Michel Leiris PDF

MICHEL LEIRIS
Writing the Self
This is the rst full-length study in English of Michel Leiriss work.

Frequently cited as a central gure in contemporary French cul-
ture, Leiris was an outstanding writer whose double career as
ethnographer and creative writer places him at important points
of intersection within French cultural history. Sean Hand explores
Leiriss 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 Leiriss multi-volume autobiography
La Regle du jeu stands as the model form of self-enquiry in the
twentieth century. More broadly, Hand explores Leiriss 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 Johns 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

Womens 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 Francois 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
SE A N HAND
Oxford Brookes University

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Cambridge University Press 2004
First published in printed format 2002
ISBN 0-511-03959-X eBook (netLibrary)

ISBN 0-521-49574-1 hardback
For Maolosa and Dominic
Contents
Acknowledgements page x
List of abbreviations xi
Introduction: the deaths of Michel Leiris

Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism
Recasting the self: from surrealism to ethnography
Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography
to LAge dhomme
Positional play: La Regle du jeu
Secreting the self: Journal
LA R EG LE DU JEU
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 Regle 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 beneted from the opportunity
to discuss related ideas at the universities of Kent, London, Manchester,
Oxford, Paris VII and Reading. Early versions of certain sections have
previously appeared in the journals Aura, Paragraph and Romance Studies,
and in the edited volume LAutre et le sacre (LHarmattan). I am grateful to
editors and publishers for permission to incorporate material in modied
form. For special advice, I am indebted to Dr Vivienne Suvini-Hand.
Dr Rima Dapous acted throughout as an expert and encouraging re-
search assistant, and Helena Garnett assisted with indexing. I wish to
thank everyone at Cambridge University Press, and especially the com-
missioning editors Dr Linda Bree and Dr Katharina Brett for unusual
forbearance, the editor Rachel De Wachter for guiding the book through
production, and Susan Beer for her gentle yet scrupulous copy-editing.
Both Professor Malcolm Bowie and Professor Michael Sheringham,
as successive General Editors of the series, were generous with their
time and encouraging with their advice. Above all, this book is for
Maolosa, who has endured each stage of its intermittent formation,
and for Dominic, whose continuing delight in language puts the exercise
of reading Leiris into joyful perspective. They are the rule and the game
of my work, the law and the love of my life.
x
Abbreviations
A Aurora
AF LAfrique fantome
AH LAge dhomme
Bi Biffures
Br Brisees
CE Cinq Etudes dethnologie
FB Frele Bruit
Fi Fibrilles
Fo Fourbis
GFN Grande fuite de neige
J Journal,
LS La Langue secrete des Dogons de Sanga
LT Langage tangage
MSM Mots sans memoire
N Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour
O Operratiques
P La Possession et ses aspects theatraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar
S Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne
Z Zebrage
xi
Michel Leiris est enn mort. Liberations reaction to Leiriss 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 sensibil-
ity, 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 Bushs statement to the United Nations about Kuwait,
Iraq and the ArabIsraeli conict, psychoanalysis to the projection and
demonization of Saddam Hussain, and something approaching ethnog-
raphy 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 ul-
timate 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 Liberations
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 simplied and simultaneous commentary.
The rest of the article, however, and the remaining synopses and tes-
timonies, extending over the issues rst six pages, and drawing on the
judgements and recollections of Levi-Strauss, Marc Auge, Jack Lang,
Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, makes clear how the phrase
was intended in fact to summarize the heroic endurance of Leiriss 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 Lindons words,

Michel Leiris
had remained all his life a marginal to the point of being ambigu-
ously described as Leiris fantome (p. ), whom Levi-Strauss described as
un phenomene a part (p. ), and whom Marc Auge conned to the past
as un ecrivain dune certaine epoque (p. ), was therefore also hailed
more historically as un grand matre by ( Jack Lang, p. ), exemplaire
and remarquable (Maurice Blanchot, p. ), and incontestablement lun
des grands ecrivains du siecle (Claude Levi-Strauss, p. ).
The brutal facts governing the primary subject of Leiriss 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 stockbrockers 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 Andre 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 DakarDjibouti ethnographic expedition led by
Marcel Griaule, the experience of which generated the transgressively
reective ethnographic journal LAfrique fantome, published in . On
his return, interrupting his psychoanalysis and becoming a CNRS re-
search assistant, he eventually joined the staff at the Musee de lHomme,
where he was to spend his entire career until retirement in (replaced
in one account by a computer), as director of the department for sub-
Saharan Africa. Related by marriage to the cubist art dealer Daniel-
Henry Kahnweiler, whose collections and exhibitions after the second
world war gravitated around the Galerie Louise Leiris, Leiris also con-
sistently 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, includ-
ing Picasso, Miro, Laurens, Masson, Lam, Giacometti and Bacon.
As a committed intellectual, he was in briey a member of the
Communist Party, contributed to the journals Critique sociale and Docu-
ments, and co-founded with Georges Bataille the College 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 concern-
ing the right to insubordination during the Algerian war, supported the
movement of May and, with Simone de Beauvoir, helped to di-
rect the Association of Friends of the Maoist paper La Cause du peuple.
Such commitment did not prevent Leiris from also noting his love of
opera, whether in the form of private reviews and reections, or in the
mythographic mises-en-scene of his autobiographical works. And through-
out 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 sub-
saharan Africa and the Caribbean, and above all the work for which
he has become known more widely, a remarkable collection of auto-
biographies. These include not one but two henceforth classic texts of
autobiography: the terse and corrosive one-volume LAge dhomme (),
inspired methodologically and ethically by ethnography, psychoanalysis
and existentialism; and the sinuous and labyrinthine four-volume La Regle
du jeu (), wherein immense temporal prolongation and minute
linguistic analysis brought the art of autobiography to a new pitch of self-
conscious sophistication and phenomenological registration, driven by a
traditional apprehension of cowardice, failure and death. As Liberations
phrase suggests, the work nally 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 Pere-Lachaises columbarium.
These facts, barely adumbrated, sufce to change the resonance of
Liberations blunt phrase. As part of a consciously public oration, rather
than as a private dismissal, the newspapers reaction summarizes how
Leiriss writing, in part by virtue of its temporal endurance, had become
synonymous with the evolution of key twentieth-century cultural move-
ments, and in effect salutes the heroic persistence of a practice which
wove a complex of aesthetico-political ideals raised by different disci-
plines 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 Bete noire (), Presence
africaine (), Critique (), Cahiers detudes africaines (), and
Gradhiva (). Indeed, through obsessive concentration on Leiriss
autobiographical output, it is sometimes overlooked how intensely col-
lective Leiriss work also was, the list of active collaborators including at
the very least Breton and Aragon, Bataille and Souvarine, Riviere and
Griaule, Sartre and Levi-Strauss, Metraux and Cesaire. In the course
of these fraternal undertakings, Leiriss work gradually assumed an en-
cyclopaedic 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 perspec-
tive, Liberations valedictory pronouncement does indeed signal that Leiris
was the last survivor of a disappearing generation, the nal witness of a
century of fervent historical change and intellectual revolution. But this
in itself also begins to indicate the driven singularity of Leiriss work. For
all the fraternal efforts and enthusiasms, extending from jazz and revolu-
tionary art to political and historical temoignage, Michel Leiris remained
fundamentally an obsessive autobiographer. Through all its formal and
intellectual transformations, Leiriss uvre was propelled forward by the
one essential and impossible goal, summed up in the title of his greatest
work, La Regle 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 nal demise.
One central effect of this heroic singularity was the renewal and ex-
pansion 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 eurocen-
tric 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 conuence of liberating ideas
all worked through in the professional knowledge and political support
of suppressed causes. In this light, Leiriss 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 specic 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 emancipa-
tion. Similarly, another equally important effect of this protracted but
always committed writing of the self was the successive trace it uniquely
fashioned of the centurys most revolutionary theorizations of identity.
Thus Leiriss autobiography was initially fuelled by the emerging theo-
ries of the self propounded by psychoanalysis, linguistics, phenomenol-
ogy, anthropology, political engagement, sexual and political revolution,
decolonization and deconstruction, but subsequently became itself the
eld of study and discovery for each of these disciplinary approaches.
Though historically Leiris was never as notorious or public a gure as
Breton or Bataille or Sartre, then, he can be seen in comparisons typi-
cally 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 pro-
voked, 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 inten-
tions in this study. Liberations spontaneous reaction was also a cultural
gesture of anamnesis, that is to say a recollection that the existential effort
of Leiriss 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 implic-
itly confronted and denounced by Leiriss dissatised 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 exis-
tential 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 rst 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 Leiriss 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
Leiriss autobiography and the theme of writing the self which I had iso-
lated as the key artistic issue, I once more needed to follow the complex
unfolding (and refolding) taking place in Leiris rstly through the autobi-
ographies progressive publication, and thereafter more synchronically
Michel Leiris
and synthetically through an accumulation of themes, gures and deter-
minations.
For these reasons, the main body of my work is divided into two parts.
In the rst part, I review each of Leiriss 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 un-
derlying 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 autobiog-
raphy 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 rst 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 unicatory vision, are
more obsessively phenomenological, tending therefore to draw on the
insights and formulations of Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida and Levinas.
Strategically, the l conducteur uniting the two parts, beyond the conti-
nuity of approach, is a constant rereading of the famous . . . Reusement!
scene which opens La Regle du jeu, this strategy deriving from Leiriss 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 gures of the day. I
delineate Leiriss 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, LExperience interieure, or
LEtre et le Neant, or canonic autobiographically related texts such as the
Confessions of Augustine and Rousseau, or the work of Proust and Freud;
but also more personally signicant if less well-known works such as those
of Jouhandeau or Melville, to name only two.
The opening chapter of the rst part, Unities and identities: Leiris
and surrealism, examines the early emergence through surrealism of
Leiriss 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
Glossaire jy 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, LAfrique fantome, is read as a re-
location (and subterranean persistence) of surrealist dualism in social
and political construction, of absolutism in cultural and methodologi-
cal relativity, of identity in critical and increasingly distopic temoignage.
LAfrique fantome, then, is the site of a personal struggle involving compet-
ing 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 ethno-
graphy to LAge dhomme, details Leiriss rapid development, following
his reexive use of scientic objectivism, of transferential principles of
self-analysis. Through the key text Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne,
I show how Leiris evolves an academic prototype of the autobiographical
eldwork 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 specic cultural situation. This in turn is shown to involve a transfor-
mation and re-integration of previous phases of surrealist resonance and
ethnographic reciprocity, in the sacred sociology of the domestic initi-
ation 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 specically an
adherence to an existential ethics of language and generally a shift from
Bataillean dilapidation to Sartrean depassement. Leiris gives this a brilliant
reframing by introducing the analogy of the bullghter, and relocating
the litterateurs language play in the purposeful arts of the self-moderating
intellectual. This in turn leads to a close reading of the nal key text
in this chapter, LAge dhomme. Here I follow closely the implications of
this new methodological determination for writing the self. The syntag-
matic adherence to time is overlaid by paradigmatic conceptualization
and explanation drawn from psychoanalysis and ethnographic catego-
rization. LAge dhomme demonstrates the view that the autobiographical
Michel Leiris
subjects veracity is culturally and reactively constructed, through a priv-
ileging of the regulatory, the repetitive, the archival and archaeological,
the heterodiegetic and the referential, over individuality, immediacy, ex-
perience 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 unnished, undetermined and uncon-
scious elements at play within the text itself. This leads directly to the
fourth chapter, Positional play: La Regle du jeu, where I offer an ex-
tended analysis of the key four-volume autobiography that is undoubt-
edly Leiriss crowning achievement. I emphasize the shift in temporal,
philosophical, formal and moral positions in the move from LAge dhomme
to these later works. The formers static and composite approach gives
way to a mobile and constellatory vision foregrounding chronology and
change. The cognitive and clinical objectication 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 LAge
dhomme, concerned above all to categorize otherness, is transformed into
the atmosphere of social commdia 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 princi-
ples 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 rst apprehension, and the end-
lessly deferring structure of self-enquiry it produces in the rest of Biffures,
wherein the name is revealed as a privileged locus of such meconnaissance,
I turn to the second volume in the series, Fourbis, in order to read how
the childs 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 lin-
guistic revelation and into the concrete and coenaesthetic situation out of
which is generated solidarity, anguish and the apprehension of mortality.
A social enonce overtakes the solipsistic enonciation, to create a newly val-
orized self-identity from communion with others. This new aspiration to
reconcile poetical and political authenticity in an elaborate depassement 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
to a suicide attempt, and subsequent convalescence, in order to detail
the autobiographys recovery through its re-examination of its own writing
principles and in particular that of the rule of the game. Here we ob-
serve the realization that the failure to nd 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 nal volume of the series, tellingly entitled Frele 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 fth and nal
chapter of the books rst part, Secreting the self: Journal , of
a posthumously published, designedly modest and unnished, if massive,
journal. Here I focus rstly on the Journals primarily derivative status
in relation to the polished oeuvre, its complex reinvagination of the pre-
viously read and nished work, its temporal and formal accentuation
of historical, ideological and stylistic irresolution, and its accompanying
foregrounding of non-nite 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 fun-
damental cyclomythic structure subtending all Leiriss 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 specic
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 books rst 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 Regle du jeu. The rst chapter, Excess of
joy: the beginnings of presence in . . . Reusement!, looks in detail at how
pure presence is presented and exposed in Biffuress opening chapter, the
attempt to capture such a state revealing the differance already within the
language and structure of self-representation. The metaphysics of self-
presence is shown graphically to be outdone from the beginning by the
Michel Leiris
operations of the biffure and decalage inherent in self-presence. Building
on this realization of pre-gural alterity, the second chapter, Organs
of learning: sensing presence in Biffures, focuses on the normally ef-
faced organs of self-perception. These are shown to hold and project
the drama of presence in La Regle du jeus opening volume, with initial
shifts from visual through phonic and then aural immediacy leading to
later, more sophisticated gures 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 sub-
ject of the third chapter, The act of union: being-in-the-world in La Regle
du jeu, which focuses on Leiriss will to give permanent authenticity at
least a series of dramatic realizations, gravitating around such key exis-
tential 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 gure into
metaphors of sport and thence to socio-political engagement, as drama-
tized by precise historical involvement, such as being caught in a cross-
re. Thereafter I trace the irruption and attempted signicance of similar
historical contexts, including the Occupation, the Liberation and May
, and through them the ambiguous network of obligations and fail-
ures opened up within the homophonically related terms tache and
tache. We then observe how the nal volume, Frele Bruit, recognizes
how these attempts are at best ashes that illuminate an increasingly
crepuscular psychological landscape. The paradox gradually borne in
on Leiris is that the presence represented by the tache constantly conrms
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
nal chapter, entitled Thanatography: non-being as the limit of autobio-
graphy. Beyond the presence of death as a major content of Leiriss La
Regle du jeu lies the revelation of death as inherent in autobiographys tech-
nical splitting of selfhood, as predicted and reected from the beginning
in the biffure. The key signs representing self-presence in Leiris point up
the objectication and mortication which their existence entail. Leiriss
working-through of this paradoxical limit shows, then, how autobiogra-
phy depends on a drive to the death: from Biffuress insectile otherness,
we move through Fourbiss resolve to face the real death of others, and
Fibrilless failed attempt to sublate death in a feverish, poetic resolution, to
the entertainment of actual death in Frele Bruit. The whole of La Regle du
jeu is shown to work with this knowledge and the impossibility of its reso-
lution, self-presence thus being constructed from repeated conrmation
of the impossibility of knowing its own completion. The text is peppered,
then, with gures of consciousness confronting non-being, driven by the
temptation to bring Being to termination and its own existence as con-
tinuing 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-nite series of images, projections,
dreams, meditations and memories. In the works closing pages, then,
this spectral guration of the death inherent in self-intuition becomes
conrmed by the nishing works emergence as the monument to a life
reaching its end and the elaborate preguring of the autobiographys
unknowable nothingness.

Texts and contexts

LAspiration viscerale a un systeme qui serait a la fois esthetique, moral et

scientique. Le Vrai, le Beau, le Bien donnes en bloc. Une seule chose.
Michel Leiriss denition of surrealism could equally describe the
general aspirations of his mature autobiographies, and in particular
La Regle du jeu. The remark demonstrates quite clearly how Leiris never
abandoned the moral and aesthetic precepts of his surrealist apprentice-
ship and regarded himself to the end of his days as a surrealist. This is
all the more signicant for his work as a whole, given that, according
to the Dictionnaire abrege du surrealisme, compiled by Andre Breton and
Louis Aragon, rst published in , Leiris belonged ofcially to the
movement only between and . These dates in themselves, of
course, make Leiris an interesting case-study in the evolution of surre-
alism, since they mark two of the most decisive moments in the history
of the movement: saw the publication of Bretons rst Manifeste du
surrealisme, while witnessed the rst serious schism within surre-
alism (ostensibly over the movements political identity) whose acrimony
is recorded in Bretons Second manifeste du surrealisme. Within these
dates, Leiriss surrealist productions fall fairly convincingly into the two
main phases proposed by Maurice Nadeau in his Histoire du surrealisme: an
initial periode heroique, running from , in which the dominant
trait was the rst ush of poetic fervour as yet untainted by internecine
polemic; and a subsequent periode raisonnante, lasting from ,
in which the increasing intensication of the surrealist voice passes the
point of near inarticulacy, giving way to the institutional consolidation
of surrealism as a specic literary and social practice. What is par-
ticularly 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 rst furiously and intermittently, upon writing
the self.

