pittoresque dans le tohu-bohu d’une fˆete’ (Fo ). These interludes therefore merely serve to frame a real dramatic incident during the liberation of Paris in which Leiris feels ‘space to be transformed by the immediate presence of danger’. Within this structure of the possibility 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 m’engager sur le pont de la Concorde’, he suddently finds himself caught between a German armoured car and an ominous pool of blood: Durant quelques secondes j’eus conscience de moi comme d’un corps expos´e au vent, d´esarm´e, d´enud´e, avec la sensation aigu¨e du poids de mes fesses sur la selle et de la pes´ee de mes pieds sur les p´edales, les dimensions spatiales se

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

r´esumant en les distances qui me s´eparaient, vers la droite, de la mare sanglante, vers la gauche, du v´ehicule d’acier, et le temps, lui aussi, reconnu comme une dimension: cela donn´ee par le mouvement du v´elo actionn´e par l’effort de mes jarrets et am´eliorant, a` chaque instant, ma position dans le syst`eme. (Fo  –)

Identity (spatio-temporal existence) and difference ( the drama of dangerous choice, political and historical action, and the recognition of the Other which these entail) here fuse into a single ‘conscience corporelle port´ee au maximum’ (Fo ). Such a bodily consciousness, Leiris comments, resembles desire in its mixture of fear and pleasure, its (occasionally literal) stripping away of inessentials and its revelation, via the superlative existence of another body, of a common physical nature, ‘notre propre nature d’organisme actuellement debout’. The dangerous situation in which Leiris finds himself is therefore one which can make us all intensely aware of ‘our flesh’. In quasi-Sartrean language, Leiris adds that even ‘le lˆache’ can derive a certain ‘voluptuousness’ from this laying bare, given that the constraints and dangers of war and occupation at least have the merit of denuding and transforming humdrum and abject existence to the point where ‘one can no longer even speak of solitude’ (Fo –). Typically, Leiris immediately emphasizes how tangential he was in fact to the events of the War and Occupation. Even the official function which he would have performed, had a positional war ensued in France, involved the ‘archaeological’ rather than actively participatory task of advising against the shelling of certain monuments. It is only towards the end of the Occupation that Leiris tentatively ‘engages’ in the activities of the F.T.P., a ‘moral gesture’ that at least shows willingness to assume a risk, even if his level of courage still remains somewhat ‘en de¸ca` ’: he hands over some bullets to a comrade; he goes along with the occupation of certain buildings; and he offers to help move a truck, though in the event he is not needed. The following evening, the bells of Paris celebrate the city’s liberation (‘fˆeter’), a cause for which Leiris’s gestures have at best been incidental (‘frˆoler’). On the historical level, then, Leiris has neither manifested a decisive courage nor partaken in an epic event. Instead, what he has learned, and most acutely in his moment of ‘bodily consciousness’ on the pont de la Concorde, is fraternity. Henceforth, his ‘r`egle d’or’ will involve determining with whom and for what to express solidarity. This contract with others, who stand as a ‘conscience morale personalis´ee’ (Fo –), offers at least a personal liberation over the tyranny of fear. Significantly,



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

Leiris represents the autobiographical form of moral resoluteness which he has culled from the adult realism of history by recalling the playful world of dreams, fantasy and childhood. This personal triumph over fear is therefore embodied in a jujitsu grip, a non-violent and unarmed form of self-defence which he associates with childhood photographs of exotic Asians, and in a dream in which he kills a winged bull in front of the Mus´ee de l’Homme. In the latter case, Leiris recognizes at the instant of thrusting his sword that the animal is made of gilt, and understands how the simple decision to strike is what abolishes terror. Courage is therefore an internal force which controls le dehors, and involves more will than knowledge (though it is the quest for knowledge which most exercises his will and is the science which prevents him from falling into inauthenticity). Leiris brings this episode, in which disquisition has inevitably far outweighed the actual event, to a close with a long definition of ‘fraternity’. On the existential level, the major lesson of the Occupation has led Leiris to appreciate more highly those acts which reveal a certain savoir-vivre that does not have to be brilliant or heroic to adhere to a basic moral rule, distilled into the axiom (with its further childhood resonance): ‘tu ne cafarderas point’ (Fo ). On the textual level, Leiris has similarly learned that his writing should be guided by an essential moral aim reminiscient of L’Age d’homme’s prescription: ‘faire passer en actes ces id´ees, et certainement e´ crire, e´ crire encore, pour les formuler de fa¸con toujours plus claire, plus communicative, plus convaincante . . . ’ (Fo ). These imperatives are in turn refined into one rule of thumb (echoing the book’s pri`ere d’ins´erer) which emphasizes how the drive to fraternity will henceforth constitute a basic self-proposition: ‘briser sa gangue, sortir de soi, se fondre avec les eˆ tres du dehors’ (Fo ). This necessary contact with others will not only establish the self ’s presence, it will create a ‘multiplication enivrante de soi’, a personal intoxication which coincides in Leiris’s account with the popular joy and optimism that mark the end of the war and the advent of a new ‘livable world’. In autobiographical terms, this concluding image of a new, fraternal beginning is highly significant, for in several profound ways, which are merely indicated by the shift of emphasis from solitary play to solidarity in sport, the representation of bodily consciousness in ‘Les Tablettes Sportives’ rewrites ‘. . . Reusement!’ ’s philosophy of presence in terms of an existentialist morality. These revisions all depend on the presence of the Other. Whereas in ‘. . . Reusement!’ the Other brings about the first event of self-presence by correcting Leiris’s exclamation, that is to

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

say by entering onto the scene after the event of self-expression, at least on the narrative’s first reading, on the pont de la Concorde Leiris’s acute consciousness of his own bodily existence is the result, on the narrative’s first reading, of his confrontation with the primary presence of the other’s real body. Whereas facticity follows on as the abstract lesson of ‘. . . Reusement!’ ’s shattered play, in ‘Les Tablettes Sportives’ it is present from the beginning as the body of the Other. This in turn relates to the primacy of action over words in the latter event. Whereas in ‘. . . Reusement!’ the eventual recognition of one’s participation in society seemed to emerge out of an initial metaphysical temptation in which words alone mysteriously constituted the world (a struggle repeated constantly in the ensuing chapters of Biffures), the pont de la Concorde’s first moment of consciousness and its subsequent lesson reassert a moral pragmatism which must be served by words. It is not firstly in language but rather in the anguish of potential action that Leiris discovers what Sartre terms the ‘absent–presence’ of ‘selfness’, and it is emphasized how the nihilation inherent in the moment of self-presence is a physical possibility rather than a linguistic biffure. Both these points are confirmed by a further emphasis in the latter scene, namely the manner in which Leiris explicitly recognizes the overcoming of abjection inherent in a political prise de conscience: ‘pour [. . .] les sortir de l’abjection qui consiste a` s’en remettre aux e´ v´enements du dehors – non voulus mais subis – pour qu’un changement s’op`ere dans votre vie’ (Fo ). This grasping of le dehors was again already implied in the conclusion to ‘. . . Reusement!’, where the child moved from a fluid and ambiguous (arguably maternal) uncorrected environment of play into the more ordered, named and systematized (arguably paternal) corrected world of law. But in Leiris’s later meditations on the overcoming of fear and the breaking of solitude, the transformation of abjection by the very beginning of autobiography is more directly acknowledged. Lastly, this transformation of the ‘abyss of meaninglessness’ which is opened up in part by abjection, combines with the Sartrean reference to ‘le lˆache’, and the politicization of play represented by the chapter as a whole and the bridge scene in particular, to recall the first reference to play in Sartre’s L’Etre et le N´eant, a reference which helps to clarify the transformation of ‘. . . Reusement!’ effected by ‘Les Tablettes Sportives’: Le moi que je suis d´epend en lui-mˆeme du moi que je ne suis pas encore, dans l’exacte mesure o`u le moi que je ne suis pas encore ne d´epend pas du moi que je suis. Et le vertige apparaˆıt comme la saisie de cette d´ependance. Je m’approche



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

du pr´ecipice et c’est moi que mes regards cherchent en son fond. A partir de ce moment, je joue avec mes possibles. Mes yeux, en parcourant l’abˆıme de haut en bas, miment ma chute possible et la r´ealisent 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 reflective apprehension of the self, that is to say an existential anguish resulting from the vision of one’s non-being and the necessity of decisive action which ensues. Such play therefore destroys the unreflective vertigo or fear produced by one’s 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’. ⁄ ˆ  The central ‘pont de la Concorde’ scene from ‘Les Tablettes Sportives’ directly represents Leiris’s body as exposed to the possibility of non-being in a socio-historical setting. The interpretation of the scene directly represents Leiris’s presence as the authentic moral consciousness which grasps this nihilation in a socio-political way. La R`egle 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 final volume, Frˆele Bruit. Leiris recalls Goethe’s famous translation of divine consciousness into dogmatic rationalism: Au commencement ´etait l’action. C’est ainsi que Faust, vers le d´ebut du drame goeth´een, paraphrase la sentence initiale de l’´evangile de saint Jean: au commencement ´etait le Verbe. (FB )

On the most immediate level, this recollection of the primacy of action bears out Fourbis’s major revisions of ‘. . . Reusement!’. The statement would endorse the view that self-presence exists not via the verbal confirmation of a marvel, but in the physical confirmation 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 Frˆele Bruit. Instead, the latter volume in a rhizomatic manner connects passages concerning language, often of the most simplified, and hence exclamatory, nature, with scenes of

The act of union: being-in-the-world in La R`egle du jeu



participation in a modern event. The result offers a structural and temporal self-representation not determined by sublation or closure, in which word and action are not ideologically opposed. It is above all this ‘constellatory’ nature which exposes the ultimate bad faith of Fibrilles’s 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 biffure’s possibilities). In the context of Frˆele Bruit’s 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 final volume’s 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 Frˆele Bruit’s accommodating nature, it is fitting that Leiris employs a double term which signals both intellectual coexistence and homophonic singularity: tache/tˆache. Three dated events in Frˆele Bruit first of all combine to establish a general recollection of the moral choice posed by ‘Les Tablettes Sportives’. In the book’s very first scene, dated  August  (FB –), Leiris is shown witnessing another bloody confrontation between the occupying Germans and the Free French. He flees 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’ fire which sought to disrupt the celebration of the liberation of Paris. Here in fact he does use the term ‘tache’ in reaffirming 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 d´egˆats 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,

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The quest for presence in La R`egle 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/tˆache and related actions of washing one’s hands of an affair or else using them to create an authentic presence. 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 flesh. This leads Leiris to meditate ethnographically on his own and others’ fastidiousness (‘l’on dirait qu’`a faire ainsi la main se tache vilainement’ (FB )) before concluding by reminding himself of Lenin’s dictum that one should not be afraid to dirty one’s hands when one works for the Revolution (FB ). In spite of this conscious repudiation, however, the image of washing one’s hands persists in the two subsequent entries. The first is a direct account of a black girl’s night-time vision of two disembodied hands washing. The second is an allusion to Lady Macbeth’s 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 final entry interprets all these images as a commentary on Leiris’s own moral presence: ‘Coup´e de tout ce qui s’agite sous mes fenˆetres, . . . suis-je plus vivant que deux mains a` la d´erive qu’on d´ecouvre en train de se laver sous un robinet, dans la p´enombre d’une 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 Leiris’s own fear of ‘la tache de sang intellectuelle d´enonc´ee par Isidore Ducasse’ (FB ). One such image, that of Lucia di Lamermoor, leads to the open statement: ‘D’ailleurs, est-il possible de rester sans tache? Et l’une des pires, n’est-ce pas de faire en sorte qu’on n’ait jamais a` express´ement se tacher?’ (FB –). Thereafter, answers will be found to these questions on both a conscious and a subconscious level, and it is typical of Frˆele 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 d’automne” ’ (FB ). This dream is interpreted, 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 policeman’s job a ‘tˆache d’organisation’, while the compressed reference to Proust and Hugo is read as representing a shameful literary topology full of unpronounced words and unmade gestures.

The act of union: being-in-the-world in La R`egle du jeu

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The tache/tˆache 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 specifically in terms of imaginative representation: Prendre garde a` cette tache de sang: conclure abusivement de ce que l’on pense a` ce que l’on est. Autre tache possible: souhaiter que la R´evolution progresse et s’´etende, alors que progressivement on ne fait rien ou a` peu pr`es rien pour hˆater, chez soi, son d´eclenchement . . . Inutile d’argumenter, je suis marqu´e par cette tache, signe entre autres du grave hiatus ouvert en moi entre fa¸con de se repr´esenter le monde et fa¸con de s’y comporter. (FB –)

This conclusion leads in turn to examples of the correct moral ‘tache’ left by writing, examples inspired by the graffiti of May  (FB –). As implied in one such famous slogan, ‘Soyez r´ealistes, demandez l’impossible’, 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 o`u je me meurs, fum´ee; un vin qui, sans peser, se rie de ma tristesse et me fasse rˆever;’ (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/tˆache. Frˆele Bruit concludes with the hope that the ‘tache de sang’ representing Leiris’s 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 defined as ‘un d´esir d’affranchissement maximal [. . .] o`u tˆaches et biens seraient e´ quitablement r´epartis’ (FB –). These concluding representations of the tache/tˆache of presence are among the most affirmative moments in Frˆele Bruit, yet they could hardly be considered a successful final sublation of the biffure within interiority. At best such intermittent flashes emphasize the sense of mortality which increasingly darkens Frˆele Bruit. The final volume of La R`egle du jeu after all opens and closes not with the primacy of action, but with a crepuscular sense of resignation that names interruption, lack and absence as its limits. This is Frˆele Bruit’s original and ineffacable tache. Given that

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The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

La R`egle du jeu’s 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 reflection as ‘character isolated by a deed, to engross the present and dominate memory’ will inevitably involve the violent erasure of rejected possibilities. In autobiography, where these erasures must be self-inflicted, the paradox is therefore that the presence represented by the tache constantly confirms its own death. This returns us, finally, to the fundamental paradox of representation itself. In general, Frˆele Bruit’s 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 Sartre’s Th´eaˆ tre 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 flowing like blood from death, or surging like violence towards it, or indicating even in its imminent coagulation the advent of a final death) ultimately confirm 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.