Texts and contexts
Surrealism came of age in the aftermath of the rst world war, and
sought to sweep away the bourgeois conservatism of a previous age
with a new, revolutionary, declasse 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 ossied logic of a re-
alist epistemology and give free representation to the unconscious. The
mental transguration 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 Bretons credo: Je crois a la resolution future de ces deux etats, en
apparence si contradictoires, que sont le reve et la realite, en une sorte de
realite absolue, de surrealite. The obligation to reveal this unconscious
world conferred a scientic status on the surrealists instrumental use of
language to overcome the rational defences of the stultied 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 Traite du style, noted: En realite,
toute poesie est surrealiste dans son mouvement. Such a metaphysical atti-
tude 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-justicatory spiritual apocalypse, in
which life and death, reality and imagination, past and future, the com-
municable and the incommunicable are no longer locked within the
rationalist logic of negation and contradiction. Idealism and material-
ism meet at this point. Poetic language displays its own material qualities
instead of devoting itself to verisimilitude, and the surreal representa-
tions created by this alchemical process confound rather than conrm
the conventional relationship between signier and signied devoted to
a rationalist programme of knowledge and identity. As the surrealist
dictionary itself denes the word representation:
Les representations conventionnelles des sources geome-
triques de la nature ne sont seduisantes quen fonction de leur puissance
dobscurcissement. (A.B. et P.E.)
This dark metaphysical urge is given its most programmatic exposition

in Bretons Manifeste du surrealisme, where it is dened in psycho-
logical and technical terms as psychic automatism. The phrase indi-
cates a quasi-Freudian concept of the unconscious, whose emancipatory
language confers the status of shaman on the poet. The focus of the
Manifesto therefore falls on the creative manipulation of pure language:
le langage a ete donne a lhomme pour quil en fasse un usage surrealiste
(p. ). In the rst 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 ma-
teriality, creates rather than represents the world, and burgeons beyond
the pre-established explicative functions of the dictionary. No correc-
tion or negation will be used by the surrealist to bring language to heel.
Surrealist freedom is an innity of utterances, each emancipatory and
revolutionary in intent and effect, an activity free of the exigencies of
description or dialectic:
Le surrealisme poetique, auquel je consacre cette etude, sest applique jusquici
a retablir dans sa verite absolue le dialogue, en degageant les deux interlocuteurs
des obligations de la politesse. Chacun deux 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 soffrent que comme tremplins
a lesprit de celui qui ecoute. (p. )
Psychic automatism therefore denes 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 surreal-
ist 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 Reverdys formulation of this idealist
conceptualism:
Limage est une creation pure de lesprit. Elle ne peut natre dune comparaison
mais du rapprochement de deux realites plus ou moins eloignees. Plus les rap-
ports des deux realites rapprochees seront lointains et justes, plus limage sera
forte plus elle aura de puissance emotive et de realite poetique. (p. )
Leiriss belief in this revolutionary practice went beyond his cir-
cumstantial afliations, as the notes for a conference, entitled
Le Surrealisme et lunite, make plain. Notwithstanding their con-
temporary emphasis on political liberation, Leiris signicantly describes
Surrealisms essential aspects as constituting une tentative pour rompre
le cloisonnement quimposent a notre vie les facons de penser et dagir
liees a notre condition dOccidentaux modernes ou, si lon veut, de
civilises (Z ). What is lost in this alienating, capitalist and technolo-
gizing world are ces moments quon pourrait dire totaux et que sont,
par exemple, les fetes africaines: a la fois techniques, sociales, esthetiques,
Texts and contexts
sportives, religieuses, etc. (Z ). Into this sundered civilization, then,
comes Surrealisms 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 signicant how much emphasis Leiris places on the unication of
personality (using Bretons phrase) (Z ) as well as the overcoming of
all internal and external constraints (Z ). An identicational synthe-
sis is therefore implicit for Leiris in this revolutionary aesthetic. What
his exhortation does not bring out is the technical means of achieving
this unication in writing. If we review now Leiriss 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 signicantly,
at the points of irreconciliability.
A number of very early inuences, of an apparently idiosyncratic
nature, provided Leiris with a rst technical apprenticeship. These in-
uences, of which the most important were Max Jacob and Raymond
Roussel, gave Leiris an early opportunity to explore the creation of a
bouleversante unite 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 signicance here is
the fact that Leiriss appreciation already focuses less on the passive regis-
tration 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 Leiriss
own LAge dhomme and La Regle du jeu, and it demonstrates in my view what
will be my main concern here in reviewing the productions of Leiriss
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 rst of the four texts
I am going to discuss here: Glossaire jy serre mes gloses.
G LOSSAIRE JY SERRE MES G LOSES
Glossaire jy serre mes gloses marks Leiriss ofcial acceptance into the sur-
realist movement. The earliest entries in the book, eventually produced
in its entirety in , were the rst poetic material Leiris produced in
the doctrinal journal La Revolution surrealiste: between and no
fewer than four extracts, one of them composed of calligrammes, illustrate
Leiriss adherence to surrealist doctrine. It is also the most abiding
and representative of Leiriss literary forms, constantly supplemented
over the years, right up to the rst half of the Langage tangage, ou
ce que les mots me disent, whose title, Souple mantique et simples tics de
glotte, plays on the very word supplementary. Far from being a tick,
the denitions produced express in pure form Leiriss abiding interest
in writing the self by releasing the magical and revelatory power of lan-
guage. This belief is illustrated by the very title of the collection: Glossaire
jy serre mes gloses. The book is a surrealist anti-dictionary in which the
traditional subservience of signier to signied is reversed. The sound
and shape of the word Glossaire therefore creates its own denition:
jy serre mes gloses. Seventy-ve similar entries appeared in the third
issue of La Revolution surrealiste, and were followed by a direct explanation
of their underlying linguistic philosophy. It is a monstrous aberration,
says Leiris, to imagine that language exists for the simple purpose of
facilitating mutual relations. This utilitarian view of language is based
on the erroneous science of etymology which teaches us nothing about
a words real meaning and hence nothing about ourselves. A surrealist
glossary breaks open this false prison-house of enlightened reason:
En dissequant les mots que nous aimons, sans nous soucier de suivre ni
letymologie, ni la signication admise, nous decouvrons leurs vertus les plus
caches et les ramications secretes qui se propagent a travers tout le langage,
canalises par les associations de sons, de formes et didees. Alors le langage se
transforme en oracle et nous avons la (si tenu quil soit) un l pour nous guider,
dans la Babel de notre esprit.
Despite the exoticist and prophetic gestures, we notice again Leiriss
technical and scientic interest in dissecting language to reveal the se-
cret relations within. The tone is subtly different from the more roman-
tic, revolutionary and deliberately deranged endorsement given these
remarks by an enthusiastic Artaud in the same issue:
Oui, voici le seul usage auquel puisse servir desormais le langage, un moyen
de folie, deliminations de la pensee, de rupture, le dedale des deraisons, et non
pas un ou tels cuistres des environs de la Seine canalisent leurs
retrecissements spirituels.
Leiriss project is both more scientic and less local: he is interested in
the analysis of words and the logic revealed by them in a way that will
eventually bring him into close proximity with the aims and techniques of
Texts and contexts
psychoanalysis. But in this he is in fact agreeing with Bretons dismissal
of etymology in Les Pas perdus () as the subjugation of language to a
pietre conservatisme humain whose horror of innity is ingrained in
the closed world of the dictionary. Breton encourages us in Les Mots
sans rides: de considerer le mot en soi; detudier daussi pres que
possible les reactions des mots les uns sur les autres. Leiris may also
have been aware of the six jeux de mots presented by Rrose Selavy
in Litterature, whose very title Breton on one occasion broke up into
Lits et Ratures. But it is perhaps Bretons famous conclusion to Les Mots
sans rides which best describes both the philosophy and technique of
Glossaire jy serre mes gloses: Jeux de mots, quand ce sont nos plus sures
raisons detre qui sont en jeu. Les mots du reste ont ni de jouer. Les
mots font lamour. Beyond the frivolity of punning, in which reason
plays with language as evidence of its control of the world, its condence
in its own identity, and its encyclopaedic and organizational use of the
dictionary to both these ends, lies the realization in les mots font lamour
that words are active and reproductive agents which produce the speaking
subject and reveal him to himself. This is the revolutionary factor which
Leiris even at this early stage is already beginning to introduce when
writing the self.
Many of the entries in Glossaire jy serre mes gloses metatextually pro-
nounce this very point (logically, given my earlier statement that the con-
tent of surrealist language is primarily itself ). One such example, typical
in its panache, is quau gte tot scat ! ( ).
This derides the very foundations of Cartesian knowledge and its logical
use of language as the aspirations of a slug, tediously slithering towards
a miserable haven in which to hide from the innity revealed within
the abstract philosophical term cogito. Elsewhere, all credos, whether
philosophical or religious, which keep language in subservience to the
operations of abstract thought are exposed as props by an autonomous
signier: ode sacree. Les cordes au dos du decor ( ).
Symbols of authority, and the transcendence they bring, are similarly
exposed by the language used to designate them:
= spectre. (MSM )
lest petrie des paroles tues. (MSM )
, transe sans danse. (MSM )
This direct equation between the state of language and self-identity

means that the poetic subject does not pre-exist the creative shift of
the process of metaphor itself, as Leiris acknowledges in the arti-
cle entitled Metaphore: Non seulement le langage, mais toute la vie
intellectuelle repose sur un jeu de transpositions, de symboles, quon
peut qualier de metaphorique. This speaking subject is not essential
and prior to language: instead Leiris exists within a dense metaphori-
cal texture, slung between signiers which constantly generate and dis-
seminate his essence. As Jacques Lacan, whom Leiris has described as
le psychanalyste surrealiste, has put it: Lon peut dire que cest dans
la chane du signiant que le sens insiste, mais quaucun des elements
de la chane ne consiste dans la signication dont il est capable au mo-
ment meme. This crisis in the representation of a transcendental self
simultaneously afrms the productivity of the material sign. (We should
note that the texts typography indicates that the relationship between
signier and signied 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 conation 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 de-
fence 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 Leiriss approach to writing the self, is the one aptly subtitled
plongeoir de Narcisse (MSM ). Here Leiriss own proper name is
simultaneously displayed as a narcissistic rebus and as the dispersion of
identity across the framework of writing (see gure ).
This explosion of the conventional symbol for Leiriss identity offers
several surrealist lessons at once. It parodies the dictionarys normal util-
itarian 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 Bretons Manifeste: it is its own truth onto itself, a double soliloquy pos-
sessing no negation or contradiction, and parodying the dialectic. The
Texts and contexts
Figure Le plongeoir de Narcisse.

dislocation of the name disrupts our unconscious identication with the
proper noun, forcing us to see it for the rst 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 reection. Thus these
surrealist lessons already encapsulate the existential conundrum and the
formal problematic fundamental to writing the self problems which
the whole of Leiriss later autobiographical uvre 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 sym-
bol of sovereignty whose ideogrammatic nature encourages analysis and
rereading, this time entitled le sceptre miroitant (MSM ). The ele-
ments 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 gure ).
The rectitude of this emblem contains a paradox, however. Having
been composed from the frictional encounter of signiers, 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 signiers in
which we are insinuated constantly offers alternative denitions within
the text for the basic elements of the sceptre:
= spectre. (MSM )
, armure. (MSM )
ramure de larmes petriees. (MSM )
minotaure amateur dhommes. Saumatre traumatisme. (MSM )
loi que jaime. Ma moelle. (MSM )
Following the chain of signiers reveals the extent to which the subter-
ranean law guiding the original brash calligramme was one relating to the
fear of death. As we shall see, this is a constant factor in Leiriss works. The
texts productivity, far from exhibiting the sceptre in order to command
Texts and contexts
Figure Le sceptre miroitant.

respect, encourages the realization that it was brandished as a self-
defence (armure) and an act of self-petrication in the face of the bitter
and traumatic knowledge (Saumatre traumatisme) of mortality. Bretons
Manifeste acknowledges this tendency on the part of surrealism to return
to the persistent myth of annihilation underlying and propelling a fre-
netic nominalism: Le surrealisme vous introduira dans la mort qui est
une societe secrete. Il gantera votre main, y ensevelissant lM profond
par quoi commence le mot Memoire.
This spectral image is entirely consistent with surrealisms dark meta-
physical impulse. But in terms of writing the self, it equally reveals the
limitations inherent in the surrealist use of language, and qualies many
of the above statements regarding the revolutionary effect of the signi-
er and the position given to the reader. For the transcendental signied
which represses the irrational irruption of death into representation is
replaced by the cabbalistic force of a transcendental signier. The static,
formal disposition of language in Glossaire jy 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 denition revealing an omniscient
self-consciousness capable of looking on its own death:
Y fourches caudines de la mort. JY suis lance. (MSM )
Y is the logical nadir of surrealist linguistics: a monade hierogly-
phique 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 col-
lapse 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 jy serre mes
gloses ultimately denes the closed world of the transcendental signi-
er, which replaces the discursive meaningfulness given to the signied
by classic representation with the absolute oneness of words making
love to each other. Revolutionary intentions with respect to represen-
tation and the consciousness it portrays therefore translate in practice
here into the language of hermeticism and the self-justicatory will to
transcendence.
Texts and contexts
This paradoxical logocentrism, which is severely limiting for a full
writing of the self, results from surrealisms material view of language
and its idealist view of enunciation. This can be clearly heard in those
entries whose phonetically derived signieds maintain a privileged rela-
tion between voice and meaning. For example:
cest acheve a ailes: Pegase. (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 denition, 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 denition in turn indicates that the moment of supreme
surrealist identity is one in which self-consciousness coincides completely
with a world of mysterious and innite signicance, a world from which
language can only separate us in its imperfect and frustrating approxi-
mation to truth (veritable?) and its inevitable introduction of sequential
time and hence mortality (un bal larvaire) into the relation between self-
consciousness and this world. Glossaire jy serre mes gloses therefore gleams
with references to a radiant point of pre-verbal ecstasy:
-- lac essentiel, et l darchal . . . (MSM )
la terre originelle. Lair net. (MSM )
le bloc massif, lapex prive dacces, lultime pinacle (MSM
)
ramage du mystere sans clef. (MSM )
sinuosites originaires des races. (MSM )
quil mattise! Et je nhesite . . . (MSM )
This has the effect of working against the privilege so recently granted
the signier. For although the claim may be that it is the signier which
creates its concept, we become once more aware of its subordination to
the power of the poets predication.
The conceptual unity of self-consciousness which this transcendental
signier maintains equally gives the reader an illusory omnipotence freed
of all dialectical obligations. One of the best examples of this unity of read-
ership is given by the entry entitled Arbre de stuc (MSM ) (see gure ).
A stucco tree is a perfect image of surrealisms desire to transform the real
world into an impossible conceptual art object. (Signicantly, a similar
Figure Arbre de stuc.

Texts and contexts
calligram concludes Le Point cardinal.) The tree exfoliates the absolute
means of reecting upon its total sense of self unpruned by any negation
or contradiction. Indeed, it displays ingrowth rather than outgrowth,
seeking, in the words of Bretons Point du jour, to recover itself in the
labyrinth of its own song. Language and mind coincide in this crystal-
lized form, and reproduce their simultaneity in the readers eye as it
registers how the language of its own deciphering (silence, clef , cele,
scrute) is held together by the trees central yet separate fork: the letter
Y, with its fourches caudines de la mort, and by the ghostly pres-
ence within the tree of the signier Leiris. This silent knowledge intuits
the divine point of the text and its underlying philosophy. Its ultimate
determination is described clearly in Bretons Manifesto:
Tout porte a croire quil existe un certain point de lesprit dou la vie et le mort,
le reel et limaginaire, le passe et le futur, le communicable et lincommunicable,
le haut et le bas cessent detre percus contradictoirement. Or, cest en vain quon
chercherait a lactivite surrealiste un autre mobile que lespoir de determination
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 trans-
cendental power of enunciation which provokes this crisis transforms the
mediocrity of the real world into self-justicatory mental matter, which
then petries into innite self-reection.
The transcendental signier and the transcendental reader are gen-
erated, therefore, by surrealisms 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 construc-
tion of mental matter to the detriment of the signs social dimension.
From this perspective, it is interesting to turn now to Leiriss surrealist
narratives, Le Point cardinal and Aurora.
LE POINT CARDINAL
Le Point cardinal transforms the typographical star-bursts and self-

incubating imagery of Glossaire jy serre mes gloses into a sustained prose
narrative of erotic transcendence. Its continuous succession of mental
landscapes resulting from the generative feeding of imagery by syntax
has the effect of ushing out the speaking subject, marking the rst true
dramatic localization of the rst-person voice that will narrate all of
Leiriss major works.
The books 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 rst-person narrator, who crosses the barrier separating bourgeois
representations from precise hallucination by copulating furiously with
an ingenue at the back of a theatre. He enters a petried landscape whose
presentation is ceaselessly accelerated and annihilated by a libidinal dy-
namics, 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
nal section which accelerates to a multilingual and impossibly imme-
diate 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 vitried into his nal true self , a fragile scaffolding of
letters (MSM ) (see gure ).
This nal syntactic prolongation of the purely poetic metamorphosis
spasmodically gured in Glossaire jy serre mes gloses arguably acts as the
culminating or cardinal point for what is the rst surrealist narrative in
Leiriss work. In addition, for all its mythic tenor, its prosaic loosening of
an earlier tense nominalism now suggests how Glossaires 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-scene of
mental matter, with an attendant yet autonomous rst-person presence,
automatically unfolds. This more open contrast between nominalism and
narration presages the development of poetic apperception into a phe-
nomenological project. This potential produces a number of recurrent
symptoms, indicative of neurotic yet localizable identity. For all the neg-
ativity of its naissance a lenvers dynamic, then, to recall Alexandrians
Texts and contexts
Figure Paris, October .

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 allegorie traduisant le pas-
sage du Mot de letat pense a letat ecrit, les symboles sexuels et guerriers
ne servant qua illustrer le sens intime et risque de cette operation. To
this forensic reading we can add the contextual remark that the patho-
logical gestures of the narrative, far from lying beyond identicational
recuperation, fairly clearly partake of an episodic culture in part absorbed
from contemporary readings of Aragon, and reected almost immedi-
ately. The speed of retransmission, arguably due once again to Leiriss
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 lOpera section of Le Paysan de Paris, focused especially
on the literal signs with which both texts are punctuated. Beyond this,
two contemporary quotations in Leiriss posthumous Journal show that
he was also familiar with Aragons mock-epic Les Aventures de Telemaque.
Other, long-term, effects possibly include Le Paysan de Pariss metropoli-
tan realism, and Les Aventures de Telemaques 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 , nally 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 sur-
realist 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 narrators breakdown. It should be stressed
that hysteria is certainly not used here in a pejorative or dismissively
Texts and contexts
pathological sense. Hysteria is simply the supreme means of surrealist
expression, as the Dictionnaire abrege du surrealisme makes clear:
Cet etat mental est fonde sur le besoin dune seduction reciproque,
qui explique les miracles hativement acceptes de la suggestion (ou contre-
suggestion) medicale. Lhysterie nest pas un phenomene pathologique et
peut, a tous egards, etre consideree comme un moyen supreme dexpression.
(L.A et A.B.)
The entry is credited to Louis Aragon and Andre Breton, who in