Thanatography: non-being as the limit of autobiography

Non-being marks the limits of autobiography. Chronologically, this is a truism, but the phrase serves to emphasize the most important of La R`egle du jeu’s philosophical and technical limits. Leiris writes about death in three major ways: on the most obvious level of content, his autobiographical discourse constantly lists and discusses instances of death as an important part of the awareness of one’s own temporality; more fundamentally, La R`egle du jeu revolves philosophically about the unknowable, unlivable personal death at its heart; and most particularly in Leiris, this content and philosophy are both affected by Leiris’s consideration of autobiography’s technical splitting of the self, a process reflected in the operations and movements of the biffure. I have already chronicled death as content when discussing the obsessive return of the fall in Leiris’s autobiographically oriented narratives, and the philosophical interpretation given to these falls can be thought of here at the same time: the historical context and the philosophical reaction may differ from book to book, but the fundamental content and philosophy concern the threat to Leiris’s being. Beyond the level of this discourse, however, it is technically that La R`egle du jeu most radically reveals the figure of the fundamental death existing already within the operations and the sign of self-presence. Here the philosophical and the technical limits of La R`egle du jeu confirm one another. From the biffure of ‘ . . . Reusement!’ to the tache of Frˆele Bruit, the sign representing self-presence points up the objectification and mortification which its existence entails, endorses rather than annuls the impossibility of the coincidence needed for absolute presence, and reminds us that it is only through a death figured as erasure or splitting or staining that a whole presence can be conceived. Writing about death here represents an ambiguous limit for both Being and autobiography: it may be feared as the advent of non-being, but is also obscurely desired as the threshold onto a final wholeness; it may constitute the unbreachable limit of 



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

autobiography, but by the same token it defines the existence and the value of the work. Leiris’s relationship as autobiographer to the biffure is a case in point: the operations of the biffure are contained by the controlled representation of Biffures’s typically worked first paragraph in order to permit Leiris the pleasure and the power of returning to himself in a round of presence; but simultaneously they are released as an irrevocable disruption of the first paragraph’s closed economy, indicating by their enthusiastic proliferations and effacements how autobiography depends on a drive to the death. The relationship between these two economies certainly constitutes the standard fort/da of any autobiographical rhythm. What is perhaps challenging in Leiris is the degree to which the space given to the biffure’s disfunction reveals clearly how a permanently pure presence would fuse with death. Even if Leiris knows this (indeed, because Leiris knows this), such a pure state cannot be lived, but can only be written about. What results from all this is that autobiography often approaches the unlivable pure self-presence that would be a complete non-being and a complete wholeness of being by writing about the death of others. This kind of thanatography ties in with Biffures’s opening recognition that Being involves being with others from the beginning, and provides one strong pedagogical link between La R`egle du jeu’s different volumes. Whereas Biffures predominantly apprehends death as an abstract and monstrous phenomenon revealed by others, Fourbis resolves to face the real death of others in order at least to create the possibility of autobiographical totality and authenticity from holding to this resoluteness. This politics is further continued by Fibrilles which then countenances moving beyond a moral discourse on the end of the other’s death to knowing one’s own death as a feverish poetic resolution. The bathos to which this leads carries over into the resigned metatextual aper¸cus of Frˆele Bruit, where Leiris’s actual death dominates the discourse in being anticipated and apparently played with as part of a wise prothanamium. Each volume therefore offers a distinctive prolongation of the concept of the other’s death in order to come closer to the personal death which cannot be lived. Theoretically, this should mean that La R`egle du jeu progresses towards that fully successful self-representation in which one lives one’s own being-towards-death. In fact, as we can see from the r´esum´e of the pedagogical link given above, this desire to know death is punctuated not by a series of successes, but by the recurrence of failure (a failure successfully represented). Here again the philosophical problem and the technical properties of the biffure go hand in hand: even as each

Thanatography: non-being as the limit of autobiography

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volume employs the deferrals and reprises of the biffure in an attempt to amass a full representation of self-presence, the biffure’s disseminations simultaneously undo this fixation. This rhythm returns Leiris’s work not simply to self-presence, but to a self-presence constituted by the constant confirmation of the impossibility of knowing its own death or wholeness via the representation of the other’s death, even while the autobiography becomes increasingly wise or metatextual about these failures, and already carries throughout within its self-objectifying operations its own pre-original death. Actual dying, in other words, cannot be a personal event, something which in autobiographical terms makes actual dying the only pure event of a pure self-presence. The knowledge of this impossibility creates one last, almost allegorical, level on which death is still written about in La R`egle du jeu. The representation of different events, as in ‘ . . . Reusement!’ or ‘Mors’, can be read as offering up an insistent figure of consciousness confronting non-being. Beneath the increasingly social conception of discourse which each episode concretely advances, there none the less persists a single abstract dynamic, one which traces the movement of self-presence as an experience that is returned to being by consciousness. This consciousness may continue to present being as pure and primary in a number of different philosophical ways, but in each case this pure being is known only on the basis of a return. Whether Leiris’s reaction to the anxiety which engenders a scene is a Rousseauist or a Sartrean one, then, whether he resolves the desire for presence by presenting the non-coincidence within self-presence as the sad falling away from full presence, or the resolute moving towards full presence, the resulting practice is fundamentally a thanatography, in which the consciousness of autobiography is generated, demonstrated and curtailed by the absence of presence. This non-coincidence at the heart of self-representation is in turn exacerbated by one further paradox. Death is not the end of Being in the sense of bringing it to any natural termination or ultimate triumph. But representation constantly generates its own natural terminations or dramatic climaxes, and Western self-representation from the beginning has consistently presented death as the natural apotheosis of presence (one thinks immediately of the closing lines in Augustine’s Confessions: ‘By the gift of your grace some of the works that we do are good, but they are not everlasting. After them we hope that we shall find rest, when you admit us to the great holiness of your presence’). This tension is another reason for the recurring non-definitive readings which create such a distinctive rhythm in La R`egle du jeu and which I have already read in terms

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The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

of failure and the biffure. Leiris is constantly tempted to bring his Being to a natural termination and the holy rest of a finished work, while simultaneously continuing his self-representation (so sustaining consciousness and preventing wholeness) as a rejection of such an eschatology.  We have already seen in my previous examinations of ‘ . . . Reusement!’ how all of these complex considerations are present from the opening of La R`egle du jeu. Biffures’s opening chapter displays not simply an original nostalgia but more fundamentally a first evidence of the absentification within self-presence which takes place from the beginning of consciousness. La R`egle du jeu’s original moment of self-observation cannot view itself wholly as a moment of presence; at best it manages to open up a first moment in the world by placing all non-original moments in parenthesis. The first paragraph’s move from this initial parenthetical negativity to the concluding image of the already fallen toy soldier therefore 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 R`egle du jeu’s later narratives. Logically enough, this thanatography is especially apparent in the autobiography’s metatextual sections. As the object of its own analysis, the narrative at these points can be read as a single enormous figure 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 figurally 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 evolution 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. Leiris’s original conception of the poet as spiritually and socially en marge has not withstood his slow

Thanatography: non-being as the limit of autobiography

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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 n’´ecris presque plus de po`emes et plus aucun r´ecit imagin´e, tendant a` adopter l’autobiographie en prose pour unique moyen d’expression. Je ne sais s’il ne faut imputer cette st´erilit´e relative a` l’existence trop ordonn´ee que je m`ene, au fait de n’avoir plus tout mon temps (ce qui, quant a` la po´esie, pourrait bien revenir a` n’en avoir plus aucun) ou si ce n’est pas, plutˆot, parce que la veine po´etique e´ tait d´ej`a plus qu’`a demi tarie et ma foi e´ mois´ee, que j’ai pris l’habitude de faire un usage quasi scientifique de la litt´erature en mˆeme temps que je me fixais dans mon actuel m´etier. (Bi )

Autobiography here presents itself as the testament of a series of deaths: it offers the sole means of expression in the wake of poetry and imaginative prose; it evinces a relative sterility resulting from the death of an absolutely free time; it represents a quasi-scientific professionalism that survives a tarnished spirit. However, Leiris does not claim that autobiography is here being compromised by external constraints imposed upon self-representation. On the contrary, he recognizes at once that these demands placed on language, time and spirit are self-imposed, for without them he would live in a ‘perpetual Sunday’, ‘sans barri`ere aucune pour me d´efendre contre l’id´ee de la mort, comme si le fait d’ˆetre libre et de disposer enti`erement de mon temps, le fait d’ˆetre grand ouvert et vacant me livrait au vertige de rien, par cette impression mˆeme de “carte blanche”’ (Bi ). To this we can add that the negative qualities associated here with autobiography are indeed normally part of the genre’s definition (with the model of Augustine once again in mind we can say that autobiography is generally conceived as being not poetry and not imaginative, as regulating and interpreting time, and as presenting discursively a spiritual experience) and are furthermore confirmed by the very techniques of this present self-analysis. In this first metatextual turn, then, a certain death (one that is not simply a chronological phenomenon) is already confirmed as externally and internally present in the reasons for autobiography’s existence. Leiris then adds a further series of deaths to this first, personal list by pointing out how his writing is also inspired by a socio-political version of negation: Un certain besoin de n´egation, comme si mon but ultime e´ tait de me soustraire, de me mettre hors d’atteinte, en inventant un monde o`u, toutes lois naturelles et humaines se trouvant abolies, sont tranch´ees a` la fois attaches avec les classes

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The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

sociales et corde soigneusement tress´ee que passe autour du cou l’´etat civil, greffier – sinon bourreau – pour tout ce qui est humanit´e engendrable, corv´eable et enterrable a` merci. (Bi –)

A complex series of negations here presents itself: Leiris writes to conceal, remove and abstract himself from a class system, and a strangulating civil status that ruthlessly enslaves, destroys and buries all humanity. (He recognizes the danger inherent in conceiving of writing simply as a negation of negation by acknowledging in the next sentence that poetry, at least for him, had eventually been nibbled away entirely ‘par ce non dont elle e´ tait la paraphrase’.) His negation of negation takes the form of the careful construction of his own image or statue. This representation adds a further layer of negations, for it is achieved by putting himself on tenterhooks, and used merely to keep time and decrepitude at bay. But this in turn leads Leiris to admit a further negation, for he is so obsessed with constructing an image which will halt the effect of time (an attempt which inevitably fails, as he knows) that he ends up not living at all: En avant de moi-mˆeme. Vivant, non a` l’indicatif pr´esent, mais (quand je ne me replie pas sur le pass´e) a` ce futur absolu dans lequel on est pr´ecipt´e par l’appr´ehension de la mort. (Bi )

For all these acknowledgements of the death at the heart of selfapprehension, however, Leiris can come no closer at the end of this chapter to looking death straight in the face. As I am arguing here, this is not simply because such a vision is difficult to bear, but more fundamentally because Leiris cannot view in unmediated form a death which is already internal to the operations of self-awareness. We can see that the complex series of negations which he has constructed here helps to present the ultimately internal and unrepresentable nature of this death. This logically also serves to explain why the chapter concludes with a number of oblique figures of death. Firstly, Leiris recalls a dream (an obvious figure of repression and unfaceable presence made more complex by its inclusion in a metatextual critique) which he had during the Occupation. He is to be executed by a firing squad opposed to the advent of a golden age in which the question of death would never be put, and he is sure that he will panic at the last minute. He then recalls that the next day, on which the chapter will end, will be a Sunday, and will doubtless once more be ‘bien r´egl´ee’, before closing with two deathfilled references to other writers. The first of these writers is Desnos, who could stand for the whole early surrealist period of Leiris’s writing which has just been examined in this chapter. Leiris has just read of his death

Thanatography: non-being as the limit of autobiography

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and remarks that one cannot properly react to such an event with anything other than silence (Bi –). The second writer is Sartre, who could stand for the whole alternative to a surrealist cosmogony which has also been suggested in this chapter. It is Sartre who gave Leiris the pen with which he records an old fragment from a journal which concludes: ‘Je ne puis pas comprendre que ces gens semblent n’avoir aucune id´ee de leur condamnation a` mort’ (Bi ). After a gap in the text, the entire chapter finishes on an historical image (one of ending and failure as well as relief): ‘c’est la fin de la guerre car le Japon vient de capituler’. But the abiding image of this whole metatextual chapter is that of the complex figure of death within the structure of self-intuition which Biffures has had to present in such an oblique fashion – the final capitulation so barely articulated here belongs properly to this chapter’s impossible struggle to represent the death within self-apprehension. The final chapter, ‘Tambour-trompette’, approaches this same impossibility in a slightly different way. Leiris’s attempts to construct an image have become his desire to recover an impossible object. Once again, a dream is invoked in order to state this representational ideal: L’un des plus insistants parmi les rˆeves de mon enfance – je l’ai not´e a` diverses reprises sitˆot que la vision d’un avenir sans cesse raccourci eut commenc´e de m’inciter a` fourgonner dans le pass´e qui s’accumule derri`ere moi – avait pour base ce th`eme tr`es simple: recherche d’un objet connu, e´ gar´e pour un temps et que je souhaite ardemment retrouver. Rˆeve de pur d´esir. (Bi )

This dream object was usually an ‘absolutely marvellous’ record which was real, ready to hand but none the less unlocatable. A number of other such ‘grails’ are evoked in the same passage, chief among them being the ‘tambour-trompette’ of the chapter’s title (which conceivably would feature on the marvellous record) and the ‘carte postale disque de phonographe’ (equally arguably a more openly autobiographical version of this same record). I have noted both these registering producers of sound earlier. In the present context of thanatography, of immediate note is the fact that Leiris readily acknowledges how this dream of a marvellous object ultimately signifies his abstract desire to isolate himself as a pure object of self-representation: Quand je proc`ede a` cette chasse qui n’aboutit qu’`a des captures d´ecevantes (maigres fantˆomes de r´ealit´es toujours en retard sur moi-mˆeme et circulant d´ej`a parmi des ruines a` l’instant o`u j’´ecris), je reproduis, transpos´ee sur un plan abstrait, la quˆete que dans mes rˆeves comme dans la vie courante je fais si souvent d’un objet. (Bi )

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The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

Instead of uncovering the pure object of selfhood, however, Leiris finds himself wandering in the underworld of his own dead selves, an image once again presented in parenthesis. This failure to find the pure object in time eventually leads autobiography to become the manipulation of objects, each of which in absolute terms marks a failure and a small death: ‘manier des objets, faute d’avoir trouv´e l’objet . . . , je m’´etais mis a` ranger, a` faire de l’ordre, afin que fˆut masqu´e tant bien que mal le manque de ce que primitivement j’avais cherch´e’ (Bi ). But this artisanal sublation of the lack of the marvellous object at least offers the consoling marvel of words (Bi ), something which, as we know from ‘ . . . Reusement!’, is as intimately linked to an original childhood pleasure as any ‘rˆeve de pur d´esir’. So perhaps the marvellous object could be produced as the circulating end-product, rather than the absolute origin, of autobiography: ‘battre monnaie de ma propre chair et produire cet objet qui sera mon gage de vie dans la mesure, cette fois, o`u son destin est qu’il m’´echappe (mis en circulation contre esp`eces sonnantes) et continue sa carri`ere entre la main des autres’ (Bi ). But this constructed object differs fatally from the marvellous grail in acknowledging the presence of the medium and of temporality. Both of these expand in the course of construction to bar any ‘real contact’ between the apprehending self and the self as object in the world. In the case of the medium, Leiris recognizes that a basic vicious circle is involved in his desire to achieve ‘un commerce intime avec une merveille palpable’ (Bi ), for the gap between himself and the concrete world, which is to be miraculously overcome, will be merely confirmed and widened by the insertion into it of a writing that signifies his difference from the concrete. Far from creating an internal coincidence, it confirms an elementary and logically unbridgeable gulf: ‘Tout cela revient a` la notion e´ l´ementaire d’exil, ou de coupure, de faille se creusant entre moi-mˆeme et ce que j’appr´ehende’ (Bi ). Leiris’s autobiography cannot lead him to a land of the living; rather, it has the inevitable effect of drawing him further and further into a fatal labyrinth: Cette voie que je suis, me fiant a` ces lignes comme a` des guides qui doivent me conduire vers un pays o`u tous les eˆ tres me paraˆıtraient plus vivants, est-elle vraiment la bonne? Ou n’est-elle pas plutˆot un fil trompeur qui s’enroule et s’emmˆele, m’´eloignant finalement du point vital que je voudrais atteindre au lieu de m’y mener apr`es quelques in´evitables lacets? (Bi )

Similarly, in the case of temporality, the patient and increasingly wearisome constitution of an autobiographical object eventually has the effect of destroying even any compensatory marvel produced by words by

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burying it under a mountain of details, none of which contains the immediacy of the marvellous object at the heart of the dream of pure desire. The result is that once again Leiris is imprisoned in a deathly landscape: Je me suis donc enlis´e dans ma besogne de raboteur de fiches et trouve un goˆut de plus en plus amer a` ce ressassement perp´etuel d’observations et d’´ev´enements, ressortissant tous au pass´e le plus mort. Nulle flamb´ee po´etique ne monte, je perds de vue mon but ultime qu’´etouffe la foison de d´etails plutˆot qu’elle ne concourt a` y mener, et je m’engonce, a` chaque pas, davantage dans mon lugubre petit traintrain de collectioneur. (Bi )

By way of confirming the failure of this ‘ressassement’ with a further metatextual twist, Leiris prefaces the above passage with a review of those critical reactions to ‘Dimanche’ which greeted its original publication in Les Temps modernes. Friends, writers and critics with virtually one voice appear to condemn the ineffectual narcissism, snobbery or simple inaccuracy of what had been offered as a true ‘gage de vie’. Such a negation of the preceding self-reflexive chapter here effectively undoes the possibility that this ‘corpus’ or ‘compendium’ will create a successful closure. But when Leiris then decides to abandon altogether his drive towards a final autobiographical object, he finds himself drawn into another series of paradoxes and negations. Such an act of abandonment ipso facto turns the autobiography into a final object, one all the more associated with death for being the result of a failure: ‘mon livre – comme ma vie mˆeme vou´ee maintenant a` l’oisivet´e – est donc une chose parvenue au bord extrˆeme du vide et qui, d´ej`a, n’existe plus qu’en silhouette, en d´ecoupure d´epourvue presque de substance’ (Bi ). There is equally a moral paradox here, for the resolution to abandon what has become a dead activity can only be presented within the framework of that activity itself; indeed, it is in the negative, metatextual chapters that Leiris can most intensely sustain a moral object for autobiography. Leiris’s momentary euphoria at the prospect of giving up this deadening task therefore presents itself as a profoundly ambiguous moral gesture, one which, in condemning Leiris to be free, merely leaves him stalled in the pointless vacancy beyond moral self-representation: ‘Moralement, je goˆute un bizarre suspens: comme si, jamais, je ne devais mourir ou comme si, d´ej`a, je n’´etais plus vivant; une marge de grandes vacances, sans voyage, au point mort’ (Bi –). The ‘lack’ or ‘void’ or ‘hole’ which Biffures had sought to fill by finding or building the self as object will be confirmed, then, whether Leiris completes or abandons his task. This unavoidable fact, together with the image of a moral journey suspended, explain the



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

peculiar object which intrudes on Biffures’s closing page: ‘une locomotive qui trouve la voie ferm´ee et stoppe en rase campagne, apr`es avoir lˆach´e une bord´ee de coups de sifflet’ (Bi ). Like the previous mechanical objects in this chapter (the ‘tambour-trompette’ and the ‘carte postale disque de phonographe’) the train’s stoppage on the metatextual level offers a figure of the autobiographical impossibility of closing the circuit of self-capture or self-transportation. Biffures’s autobiographical ‘machine’ (Bi ) has therefore not brought Leiris to a definitive destination (or even point of departure) but instead has merely emitted a volley of shrill sounds before breaking down in the middle of an uninhabited landscape. Leiris is left stranded at the end of the volume like a failed Orpheus, his own notes trailing off timidly on the word ‘tantˆot’. The task of rescuing him from this intervallic state and bringing him back to a lively terminus is deferred to Fourbis, where death will be written about as part of an existentialist determination.  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 objectifies presence. The whole of Fourbis therefore envisages non-existence, and nowhere more directly than in the opening chapter, ‘Mors’. ‘Il me faut donc remonter’: Leiris’s undertaking at the beginning of Fourbis presents itself firstly 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 definitive 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

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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 L’Etre et le N´eant: Angoisse, sitˆot tir´e du noir par ce signal, de se sentir p´etrifi´e, redevenu presque conscient mais sans contrˆole sur des membres inanim´es, ossements e´ pars attendant un jugement dernier; d´esespoir, sans cri qui vienne l’att´enuer, de jamais e´ merger de ce matelas de sommeil confondu avec le mat´elas mat´eriel – lui-mˆeme e´ pais et floconneux – sur lequel la nuit, avec nous, s’est allong´ee; av`enement brutal, enfin, nous arrachant a` ces affres quand (sans qu’on sache comment pareille vapeur aux rouleaux e´ touffants a pu, d’un coup, se dissiper) l’on se trouve les yeux dessill´es. Seuil, donc, assez d´eplaisant a` franchir que celui de l’´eveil, chaque fois que ce retour exige que nous restions ainsi lucidement suspendu dans les limbes durant un temps ind´etermin´e. Incubation dans la p´enombre, attente anxieuse avant l’´evanouissement des brouillards ou le retrait soudain du rideau comme quand, par exemple, arrive apr`es une p´eriode de confusion et de torpeur l’´eclaircie qui fait qu’on se met a` e´ crire, pouss´e ainsi par quelque chose qui demeure e´ tranger bien que cela soit int´erieur, et moyennant un saut dont nous ne sommes jamais assur´es qu’il pourra s’accomplir parce qu’il ne d´epend que partiellement de notre volont´e. (Fo )

This awakening takes the immediate form of yet another series of ‘ressassements’ (Fo –), as Leiris corrects certain misapprehensions in Biffures. To these ‘abolished images’ he then adds a number of ‘positive lacunae’, which in fact reveal one fundamental form of deficiency, a ‘manque absolu’ or ‘d´efaut originel’ (Fo ). (Leiris’s account at this point quite clearly recalls L’Etre et le N´eant, and specifically the moment in the latter when the possibility of falling into an abyss is realized. I have already noted how this is also interestingly the point at which Sartre first mentions play. Leiris differs from Sartre, however, in experiencing the existence of non-being not as an ‘´evanouissement’ but as the dislocation of consciousness from reality and the ability to view life and death ‘selon une optique d’outre-tombe’ (Fo ).) The apprehension of this ‘absolute lack’ is the fundamental event which Leiris will therefore now directly address. The child Leiris hears a noise in the dark which frightens him. He asks his father for an explanation. The response: ‘C’est une voiture qui est tr`es loin, tr`es loin’, frightens him even more. He would have preferred to be told that the noise was that of an insect. The comparison with Biffures’s opening is obvious, but the eschatology of presence here differs crucially in that the sound and the action from the beginning come to Leiris and



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

give rise firstly not to exuberance but to fear. Leiris emphasizes the primal nature of the situation: prior to the event taking place, he is ‘en proie d´ej`a a` une crainte vague’; while the object of his fear is not a particular noise but an ‘unique pr´esence sonore dans le silence’. Its uniqueness is in fact the only thing it offers; completely closed in on itself, its one message is that it is ‘l’unique signe d’une unique obstination trop solitaire pour se situer autrement qu’au del`a’ (Fo ). So insistent is this au-del`a, indeed, that in the course of its obstinate being even the meaningful or projecting origins of presence proposed in ‘ . . . Reusement!’ and ‘Pers´ephone’, namely the voice and the ear, are appropriated by a perpetual neutrality and externality which refuses to yield any message: Faible chant lanc´e pour soi et qu’on devine eˆ tre l’accompagnement 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 int´erieures de l’organe de l’ou¨ıe, n’aura charri´e nul message. (Fo )

This lack of message is a message, however, in the sense that it produces consciousness of a fundamental and repressed lack. It is the total indifference of the noise which creates the anguished recognition of facticity in Leiris. (A most peculiar confluence between Leiris and Sartre occurs here: in La Naus´ee, Roquentin describes the unclassifiable root which makes him experience his own contingency as ‘cette peau dure et compacte de phoque’; Leiris compares the word ‘Mors’ to ‘le morse, mammif`ere aquatique du mˆeme ordre que le phoque’ (Fo ).) The negative message of the sound’s ‘nocturnal intrusion’ produces in Leiris a new sequence of childhood scenes and a resumption of the journey metaphor interrupted at the end of Biffures. The ‘voiture’ or ‘fiacre’ itself is first of all associated with the signifier ‘Mors’ and the signified concept of death: the carriage is doubtless being pulled by a horse with a bit (‘mors’) between its teeth, a horse which may at any moment fall to the ground and expire in agony; the bourgeois child, we are told, is undoubtedly also scared of the death-threatening poverty and squalor to which ‘fiacre’ and horse are presumably returning at this late hour. Having negotiated this ghostly and hearse-like carriage, Leiris now boards it, as it were, in order to be spirited out of Viroflay towards a new series of outdoor locations along the Picardy route. None of these locations has featured in Biffures, and each of these previously abolished representations confirms the permanent presence of non-being at the centre of self-perception. The first stop is at the ‘guinguette du “P`ere l’Auto” ’,

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which Leiris naturally associates with ‘consomm´e’ and ‘consommation’. In addition to signifying food and drink, however, these words are a simple instance of thanatography, suggesting an end that is both secular (‘la consommation des si`ecles’) and sacred (‘tout est consomm´e’). The second stop is at ‘Les Jardies’, which is no less than the ‘maison mortuaire’ of Gambetta. (As an anti-clerical Republican who detested Napoleon III, Gambetta could well have been admired by Leiris, and in terms of the Sartrean resolution being promoted here in Fourbis, such a political figure would be a fitting presence. But I am tempted to establish a more tenuous, psychoanalytical link: Gambetta’s death, which was caused by an accidental wounding, could stand as a thanatographical figure for the invasion and hence construction of consciousness by an external threat which marks the beginning of Biffures and Fourbis, and which is presented as the unforeseen wounding of a primal serenity and integrity. This notion of wounding has already been analysed in terms of the fall in this chapter’s previous section.) Here Leiris experiences a moment of vertigo when he attempts to distinguish between the roses which really did exist in the ‘Jardies’ and those which his memory now assumes or invents. The cause of this vertigo, however, is the way in which yet again an element of nature has intruded in order to present Leiris with a consciousness of being which centres on the uncertain being of that very consciousness. The rose garden is therefore a representation of his own ambiguous autobiographical existence: ‘endroit d’habitation o`u un homme a v´ecu et dont on ne sait plus, parmi tant de souvenirs qu’on y voit rassembl´es, lesquels e´ taient choses a` lui, qui l’entour`erent de son vivant, et lesquels n’ont e´ t´e mis l`a que plus tard, souvenirs impersonnels de l’Histoire et non pas reposoirs d’une m´emoire humaine’ (Fo ). This abstract view of self-perception is typically made concrete by the way in which Leiris now recalls the ‘consomm´e’ of the restaurant in order to link the ‘yeux du bouillon’ which are shortly to be ingested with the ‘deux lentilles a` fleur de peau’ through which we look out. Moreover, the deathly landscape which we view when we do look out (‘l’air d’outre-tombe’) is, for Leiris, merely a projection of the dark chamber which already exists within our heads, a ‘cavit´e bien close qui est la r´ealisation imaginaire de ce qu’on nomme “for int´erieur” – soudain illumin´ee et pass´ee a` une esp`ece de fixit´e mortuaire de mus´ee Gr´evin’. Leiris then establishes a further connection between the ‘eyes’ of this cavity and the ‘eyes’ of the food by speculating that one’s fear of all cavities, grottoes or dark spaces rests on the child’s fear of being eaten, an act representing ‘the most elementary