Le Cinquentenaire de lhysterie gave the fuller version from which
this denition is taken. Hysteria in their view challenges the positivist hy-
potheses 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 unsatisable 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 expres-
sion coincide in silence. This is precisely what Breton envisages in the
rather naive and idealistic section regarding Freud in the rst Manifesto:
un monologue de debit aussi rapide que possible, sur lequel lesprit cri-
tique 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 pregured 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 narra-
tive with the phantasmagoria and linguistic experiments particular to
Leiris. The books title is taken in part from Nerval, a hero of the sur-
realists: Aurora, among other things, then, is the schizophrenic con-
junction of Aurelia and Pandora. Like Nervals Pandora, Aurora is
an indechiffrable enigme who provokes a violent narrative revolving
around the schism described in Pandoras epigraph:
Deux ames, helas! se partagent mon sein et chacune delles veut se separer de
lautre: lune, ardente damour, sattache au monde par le moyen des organes
du corps; un mouvement surnaturel entrane lautre loin des tenebres, vers les
hautes demeures de nos aeux.
Aurora dramatizes this tension by blurring the distinction, as ever, between
dream and reality, a surrealist dictum here taken from Aurelia, whose
opening line is Le reve est une seconde vie, and by identifying the
narrative voice with a number of different characters whose appearance,
like the doppelganger of Aurelia, signify the proximity of death.
The narrators encounters with the mythical muse Aurora therefore
constitute a dangerous and hallucinatory roman damour, which is driven,
like Bretons Nadja, by des rapprochements soudains, des petriantes
concidences. The heros body is endlessly dismembered and revivi-
ed by this Medusa, who controls the texts dream logic in her various
guises: Eau-Ro-Rah, , , Horrora, . In
addition to being a surrealist transformation of a typical roman damour,
moreover, it is clear that Aurora is the rst text by Leiris that can be read
without difculty as an autobiography, albeit a more oblique version of
the surrealist model offered by Nadja. Several scenes correspond closely
to events in Leiriss 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 coun-
tries in , and the story of Damocles 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 sur-
realist 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, . . . cest ton tube digestif qui fait communiquer ta bouche, dont
tu es er, et ton anus, dont tu as honte, creusant a travers tout ton corps une
sinueuse et gluante tranchee . . . Ces marches descalier, . . . ce sont les echelons
qui, a chaque coup, te manquent et te rapprochent de jour en jour dun corridor
glace, rempli de vieux epouvantails . . . Et toute ta vie tu descendras cet escalier.
Les poemes que tu ecriras, les stupidites que tu diras, . . . tout cela naura pas
plus de realite pour toi que le permier venu dentre les differents phantasmes
qui peuplent en ce moment meme les tenebres de cet escalier dont la pente
seule est sanglante et reelle. (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
aneantissement de letre en un brillant, interieur et aveugle other than
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 con-
fronted by the rst of many oracles, a plaque on which he can read both
his past and his future. The name Aurora is pronounced for the rst 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 par-
ties 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 rst-person male voice registers his own increasing mineralization,
decides that he has arrived and that la dynamite des faits, the object-
ive 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 pessimisms skyscraper. They ee 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 nal rem-
nant, her hair, becomes ames, 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 Damocles Siriel,
a tyrant sexually excited by petrication who alters the temple dedi-
cated to Femininity in order to represent his own taste for cold, angu-
lar constellations, and who, threatened by his outraged subjects, oods
the temple. The spectre of Aurora oats over his story. In the fourth
chapter, a young vagabond, through a reading of Paracelsus casts fur-
ther light on Auroras identity. Paracelsuss coat of arms bears the motto
and his books description of la Pierre philosophale makes
plain how Auroras ubiquity signies the books search for lessence
meme de la purete, a cause de cette perpetuelle ondoyance que
represente cette chevelure, sous le ligne de laquelle elle est placee.
Puriante et puriee, elle est le signe de la pensee (A ). The search for
a nal, impossible union with Aurora, who by now is a meteoric phan-
tom, 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 fth chapter is therefore devoted to the vagabonds rejec-
tion of the attributes of foul reason and his longing to feel the destructive
and purifying ame of the undescribable, unnamable and unknowable
Aurora. In the nal chapter the narrator re-enters the sea and oats 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 as-
sociated terms hour, mouth, orice, 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 nger bears the red and gold
words , and his quiescent, vitried 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 cathedrale 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 summa-
tion of Leiriss 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 narrato-
logical implications of a full writing of the self. This tension is reected
if not diffused in the narratives typical surrealist contrasts, between the
architectural and the organic petrication and uidication, mineraliza-
tion 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 ramications
vegetales, or traversed and transformed by oods, 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
Philosophers Stone. In the Second Manifesto Breton makes clear that
this is rien autre que ce qui devait permettre a limagination de lhomme
de prendre sur toutes choses une revanche eclatante: the furious move-
ment of the narrative is underpinned by the unaffected imagination of
the poet as alchemist. Breton specically tells us that love is le lieu
doccultation ideale de toute pensee. It therefore comes as no sur-
prise that the Philosophers Stone and Aurora are equated in the novel.
Verbal possession, then, lies at the heart of the storys 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
Texts and contexts
occultation of thought and the gift of verbal transmutation. All of this
bears out Bretons exclamation: Gloire [. . .] a lhysterie et a son cortege
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 multi-
ple 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 pensee,
this Muse is not only the surrealist angel of language at whom the nar-
rator 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 poets 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 sub-
mit to a subliminal and enigmatic message and abandon the body to its
nal wastage.
Two related techniques are used to fabricate a resolution. Firstly, the
narrative movement brought to the individual instances of Glossaire re-
sults 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 secoulaient entre les monotones berges de lespace le euve eternellement
semblable a lui-meme, malgre ses soi-disant contradictions quetait lesprit du
vagabond. Ainsi savancait-il, a travers les detours toujours insufsants des
phrases, vers locean mortel quune ecume declats 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 predicat-
ing the total revolution of the object, the rst-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 unsatised desire, and with it an unassailed sense of ideal
self-identity. Damocles Siriel makes this plain when he deliberately revo-
lutionizes the nature of imagery by inverting every symbol in his temple to
Femininity. The result merely conrms his dark desire to achieve absolute
self-intuition:
Sur le plafond de cette matrice qui representait une nuit etoilee semblable a
la vraie nuit qui envoutait le temple, jallai meme jusqua peindre mon nom,
encadre des principales gures de la geometrie, et cela en noir sur fond blanc,
ce qui indiquait clairement la volonte formelle que javais de me refuser a
considerer le monde autrement que comme une fonction de moi-meme, esclave
blanc de terreur sous le talon noir de ma pensee. (A )
Every sign in the book, of which Aurora is the prototype and goal, is in
fact used, then, to conrm 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 dabord que ces quatre lions malgre leurs pelages dissemblables
sont egaux, et que ce mot egaux est lequivalent du pronom latin , qui
veut dire moi. (A )
The nality of such an equation points to the often sententious use of
language in the text. Again a narrative of desire, with the psychological
identications it produces between narrator and reader, transforms in-
stances of magic nominalism into the generalizations of an incontestable
speaker. Woman is therefore un briquet, un coup de pioche philan-
thropique, le sang dun caisson. The arbitrary nature of analogy advo-
cated in the Manifesto becomes the conrmation of linguistic possession
in a ritualized and contrived encounter. The potential destruction or den-
igration of the Cartesian-Kantian language of intelligibility afrms 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 Philosophers Stone creates a specic 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 nar-
rator nally 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 narrators selfhood.
This translates technically into the poets 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 nally represent the
self only as blindly and endlessly running up against the limits of repre-
sentation 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
Texts and contexts
failing indicates the growth of a confessional and rationalizing framework.
Underpinning the spasmodic linguistic eruptions, then, is the registra-
tion 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 Leiriss rst autobiography in that it laisse pressentir le trajet
autobiographique. In addition, in its localization and development of
a rst-person merveilleux, it partakes fully of the narrative effects of
realism dismissed as inferior by Bretons Manifeste.
We can see, then, that the tension between Auroras lyrical perfor-
mance and its projet de connaissance brings Leiris to the point where
he can recognize that the possibilities presented by the surrealist pro-
gramme 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 deni . . . quoppose a presque chaque page cette condition
dhomme devant laquelle . . . certains ne cesseront pas de se cabrer (A ).
But signicantly, he already found the technical means offered here to
self-expression to be embarrassingly inadequate: le fatras dune allure
symbolique et les rodomontades dans le gout noir ou frenetique
dont cet ecrit 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 necessaire 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 nd a new relationship between language and the self
it represented, one that would continue to show the inextricable link be-
tween the two while dealing adequately with the concrete social reality
which surrealisms frenetic dualism could no longer for him represent.
Ethnography and psychoanalysis were to provide the intellectual frame-
work 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 Leiriss
major texts dating initially from the twenties which I am analysing here
in terms of their contribution to his emerging approach to the writing
of the self. The book is in the form of a dream diary which contains,
in a transformed state, some of Leiriss earliest writing: entries in the
posthumously published Journal for March, April and
April , for example, form the basis for the second, third and
fourth dreams recorded in Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour. These
dreams are also chronologically contemporary with the earliest exam-
ples of the anti-dictionary Glossaire jy serre mes gloses: issues four and ve of
La Revolution surrealiste, in addition to containing calligrammatic material
by Leiris, recount a total of nine dreams from the eventual diary. Like
the anti-dictionary, moreover, the dream diary offered Leiris a particular
approach to self-expression, encapsulated in the collections epigraph
from Nerval: Le reve est une seconde vie, to which he remained at-
tached: just as the Glossaire jy serre mes gloses was reissued in expanded
form thirty years later (and further supplemented by such late texts as
Langage tangage ou ce que les mots me disent ) so the original Nuits sans
nuit became, in , the denitive Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour.
Within this consistent formal approach to self-representation, how-
ever, the temporal and intellectual expanse contained in the diary results
in individual accounts which, on both the narrative and metanarrative
levels, reect contrasting conceptions of the self and its situations which
are gleaned progressively from surrealism, psychoanalysis, existential-
ism, or post-war anti-colonialism. Secondly, in conjunction with this di-
achronic development, the collection also bears out a more synchronic
tension between an inspirational spiritual principle and the condensed
representation of an epiphany. The collection does not question the be-
lief that the dream is the complete and undeniable evidence of a poetic
truth, a model learned from the rst issue of La Revolution surrealiste and
celebrated notably by Aragons Une vague de reves; but it tempers this
sense of ecstatic being with a writing principle, to be found in all of
Leiriss work, whose technical and analytic workings conict with un-
qualied approval for a pure, useless, unemployable dream. And lastly,
a third, related tension emerges clearly once individual instances of a
dreams fatality converge as a collection. Their repeated recourse to
the drama of mystery and detection (a rhythm that endorses both the
purity of the dream and the power of its decipherment) has the effect
of dulling in advance the events poetic potential, and so of relocating
it in a realist rather than surrealist perspective. In the same way, their
sequential (and hence implicitly inconsequential ) nature replaces a closed
uniqueness of self-presence with the coudoiement of social encounter and
its production of the dreaming self. Together, these tensions indicate a
Texts and contexts
crucial development in Leiriss writing of the self which derives from
the recognition of two major constraints. The rst involves a dramatic
localization of the individual in terms of both achievement and answer-
ability: the surrealist alter-ego of Fantomas or Jack lEventreur has been
replaced by a bourgeois aneur. The second involves the obligation to
enter extended narrative form: for the rst time in his surrealist writing,
Leiris is recognizably subject to linguistic laws and cultural construc-
tions, formed by a social syntax rather than obliterated by a sublime
aphasia. This conicts with the opposite temptation, simultaneously de-
veloped in Glossaire jy serre mes gloses, to explode the rules of representation
and so conrm an absolute self-intuition and self-expression. This op-
position, which we have already noted, far from being resolved will fuel
the most passionate metatextual moments in Leiriss major autobiogra-
phies. But it is the approach to psychology and form in Nuits sans nuit
et quelques jours sans jour which enables an autobiographical dialectic to
develop in Leiris. While the collection is sustained by a desire to uncover
and inhabit the moment of pure being, its dramas, to which the self must
respond, show clearly how individual identity is now perpetually renew-
able only because it is already circumstantial. Nuits sans nuit et quelques
jours sans jour can be said truly to break open the still not fully negotiated
nature of self-identity in Aurora or Glossaire jy serre mes gloses, then, with a
Baudelairean psychologism which acknowledges the transitory or fugi-
tive nature of selfhood. As such, it is a crucial text, for it brings centrally
into play what henceforth will impinge increasingly upon self, situation
and structure in Leiris, namely, the full phenomenology of modernity.
The modernity and urbanity of the dreams self are immediately ap-
parent. The je in his many situations is a psychiatric patient, a lm-
goer, a tourist, a typist; his heroic alter-egos (especially invoked by the
earlier dreams) are such modern artists as Limbour, Tual, Masson and
Ben Turpin (!). The correlating Other, classically embodied in these
dreams by that terrible and incommunicable being, Woman, is equally
a projection of a male bourgeois, appearing as whore, chambermaid,
moll, nurse, but, above all, wife. At the same time, though, the stereo-
typical scenarios suggested by these cliches are reinforced by the persis-
tence of more abstract personications: the je is a dead man, a fearful
lover, a soldier, a prisoner; while the Woman is Minerva, a prophetess,
an Oriental. In itself this latter tendency could be viewed as a prod-
uct of cultural alienation as much as of desires reiteration. But it is
above all the tension generated between modern and classical image
(employed most dramatically in LAge dhomme), as it here recurs within
the dreams permutations, which brings out the speed, fragmentation
and reversibility of the self s world, and the consequent instability of
that self which the world conditions. This splitting of the self between
instability and constancy is repeated on the level of the dreams transcrip-
tion. The je often objecties itself through an intentionality (je pousse
(N ); je persiste (N )) reinforced on occasions by a reexive verb
(je me jette (N ); je me dis (N ); je mapercois (N )). The same
effect is produced by a contradictory negativity, wherein the enonciation
afrms the opposite of the enonce, as in je suis mort (N ) or jai oublie
(N ). Often the splitting of the self is the actual drama recorded, as
in the fourth dream, beginning: Un soir, en entrant dans ma chambre,
je mapercois assis sur mon lit. Dun coup de poing, janeantis le fantome
qui a vole mon apparence (N ). Here, as in other examples (N ), the
several different grammatical designations of the rst person add to this
phantasmic self-image. Lastly, in a particularly abyssal twist, individ-
ual dreams themselves acknowledge or experience the state of dreaming
(N , , ), a moment where the terrible anxiety produced testies to
the radical doubt out of which the self s grasp of reality must none the less
emerge.
Modernity and reversibility equally dene the dream situations. The
most typical dynamic in the book is that of the archetypal modern tale:
the detective adventure, with its speed, violence, alienation and dif-
cult decipherment. Not that this is the only recognizable genre however:
indeed, the uidity of genre and register in the dreams assists the impres-
sion that any event is reversible and exists also only within the modern,
urban context of a simultaneity of adventures. Different interpretations
can of course also be placed on the dreams situation. A psychoanalytic
reading is fairly obvious: in general terms, the Oedipus story, like the
dream in Leiris, is an ironic drama of self-deception and self-detection;
in particular the processes of condensation and displacement which,
according to Freud, in part constitute the dreams technical workings
continually resurface in Leiris as a series of brutal obliterations and muta-
tions. These, acting both within and between dreams, condition the self s
situation, which is consistent precisely in being constantly differently
centred . . . and consequently transformed into something extraneous.
But a more political or sociological interpretation is equally valid, the col-
lections overall situation being also a permanent revolution wherein the
je continually registers what Benjamin called the Schockerlebnis or shock
experience of modern life and negotiates an endless series of what Marx
called social hieroglyphics. Whatever the interpretation, though, the
Texts and contexts
situations modernity and reversibility translate, in concrete terms, into
a dangerous trial. Time and again, the je undergoes torture, penetra-
tion and execution. He is red down a barrel, threatened by a vulture,
engulfed by waves. He ends most dreams by screaming. In a very lit-
eral rendering of the savagery and bestiality of modern life, the dreams
overow with dogs, cats, lions, gorillas, panthers, leopards, monkeys,
rams, toads. Reversibility is a constant law: the hero climbs up only to
fall down; he boards a boat only to suffer the threat of drowning. This
possibility of annihilation is in fact at its strongest in the two most obses-
sively repeated scenarios, those of the journey and the sexual overture.
And signicantly, where dreams conjure up a nirvana-like opposite of
the dangerous situation, it is always a reality based on an anti-modern
or anti-urban or anti-European existence which death cannot affect:
Iles, cites, dautres climats, forteresses ou chateaux qui surplombent la
mer: images dun lieu assez distant ou separe pour que la mort ne puisse
my relancer (N ). The unchangeability of these distant places in turn
brings out how the locus of the self s situation acts often specically as
a threshold. This lieu de passage, as I have mentioned, can involve literal
travel, via a bus, a tram, a steamship, a boat, a bicycle, a train, and so
on; but literally it indicates a psychological journey, via halls, grottos,
foyers or stairways. It even marks a threshold onto the sacred as loosely
dened, individual dreams unfolding in churches, brothels and theatres.
Above all, the threshold exists in a modern, urban setting, as a hospital,
a cinema, a prison, a dance-hall, a hotel, a cafe or restaurant, not for-
getting, of course, a library. But there is one, abstract, level on which the
dreams situations register most powerfully the impact of modernity and
reversibility on the conceptual unity of the self: namely, the changing ide-
ological convictions recorded chronologically in the collection. Thus the
surrealist-inspired readings of the dreams from the twenties, involving
linguistic overdetermination, anthropomorphism, and the conuence of
scandal and sentiment, become overlaid in the dreams of the thirties with
more socio-political visions, such as colonialism (N ) or communism
(N ), in the dreams of the early forties with the concrete metaphors
of Occupation, and in the latest examples with the post-war and post-
colonial readings epitomized by the central phrase of one of the few
Chinese dreams recorded: Que lisez-vous? Militez-vous? (N ). The
few constant features in this changing ideological landscape, notably the
fact that the situation continues to be as much verbal as physical, em-
phasize how the collection bears out the complete cultural construction
of the self.
Changeability is lastly also a strong feature of the collections many
structural patterns. I have already remarked on the roles of conden-
sation and displacement, and we can remind ourselves here of how
Freud saw the formal dimensions of dreams as being the key to their real
content. It is plain, then, that the dreams oscillations (inside/outside,
passion/death, mystery/detection, night/day, and so on) are in them-
selves a structural representation of the self s mutability. By the same
token, it is equally plain that we cannot simply laud the dreams poet-
ics of presence without recognizing how this sense of parousia is from
the very beginning itself differently centred by the various contextu-
alizing forms of secondary revision. This critical distance shows up in
the collection above all as a metanarrative level, one which tempers
the dreams valeur de certitude en elle-meme, qui, dans son temps, nest
point expose a mon desaveu, or assured and celebratory self-postulation,
with a relativizing questioning of the dreams accuracy, message, values
and motives. This lucid disenchantment is encoded in each dreams
dramatic structure, wherein the original mysterious moment typically
undergoes an analytic turn. (The occasionally involuntary nature of the
analysis, in conformity with the idea of the dreams inherently revelatory
power, in no sense invalidates this process of detection or verication.)
The inquietude (N ) marking the commencement of the analysis thus
contradicts Bretons view that in the dream langoissante question de la
possibilite ne se pose pas, for the most absolute kind of possibility, that of
the dreamers own existential nature, is posed as a question through these
structural ironizations, and not only in the dreams recorded during the
existentialist period. Of course, the composite structure of the collec-
tion reinforces this relativization. And in neither case does this internal
distance contradict Freuds basic assertion that dreams have no means
of representing logical relations, and that what relations appear are in
fact part of the dreams material, not a representation of the intellectual
work performed during the dream itself. For the point we are making
is precisely that reversibility of the self is structurally presented by the
dreams.
The dreaming interaction of self, situation and structure in Nuits
sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour brings Leiris from a radical individu-
alism, where the Other is predominantly a phantasmic and potentially
deadly projection of the self s desire, to the threshold of a social theory
that acknowledges the determining fact of the Other on self-intuition and
self-expression. The heuristic, accidental and contemporary dimensions
of the dream diary have encouraged the dissolution of the hypostatized
Texts and contexts
state of society preserved, when actually seen, in Glossaire jy serre mes
gloses, Le Point cardinal and Aurora. Their neurotic sensitivity has here been
resolved as the mutability of modernity itself. In addition, the discursive
and relativizing nature of the writings forms have naturally promoted a
consensual rather than hysterical construction of self-identity, for all the
traumatic tenor. Together these factors predict the attraction which the
intellectual frameworks of ethnography and psychoanalysis were going
to provide for Leiriss writing of the self from the beginning of the thirties.
It is to those writings that we should now turn.