The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

form of aggression to which we can imagine our presence in the world exposes us’. ‘Consomm´e’ and ‘consommation’ now represent the direct and violent possibility of one’s own non-presence, a non-presence that is still sacred as well as secular, as Leiris emphasizes by drawing together the various images of eyes, teeth and devouring dark into one clich´ed representation of death: La mort, que les all´egories chr´etiennes repr´esentent comme un squelette aux orbites vides et aux dents bien apparentes, ne serait-elle pas – avec les deux trous noirs qui lui servent d’yeux et son rictus d’ogre sadique – la chose obscure et sans regard qui un beau jour vous mange? (Fo )

This appearance of an engulfing death marks the transition from outdoor to underground scenes, the latter combining the former’s external sense of location with a figural sense of the inner, mental ‘cavit´e bien close’. In keeping with the network of metaphors being built up, these caves and grottoes which Leiris now remembers are directly described as being both visceral and devouring, and sacred and Orphic: C’est un souvenir de v´eritable incursion dans les visc`eres de la mort (comme si j’avais e´ t´e d´evor´e tout cru par le monstre de mˆeme que le sont cens´ement les initi´es de nombreux cultes archa¨ıques), un souvenir de prise de contact avec l’abˆıme ou de descente aux enfers que je conserve de certaines promenades touristiques ou circonstances diverses qui m’amen`erent a` visiter des grottes, des carri`eres. (Fo )

Given the autobiographical location of the first moment of consciousness in a childhood pastime, as at the start of Biffures and Fourbis, it is not surprising that the first cave is remembered as displaying a sign over it reading ‘Entr´ee du Gouffre’, as though it were a fairground attraction complete with ‘train fantˆome’ (in this image both the ghostly ‘voiture’ and the incongruous presence of the faltering train at the close of Biffures are neatly combined). The link between the cavern and the childhood interest in eating which is another ubiquitous theme is also amusingly sustained, since on this cave’s first underground level, a restaurant has actually been established. However, it is when Leiris continues further into the dark by taking a boat along an underground river that the cave offers a figure of the ‘vertige’ of self-consciousness. Leiris enters into an ‘immensit´e en vase clos’ and stares giddily at the double vault created by the cave’s perfect reflection in the water. The scene graphically illustrates the internal dilemma of pure reflection, representing in an external and yet internal space (one in which ‘infinite space appears as a content and not as an envelope’) how self-reflection opens wider the gulf between

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reflexive and reflected consciousness which Leiris’s journey to the centre of his world has sought to understand and so close. The next group of caves which Leiris records are also presented initially in a somewhat carnivalesque way: the clich´ed skeleton of death mentioned above crops up as a gigantic graffito on the wall of a quarry; and on one occasion Leiris and his wife visit a ‘Grotte aux F´ees’. But more quickly than before (‘apr`es quelques sinuosit´es et une br`eve descente’), Leiris comes face to face with a pure threshold unto nothingness: Je me trouvai tout a` coup en face d’un immense e´ cran de noirceur: obscurit´e totale, surgie d’un bloc et parfaitement imp´en´etrable; [. . .] apparue de mani`ere si soudaine et ferm´ee a` tel point au regard qu’elle e´ tait bien plutˆot portail donnant sur le n´eant. (Fo )

So pure is this nothingness that it engenders no sense of a fall or collision, not even an image of a catastrophe which can be nihilated. But by the same token, if this ‘noir absolu’ is more quickly and directly represented, it can equally be more impressively played with, conceptualized, drawn into the field of moral reflection. Leiris returns several times to this last site, and replaces the anxiety of his first visit with more mixed feelings: those of a child who consciously engages in a dangerous game, or who, in the unthreatening location of a church, senses the presence of an other world; or else those experienced in the wings of a theatre ‘o`u cordages, portants, praticables joints a` ce qu’on divine des trappes et des dessous donnent l’impression d’un voyage dans les sph`eres infernales ou d’une e´ preuve ma¸connique’ (Fo ). In other words, the representation of Leiris’s confrontation with nothingness is now at its most powerful, allowing Leiris to imagine himself at the end of this whole section as having ‘p´en´etr´e dans l’antre des myst`eres et en eˆ tre sorti bien vivant’ (Fo ).   ‘Il me faut donc remonter.’ The Orphic ascent chronicled in ‘Mors’ has several major effects. It marks the beginning of Fourbis and the continuation of La R`egle 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 confrontation with contingency. It balances the original pleasure, nostalgia and ideality of the first of these effects with the original fear, resolve and materiality of the second. It creates a new list of cultural precedents

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The quest for presence in La R`egle du jeu

and influences in the process, recalling only in passing Biffures’s crucial ab´ec´edaire, changing or rearranging the first volume’s biblical, operatic and fabular references, and introducing the Comtesse de S´egur and Jules Verne on account of their mise-en-sc`ene of subterranean exploration. Above all these reassessments of a first 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 confrontation with non-being. But its real logic offers an even more profound thanatography, for it involves the progressive move from staging the external appearance of nothingness to figuring the internal death within pure reflection, 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 continue throughout the rest of La R`egle du jeu. Even while the autobiography progresses towards its end, Leiris will continue to search for the authentic origin or approach, prior to any ressassement, which would permit the final emergence of a pure first presence. Such a moment would most absolutely mark autobiography’s 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 m’enfoncai d´ecid´ement 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 unfinished article on the evolution of Aim´e C´esaire’s poetry and political theses, something which neatly encapsulates both the wish to emulate this prime example of Sartre’s black Orpheus and the inevitable death of pure intuition and expression entailed in this intellectual ‘d´epassement’. Following Fibrilles’s failure to reach and represent a pure death, then, Frˆele Bruit can be read in turn as a further ascent and reassessment. As a sadder and a wiser Orpheus, Leiris abandons trying to find and inhabit the instantaneous ‘point of convergence’ between poetry and political commitment (FB ),and instead emphasizes, in a series of melancholy reflections, ‘o`u (qu’y 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

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horror’ of a final sleep (FB ). As we have seen in this section, the external nature of this journey offers a figure of the fundamental internal gap separating representing consciousness and represented consciousness. As it closes, La R`egle du jeu therefore recognizes in its own enormous presence a permanent monument to this primordial death within self-presence which already prefigures the existential apprehension of a forever approaching nothingness.

Conclusion: locating Leiris

Existing between two deaths, the first inherent in the original apprehension giving rise to self-consciousness, and the second projected in the final and unknowable termination of selfhood, Leiris’s 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 selfidentity and the place and form of its writing, Leiris’s autobiographical quest moreover arguably stands as a classic example of the century’s most radical intellectual investigations, to be ranked here alongside key texts by Freud, Sartre, or L´evi-Strauss. Though historically grounded assertions about canonic status are still premature, such claims will certainly be boosted by the forthcoming publication in Pl´eiade form of the entirety of Leiris’s œuvre. 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 autosuffisante que la philosophie 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 approaches, 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 wideranging critical appreciation of Leiris’s work. Two extreme examples offer a clear illustration of this point. Georges May’s L’Autobiographie  is a well-established reading of the genre that reflects rather than challenges conventional definitions of the form (p. ), generally endorses the referential tenets of humanist criticism, including intentionality, 

Conclusion: locating Leiris



identification, 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 conventional 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 reflection’ of individuality’s ‘irreducible unicity’ (pp. –). Such a philosophy of individuation can therefore easily absorb the example of Leiris, ignoring its reduction of the radical biffural effect. The ‘case’ of Leiris is therefore presented by May as both ‘abnormal and exemplary’ (p. ), and its intellectual and formal ruptures a typical product of their age (p. ) notwithstanding which ‘La R`egle du jeu le range a` cet e´ gard dans une tradition autobiographique parfaitement reconnaissable’ (p. ). At the extreme end of this conventional approach, the contemporary deconstructive project of Jacques Derrida, as demonstrated in Marges de la philosophie, works to challenge conventional definitions of a form, primarily 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 book’s introduction, ‘Tympan’: ‘d´eplacer le cadrage, par la philosophie, de ses propres types [. . .]. D´elimiter la forme d’une clˆoture qui n’ait plus d’analogie avec ce que la philosophie peur se repr´esenter sous ce nom, [. . .] D´eterminer, tout contre le philosoph`eme, l’intraitable qui l’empˆeche de calculer sa marge [. . .]. Manger la marge en luxuant le tympan, le rapport a` soi de la double membrane’ (pp. xx–xxi). This ‘relationship to itself of the double membrane’ is precisely one that we have seen Leiris’s work consciously negotiate as part of the paradoxical constitution of autobiography’s 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 ‘Pers´ephone’ (Bi – and –) that begins with Leiris’s description of that ‘nom tout a` la fois floral et souterrain’. Tympanizing philosophy through the incorporation of Leiris as part of the double membrane, and a crucial extract from Leiris at that, wherein he attempts to figure 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 Leiris’s ‘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 Leiris’s work in the future might be located. As we have repeatedly seen, Leiris’s 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 conventional collective representations. His literal migrations and their accompanying politico-aesthetic rejection of eurocentrism were mirrored textually by his exploration of genres. This constant revolution in selfrecognition, brought to its most complex exemplification in La R`egle du jeu, was in turn symptomatic of the wider contemporary epistemological explosion, generated in Europe by a shift from modernist to postmodern conceptions of space and time, and beyond Europe by a growing affirmation, which Leiris promoted, of the experience and expression of ‘m´etissage’. By the same token, of course, this immersion in fragmentation was predicated on the tenacious attempt to maintain deep-rooted ideals of lucidity and integrity, evidenced in Leiris’s 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 globalization, offering a dramatic autobiographical registration of its conceptual framework as well as, on a technical level, what Anthony Giddens described in the year of Leiris’s death as its ‘complex relations between local involvements (circumstances of co-presence) and interaction across distance (the connections of presence and absence)’. Just as the dialectics of globalization have causally intensified local affiliations and affirmations of difference (to the point of this becoming the new post-imperial field of conflict), so Leiris’s 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 identification (as detailed clearly in, for example, Homi Bhabha’s Lacanian reading of Frantz Fanon ), to the increasing dis-location of the intellectual’s identity and role in globalized society. Read in this specific context, Leiris can be appreciated as once more

Conclusion: locating Leiris



offering an individual yet exemplary lesson. Permanently vacillating between 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 ), Leiris’s writing could be held to fail on both counts, given the extreme sophistication of its anti-hegemonic inhabitation of alterity, and its consequent 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 dislocated consciousness is indirectly given credence by James Clifford, in The Predicament of Culture. Here Clifford focuses acutely on the methodological ambivalence within Said’s postulation (involving his deployment of the tools of a culture he oppositionally rebukes), before raising the obvious following question regarding the possibility of any cultural identity being classified as native in a globalized culture (pp. –). By way of indirect reply, the whole of Clifford’s book repeatedly advances the positions of Leiris as evidencing an exemplary exploration and retention 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-first century (and post-globalization), then, the new and emerging locations of Leiris should confirm 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

:       Lib´eration,  October , pp.  –, p. .  Edouard Glissant, ‘Michel Leiris: the Repli and the D´epli’, 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 Observateur, – May , pp. –, p. .  Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surr´ealisme, Paris, Seuil, .  Andr´e Breton, Manifeste du surr´ealisme, in Œuvres compl`etes, Paris, Gallimard (Pl´eiade), vol. , , p. .  Louis Aragon, Trait´e du style, Paris, Gallimard, , p. .  See Andr´e Breton, Second manifeste du surr´ealisme, in Œuvres compl`etes, vol. , p. .  See Andr´e Breton, Dictionnaire abr´eg´e du surr´ealisme, in Œuvres compl`etes, Paris, Gallimard (Pl´eiade), vol. , , p. .  ‘Le Surr´ealisme et l’unit´e’, collected in Z´ebrage, pp. –.  See Leiris’s preface to Max Jacob, Le Cornet a` d´es, Paris, Gallimard, , pp. –, p. . I examine these early influences in more detail in an article which also repeats some of my other claims in this chapter. See ‘The sorcerer’s apprentice: Leiris and surrealism’, Aura  (), pp. –. In a future work, I examine more closely the homotextual dimension of Leiris’s mentors. I touch on the theme later in this book, in my reading of Leiris’s Journal. ´  Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses, Paris, Editions de la Galerie Simon, ; reprinted (without the illustrations by Andr´e Masson) in Mots sans m´emoire, Paris, Gallimard, , pp.  –. All references are to this latter edition, which is referred to in parenthesis as MSM.  See: La R´evolution surr´ealiste  ( April ), pp. – and – (which include Bris´ees, pp.  and ); La R´evolution surr´ealiste  ( October ), p.  (reprinted in Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses, pp.  and ); La R´evolution surr´ealiste  ( March ), pp. –. 

Notes to pages –



 Reprinted in Bris´ees, p. .  Reprinted in Bris´ees, p. .  See ‘Le monde des mes rˆeves est un monde min´eral’, Le Disque vert, Paris, Brussels,  (March ), pp. –, p. . . Andr´e Breton, ‘Les Mots sans rides’, Les Pas Perdus, in Œuvres compl`etes, vol. , p. .  Originally the pseudonym of Marcel Duchamp, subsequently adopted by Robert Desnos. See Robert Desnos, Corps et biens, Paris, Gallimard, , pp.  –.  Ibid., p. .  Bris´ees, p. .  ‘Un entretien avec Michel Leiris’, ibid., p. . ´  Jacques Lacan, ‘L’Instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient’, Ecrits I, Paris, Seuil, (Points), , p. .  Œuvres compl`etes, vol. , p. .  Cf. Bris´ees, p. .  Andr´e Breton, Point du jour, in Œuvres compl`etes, vol. .  Second Manifeste du surr´ealisme, in Œuvres compl`etes, vol. , p. .  Sarane Alexandrian, Le Surr´ealisme et le rˆeve, Paris, Gallimard, , p. .  I pursue this intertextuality further in a separate article. It is obvious that, through the influence of the  Les Aventures de T´el´emaque, which is a rewriting of F´en´elon’s  novel, Le Point cardinal retains a paradoxical trace of canonic derivation. See Louis Aragon, Les Aventures de T´el´emaque, Paris, Gallimard, . Leiris’s quotations in the Journal are on pp.  and , and refer without full referencing to Les Aventures de T´el´emaque, 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 Paris’s final two pages, fragments of which were originally published under the title ‘Id´ees’ in La R´evolution surr´ealiste, no. ,  April , p. . In the same issue, Leiris published ‘La Revendication du plaisir’, co-written with Jacques Baron (pp. –) and, more significantly, two pages of entries from the eventual Glossaire j’y 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. L’Imaginaire), . Page references are to the latter edition, referred to in parenthesis as A.  Dictionnaire abr´eg´e du surr´ealisme, in Œuvres compl`etes, vol. , p. .  ‘Le Cinquentenaire de l’hyst´erie (–)’, La R´evolution surr´ealiste  (March ). Included in Andr´e Breton, Œuvres compl`etes, vol. , pp. –.  Manifeste, p. .  Notwithstanding this, Marie-Claire Dumas has importantly documented the transformation of the  manuscript in the  book in ‘Commencer et finir. Le manuscrit d’Aurora de Michel Leiris’, in Didier and Neefs, Manuscrits



  

    

    

Notes to pages –

surr´ealistes, , 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 p´eriode d’intense cr´eativit´e appartiennent d’un cˆot´e Simulacre, une partie des gloses de Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses et des po`emes de Failles; de l’autre, Le Point cardinal, Grande fuite de neige, et Aurora; ainsi que, dans l’entre-deux, Le Pays de mes rˆeves, et certains des r´ecits de rˆeve de Nuits sans nuit.’ (See ‘Le For¸cat vertigineux de rˆeve ou du bon usage du surr´ealisme’, in Didier and Neefs, Manuscrits surr´ealistes, , pp. –, p. .) Although this exploits a legitimate if unexamined 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 For¸cat vertigineux where Leiris writes: ‘            . . . M comme la mer, I comme un rire [etc.]’ (see Michel Leiris, L’Evasion souterraine, Montpellier, Fata Morgana, , p. ). In the Journal, p. , Leiris also gives the collective term ‘Autocritique’ to Simulacre, Le Point cardinal, Le For¸cat vertigineux, and Aurora. G´erard de Nerval, Œuvres, Paris, Gallimard (Pl´eiade), , vol.  (where Pandora is named La Pandora), p. . Andr´e Breton, Nadja, in Œuvres compl`etes, vol. , p. . See Jacqueline Ch´enieux, Le Surr´ealisme et le roman, –, Lausanne, L’Age d’homme, , pp. –. Certain other details in Aurora may have been influenced by Georges Limbour’s 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 first and last editions of La R´evolution surr´ealiste, which gathered the (male) surrealist gang around a female icon: in the first issue, this female was Germaine Berton, a woman who had killed a proto-fascist; by the twelfth and final issue, the female figure significantly had become a classical academic nude. See the serene version of this same state given at the end of Breton’s contemporary ‘Exposition X . . . , Y . . . ’ in Point du jour, Œuvres compl`etes, vol. , p. . See Marie-Claire Dumas, in Didier and Neefs, Manuscrits surr´ealistes, , p. . Andr´e Breton, Manifeste du surr´ealisme, in Œuvres compl`etes, vol. , pp. –. See Jacqueline Ch´enieux, Le Surr´ealisme 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 l’autobiographie, Paris, Corti, , pp. –. The publication of material, eventually contained in Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses and Nuits sans nuit, in La R´evolution surr´ealiste is as follows: no. ,  April , pp. –: seventy-five entries collectively entitled ‘Glossaire j’y 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 j’y serre mes gloses (suite)’. no. ,  October , p.: calligrams from the  edition of Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses (pp.  and ). no. ,  October , pp. –: five 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 j’y 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 first issue of La R´evolution surr´ealiste contained dreams by Giorgio de Chirico, Breton, and Ren´ee Gaulthier. Louis Aragon, Une vague de rˆeves (Commerce, , Autumn, ), Paris, Seghers, . For a lyrical evocation 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 n’y a pas de pens´ee hors des mots tout le surr´ealisme e´ tage cette proposition . . . ’ (p. ). Given the date, it is not surprising that Leiris is not included in the list of dreamers on page . Aragon’s contributions to the first two issues of La R´evolution surr´ealiste stress the notion of perpetual revolution. It is perhaps this which inspired Leiris’s first entry in his Journal regarding Aragon: ‘Actuellement, je ne vois qu’un litt´erateur dont on puisse dire qu’il e´ crit “au participe pr´esent”, c’est Aragon’ (p. ), an appreciation apparently betrayed, to judge by the disillusioned tone of the final entry on Aragon ( December ), written two days after the latter’s funeral: ‘Chez Aragon, il n’y a pas eu fid´elit´e a` une id´ee, mais fid´elit´e a` une e´ glise (dont pourrait-on dire m´echamment il avait besoin pour sa gloire)’ (p. ). This tendency to denigrate an original enthusiasm is another aspect of the dynamic of the ‘naissance a` l’envers’ in Leiris. We shall see it return several times in this book. See Louis Aragon, Trait´e du style, Paris, Gallimard (), , pp. –: ‘La puret´e du rˆeve, l’inemployable, l’inutile du rˆeve, voil`a ce qu’il s’agit de d´efendre contre une nouvelle rage de ronds de cuir qui va se d´echaˆıner. Il ne faut pas permettre que le rˆeve devienne le jumeau du po`eme en prose, le cousin du bafouillage ou le beau-fr`ere du ha¨ı-ka¨ı.’ Roger Caillois, L’Incertitude qui vient des rˆeves, Paris, Gallimard, , p. .



Notes to pages –

 For just one example of each, see respectively Marcel Noll, ‘Rˆeves’, La R´evolution surr´ealiste, ,  June , p. ; and Leiris’s Journal, p. .  I am obviously referring to Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, Œuvres compl`etes, Paris, Gallimard, Pl´eiade, , 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 modernity 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.’  Andr´e Breton, Manifeste du surr´ealisme, in Œuvres compl`etes, vol. , p. .  Ibid., p. .  Freud, ibid., p. .  Compare Eluard’s  publication notice for Les Dessous d’une vie: ‘Les rˆeves, nul ne peut les prendre pour des po`emes.’ (Paul Eluard, Œuvres compl`etes,  Paris, Gallimard, Pl´eiade, , pp. –.) Breton considered this generic division to have distanced Eluard from the fundamental tenets of surrealism. See Andr´e Breton, Entretiens –, Paris, Gallimard, , pp. –.    :      See, for example, Denis Hollier’s remarks in ‘Un homme du secret discret’, an interview by Aliette Armel with Denis Hollier and Jean Jamin, Magazine litt´eraire  (), pp. –, p. .  See Georges Bataille, Œuvres compl`etes , p. .  One of the best intellectual reviews of the influence of Negro art on Western 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: TwentiethCentury 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 ‘n`egre’ during this period, see Jean Jamin’s introduction to his edition of ethnographic writings by Leiris, Miroir de l’Afrique, Paris, Gallimard (Quarto), , pp. –.  Leiris contests the common myth that this took place at La Revue N`egre, claiming that he saw Baker dance in the Revue in , and that the famous bananas appeared only after she had moved to the Folies-Berg`ere. 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 confirmation of this point, see Jean Jamin, ‘On the Human Condition of Minotaure’, in Focus on Minotaure, Geneva, Mus´ee d’Art et d’Histoire, , pp. –, p. , footnote . For a similar photograph, see Miroir de l’Afrique, p. . Jamin’s introduction (pp. –) provides an excellent contextualization of Leiris’s preoccupation in the light of the work of the Mus´ee de l’Homme and the Mission Dakar-Djibouti.  Ren´e Maran, Batouala, Paris, Albin Michel,  (´edition d´efinitive, ).  Michel Leiris, Instructions sommaires pour les collections d’objects ethnographiques, Paris, Mus´ee d’ethnographie du Trocad´ero, .  Jamin’s 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 l’Afrique, 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 Rivi`ere leans towards Brown; behind them stands Brown’s ‘match-maker’ David Lumiansky.  I document in more detail Leiris’s 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 pr´esence dans l’´ethnographie surr´ealiste de Michel Leiris’, in L’Autre et le sacr´e, ed. C. W. Thompson, Paris, L’Harmattan, , pp. –.  See Claude L´evi-Strauss, ‘Introduction a` l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss’, in Marcel Mauss, sociologie et anthropologie, Paris, PUF, , pp. ix–liii.  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 Rivi`ere, ‘A propos de l’art n`egre’, Le Figaro artistique, July– August , pp.  –. Quoted by Jamin in Miroir de l’Afrique, pp. –.  Denis Hollier notes both the apprehensions of the co-founders and the shifts in the rubric. See Les D´eposs´ed´es, Paris, Minuit, , pp. –.  See Leiris’s somewhat official account of their intellectual collaboration, ‘De Bataille l’Impossible a` l’impossible Documents’, Bris´ees, pp. –. The article was first 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 unificatory rather than conflictual practice. See Miroir de l’Afrique, p. .  ‘La “vieille taupe”’, Œuvres compl`etes , pp. –; ‘La valeur d’usage de D. A. F. de Sade’, Œuvres compl`etes , pp. –; ‘Le Jesuve’, Œuvres compl`etes ,



   

 



  

 

Notes to pages –

pp. –; ‘L’Oeil pin´eal’, Œuvres compl`etes , pp.  –. On the subject of rivalry, Jean-Fran¸cois Farny has even suggested that Bataille’s 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 d’histoire litt´eraire de la France, , pp. –. Andr´e Breton, Second manifeste du surr´ealisme, in Œuvres compl`etes, vol. , p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . And beyond! See for example, from , Bataille’s ‘La religion surr´ealiste’, Œuvres compl`etes , pp.  –; and from , ‘Les probl`emes du surr´ealisme’, Œuvres compl`etes , pp. –. See also the notes on pp. – and – for further ejaculations. Georges Bataille, ‘Le Langage des fleurs’, Documents , June , pp. –. Reprinted in Œuvres compl`etes , –. Andr´e Breton, Manifestes du surr´ealisme, p. . Georges Bataille, ‘Le “Jeu lugubre”’, Documents , December , pp. – . Reprinted in Œuvres compl`etes ,  –. Given that Breton and Bataille were fighting this time for possession of Dal´ı and that Dal´ı had not permitted reproduction in Documents of his canvas for fear of offending Breton, the charge of cowardice is also being launched against Dal´ı. ‘Oeil’, Documents , September , p. , reprinted in Œuvres compl`etes , pp. –; ‘Bouche’, Documents, second year, , , p. , reprinted in Œuvres compl`etes , pp. –; ‘Le gros orteil’, Documents , November , pp. –, reprinted in Œuvres compl`etes , pp. –. ‘M´etaphore’, in Bris´ees, pp. –, p. . ‘Talkie’, in Bris´ees, pp. –. On an institutional level, it is interesting in this context to recall Hollier’s remark that Bataille’s exploitation of Marx’s opposition of use-value and exchange-value, pervasive if unmentioned in Documents and more directly acknowledged in ‘La Valeur d’usage de D. A. F. de Sade’, in the context of the museum ‘devait conduire a` l’introduction du corps dans l’espace du mus´ee, devait ouvrir l’espace apollinien du mus´ee au monde du corps et des besoins.’ See Hollier, ‘La po´esie jusqu`a Z’, , p. . On a purely representational level, Jack J. Spector claims that Leiris, along with dissident 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 Breton’s 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. . ‘L’Eau a` la bouche’, in Bris´ees, 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 L’Afrique fantˆome provoked, see Jean Jamin, ‘Les m´etamorphoses de L’Afrique fantˆome’, Critique,  (), –.  Jamin lists the ‘butin’ in Miroir de l’Afrique, p. . His account of the expedition rightly stresses its ‘cˆot´e Pieds Nickel´es’: its scheming, theft, and deceit; its machine guns, political machinations, and media-conscious posturing. See Miroir de l’Afrique, pp. –. Most tellingly, Jamin is able to draw on unclassified archive material in the Museum in order to demonstrate the colonial dimension of the expedition’s acquisitiveness. He quotes Rivet’s 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 pr´ecieux et indispensable de documentation sur les populations qu’ils sont appel´es a` administrer’. See Miroir de l’Afrique, p. . This puts into sinister context the picture of Leiris’s socializing given for the same period, – December , in L’Afrique fantˆome.  Reprinted as ‘L’Afrique fantˆome’, in Bris´ees, pp. –.  Miroir de l’Afrique, pp. –.  I am uncomfortably aware of how in my reading of Leiris’s 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 C’est-`a-dire. Entretien avec Sally Price et Jean Jamin, Paris, Jean-Michel Place, , pp. –, p. .  Ac´ephale’s 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-Attaque’s ‘equivocal’ politics, see Denis Hollier, ‘On Equivocation (between Literature and Politics)’, October , Winter : –. For an account of Breton’s and Bataille’s collaboration on ContreAttaque, see Henri B´ehar, Andr´e Breton. Le grand ind´esirable, Paris, CalmannL´evy, , pp. –.  Georges Bataille, ‘La Structure psychologique du fascisme’, La Critique sociale , November , –, and , March , –. Reprinted in Œuvres compl`etes , –.  Georges Bataille, ‘L’Apprenti sorcier’, Nouvelle Revue fran¸caise , July : –; reprinted in Œuvres compl`etes , –.  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. viii–xxix, p. xiii.