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, surreal-
isms metaphysical convulsions became translated into the emergence
of more directly socio-political concepts of the self. This period, begin-
ning 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,
uctuating wildly between leftist and rightist positions, and dominated,
even captivated, by Kojeves presentation of History as fundamentally
tragic and fundamentally over. It is a dynamic summed up in Batailles
phrase: politics of the impossible. Ideologically, Leiris registers this
turbulence, passing from the rigorously controlled group-effect of surre-
alism through, successively, such transliterary journals and societies as
Documents (), La Critique sociale ( ), Minotaure (), Contre-
attaque (), Acephale (), and the College de sociologie ().
This intense intellectual and political ferment, as we shall see, was to
throw up a host of confused yet daring identicational practices, not
least on the level of a writing of the self, which were to inuence Leiriss
work radically.
Paradoxically, then, such uncertainty meant that it was therefore in
the growing scientic disciplines of ethnography and psychoanalysis that
surrealisms revolutionary absolutes were often best preserved and de-
veloped, albeit by shifting towards a collective and usually consensual
interpretation to pathological expression. In other words, the method-
ological rigour and analytic irony of these two disciplines, in many ways
closely related in their recognition of the transferential relationship ope-
rating between the attentive science and the expressive object of their
inquiry, managed to represent the subjects mysterious possession by the

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 un-
challenged); it is true, however, as we shall see, that Leiriss meditations
on his involvement with both disciplines stress the purely psychosocial
dimensions and psychological benets as much as a reassessment of sur-
realist aesthetics. The denitive 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
LAge dhomme, ttingly entitled Le Radeau de la Meduse.
If recognition of the Other is the most signicant 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 fash-
ionable modernity. The term betrays the ethnocentrism of the Champs-
Elysees, 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 secretaire-archiviste, were eventually exhibited at the Musee
du Trocadero, Josephine Baker was photographed at the opening, shak-
ing one item, a magicians 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 ippant scandal of savagery.
saw the publication of Cendrars Anthologie negre, an eclectic collection
of folklore, invention and ethnographic features. This was equally the
year in which the Goncourt was awarded to the Martinique writer Rene
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 pro-
mote a potential political restructuration du monde. In the slightly
bizarre and not terribly talented Ballets Suedois performed La Creation du
monde, with a jazz score by Milhaud and savage costume designs, fea-
turing monkeys and crocodiles, by Leger. In Andre Schaeffner, who
was also to take part in the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, produced a book on
Le jazz: la musique moderne. Upon the Missions return, funds were raised
via a gala boxing exhibition, given by the black bantamweight world
champion, Paname Al Brown, on April , at Cirque dHiver in
Paris. These proceeds served among other things to nance the publi-
cation 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 Missions work: Brown, he said, was an
example of the negro ghting to make the land of his ancestors better
known and so respected.
The frivolity and inherent racism of much of this spectacular adora-
tion of tropical energy was to be acknowledged by Leiris in a famous
passage of LAge dhomme:
Dans la periode de grande licence qui suivit les hostilites, le jazz fut un signe
de ralliement, un etandard orgiaque, aux couleurs du moment. Il agissait mag-
iquement et son mode dinuence peut etre compare a une possession. Cetait le
meilleur element pour donner leur vrai sens a ces fetes, un sens religieux, avec com-
munion par la danse, lerotisme latent ou manifeste, et la boisson . . . abandon
a la joie animale . . . Premiere manifestation des negres, mythe des edens de
couleur qui devait me mener jusquen Afrique et par-dela lAfrique, jusqua
lethnographie. (AH )
Leiriss clear depiction of the frenetic activities of a dying civilization

demoralized by the rst world war, addicted to sensation and inarti-
culately 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 condently assumed tone of scientic 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 ethno-
graphic, 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 sev-
eral surrealists failed to appear at a meeting designed to air the possibility
of collaborative political action with gures 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 , rst at the Institut dEthnologie, under Marcel Mausss inspired
teaching, and later at the Trocadero museum (which was to become
Texts and contexts
the Musee de lHomme). Mausss Essai sur le don () was the focus for
this emerging eldwork-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 rst world
war and the consequent nihilism dramatized in the last quotation from
LAge dhomme, also powerfully represented a materialist subject formed
by involvement in an endless dialectical process. Levi-Strauss was later
to view Mauss as a proto-structuralist, and the conclusion to Mausss
Essai sur le don offers a suggestive programme for an attempted transpo-
sition 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 implica-
tions for a writing of the self, come over clearly in a contemporary article
by Georges Henri Riviere, A propos de lart negre. Notwithstanding
the typical traces of Levy-Bruhlian racism and blood-tinged excitement,
Riviere importantly isolates the circulation of affect and its underpin-
ning of identity, noting signicantly how aesthetics and technique are
similarly dependent on a network of relations:
[D]ans les societes primitives, le sentiment esthetique, loin de saccumuler
dans les objets specialises, circule dans les institutions, dans les metiers, dans
les croyances, comme le sang de nos veines dans tous les points de notre
corps . . . Dans les civilisations qui nous occupent, tout se tient, tout depend de tout,
comme lecrit notre collaborateur Jacques Soustelle: murs, techniques, croy-
ances sont etroitement solidaires et un reseau de prescriptions et dinterdits
enveloppe lindividu, le xe ou le soustrait a son clan, lasservit a son totem.
Between and , prior to travelling to Africa, Leiris was to re-
hearse the implications of Maussian ethnography for an anti-idealist
view of selfhood in Georges Batailles dissident journal, Documents.
Bataille () was a contemporary of Breton and Artaud with
whom Leiris came into contact in , and who founded the journal
largely in a spirit of rejection of the emmerdeurs idealistes constituting
the Surrealist clique. Financed by an increasingly uncomprehending
and apprehensive Georges Wildenstein, Documentss direction, like the
somewhat misleading title, were Batailles own. Supposedly a deliber-
ately eclectic publication devoted to Archeologie, Beaux Arts, Ethno-
graphie, Variete, its true nature is more accurately given by Leiriss
recollection in De Bataille lImpossible a limpossible Documents:
Bien quil fut loin dy exercer un pouvoir sans controle, cette revue semble
maintenant avoir ete faite a son image: publication Janus tournant lune de ses
faces vers les hautes spheres de la culture (dont Bataille etait bon gre mal gre
un ressortissant par son metier comme par sa formation) et lautre vers une
zone sauvage ou lon saventure sans carte geographique ni passeport daucune
espece. (Br )
In fact, Leiris, as editorial assistant, was perhaps the only person to at-
tempt the full range of the subtitles ambitions, contributing no fewer
than pieces, including collaborative ventures, on every aspect of the
arts as well as on ethnography. But such iconoclasm did mean that dis-
affected surrealists studied lhomme total alongside emerging French
ethnographers. These included the above-mentioned Shaeffner, a mu-
sicologist, Marcel Griaule, the leader of the Mission, and Georges-Henri
Riviere, who reorganized the Trocadero museum. The peculiar mix-
ture of motives and enthusiasms created a unique form of ethnographic
surrealism, capable of refuelling Leiriss abiding dream of a system simul-
taneously aesthetic, moral and scientic. Documents juxtaposed examples
of high and low culture in a presentational as well as intellectual way that
effectively recast the surrealist breakdown of mimetic representation as a
natural ethnographic phenomenon. The surrealist principle of metaphor
(the juxtaposition of umbrella and sewing-machine) informed the mag-
azines ethnographic aim to expose the heterogeneity of cultural reality
and the ideological nature of identity. Such an aesthetic arguably still pre-
served a contemporary disposition to sentimentality and fetishism; and
its juxtapositions of Fantomas with pre-Columbian art, or photographs of
big toes with articles on Gnosticism can be dismissed as merely disingen-
uous. But a main purpose and value of such ethnographic collage was
to recast the surrealist ideal cosmogony as an aggressively anti-idealist
recognition of base material. The surrealist fetish becomes strategically
Texts and contexts
a subversive museographical witness. The big toe and Gnosticism in
themselves expose the (surrealist) taboo placed on anything indicating
our materialist origins, while their juxtaposition conrms the existence of
the taboo in challenging our hierarchy of artistic and intellectual values.
On a practical level, it is hardly surprising that such a carpe et lapin
journal did not survive for long, but Leiriss above-mentioned article
makes plain that for him the journals impossible form signied a higher
impossibility: the attempt to supersede the surrealist conceptual unity
with the ethnographic view of the body as a material and cultural collec-
tion. It should be added that this review of Batailles production, while
admiring of the intractable confrontation it sustains, carefully prefers to
view such a tenacious enterprise ultimately as a qui-perd-gagne game
that only one obsessive spirit can play, and without any progression
or true partnership. Given the journals materialist and heterogeneous
message, this eccentric image is telling (all the more so given supercial
similarities to a long-game strategy in La Regle du jeu). As we shall see,
Leiris will absorb the lesson regarding the dislocating of conceptual unity,
but without desisting from the larger apprenticeship, concerned with the
possibility of self-writing, which will lead him to establish a distance from
the wilder shores of acephalic dissipation.
A number of position papers written by Bataille between
and but not published in Documents make plain the aesthetico-
political disagreement with surrealism (and the psychological rivalry with
Breton). La vieille taupe of denounces the Icarian adven-
ture of surrealism in materialist marxist terms, contrasting the formers
representation of revolution as a lumiere redemptrice selevant au-dessus
du monde, au-dessus des classes, le comble de lelevation desprit (p. )
with the old-mole revolution which hollows out chambers dans un sol
decompose et repugnant pour le nez delicat des utopistes (p. ). The
latter begins, then, dans les entrailles du sol, comme dans les entrailles
materialistes des proletariens (p. ). This is an assumption of Bretons
charge, at the end of the Second Manifeste du surrealisme, that Bataille is a
philosophe-excrements. Batailles response is to rub Bretons nose in
it, denouncing his purely literary view of base earth (and of Marx), and
insisting precisely on overturning this imbecilic elevation through an
excavation of the fetid ditch of bourgeois culture. It is through this
immersion, and not because of larme vengeresse de lidee contre la
bestialite, as Breton would have it, that la force et la liberte humaine
setabliront (p. ). La valeur dusage de D. A. F. de Sade, from the
same period, and Le Jesuve and LOeil pineal, both probably written
in , continue with this dirty protest. The rst praises the literal dra-
mas of excretion and appropriation in de Sade as a morality permitting
the violent eruption of a heterological body, one that reverses the philo-
sophical process and so abolishes exploitation through a sacricial and
revolutionary expenditure. (Breton, in the Second Manifeste, was to reclaim
de Sade for his own sense of surrealist integrity. ) The other two pieces
link the excremental fantasy (p. ) to the pineal eye, that mystical sup-
plementary organ of vision which in Bataille rises from the shit-smeared
and obscene anus to burst orgasmically out of the top of the skull, in a
violent discharge that makes existence immediate, a durable orgasm,
a blind consummation, une evre qui mange letre (p. ).
The shit continues to hit the fan (Bataille denouncing Bretons moral-
izing idealism, Breton denouncing Batailles anti-dialectical materialism)
within the pages of Documents. In Le Langage des eurs, the ideal sym-
bol par excellence, the rose, is stripped down to its hairy sexual organs
and admired for its ability to represent a sacrilege, once it reaches its rotten
form. The article closes with the image of de Sade tossing rose petals
into a manure ditch; Breton in the Second manifeste replied in Mallarmean
tone that la rose, privee des ses petales, reste la rose. This in turn led
Bataille, in Le Jeu lugubre, to celebrate, in Dals canvas of that name,
the soiled subjects shit-stain as both cause primitive et remede and in
the process to recall how, in prison, de Sade screamed down his waste-
pipe, before concluding with a provocation directed obviously at Breton:
il est devenu impossible dorenavant de reculer et de sabriter dans les
terres de tresors de la Poesie sans etre publiquement traite de lache
(p. ). Other pieces focus squarely on de-idealized body parts: eye
(cut, lugubrious, enucleated); mouth (bestial, screaming, spurting); most
famously, on account of the three accompanying photographs, the big
toe (the most human part of our bodies, since the most connected to
our baseness). These and similar celebrations of the bodys irreducible
indecency obviously present radical implications for self-representation,
in terms of presentation as well as vision. Surrealisms tendency to tran-
scendence, verticality, metaphor and ideal unity, is challenged by the
irruption of an aggressive degradation, a violently materialist disartic-
ulation of selfhood. Leiriss apprenticeship in writing the self will be
massively inuenced by this location of identity within corporeal mass,
and by the documentary, testamentary and anti-poetic forms deemed
to be tting to this vision.
It is signicant that several of Leiriss articles for Documents appeared
under the rubric Dictionary, for in effect they shift from an obsession
Texts and contexts
with self-justifying glossolalia towards an ethnographically charged and
socially geared vision of selfhood as corporal and relative. For example,
rather than focus uniquely on the autonomy of the signier displayed in
Glossaire jy serre mes gloses, the article Metaphore recognizes the dialecti-
cal nature of metaphor. Language is not now an alchemical process that
solely refers to and relies on its own essence: it is the gural representa-
tion of our cultural values, whose hierarchy is discursively produced in
a way that engages the speaker in real social exchange and relativity:
Non seulement le langage, mais toute la vie intellectuelle repose sur un jeu de
transpositions, de symboles, quon peut qualier de metaphorique. Dautre part,
la connaissance procede toujours par comparaison, de sorte que tous les objets
connus sont lies les auns aux autres par des rapports dinterdependance.
When Leiris concludes the article with the remark: Cet article lui-meme
est metaphorique, he is not at all suggesting a linguistic abyss deprived
of a referential ground, but is instead turning from the boundless self-
generation of Glossaires language and looking towards the social concept
of language used by ethnography, a concept that additionally has the
effect of presenting a more historical and interactive self. This new ref-
erential framework is displayed in another article, Talkie, where Leiris
comments on popular American movies. The voice of the ideal heroine
in Weary River, we are told, transports us to a realm of sensualite ardente
in a lm that is otherwise idiotically puritan. But the presentation of this
typically surrealist amoureuse, fetishized as pulsing throat and uttering
ngers, here has the effect of bringing to the fore the base material behind
the production of the disembodied voice of surrealism. A new material-
ist concept of the speaking self, one that is more socially determined and
signifying, is literally embodied in this example taken deliberately from
low rather than high culture. The implication of surrealist ethnography
for a linguistic theory of self-identity is most explicitly borne out in the
article Leau a la bouche. Signicantly, the article itself formed part
of a larger, collaborative piece of writing: Leiriss contribution formed
the second paragraph, while the rst, entitled Crachat-ame, was by
Griaule. Leiris concentrates on the privileged situation of the mouth.
Ideally, the mouth is the site of the word, the sender and receiver of kisses,
the generator of surrealist love and poetry. Materially, it scandalizes and
exposes ideal love and its formulations, by literally bringing up the or-
ganic viscosity of being in the sacrilegious form of spittle. The mouths
divinity is daily sullied, and abstract discourse derided by the organ of
nutrition and excretion. The mucosity of spittle is therefore the perfect
symbolic form of an ethnographic revision of both surrealist idealism
and bourgeois etiquette. No more material expression could be found to
offer happy release to a speaking subject increasingly aphasiac in the face
of surrealist absolutism and bourgeois conformity. As such it is le crachat
dun demiurge en delire, riant aux eclats davoir expectore cette larve
vaniteuse, comique tetard qui se gone en viande soufe de demi-dieu
(p. ). It is also a gesture that brings the surrealist self into the ethno-
graphic domain of sacrilege and sacrice, where the bodys functions and
excretions form an inextricable element of sacred reality. And nally,
it provocatively poses fundamental methodological difculties for the
museums collecting mania. Leiriss later autobiographies will therefore
be inuenced crucially by both a surrealist conception of language and
an anti-idealist ethnography of the bodys functions and behaviour.
This lesson of surrealist ethnography for a vision and a writing of the
self ran in tandem with Leiriss contemporary experience of psychoanal-
ysis. It was again Bataille who, in , suggested to Leiris that he enter
into psychoanalysis as a way of responding to his increasingly desperate
feelings of genital and intellectual impotence. Bataille referred Leiris to
his own analyst, Adrien Borel, by all accounts an avuncular and non-
dogmatic founder member of both the Societe psychanalytique de Paris
and the Evolution psychiatrique movement. With Bataille, Leiris and
Rene Allendy, he also founded the Societe de Psychologie Collective in
; this collective was to publish a two-part article on circumcision
as ritualized castration in and, more generally, to interest itself
in the collective manifestations of the miraculous and the occultist.
Leiris remained in analysis from to , and the psychoanalytic
concepts of the linguistic nature of the self and the revelation of the un-
conscious through language, were to be exploited in LAge dhomme. This
suggests that Borel was perhaps well-suited to bridge the gap between
Leiriss surrealist and ethnographic interests in ecstatic self-loss, on the
one hand, and his contradictory need to recover and retain the basis for
self-identity and expression on the other, the latter rendered pathological
by the Surrealist goal of unmediated unity. Certainly Borels readings of
the convulsionnaires resemble an academic and medical explanation
of the Saints noirs adored by Leiris. Leiris remained reticent, though,
about his analysis and adherence to psychoanalytic doctrine: if he is to
be believed, he read little of the primary literature other than the in-
troductory Psychopathology of Everyday Life; and while understanding in a
surrealist way the attention paid to language and the belief in the central
role played by sexuality, he took the decision to play down the importance
Texts and contexts
of psychoanalysis in favour of the vocabulary of direct political commit-
ment in the additions to LAge dhomme (denigration we could of
course choose to read as indicative of the disciplines real status). In any
event, the analysis of dreams, the language of the unconscious and the
phantasmagoria of sexuality, which remain constant features of Leiriss
work, are central to the ethnographic journal LAfrique fantome. Like
ethnography, then, the human science of psychoanalysis conrmed the
diacritical nature of the linguistic sign to Leiris, and helped to relocate
his surrealist dualism within the more complex social jeux de construction
which he was to analyse (in both himself as well as his surroundings) in
an overdetermined Africa.

Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre: LAfrique fantomes open-
ing quotation, taken ttingly from Rousseaus Confessions, summarizes the
approach of a massive volume that is both the single triumph of surrealist
ethnography and the prototype ethnography of the ethnographer. From
the beginning of this work, the relative nature of identity, the calling into
question of values and civilizations, and the introspective preoccupa-
tions underlying the surface objectivity of an ethnographic science, are
all apparent. LAfrique fantome begins with a fundamental recognition of
the other, a belief that leads this eldwork document continually into the
mysterious and sacred terrain of dreams, fetishes and secret languages.
This cultural and methodological relativity in turn calls into question
the dubious deontology of a Western science felt to be collaborating in
neo-colonialism. Together, these personal and critical meditations cre-
ate an atypical ethnographic format: a chronological and syntagmatic
(rather than paradigmatic) journal intime, whose entry into the culture of
the other engenders an increasingly polyphonic representation, in which
realist irony alternates with surrealist possession. In addition to being a
classic of ethnographic literature, therefore, the book can be read as a
crucial stage in the development of Leiriss unique form of autobiogra-
phy. Its language content displays the evolution of a surrealist poetics
into a socially and politically determined autobiographical situation,
while its form reects a general challenge to the traditional concepts of
genre assumed to exist between poetry, autobiography, ethnography and
psychoanalysis. It is not surprising, though it is ironic, that both Mauss
and Griaule criticized professionally this massive document of synthetic
anthropology for, in its constant yearning to live out a true sense of the
sacred, the work goes beyond being a surrealist ethnography or even
an existential repudiation of scientic objectivity in favour of moral and
political embarquement and temoignage: that is, it ultimately constitutes an
exhaustive programme of auto-ethnography.
LAfrique fantome is the story of a journey. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti
crossed Africa for twenty-one months between and . It was
well publicized and patronized in Parisian circles, thanks to the preva-
lent negrophilia I have mentioned and to the exploitation of personal
connections (Raymond Roussel, for example, was one of its patrons). Its
booty (one of Leiriss professional errors being that he did not conceal
the fact that some of the objects brought back had been stolen) included
over , artefacts for the Trocaderos exhibitions and research labora-
tories, as well as countless photographs and recordings. The expedition
was led by Marcel Griaule, and Leiris was the secretaire-archiviste, his
special concerns being the initiatory language of the Dogons of Sanga
and the possession rites of the Ethiopians of Gondar (he was to publish
academic theses and monographs on both subjects). But it is his diary
of the expedition, sent back in batches to his wife in Paris and published
apparently without change in , which exposes the imperialist legacy
and neo-colonialist maintenance of power-relations deeply ingrained in
the assumptions and aims of this African Mission. This endictment of a
nineteenth-century rationalist epistemology looks back, as the Rousseau
epigraph suggests, to the eighteenth-century philosophical voyage, and
also predates both the emergence of negritude as an historical force after
and Levi-Strausss farewell to exoticism in the structural trav-
elogue Tristes Tropiques. Like the latter book, LAfrique fantomes content
rejects the inevitable abolition of otherness, while its structure acknowl-
edges the irreducible temporal bind in which the ethnographer is caught
between observation and abstraction, solidarity and archaeology, posses-
sion and analysis. The self-reexive melancholy subtending both these
aspects is clearly displayed in the books priere dinserer. In itself this is a
miniature narrative of the move from Aurora to ethnography, from ight
to commitment. A weary Leiris is shown setting off on a poetic adven-
ture and a ritual of self-renewal which happens to take him to Africa.
There his self-obsessions are brought to a desperate pitch, forcing him
to acknowledge that self-realization lies not in escaping from, but in
actively working within, Western capitalism. This ethnographic prise de
conscience is, as he suggests, equally present in the rest of the volume as a
latent design. Both the content and structure of the actual text constantly
dramatize this ethnography of the ethnographer. Leiris describes it in the
Texts and contexts
books Preamble as ce journal a double entree, . . . mi-documentaire, mi-
poetique (AF ). In general, scientic pretensions and capitalist acquis-
itiveness oblige the secretaire-archiviste to chronicle Europes mission
in Africa. But the surrealist ethnographer, whose knowledge of psycho-
analysis and political questioning of poetics make him personally and
professionally appreciative of the eruption of the sacred and the opacity
of language, transforms this academic reciprocity into a dramatic unfold-
ing of the operations of the unconscious and a political apprenticeship,
whose highpoint is reached when Leiris exclaims: Jai besoin de tremper
dans leur drame, de toucher leurs facons detre, de baigner dans la chair
vive. Au diable lethnographie! (AF ).
From the beginning of the book, then, a general ideological struggle
is fought out within ethnography: scientic realism or magic surrealism,
analysis or possession, politics or poetry, language as sign or language as
thing. This debate ultimately concerns which language is to possess and
present Leiriss sense of self, and a further series of binary oppositions
gives dramatic form to this metaphysical struggle. Leiris sets off from
Bordeaux in Baudelairean spirits, in search of tropical rivages heureux.
Singing songs and sipping aperitifs, he enjoys his tourist cruise before
arriving to bring French order to the chaos of Africa: Je commence
a entrevoir ce quil y a de passionnant dans la recherche scientique:
marcher de piece a conviction a piece a conviction, denigme a enigme,
poursuivre la verite comme a la piste . . . (AF ). This truth, which
is to be extracted from the deceitful natives (AF ), will be inscribed
within the prevalent orientalism of the cultured European mind, whose
references and analogies are to Heart of Darkness, Uncle Toms Cabin, Robinsoe
Crusoe and Paul et Virginie! But instead the reality of Africa disappoints
the intellectual tourist. Vulgarity, boredom and a hostile climate turn an
increasingly disillusioned and frustrated sensibility back on itself. Food,
sleep and loneliness come to dominate the narrative, which attempts to
stem its mounting anguish by reducing itself to recording the brutish
mechanics of colonial bureaucracy: Journee purement bureaucratique.
Classement. Courier. Visites (AF ). Having ed the cafard of bour-
geois mediocrity in France, an increasingly anguished narcissism nds no
exotic release in its phantom Africa: meme existence mesquine, meme
vulgarite, meme monotonie, et meme destruction systematique de la
beaute (AF ). The rumblings of war in Europe exacerbate his dark
thoughts on sexual and intellectual impotence, and Africa comes to re-
semble a landscape from Aurora, the unconscious and hallucinatory locus
of European despair:
Voici enn , la terre des a lombre, des convois desclaves, des
festins cannibales, des cranes vides, de toutes les choses qui sont mangees, cor-
rodees, perdues. La haute silhouette du maudit famelique qui toujours ma hante
se dresse entre le soleil et moi. Cest sous son ombre que je marche, ombre plus
dure mais plus revigorante aussi que les plus diamantes des rayons. (AF )
But as Leiriss attempts to express the inexpressible come to acknowledge
that the real subject of the journal is the ethnography of the ethnogra-
pher, so the ethnography of Africa truly begins. Leiriss recognition of
his religious rather than scientic impulses (AF ) opens the way for
a passionate record of fetishism, sacrice and possession. Grafti, cave
markings and the performances of griots all stand as alternative docu-
ments to the bureaucratic classication of the African spirit:

. (AF )
Le griot . . . tracait en mesure des dessins dans le sable. Cetaient des carres et
des gures magiques islamiques . . . Fusion de la musique, du dessin, de la danse,
de la magie. Le personnage semblait completement hors de lui. (AF )
Un enchevetrement de lignes ocre rouge, lignes doubles et regulierement
coupees de petites barres perpendiculaires disposees deux par deux. Le tout
forme un dessin, parfaitement evident en tant que dessin bien quobscur quant
a la representation. (AF )
It is the surrealist valorization of an art language not devoted to the
ego and representation which allows this spectral image of Africa to
emerge. From this point, Leiris proceeds more rapidly from revelation to
revelation (AF ). Central to this surreal reciprocity is Leiriss interest
in the circumcision societies for young boys, and the symbolic entrance
to manhood which their rituals represent. In this we can see a prototype
of Leiriss later autobiographical examination of the painful passage to
adult sexuality recorded in LAge dhomme. It is African children who in
general break down Leiriss inhibitions (AF , ) with their natural
gaiety, curiosity and desire for attention. In addition, their willingness
to cooperate allows Leiris to examine a coherent microcosmic culture,
complete with symbolic objects (AF ), songs (AF ), painful practices
(AF ), complex exchange-systems (AF ) and taboos (AF ), whose
language he learns to speak and translate.
But if it is a surrealist attentiveness to the mysterious and revela-
tory reservoir within language which has thus far helped to reveal the
Texts and contexts
phantom cultural identities of Africa, Leiriss subsequent attempt to de-
cipher and translate the secret, initiatory language of the Dogons chal-
lenges some of the absolutist assumptions of surrealist theories of iden-
tity and expression. Leiriss description of this language reminds us of
Glossaire jy serre mes gloses: la langue secrete est une langue de formules,
faite denigmes, de coq-a-lane, de calembours (?), de phonemes en cas-
cades, de symboles sinterpenetrant (AF ). Leiris notes down a text
delivered in this secret language, and recites it back to the approval of the
elder who is instructing him (and wrongly imagining that Leiris wishes
to be initiated into the mysteries of the societe des masques). Leiriss incan-
tation, beyond conferring on him a social identity, conrms the lesson of
Glossaire, namely that the materiality of a language-system in every case
creates and sustains self-identity. But far from simply conrming surre-
alisms conceptual unity of self-consciousness, the sequel to the incident
reveals the inadequacy of regarding either language or identity as a closed
and self-referential system. Leiriss attempts to have each of the words
of the incantation rigidly translated is met with irritation and eventual
anger. The text is signicant only as a general signifying form, not as an
atomistic network of isolatable signiers. The system of language and the
notion of identity which exists through it are only socially and integrally
signifying. The lesson is conrmed in a further amusing incident which
takes place a fortnight later. Once again Leiris seeks to isolate the syntax
of the secret language in order to compose a literal rather than cultural
translation. Lining up a row of pebbles, Leiris attributes one French word
to each, and then asks for the corresponding Dogon word. His intervie-
wee, however, picks up the rst stone, corresponding to the word man,
and rolls it up and down the table, explaining that the man is going for a
walk. Leiris recognizes that if his interviewee appears childishly incapable
of conceptualizing language as a separate structural entity, he himself is
guilty of attributing an idealist hypostasis to both language and the iden-
tity of man: Une double stupidite: celle dAmbibe, incapable davoir
une claire notion du langage en tant que tel; la mienne, capable davoir
traite les mots dune phrase comme des entites separees (AF ). These
examples of linguistic, cultural and methodological relativity are pecu-
liarly doubled and repeated by dividing the text into two parts. The effect
is to condense the narrative, and as mood changes become more volatile,
so metatextual meditations become more prolonged. Once again, Leiris
emphasizes how disillusionment is a prelude to such auto-ethnography:
the closing words of Part I, enn au seuil de lexotisme! (AF ), give
way only to a sombre picture of Ethiopias precarious political position
in the years immediately prior to Mussolinis invasion and the spineless
complicity of the League of Nations. Leiris meditates increasingly on his
own political role in Africa and the true motivations behind his pres-
ence. He acknowledges that he is less interested in the scientic aims
of the Mission than in the search for a muse (AF ). This results in
entries on the relative merits of psychoanalysis versus a bonte animale
de vagin (AF ). Phobias are then revealed which openly recall the
dynamic details of Aurora (AF ). The ethnography openly becomes
self-analysis: Diverses choses mapparaissent. Une grande partie de ma
nevrose tient a lhabitude que jai de cots incomplets, inacheves, a cause
dun malthusianisme exacerbe (AF ). An anthropological textbook,
Notes and Queries on Anthropology, provokes extended discussion of Freud.
A list of European cliches of Africa is simply noted: Ada, que Verdi
composa pour les fetes dinauguration du Canal de Suez; lhistoire du
pretre Jean; la mort de Livingstone; Fachoda; Arthur Rimbaud vendant
des armes a Menelik (AF ). Most remarkably, Leiris devotes several
closing pages of his eldwork diary to a rough sketch for a short story, fea-
turing a Conrad-type hero in a colonial setting whose characteristics and
circumstances are plainly those of Leiris himself. This ctionalization of
autobiographical material is a logical extension of the search through-
out LAfrique fantome for an authentic narrative model for self-expression.
We move from the false objectivity of classical anthropology, through
the equally false desire to be possessed by the mythical spirit of Africa
to a phenomenological reexivity that raises ethnography to the stage
of existential reciprocity, where Leiriss meditations inevitably become
cultural autobiography.
In part this is symptomatic of the uncomfortable awareness of ethnog-
raphys posture as a juge dinstruction. Jamin at one point makes in-
teresting remarks regarding the methodological paradoxes of Griaule
and the status of native speech. In a brilliant passage, he also high-
lights the fundamental tension between Leiriss growing anti-colonialist
sympathies, wherein ethnography offers a supporting role, and Griaules
interrogatory approach, wherein the ethnographer proceeds with the
assumption that the native is hiding or lying. But the most signicant
indicator of how LAfrique fantomes ultimate preoccupation is the unsta-
ble identity of the ethnographer is the remarkable role played by dreams
in the work. Here the smooth authority of anthropological narrative
is disrupted by the very presence of this other dark continent whose
ethnography runs as a phantasmic drama beneath the data of the con-
scious human science. Some thirty instances of sexual and intellectual
Texts and contexts
preoccupations reveal the fragile identity at the heart of Leiriss heteroge-
neous ethnopoetics: his painful inability to break with Paris (AF , )
versus his desire to be a treacherous francophobe (AF , ); his
fear of emotional and sexual impotence (AF , ) versus his dread
of being wounded, attacked or sacriced (AF , , , ); his
desire for and aversion of punishment (AF ) versus his equally
ambivalent longing for Z (his wife Louise, familiarly called Zette) which
recurs with such insistence towards the end of the book (AF , , ).
It is tting that LAfrique fantomes nal sentence should point to the
continuation of this dream-work: Il ne me reste rien a faire, sinon
clore ce carnet, eteindre la lumiere, mallonger, dormir, et faire des
reves . . . (AF ). The close of the journal merely signals the end of
an apprenticeship in ethnographic and psychoanalytic self-examination
(Leiriss analysis with Borel is curtailed on his return to Paris) and the
commencement of a direct autobiographical enquiry which will seek to
live out some of these methodological insights. LAge dhomme, a collage of
childhood phobias and sexual anxieties, will be tightly organized around
a series of psychoanalytic and mythic icons. In addition to reecting
aspects of LAfrique fantomes form and content, the metatextual obsessions
will reach a new pitch: the competing claims of psychoanalysis and the
sacred, existential politics and surrealist poesie vecue will directly translate
into LAge dhommes rigorous attempt to forge a strict language that can
express lhomme total as an authentic act in itself.

Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography

to LAge dhomme
Leiriss ethnographic curriculum vitae, Titres et travaux, describes LAfrique

fantome as amorcant la serie decrits autobiographiques qui represente
le noyau de son oeuvre decrivain. Certainly, upon his return from
Africa, Leiriss work seemed to become more condent 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 ndings of the Mission; and he contributed
seven rather dutiful reviews of psychological and political literature to
Batailles La Critique sociale. But he took no part in Batailles Acephale,
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. Leiriss
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 latters insufciently correct
application of Durkheimian principles, within the activities of the College
de sociologie. During this period, Leiris followed courses given by Marcel
Mauss () and Maurice Leenhardt (), eventually qualifying with
a certicate in sociology in ; and he produced pure ethnographic
studies as well as the more radical autoethnography Lucrece, Judith et
Holophernes that became known as LAge dhomme. Bataille, however, is
appropriating Durkheims view of the sacred and Mausss examination
of potlatch to review fascist power in terms of heterogeneous force in
La Critique sociale. Such an ambiguous celebration of un recours oppor-
tun a des forces affectives renouvelees (p. ) or, later, of a force exi-
geant que la realite inferieure se soumette a son empire, sat increasingly
uneasily with Leiriss patient demythologizations, including of domestic
politics and its sacred.

Texts and contexts
The crowning period of this period of research for Leiris is LAge
dhomme, a book marking Leiriss full entry into autobiography, and one
whose dedication, A Georges Bataille, qui est a lorigine de ce livre,
marks a typically subtle distantiation as well as a fundamental debt. This
in turn indicates a complex retrospective reframing of LAge dhommes
writing of the self in the light of two subsequent inuences, both related
critically to Batailles immersion in the virile and ritual act. These in-
uences are rstly the collective research of the College 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 litterature consideree comme une tauromachie which
prefaced LAge dhomme for the rst time in the edition. In keeping
with this complex reframing (one reproduced internally in the autobi-
ographys non-chronological collection of the vecu), I shall examine these
inuences before engaging with the main body of LAge dhomme itself.

The post-surrealist science of the sacred which Leiriss eldwork in Africa
helped to bring into being was to be applied directly to the autobiography
of a bourgeois Parisian childhood through the auspices of the College
de sociologie. Founded in by Bataille, Leiris and Roger Caillois
(the last a classicist who had studied under Mauss), the short-lived College
sought to pursue a study of modern social structures in a transformational
rather than academic manner. Resembling a revolutionary cell in the
eyes of some (and destined to disappear at the outbreak of the war), and
therefore with a radical political as well as aesthetic mission, the Societys
founding declaration appeared in the July issue of Acephale. This
declaration makes three points: the study of social structures should move
from so-called primitive societies to modern ones, and the discoveries
made should modify the prevalent assumptions and attitudes of research;
this should create an activist form of knowledge, in which the virulent
nature of the realm studied should help to create a moral community
among the investigators; the name for such an activity should be that of
sacred sociology, implying the belief that the sacred is to be regarded as
the link between the obsessive patterns of individual psychology and the
growing structures of society.
The programme of collective desubjectication is anti-functionalist,
the tone is tenaciously committed (Sartre did attend, though this is the
thirties), and the chosen place for such a pronouncement is provocative.
Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography to LAge dhomme
Yet the College was ultimately academic in its analysis of expenditure,
offering in the words of Hollier a critique of the monopolization of
community by the political. It embodied the necessity for depoliticizing
collective experience that is, it embodied a utopia.
As an attitude and as a manifesto, then, these positions might seem to
accord with Leiriss personal and professional styles, as well as his eld-
work conclusions. The phantasmic dramas of the surrealist in Africa
had become for him the real object of ethnography with the recognition
of the religious impulse common to both ethnographer and primitive
society. Thereafter, Leiris began to apply in an increasingly concerted
way these transferential and self-analytic principles to the eldwork in-
volved in writing the self. Between his return from Africa and ,
Leiris produced fragments of the eventual LAge dhomme. His participa-
tion in the College, and in particular his paper Le Sacre dans la vie
quotidienne were thus more than an extension of professional training.
They acted retrospectively upon LAge dhomme as a transformational prise
de conscience, reframing intellectually the completed manuscript prior to
its publication in book form.
This would give Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne a crucial status. Yet
Hollier states in his commentary on the paper that Leiris never adhered
corps et ame to the ambitions or motives of those others for whom the
College acted as a focus. He points out in his expanded English version
of his collection of texts relating to the College that Leiris chose not to
anthologize the paper and dismissed it in a passing reference in Biffures.
We might be tempted to take this typical instance of Leirisian denigration
as evidence of its importance. Certainly, Hollier also calls the paper
pivotal. For all its awkward juxtaposition of the different categories of
detail and their implicit strategies of writing the self, elsewhere separated
out into LAge dhomme and La Regle du jeu, it represents an academic
prototype of the autobiographical eldwork with which Leiris was to
occupy himself for the next few decades.
Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne was delivered as a paper by Leiris to
the College on January and published in revised form six months
later in La Nouvelle Revue francaise. In purely formal terms, the essay tries
to blend the post-surrealist aesthetic of the sacred learned from ethno-
graphy, and the psychopathology of everyday life (whose title it recalls)
culled from his own analysis, into a composite auto-ethnography of his
bourgeois childhood. In the best Maussian tradition, Leiriss paragraphs
build into a card-index of the linguistic, heterogeneous and psycho-sexual
formation of the self within a specic cultural situation. To this extent, it
Texts and contexts
is arguably a unique example of a total sacred sociology managing to go
beyond surrealism, revolution and Freudianism to reveal the heteroge-
neous and ambiguous reality with which we are in collusion. Certainly
this was the opinion of Jean Wahl who makes plain in his reaction to
Leiriss paper that its formal intensity and rigour triumphed over his
scepticism, and that of a large proportion of the audience, for the rst
and only time.
The papers opening denition of the sacred: ce melange de crainte et
dattachement, cette attitude ambigue que determine lapproche dune
chose a la fois attirante et dangereuse, prestigieuse et rejetee, cette
mixture de respect, de desir et de terreur (S ) at once recalls Leiriss
presiding attitude to the phantom of Africa, and indeed the dreams
which formed the heart of that drama. Already the sacred is represented
as ethnographic and psychoanalytical, an anthropological moment of
jouissance triggered here by domestic objects, places and occasions. It is
the domestic situation of jouissance, indeed, that will stand implicitly as the
sign of authentic autobiography in this paper. Exoticism is abandoned in
favour of the menus faits that make up the least sophisticated and hence
truest aspects of our childhood. Thus prestigious objects soliciting the
childs admiration are the earliest domestic site of the sacred. Moving,
then, metonymically from these objects to their location, Leiriss atten-
tion shifts logically to the bathroom, where he and his brother dream
up toute une mythologie quasi secrete (S ), a delirious succession of
animals, plots, detectives, kidnappings, blades, spikes and stakes, dead,
wounded and prisons. From here we move outside, to experience the
sacred thrill of a no-mans land where they are warned not to trust
strangers, before arriving at the Auteuil racecourse, an irresistible locus of
sacred bourgeois activity. Evocation of this eventful place permits Leiris
to introduce events of language, the magical and sexual force in words
themselves. These childhood keys reveal the sacred, either through the
power of their own resonance (as in Glossaire jy serre mes gloses) or because
nally discovering the true nature of words which had been previously
mangled and misunderstood creates a revelatory moment of reciprocity
(as in LAfrique fantome). The new worlds opened up by this subtle change
in the speakers relation to society are the linguistic terrain for a sacred
sociology, which regards the speaker as a ritualist, pour qui le sacre se
resout nalement en un systeme subtil de distinguo, de pointes daiguille
et de details detiquette (S ).
Leiris rounds off his checklist of the domestic sacred with a reitera-
tion of items mentioned, and the transgressive, ambiguous and secret
qualities associated with them. He concludes that henceforth one of
his most sacred aims will be to obtain une connaissance de soi aussi
precise et intense que possible. This programmatic aim is conrmed
by the resurgence of material given here: LAge dhomme already houses
the Radieuse stove (AH ) and the parents bedroom; Biffures will
comment again on the fathers Smith and Wesson (Bi ), the bath-
room mythologies (Bi ), the empty hall (Bi ), Mose (Bi ) and
. . . reusement (with which Biffures opens); Fourbis remembers the Auteuil
racecourse and Rebecca (Fo ). But it is perhaps also precision and
intensity which led Leiris to leave the College shortly afterwards, even
if he was one of the three signatories of the Declaration du College
de sociologie sur la crise internationale, dated the October .
Leiriss continuing preoccupation with the technical and especially lin-
guistic means of achieving self-knowledge draws him away from the
increasingly irrational and apocalyptic negativity of Batailles writings.
It is worth contrasting Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne with Batailles
contemporary equivalent essay, LApprenti sorcier, which, along with
Cailloiss Le Vent dhiver, were published in the July issue of
La Nouvelle Revue francaise as a collective manifestation. Leiriss appeal to
honest scutiny (S ) bears little resemblance to Batailles enthusiasm
for the violent dynamic of myth, whose only goal is the return to a lost
totality, and whose obscurity as a project is dangerously viewed as both
effected and justied by the contemporary politics of despair. So, in a
brief correspondence in July , Leiris reminds Bataille of the original
three aims laid down by the Societys declaration, before articulating
his present doubts about the Colleges failure to achieve its intended
methodological rigour, and in particular its transgression of the rules es-
tablished by Durkheim. Hereafter Leiriss view of the authentic linguistic
act, helped on by the experience of the intervening war years, will come
increasingly to resemble the ethical imperatives stated by Sartre in his
critical essay on Bataille, Un nouveau mystique, published as an article
in and then in book form in , as well as in his Quest-ce
que la litterature? Leiriss ethnographic and psychoanalytic containment
and analysis of surrealisms shamanism will thus join with a specically
committed view of art coinciding largely with the publication of Biffures.
Together, these elements will form LAge dhommes new autobiographical
canon de composition, and a typical retroactive reframing. Above all,
it is in the books preface, De la litterature consideree comme une
tauromachie, that Leiris establishes this next naissance a lenvers, with
its new, authentic, set of criteria for writing the self.
Texts and contexts