Notes to pages –

 Ac´ephale –, July , . Along with all the major documents relating to the Coll`ege, this text is collected in Le Coll`ege de sociologie, ed. D. Hollier, Paris, Gallimard, . See pp.  –.  D. Hollier, ‘Foreword: collage’, ibid., p. ix.  Le Coll`ege de sociologie, p. .  The College of Sociology, pp. –.  ‘Le Sacr´e dans la vie quotidienne’, Nouvelle Revue fran¸caise ,  July , –. Reprinted in Le Coll`ege de sociologie, pp. –.  See Jean Wahl, ‘L’Air du mois’, La Nouvelle Revue fran¸caise , February , quoted in Le Coll`ege de sociologie, p. .  Le Coll`ege de sociologie, pp. –.  See Le Coll`ege de sociologie, pp. –.  For details of first 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, Qu’est-ce que la litt´erature, in Situations II, Paris, Gallimard, , pp. –.  Georges Bataille, ‘R´eponse a` Jean-Paul Sartre’, in Sur Nietzsche: volont´e de chance, Œuvres compl`etes , , pp. –.  Georges Bataille, ‘Baudelaire “Mis a` nu”. L’Analyse de Sartre et l’essence de la po´esie’, Critique –, January–February , pp. –. Large sections of this were cut out of the version which became part of La Litt´erature et le Mal. See Œuvres compl`etes , pp.  –, to which page numbers here refer. Bataille is more appreciative of Sartre’s reading of Genet. See Œuvres compl`etes , pp. –.  Michel Leiris, ‘Sartre et Baudelaire’, preface to Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, Paris, Gallimard, ; reprinted in Bris´ees, pp. –. Page references are to this last edition.  Miroir del’Afrique, 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 L’Age d’homme’, Romance Studies , : –. ´  See Emile Benveniste, Probl`emes de linguistique g´en´erale, 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 L’Age d’homme’.  We know from the Journal that this image was inspired by his affair with H´el`ene Gordon. See pp. –.  Rather more banally, this can also be read as referring to his affair with H´el`ene Gordon. See Ibid.

Notes to pages –



´  See Cinq Etudes d’ethnologie, 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

 Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique g´en´erale, Paris, Payot, , p. . ´  On this idea, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Force et signification’, in L’Ecriture et la diff´erence, Paris, Seuil (Points), , p. ; trans. Writing and Difference, London and Henley, Routledge and Kegan Paul, , p. .  Details of first publication are: ‘ . . . Reusement!’, in Domaine fran¸cais, ´ pr´esentation de Jean Lescure, Geneva, Paris, Editions des Trois Collines, , pp. –; ‘Chansons’, Fontaine, no. , Algiers, , pp. –; ‘Habill´e-en-cour’, L’Arbal`ete, no. , Lyons, , pp. –; ‘Le¸cons de choses’, in Risques, travaux et modes, Paris, Seghers, , n.p.; ‘Dimanche’, Les Temps modernes, :, , pp. –.  Emmanuel Levinas, ‘La transcendence des mots’, first published in Les Temps modernes,  (), pp. –; trans. ‘The Transcendence of Words’, in The Levinas Reader, edited by Se´an Hand, Oxford, Blackwell, , pp. –, p. .  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres compl`etes, I: Les Confessions, autres textes autobiographiques, Paris, Gallimard, Pl´eiade, , p. .  Roland Barthes, ‘Texte (Th´eorie du)’ in Encyclopaedia Universalis, , , pp. –; tr. in Untying the Text, edited by Robert Young, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, , pp.  –, p. .  In the subsequent part of this book, on ‘The Quest for Presence in La R`egle du jeu’, I shall none the less examine the desire for authenticity governing each of La R`egle du jeu’s new beginnings very much in terms of this beingunto-death. This is not irreconciliable with my fundamental point here that the emergence of singularity is based on a primary otherness, a point which in fact encapsulates the critique of ‘being-unto-death’.  For a full description of this primary otherness, see the work of Emmanuel Levinas: for example, The Levinas Reader, pp. –.  Michel Foucault, L’Arch´eologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard, , chapter  et passim. In the course of this section I consciously describe the subject of La R`egle du jeu as being both a constructed effect whose identity emerges within a discursive formation, and as a situated yet free subjectivity acting within the dialectic of praxis. The first description recalls the writings of Foucault; the second those of Sartre. In using both ideas, I am aware of how an apparent philosophical irreconciliability is being generated: Foucault’s work appears to contradict that of Sartre in rejecting the notion that subjectivity has a constituting role and analysing instead the history of the idea of subjectivity; Sartre appears to contradict that of Foucault in rejecting the immobility of an intellectual system that has no place for the transitional power of autonomous thought, action and value. But



Notes to pages –

I refuse to allow this polarity to dominate my reading of Leiris for three main reasons. Firstly, such a polarity simplifies the development of ideas in Leiris. Leiris’s conscious relations are indeed bound up in many ways with Sartre, above all during the immediate post-war years, but that in no way precludes the perhaps unintended implications of the structuration of the subject which emerges in La R`egle du jeu, implications which strongly recall conceptual frameworks in Benveniste, L´evi-Strauss and Foucault. Moreover, La R`egle du jeu is primarily structured by an experiential, rather than critical, sense of evolution: the move from Biffures to Fourbis therefore charts the development from the child’s encounters with language to the adult’s growing involvement in socio-historic relations, rather than a move from the apparently naive humanism of existentialism to the superior science of structuralism (which is not to say that the evolution of ideas does not form an important part of La R`egle du jeu’s experiential structure). Secondly, such a polarity simplifies the development of ideas in Foucault. While his work certainly problematizes the philosophical link established in Sartre via German Idealism between consciousness, self-reflection and freedom, this problematization cannot be viewed as a simple break. Foucault’s work on the Panopticon, for example, can be read in the light of the concept of objectifying power and in particular the look of the other in Sartre, and to this extent Foucault’s intellectual formation owes more to Hegelianism than is often pointed out. Similarly, Foucault’s late work, L’Histoire de la sexualit´e, and in particular Le souci de soi, examines a non-Christian ethics of the subject that no longer assumes an unequivocal correlation between subjectification and subjection. Here the relationship between event and being can no longer be explained in a deterministic way. Lastly, such a polarity simplifies the development of ideas in Sartre. For Sartre, as for Leiris, consciousness’s awareness and assumption of its activity always takes on a radically unstable form of self-questioning, dispersed across a proliferating structure of events that constantly foreground the subject’s ignorance. Moreover, in Sartre’s later work, the greater recognition given to psychoanalysis, the opacity of childhood and ‘le v´ecu’ (revalorizations learned to some degree from the work of Leiris) creates a more complex view of the coexistence of autonomy and commitment with assumption and conditioning. Here, Sartre’s writings on the nature of the event can be read as anticipating thinkers such as Lyotard and Badiou in addition to Foucault, for in them the individual can in no sense be simplistically considered as the central and determining agent of reflection and action. See for example: ‘La Grande Morale: extraits d’un cahier de notes ()’, Obliques, –, , pp. –; Critique de la raison dialectique (pr´ec´ed´e de Question de m´ethode), vol. I, Th´eorie des ensembles pratiques, Paris, Gallimard, ; Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels, Situation VIII, Paris, Gallimard, , pp. –.  An interesting parallel to this death at the beginning of autobiography is the sense of catastrophe that marks the beginning of a new structure for

Notes to pages –





 



      



Rousseau. At a later stage I shall relate the ‘peigne cass´e’ section of the Confessions in particular (Œuvres compl`etes, vol. , p. ) to the opening of Biffures. See also Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie, Paris, Minuit, , p. , for a general comment on the notion of ‘catastrophe’ in Rousseau. In this light, Deleuze perhaps overaffirms affirmation in simply inverting the priority given to memory over learning in his Proust et les signes, Paris, PUF, , p. . In so doing, he paradoxically perpetuates the reducibility of difference inherent in transcendental consciousness. For two, related, notions of function, see Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folk Tale, Austin, Texas, University of Texas Press, , and Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction a` l’analyse structurale des r´ecits’, Communications  (), pp.  –. Both help us to see how ‘ . . . Reusement!’ simultaneously prefigures and perpetuates a cellular structure. Michel Foucault, ibid., pp. –. Chapter , ‘Mors’, was first published in Les Temps modernes, no. , November , pp. –, and no. , December , pp. –. Chapter , ‘Vois! D´ej`a l’ange . . . ’ was first published in Les Temps modernes, no. , April , pp. –, and no. –, June–July , pp. –. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘There is: existence without existents’, first published in Deucalion , , pp.  –, and subsequently incorporated into the Introduction and chapter , section  of De l’existence a` l’existant, Paris, Fontaine and Vrin, ; trans. The Levinas Reader, edited by Se´an Hand, Oxford, Blackwell, , pp. –. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Etre et le N´eant, Paris, Gallimard, , p. . See ‘L’Ethnographe devant le colonialisme’, first published in Les Temps modernes, no. , aoˆut , pp. –, reprinted in Bris´ees, pp. –, and ´ Cinq Etudes d’Ethnologie, pp. –, especially p. . The original of the piece is to be found in the Journal, pp. –. The former date is official; for the latter, see the Journal, pp. –. I have read this section in greater detail in my article ‘The sound and the fury: language in Leiris’, Paragraph  (), pp. –. ´ See Jacques Lacan, ‘La chose freudienne’, in Ecrits, Paris, Seuil, , pp. –. Jean-Paul Sartre, Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels, p. .    :

JOURNAL

    --   

 Journal –, Paris Gallimard, . Henceforth referred to in parenthesis as J.  Jean Jamin’s editorial material displays how this huge text is not only perforated by gaps, but virtually originates in them. The very first endnote, qualifying the volume’s opening entry which in its entirety reads ‘[Sans date]’ ( J ), explains how the first pages of the journal’s first manuscript were torn out by Leiris, after which the first five 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 relations and close lacunae, but that further as yet unabsorbed archival material will result in a necessary modification of the ‘Leiris’ which Jamin has here helped to compose. See J , , , , . Most of these relate to the future L’Age d’homme. For example J , , , , , . As, for example, in Biffures, pp. –:: ‘un journal qui ne sera pas publi´e ni mˆeme lu de mon vivant mais constituera seulement, d’une mani`ere posthume, le dernier signe que j’aurai adress´e a` ceux des miens qui me survivront’. The term ‘invagination’ is associated most often with ‘La Double S´eance’, in Derrida’s La Diss´emination, 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 R`egle 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 significance – L’homme 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 e´ chec a` la fois litt´eraire et scientifique’ (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 Fibrilles’s artistic resolution. In the same vein, Jamin notes in his presentation of L’homme sans honneur: ‘C’est d’une certaine mani`ere toute La R`egle du jeu que le cahier annonce’ (p. ). A trace of this view remains in Girard’s presentation of the journal intime’s essential failure: ‘Insatisfaction, et mis`ere qui en r´esulte, retours s´ev`eres sur soi, entrecoup´es de mouvements d’orgueil, ruine des esp´erances, inanit´e de l’existence, vanit´e de l’effort, offrent autant d’expressions d’une mˆeme exp´erience r´ep´et´ee, et ont en lui leur racine commune’ (Alain Girard, Le Journal intime, p. ). He adds that this is a relative rather than absolute 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 unfulfilled life, with his later remarks that ‘le moi de l’intimiste demeure au conditionnel pass´e’ and that ‘sa personne est rest´ee a` l’´etat virtuel.’ (ibid. p. ).

Notes to pages –



 Guy Poitry takes a less ironic view of Leiris’s schematizations in his Michel Leiris, dualisme et totalit´e, 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 “d´ebarras” . . . tous ces objets . . . dont on ne se sert qu’`a l’occasion.’ ( J ), ‘un bric-`a-brac d’objets et de papiers’ ( J ).  Th´eodore Fraenkel, Tristan Tzara, Andr´e Lef`evre, Braque, Cocteau, Bataille ( J ); Giacometti ( J ); Breton ( J ); Ren´e Leibowitz ( J ); Jeanne Godon, Picasso, Asger Jorn, Jean-Marie Serneau, Jacques Lipchitz, fille aˆın´ee Lacan ( J ); Queneau ( J ).  The biffure which takes place in the very inscription of this insight is particularly apposite and logical.  See J  footnote . ´ enement du jeudi, – September ,  Cf. Andr´e Clavel’s remark in L’Ev´ 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 malgr´e Leiris’, L’Express,  September , pp. –.  Alain Girard, Le Journal intime, p. viii.  Jean Rousset, Le Lecteur intime. De Balzac au journal, Paris, Corti, , p. .  Louis-Ren´e des Forˆets relates Leiris’s change of opinion regarding the work of Puccini, and in particular Turandot, whose plot centres on a secret, to Leiris’s ‘family secret’. See ‘La passion de l’op´era’, Magazine litt´eraire , September , pp. –, p. .  Florence Delay quotes from Leiris’s commentary to Pierre Braumberger’s film on the subject: ‘Pour n’ˆetre pas touch´e, le secret est de rester immobile’. See ‘M´editations taurines’, Magazine litt´eraire , September , pp.  –, p. .  Maurice Blanchot, ‘Combat avec l’ange’, in L’Amiti´e, Paris, Gallimard, , pp. –, pp.  –.  Fran¸cois Bott, ‘Detective story’, Le Monde,  September , p. .  Maurice Nadeau, Quinzaine litt´eraire , – 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 litt´eraire , 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 Pl´eiade edition of Leiris’s Œuvres. For the way in which this was settled, see Magazine litt´eraire, pp. –.  At one point, Leiris writes explicitly: ‘Aujourd’hui, la droite et la gauche sont pour moi nettement incarn´es par deux femmes’ ( J ). Guy Poitry is exhaustive on these schemata. See Poity, Michel Leiris.  Jamin in Magazine litt´eraire recalls Hollier’s well-known linking of Leiris’s autobiographical being to the moment of his marriage: ‘comme l’a bien montr´e Denis Hollier, le mariage constitue pour Leiris le moment o`u l’auteur naˆıt a` son œuvre, a` son autobiographie’ (p. ). An alternative view of the ‘profound modification’ 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 Leiris’s comments on this period in L’Age d’homme, p. .  See also J , .  For the latter point, see J  note .  To judge from the five 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 Leiris’s 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 L’Afrique fantˆome that ‘Leiris kept a journal every night, sending her instalments without ever discovering that underneath the names which obsessed him (Dogon, Gondar), it was actually her name he had been rewriting all along: the name of Louise Godon’ (p. ). Jamin’s revelation of Zette’s illegitimacy suggests that Leiris did know he was rewriting her name.  See Mireille Calle-Gruber, ‘Journal intime et destination textuel’, Po´etique  (September ), –. This is a response to the original publication of some of Rousset’s ideas as ‘Le journal intime, texte sans destinataire?’, Po´etique  (), –. The essence of her argument is that the addressee is not merely extratextual.  Aliette Armel, ‘Leiris au jour le jour’, Magazine litt´eraire, p. .  See, for example, J , where Leiris notes his mother’s concern over Leiris’s noting of his own heterosexual anxieties.  B´eatrice Didier, Le Journal intime, Presses Universitaires de France, . It is also presumably the reason why my earlier reading of L’Age d’homme 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 L’Exp´erience int´erieure in . Leiris’s determination, here expressed, not to collaborate by publishing was in fact not entirely honoured.  Direct and indirect acknowledgement of Sartre’s influences 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 Leiris’s post-war reflections on ‘litt´erature engag´ee’.  Herman Melville, Pierre; or the Ambiguities (). All page references to the edition by Lawrence Thompson, New York, Hendricks House (Signet Classic), . For Jamin’s remarks, see Magazine litt´eraire, pp. –, and J  note . The French translation was by a relative, Pierre Leyris (who crops up in La R`egle du jeu), and published by Gallimard in . Jamin adds in the Magazine litt´eraire interview that he himself had included a long note on Melville in his Les Lois du silence. Essai sur la fonction sociale du secret, Masp´ero, , 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 Leiris’s little secret.  James Creech, Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s 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 simulations in the work of Proust is established by Edward Hughes, ‘The mapping of homosexuality in Proust’s Recherche’, in Mapping the Other: Anthropology and Literature’s 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 (Pl´eiade), , 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 define Jouhandeau as an ‘unorthodox mystic Catholic novelist and



Notes to pages –

memorialist’. Neither of these mentions the works cited by Leiris; the latter mentions Jouhandeau’s 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 homosexuality by alluding to his ‘mystique de l’enfer’ (a phrase used in  by Claude Mauriac), and by noting that a dramatic marriage features in his fiction. Certain French equivalents, while later in date, are similar in approach: Henri Lemaˆıtre’s Dictionnaire Bordas de litt´erature fran¸caise, Paris, Bordas,  ( lines, p. ), refers to Jouhandeau’s ‘vie discr`ete’ and ‘œuvre 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 Niderst’s entry in the three-volume Dictionnaire des Litt´eratures de langue fran¸caise, eds. J.-P. de Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty, et Alain Rey, vol.  (G–O), Paris, Bordas, , pp. –, is as coded as the later Bordas work (‘amiti´es 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 specific works such as Astaroth and offers a rudimentary characterization of his literary work: ‘Dans ses plus belles pages, Jouhandeau nous laisse deviner cette prudente m´eticulosit´e, cette lente d´emarche vers la v´erit´e’ (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 homophobia 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 justification 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 Dutard’s treatise of seduction Le Petit Don Juan as ‘entertaining and healthy’ (p. ), Romain Gary’s Pour Sganarelle as ‘a good-humored attack against the gloom of unsexed and sedulously tedious modern fiction’ (p. ), and Histoire d’O 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 Qu’est-ce que le classicisme (Paris: Droz, ), Qu’est-ce que le romantisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ) and Qu’est-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 influence 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 reflecting accurately since somewhat unconsciously what was felt by both Right and Left to have been a disastrous period involving the devirilization of French society and culture from the turn of the century to the midthirties. As I state several times, Leiris follows this course of opinion himself.  One recent resistance to such a tendency is Christopher Robinson’s Scandal in the Ink, London, Cassell, . While he seems to disapprove of Jouhandeau’s 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. ). Robinson’s 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 Jouhandeau’s  Trait´e de l’abjection as a starting point for a critique of both the exteriorizing and totalizing nature of thirties’ writing and of its heterosexualism (all of which, as we have seen, Leiris assumed). As Robinson’s primary aim is to establish an alternative compendium, he does not venture far into this speculative field. This does leave him in turn somewhat open to the charge of enthusiastic aestheticization: we may be warned of Jouhandeau’s ‘Decadent Catholicism’ and ‘Romantic revolt’ (pp. –), but we are never told of his anti-semitism. Robinson’s 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 Edelman’s 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 precisely 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 L’Age d’homme: pour un peu, je serais all´e jusqu’`a partager ses vices, si cela avait e´ t´e un moyen d’acqu´erir son g´enie’ (AH ).). Similarly, were we to add the name of Roussel to the above, we should be obliged to begin a whole enquiry into Leiris’s relation to acknowledged mentors who are generally presented as marginal by the canon and whose sexuality is always known but rarely figured.  An endnote indicates that Jamin is not unaware of the content of the contraction taking place here: ‘S’agit-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 cin´ema, Gallimard, Seuil, , pp. –; and Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Paris, Seuil, , p. .  See my earlier note .  Marcel Jouhandeau, Xim´en`es Malinjoude () in Contes d’enfer, 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 Gu´eret in . Given that Leiris elsewhere records his correction of the proofs of other works by Jouhandeau, and shows indirectly that Jouhandeau read at least L’Age d’homme in manuscript form ( J –), it is reasonable to speculate that Leiris was familiar with details of Xim´en`es 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 ‘coll´e ’ dans le journal apr`es le  juin ’ ( J  note , my emphasis)) and that it therefore influenced Jouhandeau’s description does not actually alter my essential point regarding the retention of the homotextual secret at the heart of Leiris’s autobiography and, indeed, his very journal intime.  For another example of Jouhandeau’s unacknowledged influence on Leiris’s aesthetic formulations, see the similarities between a  entry ( J –) and Leiris’s  response to an NRF survey (‘Rˆeves’, La Nouvelle revue fran¸caise, 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 Jouhandeau’s Les Instantan´es de la m´emoire, Journaliers II, Paris, Gallimard, , p. . See also his Chronique d’une 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 P´eril juif, Paris, Sorlot, ) operates in Chronique d’une passion in an ambiguous way. In the narrative, Marcel’s passion substitutes Jacques, whom he must relinquish, for God; Marcel’s wife, Elise, retorts, as it were, by presenting her desire to kill Jacques as doing God’s will. It is then that Jacques’s 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: Jacques’s flattering 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 Levinas’s book, La th´eorie de l’intuition dans la ph´enom´enologie de Husserl, in The Levinas Reader, pp.  –.  Jacques Derrida, ‘La Diff´erance’, in Marges de la philosophie, Paris, Minuit, , pp.  –, p. . The essay is fittingly preceded by ‘Tympan’, in which Derrida employs part of the ‘Pers´ephone’ chapter from Biffures. There are two English translations of ‘La Diff´erance’, neither of which is completely satisfactory, though each contributes to an understanding of the essay: ‘Differance’, in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, tr. David B. Allison, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, , pp. –; and ‘Diff´erance’, 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.  Diff´erance 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 Diff´erance’, 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. Suffice 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 Heidegger’s works, especially after . In associating them with a Leirisian logic, however, we perhaps gain an interesting critical perspective on their meaning and significance.  Martin Heidegger, ibid., H. , p. .  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres compl`etes, I: Les Confessions et autres textes autobiographiques, Paris, Gallimard (Pl´eiade), , p. . Here it is the fall itself which restores Rousseau to life and through which he finally achieves an original, mythical urstate of authenticity, one in which nature and existence cooperate in a pure Ereignis: La nuit s’avan¸coit. J’apper¸cus le ciel, quelques e´ toiles et un peu de verdure. Cette pr´emi´ere sensation fut un moment d´elicieux. Je ne me sentois encor que par l`a. Je naissois dans cet instant a` la vie, et il me sembloit que je remplissois de ma legere existence tous les objets que j’appercevois. Tout entier au moment pr´esent je ne me souvenois de rien; je n’avois nulle notion distincte de mon individu, pas la moindre id´ee de ce qui venoit de m’arriver; je ne savois ni qui j’´etois ni o`u j’´etois; je ne sentois ni mal, ni crainte, ni inquietude. Je voyois couler mon sang comme j’aurois vu couler un ruisseau, sans songer seulement que ce sang m’appartint en aucune sorte. Je sentois dans tout mon eˆ tre un calme ravissant auquel chaque fois que je me le rappelle je ne trouve rien de comparable dans toute l’activit´e des plaisirs connus.

   

Martin Heidegger, ibid., H. , pp. –. Martin Heidegger, ibid., H. , p. . Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Etre et le N´eant, 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 Leiris’s 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: firstly to describe the process of absolute coincidence between inside and outside which is Fibrilles’s dream; and secondly to recall its peculiar presence in a final footnote to Sartre’s essay on ‘la libert´e cart´esienne’ in Situations I (Paris, Gallimard, , pp. –). Sartre here recognizes by way of denegation how such a coincidence causes fundamental problems for his concepts of freedom and the dialectic (this was its value in early Foucault). Hence, for Sartre ‘mˆeme le d´esarroi, c’est-`a-dire l’imitation int´erieure de l’ext´eriorit´e, mˆeme l’ali´enation supposent la libert´e’ (p. ). Sartre’s response to a romanticization of madness is a dogmatic rationalization of it. This is in turn dependent on the essay’s 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 Fran¸cais qui vivons depuis trois si`ecles sur la libert´e cart´esienne’ (p. ).  William Butler Yeats, ‘A circus animal’s desertion’. The political and metaphysical ambiguities inherent in this revisionist account of a writer’s actions also recur in Heidegger’s 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 Leiris’s autobiography is the ultimately exemplary manner in which its complexities guard against such a simple return of the ‘spirit’. For further reflections on Heidegger’s position in this regard, see Jacques Derrida, De l’esprit, Paris, Galil´ee, , and Herman Rapaport, Heidegger and Derrida: Reflections on Time and Language, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, , especially p. . Presumably, Sartre’s intention in ‘Aller et retour’ (Situations I, pp. –) was to offer a similar critical judgement of Brice Parain. Interestingly, the conclusion to the first part of this essay, which speaks of the dangers of ‘le puissant orgueil m´etaphysique qui fut l’esprit de l’apr`es-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, Œuvres romanesques, Paris, Gallimard (Pl´eiade), , p. . One can also recall here how, in L’Etre et le N´eant, Sartre defines the defining 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, L’Autobiographie, 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 May’s 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 si`ecle, 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. vii–xxvi.  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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Unless otherwise stated, the place of publication is Paris.     Only those poems, articles and fragments not collected in book form are listed individually. For a complete bibliography – see Louis Yvert, Bibliographie des ´ecrits de Michel Leiris: –, Jean-Michel Place (Les cahiers de Gradhiva, no. ), . Wherever possible, the original Gallimard publications have been used.  ‘Sur l’esprit de Dieu’ [traduction et pr´esentation du po`eme de Sir Thomas Browne], Intentions – (), –.  ‘Le Monde de mes rˆeves est un monde min´eral . . . ’, Le Disque Vert :  (), –. ´ Simulacre, Editions de la Galerie Simon . ‘L’Id´ee de bien chez Tolsto¨ı et Nietzsche’, Clart´e  (), .  ‘Les Illumin´es’, Clart´e  (–), . ‘Joan Mir´o [translated by M. Cowley], The Little Review, New York, :  (), –. ‘Andr´e Masson’ [translated by M. Cowley], The Little Review, New York, :  (), –. ‘Amoenitates Belgicae’, Clart´e, n.s., (), –. ‘Paris-minuit’, Der Querschnitt, Berlin, . Jahrg., Heft  (), –.  ´ Le Point cardinal, Editions du Sagittaire . 