Leiriss full entry into autobiography came with LAge dhomme, a psy-
chomythology of the difcult passage to virility, completed in November
(the same month in which Breton published his Position politique
du surrealisme) but published only in . The denitive preface to the
work, De la litterature consideree comme une tauromachie, appeared
only in the edition, however, and therefore post-dates the origi-
nal manuscript in some cases by more than ten years, absorbing and
transforming the books original priere dinserer in the process. By now
this reframing effect is becoming familiar. The preface rereads Leiriss
past surrealist activities as the aesthetics of authenticity. It pre-empts
our judgement, then, of the LAge dhomme with an assertion of
socio-political commitment derived, as we shall see, from Sartre and
the politico-aesthetic programme of Les Temps Modernes. Moreover, it de-
scribes the move from the one to the other, from personal aesthetics to
political praxis, lived myth to formalized existence, as a shift from mere
play, or jeu, to a responsible rigour, or regle, which slots LAge dhomme
neatly into a track leading directly to Biffures (), the rst volume of
La Regle du jeu (), of which ve extracts had already appeared in
print, all of them written after LAge dhomme but before De la litterature
consideree comme une tauromachie. The form of the preface also
bears out this legislative role and anticipates the main texts montage
technique: the original priere dinserer, written before the drole de
guerre, is reinterpreted in more directly political terms by an additional
ten pages written after the war in Le Havre, a perspective which in turn
is subject to a second revision dated Paris January . As presented
by De la litterature, therefore, LAge dhommes writing of the self is gen-
erated, structured and valorized by an existential ethics of language.
To appreciate this shift, it is necessary here to recall Sartres dis-
agreement with both surrealism and Bataille, and to locate the points
of inuence on Leiris. From the Journal, we know that during the
period Leiris still entertained discussions with Bataille while
becoming immersed in a reading of Sartre and de Beauvoir. Specif-
ically, from LEtre et le Neant he isolated the notions of depassement
perpetuel and projet ( J ). In December Sartre pub-
lished the article Un nouveau mystique, in which he praises the acte
veritable of LAge dhomme (p. ), while dismissing Batailles LExperience
interieure as the latest example of the essai-martyre beloved of surrealism
(p. ). Bataille, the mystic, accule au fond de son impasse, sevade
de son degout par une sorte devanouissement extatique (p. ),
offering, like surrealism, a specious jouissance intuitive which is the
opposite of what we are: namely, a project (p. ). This is consistent with
Sartres judgement of surrealism, as outlined in Quest-ce que la litterature?.
Here surrealisms metaphysical destruction (p. ) dissolves subjec-
tivity (p. ) in order to reach the Impossible (pp. ) as a purely
formal depassement (p. ) that never offers un passage de la puis-
sance a lacte (p. ). (It is ironic that Sartre also employs Batailles
charge of class ignorance against surrealism.) Batailles reply to Sartre
focuses on the latters Hegelian teleology, defending with the phrase
Je naboutis jamais (p. ) the agony of process over the certainty of
project. The argument subsequently revolves around the exemplary
gure of Baudelaire. In the January article on Sartres preface to
Baudelaires Ecrits intimes, Bataille insists on the sacred as the limit of
the project (p. ), and on the anguish of poetry as the limit of the
political undertaking (pp. ). Of particular signicance is the fact
that it is Leiris who subsequently prefaces Sartres preface in its eventual
book form. Simultaneously moving to the front and the rear, Leiris dis-
tances himself from Sartres summary execution of surrealism (p. ),
while accepting that the only way to approach poets is sans transe ni
balbutiement de religiosite [. . .] comme sils etaient des proches (p. ).
With these careful words, Leiris none the less indicates his familiarity
with the debate, and his shift from Bataillean dilapidation to Sartrean
depassement.
This shift is borne out in the postulations and charged language of
De la litterature consideree comme une tauromachie. It articulates a
self-imposed existential project that reinterprets the LAge dhomme we
have yet to read. In a complete assumption of Sartres statements in
Quest-ce que la litterature? that parler, cest agir (p. ) and that lecrivain
doit sengager tout entier dans ses ouvrages (p. ), Leiris now asserts, in
the prefaces most famous moment, that his goal in writing the original
LAge dhomme was in fact to faire un livre qui soit un acte (AH ),
generating an autobiographical project that was not so much a litterature
engagee as une litterature dans laquelle jessayais de mengager tout
entier (AH ). Aware of the gap between the retroactive programme
and his previous writings, Leiris brilliantly proposes the prefaces central
moment of reframing: writing the self must be as dangerous as the act
of bullghting:
Texts and contexts
Ce qui se passe dans le domaine de lecriture nest-il pas denue de valeur si cela
reste esthetique, (. . .) sil ny a rien (. . .) qui soit un equivalent (. . .) de ce quest
pour le torero la corne aceree du taureau, qui seule (. . .) confere une realite a son
art? (AH )
In isolated form, the equation of writer with matador would be no more
than an exotic sexual cliche. But its context relates Leiriss past writings
to the future political imperative to be placed on writing the self. The
corrida had already formed the central event of the Grande fuite de
neige (dedicated, moreover, to Robert Desnos, qui mena sa vie comme
une corrida, p. ). Leiris further developed the theme in Tauromachies
() and Miroir de la tauromachie (), the latter representing the sole
publication in the Acephale collection. A article, Espagne
(Br ) had also previously used the bullght to represent the agonies
of the Spanish Civil war. The reframing of surrealist aesthetics within a
concrete political situation is already evident from the start of the article,
therefore, though the main proposition is still at this stage to achieve a
personal catharsis by running the risk of the exposure and humiliation
associated with confessional literature:
Lultime propos: recherche dune plenitude vitale, qui ne saurait sobtenir avant
une catharsis, une liquidation, dont lactivite litteraire et particulierement la
litterature dite de confession apparat lun des plus commodes instruments.
(AH )
The utilitarian restriction on literature suggested here is amply con-
rmed by the immediate revision of this rst priere dinserer. The preface
now becomes much more directly political, and deliberately less aesthetic
in itself, substituting the concise elegance of Leiriss opening phrases for
a discursive presentation of the necessary shift from jeu to regle, a
shift that is repeated no fewer than ve times. Universal myths of death
and catharsis are replaced by the specic landmarks of war and poli-
tics (Le Havre, the drole de guerre, occupied France, Nazis, Sartre) and
Leiriss art language follows the same shift: from presenting the land-
scape in an abstract cubist way (jaugeant en entites ombre et lumiere
(AH )), he turns to a realist picture of social action (Des moteurs ron-
ent; tramways et bicyclistes passent; les gens anent ou saffairent et
mainte fumee monte (AH )). He then reintroduces the idea of the
writer as matador into this new political context in order to suggest that
one can go beyond being a litterateur by transferring the danger of confes-
sion into a stylish self-denition that wins the appreciation of others. In
this light, formal preoccupations are legitimate, since they concern the
language of communication. From this point on, Leiris does no more
than elaborate on the basic shift from the seductive portrait produced by
narcissism to the authenticity achieved through social commitment, in
the process of which a theory of authentic self-writing gradually emerges.
He recognizes that the inevitable predilection for self-contemplation
at the heart of all autobiography tries to make the reader into an ac-
complice instead of a judge, and that self-exposure introduces at best
the shadow of a bulls horn into a literary activity. The task is therefore
to raise writing to the level of action: faire un livre qui soit un acte
(AH ). Rigorous linguistic cape-work becomes a real act in relation to
oneself (through revelation of the unconscious), to others (who inevitably
will be affected by the books portrait) and to literature (by exposing
the underbelly of his previous writings). A form of committed literature,
then, since he has committed himself to it. The reference now to com-
mitted literature leads to the formulation of an aesthetic rule: a rejection
of the playful potentialities of the imagination or a novel in favour of
the purposeful use of language to condense true facts and images into
an historical, scientic and juridical self-portrait: rien que ces faits et
tous ces faits, etait la regle que je metais choisie (AH ). Leiris now
accommodates his surrealist activities within his existential rule of the
game: surrealism is presented as involving a strong reciprocity with the
outside world (the objet trouve and automatism), the use of dreams and
psychoanalysis for the purposes of insight, and an insistence on exposure
(of bourgeois hypocrisy). In this light, Bretons Nadja, or LAge dhomme,
can be called realism, since the montage or collage created leads to
the emergence of an authentic portrait, ma conception quant a lart
decrire venant ici converger avec lidee morale que javais quant a mon
engagement dans lecriture (AH ). The equation made between au-
tobiography and the torero is therefore supposedly based on a common
technical rule: the performance of tragic authenticity. In one sense, this
still does not go beyond a simple jeu de mots (AH ). In another, this
regle fondamentale precisely precludes linguistic play, for the autobio-
graphical version of the toreros exposure to the bulls horn is the direct
confrontation of an unembellished truth:
Car dire la verite, rien que la verite, nest pas tout: encore faut-il laborder
carrement et la dire sans artices tels que grands airs destines a en imposer,
tremolos ou sanglots dans la voix, ainsi que oritures, dorures, qui nauraient
Texts and contexts
dautre resultat que de la deguiser plus ou moins, ne fut-ce quen attenuant sa
crudite, en rendant moins sensible ce quelle peut avoir de choquant. (AH )
Linguistic austerity and its artistic parallels (sculpture, photo-montage,

the analysis of dreams and eroticism, classicism) represent the exis-
tential approach that can confer an ethical value on the exposure of
dramatic and even romantic content. Play, in both senses, is contained
(theatralement, le hasard doit apparatre domine (AH )) by a regle
de methode that brings together a ceremonial identity and a canon de
composition. This identite (. . .) de la forme et du fond works in two
ways: the text reveals Leiriss 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. Bullghting
is no longer an exotic symbol of the poetic imagination, but has become
the guiding metaphor for an existential ethics of language. Combining
prescription (regle) with description ( jeu), the presence of the bulls horn
as the only regle de composition confers authenticity and merit on the
autobiographys subject. The highest claim of such writing is therefore
to use words to restore signicance to human action: lun des buts les
plus hauts (. . .) est de restituer au moyen des mots certains etats intenses,
concretement eprouves et devenus signiants, detre ainsi mis en mots
(AH ). This concrete valorization of the writers efforts also means,
though, that the revolutionary freedom granted to the signier by Glossaire
jy 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 writers material commitment to the emergence of
truth: ne pas mesuser du langage et faire par consequent en sorte que
sa parole (. . .) soit toujours verite (AH ). The linguistic rules of LAge
dhomme therefore reject a surrealist chatoiement and accept instead that the
self-portrait they create is an existential passage de la puissance a lacte,
to use the words of Sartres Quest-ce que la litterature? Instead of being a
linguistic emanation, then, self-identity in LAge dhomme 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 quil lui faut, se situant sur le plan intellectuel ou passionnel, apporter
des pieces a conviction au proces de notre actuel systeme de valeurs et peser, de
tout le poids dont il est si souvent oppresse, dans le sens de laffranchissement
de tous les hommes, faute de quoi nul ne saurait parvenir a son affranchissement
particulier. (AH )
The conclusion to De la litterature consideree comme une tauromachie
subtly turns the exotic metaphor of the writer as torero into a political
manifesto of the writer as liberator. And as we see, it does so fundamen-
tally in order to technologize the Bataillean transgressions still reected
in Miroir de la tauromachie and related works. As Leiris acknowledges im-
plicitly in , a Sartrean ethic is being used in order to transform
chaos and the necessity of transgression into a dramatological regle
technique (ou defcacite) qui serait en meme temps une regle esthetique
(ou de style) ( J ). The wording alone presages La Regle du jeu; the idea
expressed (akin to Batailles denunciation of Breton) offers another ex-
ample of the negative metacritical shift of position through which Leiris
continues writing the self. In focusing on the same quotation, Jamin
tellingly views this shift as a theatralisation de lecrivain ou lauteur,
tel le protagoniste sartrien, sirrealisant dans le personnage du mata-
dor, met en jeu a son image quelque chose de sa vie. So a Sartrean
shift is effected, the result of which is an ethics of language which governs
the nature of self-representation to the extent that it seeks to homogenize
past, contemporary and future activities. The very different language-
games of surrealism and ethnography can join the LAge dhomme we are
set to read as part of a general moral programme. Predating Sartres
criticism of surrealism that limaginaire pur et la praxis sont difcile-
ment compatibles, then, the subject of LAge dhomme, according to
De la litterature consideree comme une tauromachie, will reach true
authentic manhood to the degree to which the autobiographys reframed
ethics of language will manage to reconcile the imaginary and praxis. As
we shall see, however, this regulatory programme does not sufciently
control the textual traces thrown up by another regulatory programme
exploited within LAge dhomme: that of psychoanalysis. It is a practice
which in the autobiographys additions is signicantly rejected. For
psychoanalysis itself recognizes that denegation rejects a phenomenon
in order to sustain but neutralize it. We have seen this effect already.
The result in the denitive LAge dhomme is a complex autobiographical
narratology whose dynamics result on occasions from the fact that the
programmatic limits set by Leiris are undermined within the text by the
emergence of an unconscious, thus generating a reactive portrait.

Everything is double in LAge dhomme. On the one hand, it aims to present
the clearest and closest portrait of Leiris, from infancy to the age of ;
Texts and contexts
on the other hand, it seeks a therapeutic catharsis of the painful passage
to manhood. As a result, its syntagmatic adherence to Leiriss formative
years is contained by paradigmatic grids drawing on psychoanalytic and
ethnographic categorization. Personal traumas are conceptualized via
the use of a dramatis personae Judith, Lucretia, Holofernes that g-
ures chapters and subsections. Yet subtending this determination are
phantom concepts from psychoanalysis, such as oedipal rivalry, the cas-
tration complex and the death drive, which regularize the individual
moments of pain, fear and desire, in a less controllable manner. These
cultural paradigms are exploited and justied as the operations of an
autobiographical self-building, and indeed correlate to the psychoana-
lytic concept of the secondary process, as described by Laplanche and
Pontalis:
Dans le cas du processus secondaire, lenergie est dabord liee avant de secouler
de facon controlee; les representations sont investies dune facon plus stable, la
satisfaction est ajournee, permettant ainsi des experiences mentales qui mettent
a lepreuve les differentes voies de satisfaction possibles.
But it will become increasingly obvious in the course of the book that
the denitive delivery which this secondary process is designed to ef-
fect, is based on the tense and distorting containment of the primary
process. This complicates the truth function ascribed to the enterprise
of autobiography, for when Leiris categorizes his life via a supposedly
ennabling network of cultural symbols, gures bibliques et de lantiquite
classique, heros de theatre ou bien le Torero mythes psychologiques qui
simposaient a moi en raison de la valeur revelatrice (AH ), it becomes
quickly apparent that this iconography acts as more than a framework
for the subjects emergence into manhood; it equally contains the un-
reasonable demands of the unconscious, which must be compromised
if a notion of social identity is to emerge at all. As Leiris comments
much later: Comment oserais-je me regarder si je ne portais pas soit
un masque, soit des lunettes deformantes (AH ). This means that
already Leiriss constant assertion of the veracity of his representation is
underpinned by its defensive response to the voracious force of the pri-
mary process, and that part of the complex reframing in LAge dhomme
involves an ultimate acknowledgement of how the veracity of the subject
is always culturally and indeed reactively constructed. Within a clinical
structure, then, which seeks to distance itself from ction, the authentic
identity of the subject seems none the less only ever to be representable
as a mythic, theatrical and dramatic parade. From the point of view of
existential depassement, this is the autobiographys abiding inhibition
(not least on the level of the parade itself ). As we shall see, Leiris deals
with this double effect in the usual way, by exploiting and then denegat-
ing psychoanalysis. This double strategy of projection and protection
operates in each chapter.
Stylistic rationalization subordinates chronology. The most remark-
able feature of the rst, unnumbered chapter (AH ) is therefore
the fact that we are introduced to a subject already halfway through his
life (Je viens davoir trente-quatre ans, la moitie de la vie (AH )). This
enables the subsequent retrospective gaze directed on Leiriss transition
from childhood to manhood to be written into an intellectual frame-
work set up in anticipatory fashion as la metaphysique de mon enfance
(AH ). The literal pre-text with which Leiris insinuates this theory into
the life of a child is that of the suite de compositions (AH ) that
adorned the cover of one of his childhood books, Epinals Les Couleurs
de la Vie. This opening equation seeks at once to locate the subject
within a thematic structure that is returned by a conscious analogy, ef-
fected upon childhood by motivated retrospection, to a closed, cultural
system of meaning. Leiriss philosophical passivity in the face of such de-
terminism merely endorses this structural containment of subjectivity:
Je demeure encastre dans ces Ages de la Vie et jai de moins en moins
lespoir dechapper a leur cadre (AH ). It is also towards the end of this
chapter that the subjects theatrical representation rst emerges. Again
this is done in such a way that the violence of desire is subsumed into one
of the secondary processs three guiding themes directeurs. A chance
encounter in a wood with some bare-footed children becomes le theatre
de ma premiere erection (AH ). But no link, we are told, is established
between the phenomenon and the representation which provoked it.
Instead it provides an excuse for the entry of the allegorical gures of
Lucretia and Judith, who have been inspired by Cranachs paintings; and
through them the subjects entry into the age of virility is represented
by the tragic hero Holofernes. Before the autobiography begins, then, it
is effectively over. For, to use the vocabulary of the preface, subsequent
chapters will put into operation, and justify through recollection, the
structure of a catharsis already erected.
The autobiographys rst number chapter, Tragiques (AH ),
bears out this prescription. Once again, the possibility that a dangerous
drama might begin is forestalled by further examples of the pre-text.
These here consist of a quotation (i.e. repetition) of Nervals transla-
tion (repetition) of Goethes rendition (repetition) of the Faust legend.
Texts and contexts
The effect is once again to place the individual existence potentially in
question within the already regulatory framework of intellectual repe-
tition. The enumeration of tragic spectacles at this point is moreover
presented structurally as a regulating feature of the subjects childhood:
Une grande partie de mon enfance sest deroulee sous le signe de spec-
tacles, operas ou drames lyriques (AH ). The subjects behaviour can
therefore be viewed logically and truthfully not as an unregulated life,
but as a (self-conscious and hence self-thematizing) performance: cette
habitude que jai toujours de proceder par allusions, par metaphores ou
de me comporter comme si jetais sur un theatre (AH ). This repetition
of scenarios is once again bound up with the ability of the ego eventually
to master and simulate a situation. It is signicantly in terms of theatri-
cal representation, then, that the early stages of Leiriss education are
presented here, an education which precisely involves the ability (being
voiced prescriptively by the adult Leiris to the adult) to distinguish be-
tween the reality principle, on the one hand, and the censored individual
demand and dangerous libidinal drive that refuses to obey social laws
and actually tries to kill everything around it, on the other:
Je ne saisissais pas que la representation dun drame etait enchassee dans la piece
et que ces spectateurs enthousiastes, applaudissant a lassassinat qui se deroule
sous leurs yeux, netaient pas les spectateurs reels . . . mais des spectateurs gures,
inclus eux-memes dans le spectacle. (AH )
What Leiris eventually learns in this rst chapter is that these spectacles
reect life and can therefore be used as the basis for his own represen-
tation of it (AH ). The young childs reactions to these spectacles,
which is the subject-matter of the rest of the chapter, are therefore used
to delineate a prototype structure for the rest of LAge dhommes cul-
tural representation of the self: they provide the framework for Leiriss
earliest manifestations of virility, terror and punishment. Already, then,
the secondary process is generating a particular autobiographical struc-
ture from these individual instances, which are made to partake of a
pre-established logic. As the following chapter, Antiquites (AH ),
acknowledges in a typically early metatextual moment:
Lhabitude que jai de penser par formules, analogies, images, technique
mentale dont, que je le veuille ou non, le present ecrit nest quune application.
(AH )
A general body of writing is therefore established at the head of the