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Index

abjection,  Ac´ephale, , , ,  aesthetics, , ; and Leiris’s affair with H´el`ene Gordon, ; post-surrealist, , surrealist, –, –, ,  Africa, , , –,  –, , , , , , ,  – Algerian war,  Allendy, Ren´e,  anthropology, , , ,  anti-colonialism, , , ,  antiquity, , , –, ,  anti-semitism, , , n, n Appel des  ,  Aragon, Louis, , , n; Les Aventures de T´el´emaque, , n; the death of, ; Dictionnaire abr´eg´e du surr´ealisme, ; Le Paysan de Paris, , n; Trait´e du style, , n; Une vague de rˆeves, ; archaeology,  Armel, Aliette,  Artaud, Antonin, , , n; and Documents,  Aug´e, Marc, ,  Augustine, , , ; Confessions, , ,  authenticity, –; the aesthetics of, ; existential, , , –, ; poetic, , ; social, ; stylistic, ; of autobiography, , , , ,  autobiography, –, , , , , , ; Georges May, –; and L’Age d’homme, –; and antiquity, , , –, , ; and Aurora, –, ; authenticity of, , , ; ; cultural, ; death as the limit of, , ; and ethnography, ; and the Journal, –; and names, –, , ; and Nuits sans nuit, , ; and Le Point cardinal, ; and La R`egle du jeu, –, –, ; and ‘. . . Reusement!’, , , –, –,

, , –; and surrealism, , , , ; as thantography, – auto-ethnography, , , ,  Bacon, Francis, ,  Baker, Josephine, , n Ballets Su´edois and La Cr´eation du monde,  Baron, Jacques, n Barthes, Roland, ; and signifiance,  Bataille, Georges, , , , , , , , , , , n; ‘L’ Apprenti sorcier’, ; his break with Leiris, , ; his disagreement with Breton, –, , n; and Documents, –; L’Exp´erience int´erieure, ; his reconciliation with Breton, ; and the sacred,  ´ Baudelaire, Charles, Ecrits intimes,  Beauvoir, Simone de, ,  Benjamin, Walter,  Berton, Germaine, n La Bˆete noire,  Bhabha, Homi,  Bildungsroman, ,  Blanchot, Maurice, , , ,  Bonaparte, Marie, her reaction to L’Afrique fantˆome,  Borel, Adrien, , , , , ,  Borel, P´etrus,  Bott, Fran¸cois,  Breton, Andr´e, , , , , , , n, n; Dictionnaire abr´eg´e du surr´ealisme, ; his disagreement with Bataille, –, , n; and Documents, ; Manifeste du surr´ealisme, , , , , , , ; Nadja, , ; Les Pas perdus, ; Point du jour, ; Position politique du surr´ealisme, ; and ‘psychic automatism’, , ; reconciliation with Bataille, ; Second manifeste du surr´ealisme, , , , , – Browne, Sir Thomas, Hydriotaphia, –





Index

Cahiers d’´etudes africaines,  Caillois, Roger, , n; ‘Le Vent d’hiver’,  capitalism, ; the social reality of,  castration complex,  C´esaire, Aim´e, , ,  China, , –, n Chirico, Giorgio de, n class relations,  Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture,  cold war,  Coll`ege de sociologie, , , –, ; and D´eclaration sur la crise internationale,  colonialism, , , , ; see also neo-colonialism commitment, ; and Sartre, , ; existentialist, , ; and literature, –; political, , , , , , –, , , , ; revolutionary and anti-colonialist, ; social, , , ; to truth, – communism, , , ; and the Communist Party,  Contre-attaque, , , n Creech, James,  Critique sociale, La, , ,  Critique,  Croix du Sud,  Cuba, ,  Dal´ı, Salvador, , n death, see mortality decolonization,  deconstruction,  Deleuze, Gilles, n Denigration,  Derrida, Jacques, , , ; Marges de la philosophie; – Desnos, Robert, ,  detection, and Biffures, ; and the Journal, ; and Nuits sans nuit, , ,  devirilization, , , , ,  Didier, B´eatrice,  diff´erence, , , n; and identity, – Documents, , , , –; and Antonin Artaud, ; and Georges Bataille, –; Leiris as the editorial assistant of,  Don Juan,  Dorian Gray, , n; Leiris’s ‘cˆot´e Dorian Gray’ , ; The Picture of, ; see also Albert Lewis Durkheim, Emile, ,  Edelman, Lee,  Eluard, Paul, n engagement, see commitment

ethics, of ethnography, ; of language , , , , ; existentialist, , ; of surrealism,  ethnography, , , ,  –, –, , , , , , , ; of bourgeois life, ; the ethics of, ; as reviewed in the Journal, ; and surrealism, –, –,  existentialism, , , , n; as reviewed in the Journal,  Fanon, Frantz, ,  Fascism, , ,  Faust,  First World War, , , ,  Foucault, Michel, , , –, , –n, n; L’Histoire de la sexualit´e and Le souci de soi, n fraternity, – Freud, Sigmund, , , , , ; and dream-work, , ; The Interpretation of Dreams, ,  Frich´e, Claire,  Front populaire,  Gambetta, L´eon Michel,  Gaulthier, Ren´e, n Genesis, the Book of, and autobiography, – Genette, G´erard,  Giacometti, Alberto,  Girard, Alain, , , n Glissant, Edward, , n globalization,  Gnosticism, – Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, , ,  Gordon, H´el`ene, , –, , –, –,  Gradhiva,  Griaule, Marcel, , , , ; and L’Afrique fantˆome, ; and Documents, ; and Mission Dakar-Djibouti, ,  guilt,  Heidegger, Martin, , , , , n; Being and Time,  Hemingway, Ernest; ,  heterosexuality, , –, , ,  Hollier, Denis, ,  Holofernes, , , ,  homoeroticism,  homographesis, ,  homosexuality, , –, n, n; in Herman Melville’s Pierre,  Hugo, Victor; 

Index Husserl, Edmund,  hysteria, as means of surrealist expression,  –, , , ,  identity, , , , , , , , , , , , ; corporeal,  –, –; construction of, , , –, –, –, , , , n; and diff´erence, –; and difference, , ; the ethnographer’s, –; and language, –, , , –, , , ; nominal,  –, ; sexual, , –, ; social, , ; surrealist,  impotence, see devirilization Institut d’Ethnologie,  Jacob, Max, , , , n; L’Homme de chair et l’homme reflet,  Jamin, Jean, , , n,  n, n; and the Journal, , , , , , –n, n jazz, , , , ,  Jouhandeau, Marcel, , ,  –n, n, n; his formative influence on Leiris, –; his liaison with Leiris,  –; Xim´en`es Malinjoude, , –; Chronique d’une passion, n Judith, , , , , ,  Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, ,  Khadidja, ,  –, ,  – Lacan, Jacques, , ,  Lang, Jack, ,  language, and autobiography, –, , –; the ethics of, , , , ; and ethnography, , ; and identity, , –, , , ; poetic, , ; the referentiality of, ; as source of the merveilleux, ; and surrealism, –, –, –, , –, , ,  Laplanche, Jean,  League of Nations,  Leenhardt, Maurice,  Leiris, Louise, (n´ee Godon), the wife of Michel Leiris, , , , , , , ,  –, , , ; as the addressee of the Journal, –; as the main character of the Journal, ; the death of, ; in dreams, ; the illegitimacy of, –, n; as Judith,  Leiris, Michel, Aurora, , , ,  –, , , , , , , , , , , , n; L’Afrique fantˆome, , , –, , , , , n; L’Age d’homme, , , , ,



, , , , –, , ,  –, –, , , , , , ; Biffures (La R`egle du jeu I), , –, , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , –, , –, , , , –, , , , , , ; ‘De la litt´erature consid´er´ee comme une tauromachie’, , ; L’Evasion souterraine, n; Fibrilles (La R`egle du jeu III), , , , –, , , , , , , n; Fourbis (La R´egle du jeu II), , , , , , , –, , , , , –, , –; Frˆele Bruit (La R`egle du jeu IV), , , , –, , , –, , –; Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses, , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , –n; Grande fuite de neige, , , , , , n; Journal, –, , , , , –, , –, ; the reception of, –; Langage tangage ou ce que les mots me disent, , ; ‘M´etaphore’, ; Miroir de l’Afrique, n; Miroir de la tauromachie, , ; Mots sans m´emoire, , , , , ; Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour, , –, , n; Le Point cardinal, , –, , , , n; La R`egle du jeu, , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , ,  –, –, , , , , –n, see also Biffures (La R`egle du jeu I) Fourbis (La R`egle du jeu II), Fibrilles (La R`egle du jeu III) and Frˆele Bruit (La R`egle du jeu IV); ‘Le Sacr´e dans la vie quotidienne’, , , ; Simulacre, , n; Tauromachies, ; Titres et travaux, ; Z´ebrage,  Lejeune, Philippe,  L´ena, see H´el`ene Gordon Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, , ,  Levinas, Emmanuel, , , , ; and Biffures,  L´evi-Strauss, Claude, , , , , n; on Mauss’s Essai sur le don, ; Tristes Tropiques,  Lewis, Albert, Dorian Gray, the film, , see also Dorian Gray Limbour, Georges,  Lucretia, , , , ,  ‘Le Lycanthrope’, ,  Man, Paul de, n Maran, Ren´e, Batouala,  Marmande, Francis,  Marx, Karl, , , n marxism, , Hegelian,  Masson, Andr´e, , , n



Index

Mauss, Marcel, , , ; and L’Afrique fantˆome, ; Essai sur le don,  May , , , ,  May, Georges, L’Autobiographie, – Mehlman, Jeffrey,  Melville, Herman, , Pierre; or the Ambiguities, ,  M´etraux, Alfred,  Minotaure, , ; Leiris as the editor of,  Mir´o, Joan,  Mission Dakar-Djibouti, , , , ,  n; and Raymond Roussel,  modernity, –, ,  Montaigne, Michel de,  mortality, , –, –, , ; in L’Afrique fantˆome, ; in L’Age d’homme, , , ; in Aurora, , ; in Fourbis, , –, ; in Frˆele Bruit, , –; in the Journal, –, , , , ; self-presence in the face of, –, ; and Leiris’s suicide attempt, , , ,  Mus´ee de l’Homme, , ; see also Mus´ee du Trocad´ero Mus´ee du Trocad´ero, , , , ; see also Mus´ee de l’Homme. mythology, see antiquity Nadeau, Maurice, ,  names, , , –, , , , –; and autobiography,  –, –, , ; and the calligrames,  – Narcissus,  – n´egritude, ,  negrophilia, , , n neo-colonialism,  Nerval, Gerard de, , , , ; Aur´elia, ,  Nietzsche, Friedrich, , ,  Oedipus, the myth of, ; oedipal rivalry in L’Age d’homme, ,  opera, , ,  orientalism,  otherness, , , , , , , , , –, –, , n; as femininity, ,  parousia, , – Peignot, Colette, , ,  Persephone, –,  Peyre, Henri, French Novelists of Today, , –n phenomenology, , , ,  Picasso, Pablo, , , ; and the Communist party,  Plato, 

poetry, , , ; and politics, , , –, , ; surrealist, ,  Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, , ,  possession, , , , –, ; linguistic, ; surrealist,  Pr´esence africaine,  Proust, Marcel, , , ; A la recherche du temps perdu, , , ,  n psychoanalysis, , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , ,  –, , , , n; Leiris’s rejection of, , –; and surrealism, ; undergone by Leiris, see Adrien Borel racism, , ,  reciprocity, existential, ; ethnographic, , , – reflexivity, phenomenological, ; linguistic,  relativity, linguistic and cultural, ; linguistic, cultural and methodological,  repression, –, , , , ,  Reverdy,  R´evolution surr´ealiste, La, , , n, n revolution, , –, , ,  Rimbaud, Arthur, ,  Rivi`ere, Georges Henri, ; and Mus´ee du Trocad´ero,  Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, , , , , ; Les Confessions, , n, n; Les Rˆeveries du promeneur solitaire,  Roussel, Raymond, , , n; Impressions d’Afrique, ; Locus Solus, ; and Mission Dakar-Djibouti,  Rousset, Jean,  sacred, the, , , , , –, , , ; and Georges Bataille,  Sade, Marquis de, – Said, Edward, W.,  Sartre, Jean-Paul, , , , , , , –, , , , , , –n, –n; and Coll`ege de sociologie, ; his criticism of ˆ et le N´eant, , surrealism, –, ; L’Etre , , ; La Naus´ee, ; ‘Un nouveau mystique’, , –; ‘Orph´ee noir’, ; Qu’est-ce que la litt´erature?, , , , ; and ‘selfness’, ; Th´eaˆ tre de Situations,  Saussure, Ferdinand de,  Schaeffner, Andr´e, , Le jazz: la musique moderne,  Second World War, , , –, ; and D-day and Liberation, , , , , ; and ‘drˆole de guerre’, , , , , , ; and Occupation, , , , , –, 

Index S´egur, Comtesse de,  self, the, , , , , , , , , , , , ; psychoanalytical concept of, ; socio-political concept of, ; as seen by surrealism, , ; see also identity shamanism, ,  Soci´et´e psychanalytique de Paris,  sociology, , ,  Spanish civil war,  Spector, Jack, J.,  n Stalinism,  Stendhal, Henri Beyle, Le Rouge et le Noir,  structuralism, n suicide, see mortality surrealism, , , –, , , , , , , , ; and ethnography, –, –, ; as reviewed in the Journal, ; and language, –, –, –, , –, ; and its poetics, , ; and psychoanalysis,  Les Temps modernes, , ; and black poets, ; and the critical response to ‘Dimanche’, ; the founding of, ; Leiris as a



co-editor of, ; and the publication of Biffures, ; and the publication of Fourbis, ; its policy towards poetry,  thanatography, , , –; see also mortality thanatos,  Trotsky, Leon,  Tual, Roland,  Turpin, Ben,  unconscious, the, , , , , , , , , ,  UNESCO,  Vane, Sibyl, see Albert Lewis Verdi, Giuseppe, ,  Verne, Jules,  Wahl, Jean,  Wildenstein, Georges, and Documents,  World Peace Congress in Vienna,  Zette, see Louise Leiris.