autobiography. This can then be used to regulate Leiriss particular
instances of desire, by using his actual experiences of eroticism as
illustrations of art history, and, more generally, of psychosocial depassement.
In this chapter, the academic concept of antiquity is used as the struc-
tural framework for the auto-erotic stages of Leiriss development. A
resume of the chapters 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 ght between Roland and Oliver:
longue et epaisse tunique sans doute de velours rouge; [. . .] Les sous de
bronze, larmure de bronze, la main moite comme sur une virilite dressee
(AH ). Sacrices (AH ) strengthens the aura of sacred sociology:
here Leiris remembers masturbating in Zeuss 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 to-
bacco; 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 con-
sequently a symbolical form. These women are therefore collectively
placed under the sign of archaeology in the next subsection, Lupanars
et musees (AH ). The academic control which can be exerted in
this way over a dangerous caractere de violence sanglante leads Leiris
to present the relationship between himself and his mother under the
same sign in the following section, Le Genie 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 installe sur les genoux de ma
mere, 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 nal sub-
section, Don Juan et le Commandeur (AH ). Here Leiris denes
himself in relation to two specic volumes for which he has a fetishistic
love, both of which, signicantly, came into the possession of his mother
when she was a young girl: an Iphigenie, whose versication offers the
roideur antique necessary for the structuration of subjectivity; and a
Moliere Dom Juan, whose image of the Stone Commander provides the
same ideal image of stony resistance or petrication in the face of the
bloody violence of desire. In only the second chapter, then, Leiris estab-
lishes a programmatic abstraction and cultural sublation of mere event
Texts and contexts
into projective structure. Hereafter, Leiris can achieve a controlled in-
scription 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 mere a ces livres, et de ces livres pris en

tant quobjets a leur contenu, est de nature a avoir renforce la signication que
jattribuai de tres bonne heure a lantiquite, vue sous langle du rayon interdit de
la bibliotheque de mon pere. Ces souvenirs livresques ont surement concouru
a la production du trouble que je ressentis en decouvrant limage de ces deux
herones, lune romaine, lautre biblique: Lucrece et Judith. (AH )
The next three chapters derive from the biblical exemplications 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 tete dHolopherne, continues this theme of the cut suffered by the
tragic hero. Cuts occur on the level both of the texts narrative and of its
own disposition of material. There is an abrupt jump from the Nerval
pre-text wherein nos tetes roulerent 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 depassement of pain: the mem-
ory in question turns on another narrative of beheading, LHistoire sainte,
in which Leiris reads of Abrahams willingness to sacrice 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 sub-
ject of representation around the image of a wounded subject. The rst
includes Prometheus, the dream of a devouring wolf, the Red Sea en-
gulng Pharaohs 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 brothers 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
Leiriss childhood. It closes ttingly, 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 tragedie and
gives him la erte davoir a jouer un role (AH ). This last image of the
subject, as supposedly celui qui a vu la mort de pres (AH ), rehearses
all three of the psychological myths erected as a guiding framework for
the representation of the subjects growing theoretical knowledge of love
as a tragic and violent act. The logic of the autobiographical gure 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 Leiriss
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 nally appears in the text, Leiriss
real initiatrice is given a ctional name, Kay, for her role is in fact
that of tragic muse on which can be built the subjects stereotypical and
cathartic, rather than experiential, articulation.
The quasi-religious relationship which takes place with Kay (AH
) merely conrms the cultural paradigm already established around
the gures of Judith and Lucretia. Kay and Leiris are part of a jeunesse
doree that elevates its affectations to the status of a rite, regards itself
as bandits or fauns or nymphs, and identies 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 rst
meeting ends with Leiris suffering from an attack which he describes as
an horreur sacree (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 dacceder au sacre (AH ). Indeed, the seeds of the even-
tual disintegration of the relationship are sown by this very logic, for
tenir le sacre cest en meme temps le profaner et nalement le detruire
(AH ). As with Leiriss typical process of assumption and neutral-
ization, the double process of engagement and disengagement must be
maintained here in order for the logic of the gure, raised by the sec-
ondary 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 naurait pas a simmiscer (AH ). The
Texts and contexts
subsection Le Festin dHolopherne (AH ) therefore immediately
and tellingly transposes the nal entry into manhood onto the abstract
plane of the problems of representation. For the subjects struggle for
mastery is achieved ultimately on the level of the imaginary: Jaccordais
une importance preponderante a limaginaire, substitut du reel et monde
quil nous est loisible de creer (AH ). Leiris recognizes that it is above
all le miracle poetique that grants a sense of surety or eternity to the
subject of LAge dhomme (AH ). The nal acquisition of virility, far
from concerning a real love (which is seen as a sort of capitulation and
the abandonment of Prometheuss 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 surrealisms 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:
Jaccordais une importance preponderante a limaginaire, substitut du reel et
monde quil nous est loisible de creer. (. . .) Je croyais quau moyen des mots il
est possible de detecter les idees et que lon peut ainsi, de choc verbal inattendu
en choc verbal inattendu, cerner labsolu de proche et nalement, a force de
declencher dans tous les sens des idees neuves, le posseder. (AH )
He then supplements this accurate if distinctly critical description of the

aesthetics at the base of Glossaire jy serre mes gloses with the laconic de-
bunking 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 surrealisms 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 dEpinal (AH ), a reference
repeated when he mentions rst encountering his future wife: Une jeune
lle (. . .) mapparut tout a coup comme lincarnation ou le reet de cette
gure dEpinal que je nourrissais en moi secretement (AH ). Both
references are highly signicant given the use to which he has already
put Epinals Les Couleurs de la vie. In all, the picture of the young
Leiris consciously living like a poet is presented with a mixture of em-
barrassment, bathos and distaste. Indeed, Leiris reveals the very serious
psychological consequences resulting from his active decomposition of
referentiality and the deliberate attempt to toy with madness a la Nerval:
je meveillais presque chaque nuit en hurlant (AH ); je fus pris
soudain dune crainte aigue de devenir effectivement fou (AH );
je fus saisi la nuit dune angoisse panique (AH ). It is at this point
of dangerous distress that we enter the nal chapter, Le Radueau de la
Meduse, where, as the title suggests, psychoanalysis and ethnography
emerge as the two intellectual disciplines which helped Leiris to over-
come the self-destructive nature of living like a surrealist. Signicantly,
Leiris glosses their actual linguistic practices, concentrating instead on
their common ability to dispel myths and obsessions by collating and
interpreting data precisely the methodological approach adopted by
LAge dhomme. The end of LAge dhomme therefore marks the comple-
tion of an apprenticeship, and an intellectual recuperation of surrealist
hysteria. Leiris has learned to rediscover his univocal self-identity:
Ce que jy ai appris surtout cest que, meme a travers les manifestations a
premiere vue les plus heteroclites, lon se retrouve toujours identique a soi-
meme, quil y a une unite dans une vie et que tout se ramene, quoi quon fasse,
a une petite constellation de choses quon tend a reproduire, sous des formes
diverses, un nombre illimite de fois. (AH )
The autobiography then ends with an epilogue composed of three

dream sequences, followed by a series of footnotes dating from ,
of which the most signicant in turn rejects the methodology of psy-
choanalysis in favour of an unadulterated existentialist commitment:
Aujourdhui, je nexprimerais plus cela en termes psychanalytiques et
parlant castration. Au lieu dun chatiment a la fois craint et desire,
jinvoquerais la peur que jai de mengager, de prendre mes respons-
abilites (AH ). The closing appeal to existential responsibility allows
Leiriss autobiography to break through to a nal 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 par-
ticular 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
Texts and contexts
the negative, but also to remove himself from the narrative in order to
evaluate it from the illusory perspective of an extratextual present tense:
Aujourdhui, je nexprimerais 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 reexive analysis of repression should end with a legislative
instance of repression. In narratological terms, the closure of mean-
ing which this autobiography seeks also creates a number of generic
tensions. If an autobiography is a rst-person discours and an objective
document is a third-person histoire, Leiriss desire to achieve authenticity
leads the footnote to create an illusory rst-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 lenonciation with the
blank authority of the sujet de lenonce whose identity becomes more formal
and less crucially dependent on the utterance. The attainment of truth,
referentiality and realism at the end of LAge dhomme 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 LAge dhomme should use and then
criticize psychoanalysis. Aujourdhui je nexprimerais plus cela en ter-
mes psychanalytiques et parlant castration. Leiriss ethics of language
logically criticizes psychoanalytic expression in the same way that his de-
nunciation of surrealism focused on its misuse of language. Having used
psychoanalysis to liquidate the language of surrealism, Leiris now im-
poses 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 sub-
versive 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 letat presque brut, un ensemble
de faits et dimages que je me refusais a exploiter en laissant travailler
dessus mon imagination (AH ) and so to dissociate oneself from desire,
therefore comes up against the active resistance of the unconscious to the
goal-oriented and cathartic nature of such an intellectual undertaking.
The nal denegation of psychoanalysis therefore provides the solution
to the problem of how to achieve a closed identity, since denegation
is a procede par lequel le sujet, tout en formulant un de ses desirs,
pensees, sentiments jusquici refoule, continue a sen defendre en niant
quil lui appartienne. LAge dhomme uses psychoanalysis, then, to of-
fer a structurally reactive portrait. But the linguistic moments wherein
the texts unconscious resists recuperation also reveal a phantasmic por-
trait and a second-degree dramatization of the mechanics of repression.
At this point, like Freud, I begin to read backwards, regressing from
LAge dhommes legislative nal enonce to the actual dynamics of enonciation.
I resist LAge dhommes 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 intel-
lectually seductive, and concentrate my reading precisely on resistance.
It is the narratives points of maximum resistance, used to structure its
emancipatory story, which also reveal how the drama of the subjects
entry into the symbolic order is only ever wilfully concluded, in this case
by the prefatory De la litterature (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 specic 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 lenonce and the
sujet de lenonciation. These moments reveal the difference between the n-
ished subject of representation (the product of LAge dhommes signieds)
and the unnished subject-in-language (the product of LAge dhommes
signiers). In other words, the unconscious.
Given LAge dhommes assumption and denegation of a work like The
Interpretation of Dreams, it is obvious that Leiriss own interpretation of
dreams will most dramatically represent this simultaneous existence of
wish and censorship. Reading a rebours brings me rstly to the three dream
sequences at the end of LAge dhomme. Signicantly, they lie outside the
story of the struggle to achieve manhood, the rst 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 LAge dhomme. In each of these
Texts and contexts
dreams, the chronology of manhood is disrupted: in the rst 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, lombilic saig-
nant, he reveals his mistresss 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 LAge dhommes conscious progress towards
the banal reality and dead calm of heterosexual maturity. At the heart
of this conicting 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 ).
Leiriss fellow smuggler is a co-participant of a political circle to which he
had belonged. After a dreaming scene in a cafe which is the rendezvous
of these conspirators and smugglers, Leiris nds 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 be-
comes a cloth and then a womans 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, nally realizes the
meaning of these accumulated signs and murmurs with unspeakable sad-
ness: Ah! cetait 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 LAge dhommes
psycho-realist story. Exotic self-creation and self-annihilation, auto-
erotism and the revelation of the ecstatically feminine Leiris, the phallic
and phantasmic role of his image and the admission of denegated aes-
thetic and political afliations (specically the Rousselian ecstasy and
surrealist activity of the signier [suicide]) are smuggled in and revealed
to Leiris himself as the persistant chthonian unconscious at the heart of
LAge dhommes existentialist manhood.
Conrmation 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 back-
ward reading reveals a complex network of alternative referential points
for Leiriss 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 , Lucrece
et Judith (AH ), which is the rst 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 an-
tiquity and play on the signier ravin. This latter dream is connected
in turn to lombilic saignant in that Leiris again places his head be-
tween his mistresss thighs. And at the beginning of this second chapter,
Antiquites (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 Leiriss
wife (to which he played the part of Lucretia) in the femme turban
scene. Within this phantasmatic network, the repition of ravin is partic-
ularly interesting, for it constructs another calligraphic identity in which
the signication produced by Glossaire jy serre mes gloses is readmitted to
the autobiographical process. In the rst dream, Leiris kisses the raie
mediane of his mistress and pronounces the words La Guerre de Troie,
which he interprets as associated with detroit 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 quelles ont
lair absolument verticales semblent animees dun mouvement con-
stant de va-et-vient, en sens inverse lune de lautre. It is Glossaire jy serre
mes glosess 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 def-
inition here brings into being the subject-in-language denegated within
LAge dhomme. Instead of registering only the task-oriented and legisla-
tive aspects of the latter dream (Leiris needs to cross the ravine; there
is a threat of lapidation or petrication) as the ostensible narrative of
LAge dhomme would have me do, I can now read the literal inscription
of Leiriss 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 Leiriss 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, Visitee, Vue, chane, Vrai, futs, raVin, Verticales, Va-et-Vient,
inVerse, Volcanique, parat, Vent, abme, Verite, reVe. Incidentally, the
circumexes here should also be read as Vs: justication for this comes
directly from Leiriss book of dreams, Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans
jour: cet accent netant pas autre chose quun v plus petit et renverse
Texts and contexts
(N ). The entry goes on: le reve est arachneen, a signicant phrase
in the light of the alternative structuration of identity being established
here, and, as we shall see, in the light of Biffuress 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 LAge dhomme, present in dreams and those
instances of the signier beyond the control of waking ideational life.
Gradually a new set of truths emerges. We can see how, beneath the con-
sciously constructed subject as representation of LAge dhommes enonce,
an insistent subject-in-language which is resistant to ethical prescriptions
constantly erupts in the enonciation. We recognize how LAge dhommes
denegation of surrealist and then psychoanalytic language, designed to
bring about existentialist referentiality, is undone by Leiriss total de-
siring investment in the language and methodology of both practices,
an emanation that actually produces more of a bulls horn than does
any conscious cultural gestation. And lastly, we can see how autobio-
graphy and psychoanalysis set up their own resistance, resurfacing as
an unnished rather than nished state, as a discourse under constant
construction rather than as a history of commitment. It is not surprising,
then, that Leiriss next autobiographical volume, Biffures, will not con-
tinue where LAge dhommes evolutionary tale left off. Instead, it returns
to the beginning, a beginning which, as LAge dhomme ultimately betrays,
lies not in writing as conscious act of self-determination, but in language
as unconsciously determining play.

La Regle du jeu differs from LAge dhomme in one immediately obvious

respect. LAge dhomme builds up a composite image of the subject from
a relatively static position governed by the ego. The thirty-year span of
La Regle 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 nal volume. Biffures thus has eight chap-
ters, each one marking a stage in Leiriss linguistic education. Fourbis has
three chapters, dealing with Leiriss attempt to engage increasingly with
the world. Fibrilles collects four numbered sections under one delirious
heading, La ere, la ere . . . , as it seeks to fuse the subject-in-language
and the world into one revolutionary enonciation. Frele 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 conuence of self and world, rather than to the more
ambitious and willed programme of recapitulation and conclusion orig-
inally envisaged under the title Fibules.
More important than this temporal phenomenon, however, is the fun-
damental philosophical shift which it betokens. For if LAge dhommes aim
is to reveal the structural determination of presence in an ostensibly cog-
nitive and clinical manner, La Regle du jeu begins rather with the know-
ledge that, as an autobiography, it is un jeu a la recherche de sa regle (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 Regle du jeu, this autobiographys rule of the game, in
contrast to the cultural logics used to structure the self in LAge dhomme,
is that game and play are the rule of composition. This amounts to

Texts and contexts
more than the reintroduction of an ebullient note into a structure that
anxiously seeks to bring its own centre into being. LAge dhommes mythic
presentation of the subject explained every event as an exemplication of
momentary derivation from a tyrannical norm which was taught to the
young Leiris by a powerful socio-cultural machine. In La Regle du jeu, on
the other hand, derivation is the norm. As the title and opening of Biffures
make plain, bifurcation and erasure mark the rst tingling, sensual mo-
ment 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 sub-
ject of representation within a suite logique ou chronologique, Leiris ac-
knowledges in La Regle du jeus alternative denition, 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 elabo-
ration that Leiris does not control. When it is nally nished, he writes,
or rather when it is provisionally nished, that is to say interrupted, the
game itself will have produced its own rule, an autobiographical gure
that will ultimately emerge as the almost musical ground to La Regle
du jeus 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 Regle du jeu, we can be shown that there is no rule
of the game, for instead of the visually necessary fact of a nal portrait,
which is the ultimate presentation of a signied content, what we experi-
ence 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 puricatoire: cet ouvrage dont jattendais quune regle en
emerge, mais qui ne maide ni a faire ni a me faire . . .
Laborieusement calligraphique, cet ouvrage qui, malignement, me consume
au lieu de me fortier . . .
Mesure des hauts et des bas, machine tournant a vide, cet ouvrage qui ne
mapporte aucune matrise et dont je ne suis pas meme le matre. (FB )
This move from LAge dhommes synthetic and visual composition of

identity to La Regle du jeus syntactic and musical form of unmastered
production obviously carries a range of formal and moral implications.
The most striking of these is La Regle du jeus relative desacralization of
the self. In spite of the secular convictions of LAge dhomme, 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 Regle du jeus
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 interpreta-
tion of identity is reected in La Regle du jeus cultural representations.
Whereas the erudite and abstract imagery of LAge dhommes scenarios
evokes a tragic and metaphysical dualism that places the work, for all its
Freudian and ethnographic decentring of the subject, within a long tra-
dition of confessional literature, the temporal unfolding of La Regle du jeu,
an open-ended structuration punctuated by the event and spaced out by
delay, generates a social commdia of differentiality and triangularity. If
the existence of La Regle du jeu as a phenomenon in Leiriss life provides a
diversion from the daily grind, then, the existence of La Regle du jeu as a
moto perpetuo writing activity, or machine tournant a vide, more impor-
tantly 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 Regle du jeus poetics.
Just as chronology in LAge dhomme 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 LAge dhomme privileges
a series of cultural metaphors and a signied content. In contrast to this
montage technique, whose nished product is a text which provides a
model subject, both formally and morally, La Regle du jeus 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 signier and signiance has a greater part to play than in
LAge dhomme 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 LAge dhomme becomes the art of
language in La Regle du jeu.
BIFFURES
Central to emergence of the self is the changing perceptions which

occur within La Regle du jeu of the relationship between consciousness,
language and the world. The rst volume, Biffures, returns to the child-
hood already delineated in LAge dhomme, but here the structural limits
of Leiriss human consciousness are generated by linguistic events. A
true subject-in-language therefore unfolds through Leiriss close textual
Texts and contexts
analysis of his existence within and through language. Developing the
productivity of the signier 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 books 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 ones relation
to language to the recognition that autobiography attempts to reconcile
these demands through the creation of a phantasmic object. The lin-
guistic 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 Leiriss past in linguistic terms, as opposed to the
thematic approach of LAge dhomme, so there is a reassessment of the spe-
cic linguistic approaches to self-representation advocated by surrealist
poetics and ethnographic reciprocity. Whereas these were placed in ten-
sion with one another in LAge dhomme, Biffures has absorbed both into a
new concept of subjectivity in language. Biffuress celebration, rather than
denegation, of the productivity of the signier has the fundamental effect
of displacing the chronological limits of the subject of representation in
LAge dhomme with the active unfolding of a Rousselian chain of thought.
Just as Roussel had attempted, in Locus Solus and Impressions dAfrique, to
create a story from the interval between the two versions of the one am-
biguous signier, so in La Regle du jeu Leiris initially displays self-identity
as constructed from a network of signiers. His approach to documenta-
tion will therefore lead to a constellation of similar phenomena or series
of equations de faits, as in LAge dhommes collage-effect, but with the
difference that the autobiography is not a narrative joining one repre-
sentational 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 College de sociologie that Leiris rst synthesized sev-
eral fragments into Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne, thereafter incor-
porated into Biffures. In recognizing the symbolic structure of language
and the way in which self-consciousness is therefore dependent on the
Other, La Regle du jeu in particular retains the ethnographic aim of reci-
procity. The beginning of Biffures states how subjectivity is dependent on
the exchange-system of potlatch:
Car pour celui qui ecrit, toute la question est la: faire passer dans la tete ou
dans le cur dautrui les concretions jusque-la valables seulement pour
lui deposees, par le present ou le passe de sa vie, au fond de sa propre tete
ou de son propre cur; communiquer, pour valoriser; faire circuler, pour que
la chose ainsi lancee aux autres vous revienne un peu plus prestigieuse, tels ces
boucliers des Indiens du Nord-Oeust americain qui se trouvent doues dune
valeur dautant plus grande quils ont fait lobjet de plus nombreux echanges
ceremoniels. (Bi )
Biffures therefore absorbs surrealist and ethnographic theories of lan-
guage into an autobiographical form of reection which conforms to
the Saussurean dictum that there are no preexisting ideas, and nothing
is distinct before the appearance of language. The opening volume
of La Regle du jeu shows the fundamental astonishment of the subject-in-
language: not only Leiriss astonishment at language, but his astonish-
ment by language (together with the temporality and otherness revealed
within language), a language which creates Leiriss consciousness rather
than being seen in a localizable way to conrm or challenge its exis-
tence. The history of the subject in La Regle du jeu will therefore be the
history of an articulation: the gradual move from an initial utterance to
the full unfolding of a potentially innite, and consequently agonistic,
system of political, moral and aesthetic discourse. Biffuress eight chapters
consequently follow the chronology of a linguistic education: from the
astonishment caused by the word ( . . . Reusement!), we move through
pre-reading and pre-writing phases (Chansons, Habille-en-cour) into
reading and writing stages (Alphabet, Persephone) and onwards to the
increasingly artistic activities of fabulation, self-representation and meta-
textual reection (Il etait une fois, Dimanche, Tambour-Trompette).
In this way, autobiography adopts a graphological rather than biologi-
cal history, placing emphasis on the enonciation rather than the enonce, the
language of self-consciousness rather than the cultural image of selfhood.
This is the most striking difference between LAge dhomme and Biffures,
and it is a difference which, as we shall see, is dramatically displayed by
La Regle du jeus very rst sentence.
In addition, the linguistic reexivity of Biffures allows the principles
of surrealist and ethnographic practice to transform one another. The
intellectual recognition of reciprocity turns a surrealist possession by
language into the ethnographic analysis of such possession. Emmanuel
Levinas reacted to the publication of Biffures by making the acute remark
that Michel Leiris is more of a chemist than an alchemist of the Word.
Biffuress autobiographical reection on the minds linguistic markers
transforms the Rimbaldian dereglement des sens at the heart of much
surrealism into a lucid and systematic construction of a linguistic model
of consciousness. For the same reason, Leiris the surrealist expresses
Texts and contexts
dissatisfaction with the bureaucratic objectivity of ethnography (as on
Biffures, p. ). Biffures begins with the point beyond which LAfrique
fantomes scientic pretensions broke down, namely with the recognition
that ethnographic reciprocity not only provokes and improves self-
expression but is the actual structural condition of self-identity. Ethnog-
raphys gradual but limited willingness to accommodate the Other
becomes in Biffures the more radical surrealist belief that a fundamental
Otherness within self-identity creates the purest and truest form of
self-revelation: jy trouve lexpression la plus pure de moi-meme, dans
la mesure ou il ma frappe par ce quil recelait detrangete . . . (Bi ).
We come now to the books beginning, which we need to quote in full.
. . .
Sur le sol impitoyable de la piece (salon? salle a manger? tapis cloue aux ra-
mages fanes ou bien tapis mobile au quelconque decor dans lequel jinscrivais
des palais, des sites, des continents, vrai kaleidoscope dont mon enfance jouait,
y agencant des constructions feeriques, tel un canevas pour des mille et une
nuits que ne mouvraient alors les feuillets daucun livre? plancher nu, bois
cire aux lineaments plus fonces, coupes net par la noirceur rigide des rainures
dou je mamusais, parfois, a tirer des ocons de poussiere, quand javais eu
laubaine de quelque epingle chue des mains de la couturiere a la journee?)
sur le sol irrecusable et sans ame de la piece (veloute ou ligneux, endi-
manche ou depouille, propice aux courses de limagination ou a des jeux plus
mecaniques), dans le salon ou la salle a manger, dans la penombre ou la lumiere
(suivant quil sagissait ou non de cette portion de la maison dont les meubles
sont normalement proteges par des housses et toutes les modestes richesses
soustraites souvent, par le barrage des volets, aux attaques du soleil), dans cet
enclos privilegie guere accessible quaux adultes et grotte tranquille pour la
somnolence du piano ou dans ce local plus commun qui renfermait la grosse
table a rallonges autour de laquelle toute ou partie de la famille sassemblait
pour le rite des repas quotidiens, le soldat etait tombe. (Bi )
This remarkable opening transforms all those elements traditionally as-

sociated with autobiography which are still respected by LAge dhomme.
On one level, the detailed picture of a bourgeois family interior, wherein
a solitary child is seen quietly at play, reinforces the realist representa-
tion 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 program-
matically displays the double principle of bifurcation and erasure in such
a way as to show how subjectivity is embodied by the phenomenological
act of remembering rather than by the realist object of remembrance.
The physical space in which the childs consciousness emerges is one
constructed from a series of choices (salon/salle, tapis cloue/tapis mobile,
plancher nu/bois cire, penombre/lumiere, etc.). The passivity displayed
in LAge dhommes opening realist enonce (Je viens davoir trente-quatre
ans, la moitie de la vie) is replaced by the activity of Biffuress opening
enonciation, as the geographical and biological limitations placed on a subject
of representation become the graphological possibilities of a subject-in-
language. The picture that consequently emerges is that of the autobi-
ographical writer in gestation, for the bifurcations move us subtly from
the composed image of a bourgeois childhood to the compositional gestures asso-
ciated 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 privilegie like an artist composing a
work, adding things, picking bits out of it, creating a kaleidoscopic pres-
ence. Leiris repeats all of this on the level of the sentences construction,
and he adds three further cultural elements, which are blended here,
rather than contrasted, as they were in LAge dhomme: rstly, the perspec-
tive of sacred sociology, with its concentration on social ritual, signicant
and sancrosanct location and small ritualistic gesture; secondly, the pro-
ductivity of the surrealist signier 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 autobiographi-
cal antecedent, Rousseaus peigne casse, 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 passages barrage
des volets, are surely designed to recall the opening pages of A la recherche
du temps perdu, as a way of conrming, from a writers 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
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 childs closed world frighteningly socialized. This brief chapter
closes on Leiriss recapitulation and explanation of the astonishment:
Sur le sol de la salle a manger ou du salon, le soldat, de plomb ou de carton-

pate, vient de tomber. Je me suis ecrie: . . . Reusement!. Lon ma repris. Et,
un instant, je demeure interdit, en proie a une sorte de vertige. Car ce mot mal
prononce, et dont je viens de decouvrir quil nest pas en realite ce que javais cru
jusque-la, ma mis en etat dobscurement sentir grace a lespece de deviation,
de decalage qui sest trouve de ce fait imprime a ma pensee en quoi le langage
articule, tissu arachneen de mes rapports avec les autres, me depasee, poussant
de tous cotes ses antennes mysterieuses. (Bi )
The fall of the soldier symbolizes the fall of the child from the edenic
imaginary into the sins of the symbolic, a realm represented above all by
language. The childs cry unwittingly forces him to recognize how sym-
bolic reality precedes and exceeds him. The long opening description
at the beginning of the chapter was therefore not a mere prelude to the
childs dramatic pronouncement, but the already established existence
of a (linguistic) reality to which the childs consciousness was then
introduced. Leiris the child can no longer play within a closed and pres-
tigious world, sustained with a self-sufcient cry unencumbered by social
communication. For the replacement of reusement by heureusement
introduces the structure of consensual language to Leiris, who is hence-
forth literally interdit. The exuberance of . . . reusement, a cry only of
pleasure demanded and fullled, is inserted into a system of precise signi-
cations. If in some illusory sense the child appears to create language at
the moment of his original articulation, then, the move from reusement
to heureusement forces the autobiographical subject to recognize him-
self henceforth as a social phenomenon and a linguistic event. Language
(and through it Leiris) suddenly acquires a history, one in which the
individual voice functions even in moments of apparent deviation in
conformity with a general rule founded on a principle of difference.
The play of difference between the articulation reusement and the
retort heureusement, which is the ultimate location of the principles
of bifurcation and erasure, creates a self-identity that is therefore always
greater or less than unitary: an identity embodying biffures just as the
subject of representation in LAge dhomme sought to embody manhood.
The difference between the two, however, is fundamental. LAge dhommes
concern to forge a nished subject, a single image presented through
the drawing together of different art-images, gives way to a ceaselessly
multiplying and obliterating textual process in Biffures, wherein it is the
difference revealed which produces a subject. Whereas in LAge dhomme, the
subject ultimately seeks to coincide with his representation, here the op-
posite occurs: self-identity arises only at the moment of non-identity, the
deviation or interval stamped on Leiriss mind. In place of the intellec-
tual signication produced in LAge dhomme, in itself a conventional cultural
operation, the sensual production of meaning in . . . Reusement! means
that this subject-in-language emerges as a result of what Barthes calls
signiance, that radical work (which leaves nothing intact) through which
the subject explores how language works him and undoes him as soon as
he stops observing and enters it. Signiance is the without-endedness
of the possible operations in a given eld of language. And lastly, the
inevitable time-lag involved in this without-endedness, a temporal
delay which Leiris deliberately inscribes into the unfolding of this
rst sentence, makes plain that this subject as signiance is the effect of
an unending operation of writing, wherein the mythical voice of pure
consciousness is revealed as fractured from the beginning, and endlessly
redressing itself with a written series of supplements and corrections.
Redressing this scene itself, however, we can see that the apparently
original moment of this linguistic astonishment is, of course, an illusion.
The text itself is testimony to the larger realization, which concerns the
pre-established nature of the linguistic network into which the subject
has entered. The long opening description is not a mere intentum: in-
deed, the fall of Leiriss toy soldier and his exclamation . . . Reusement!
can be read as secondary to, if not inconsequent upon, the books open-
ing setting, a setting constructed from irreducible choices. The rst and
presiding feature of the scene is therefore a system of relations within
which intentionality is then to be found. As a result, we can say both that
the emergence of a subject-in-language is always testamentary, pointing
to the primary nature of the otherness on which sameness is posited,
and that, at the heart of this setting which produces a testament, other-
ness is sustained by an irreducible and already operative deviation or
decalage. These structural points are borne out by La Regle du jeus sus-
pensive opening. On a semantic level, the sentences main clause leads
inexorably to a physical event, the fall of the soldier. This in turn stands
as a metaphor for the chapters more crucial phenomenological event,
the emergence of singularity with the recognition of semantics: Voici
que ce vague vocable . . . est, par un hasard, promu au role de chanon
de tout un cycle semantique (Bi ). On the empirical level of reading
Texts and contexts
the events content, then, the passage conforms to the structure of a de-
tective story or the resolution of a psychological enigma: the sentence
negotiates a series of preliminary choices and qualications, and with in-
creasing condence localizes, claries and characterizes an ethnographic
space. Assumed intentionality is situated by a dramatic event that opens
the way to the chapters eventual expression of knowledge (une allure de
decouverte, comme le dechirement brusque dun voile ou leclatement
de quelque verite (Bi )) and a general sense of self-presence.
Syntactically, the biffures of this main clause conrm this intellection:
two phrases dependent on sur (sur le sol impitoyable de la piece, sur
le sol irrecusable et sans ame de la piece) and two sets of phrases
dependent on a double dans (dans le salon ou la salle a manger, dans la
penombre ou la lumiere; dans cet enclos privilegie . . . ou dans ce local
plus commun) employ the addition and erasure of alternatives to create
a clearer picture of the event and a growing sense of comprehension.
This is further enhanced by the three parentheses: after two brief, hesi-
tant beginnings, the rst parenthesis sets up two huge questions in which
we are none the less given an increasing amount of information and per-
sonal involvement; the second parenthesis progresses from questions to
brief differentiating descriptions; and the third more condently provides
authoritative information in a phrase almost as long as each of the large
questions. The paragraphs secondary phrases, even as they proliferate
within the structure of the sentence, can therefore be read as conrming
the main clauses increasingly structural location of consciousness.
On a purely syntagmatic level, however, the sentences main clause
evidently leads not to the replacement of pre-lapsarian play by knowl-
edge, but to the actual germination of a playful structure of potentiality
and plurality. In this light, it is signicant that the chapters conclusion
describes the singular truth revealed to Leiris as a tissu arachneen (Bi ).
Once we view the passages structural qualities in this, non-Hegelian,
light, consciousness is seen not to pre-exist or come to dominate a ma-
terialist conception of a burgeoning world whose meaning here lies in
its potentially innite form, rather than its increasingly nite content.
Instead, the purely productive nature of the passages playful structure, the
affective rather than cerebral enjoyment and joy associated with these
biffures, and the chapters climax in the revelation of a mystery rather than
a certainty (le langage articule, tissu arachneen de mes rapports avec
les autres, me depasse, poussant de tous cotes ses antennes mysterieuses
(Bi )), together with the sense of plurality and sociality, rather than
singularity, which these qualities all suggest, point to an event which
comes to the subject from a radical otherness. This other, which has not
been predicted or accommodated by the subject or the passage, is wit-
nessed by Leiris with a pure passivity. He is located in a situation whose
spacing he does not control (sur, dans, autour de laquelle) and which
increasingly recalls the sacred (grotte tranquille, le rite des repas), in
order nally to be brought face to face with an event which he has not
foreseen and to which he reacts with grammatical passivity (le soldat
etait tombe). The open potentiality which this displays locates Leiriss
subjectivity less in the present and the self than in the future and the other.
Leiris is arguably bounded not by a solitary and virile being-unto-death
but by a systeme subtil de distinguo, as he earlier dened the sacred
in Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne (S ). The structure of La Regle
du jeus opening therefore shows that the condition for the emergence of
singularity is the revelation of a primary and irreducible otherness.
This otherness is conrmed by the parentheses in a number of con-
crete ways. Their a rallonges effect on the structure of the sentence
leads the main clauses intellectual formulation to be physically over-
whelmed by the semantically secondary nature of the worlds potential-
ity and plurality. The main sentences attempts to establish a metaphor
of consciousness are dominated by the size of the metonymic interrup-
tions: the rst parenthesis, consisting of ninety-seven words, occurs after
the main thesis has advanced by no more than seven words; the sec-
ond interruption, seventeen words long, is once again larger than the
ten words given by the resumed main phrase; and the nal parenthe-
sis, consisting of thirty-six words, is preceded by only fourteen words
in the main sentence. In all, parenthetic words occupy per cent of
the total formulation. In addition, the temporality which this creates
within the phrases structure makes us feel directly how consciousness
cannot achieve a purely personal duration but comes into being within
the supposedly secondary nature of the temporal relationship with the
Other, a relationship whose achievement for that reason always lies in
the future rather than in the present. And perhaps most remarkably in
this context, given that grammar is here employed to illustrate inten-
tionalitys structuring powers, the main clause contrasts poorly with the
parentheses from a grammatical point of view. The rst three parts of
the main phrase are structured by an extremely elementary and repeti-
tious use of basic prepositions, nouns and conjunctions, avoured only
by two adjectives, both of which signicantly relate to harsh and imper-
sonal judgement. Only in the nal, extended part of the main clause
does a grammatical exposition of intellection come to life with the more
Texts and contexts
related use of the components listed above and the nal inclusion of
two verbs which, while suggesting a sense of coalescence (renfermait,
sassemblait) none the less are not controlled by the subject and to that
degree suggest a closing down rather than an opening up of intellectual
possibilities. Moreover, if we compare this nal part of the main phrase
with the main question of the rst parenthesis, since they are at opposite
ends of the paragraph and are both forty nine words long, we notice
immediately how the parenthesis contains a much greater grammatical
sophistication. Not only are all the grammatical features of the main
phrase already predicted in this rst parenthesis, but the latter contests
the dead hand of the formers move to totality with a potentially innite
enjoyment of alternatives and embellishment. In a general sense these
biffures permit body and soul to enter the scene (which is certainly neither
empty nor soulless), and in a specic sense it is in the parenthesis that
we rst obtain the basic traditional grammatical constituents of an auto-
biographys beginnings: the rst-person noun and personal pronoun,
the noun enfance, and a verb of inscription (jinscrivais) together,
signicantly, with further verbs relating to enjoyment and addition, and
nouns relating to books and construction. Even grammatically, then, au-
tobiography can be seen to originate here in a parenthesis of potentiality
and otherness rather than in the supposedly central and self-sufcient
expression of self-presence. And even this structural tension is predicted
in the rst parenthesis, which itself engineers a constant play between a
xed, angular and somewhat austere structure, on the one hand, and a
mobile, expandable, fortuitous and more sensuous version of structure
on the other. Thus a tapis cloue is contrasted with a tapis mobile,
and while the three words of the formers qualifying phrase at best can
offer ramages fanes, the latter throws up a forty-word paean to the vrai
kaleidoscope dont mon enfance jouait into which Leiris in every sense
writes himself. Similarly, the rigid lines of the bare boards in the following
question are subverted by a subject who, for amusement, and with tools
provided by chance and good fortune, plumps out their noirceur rigide
by picking uff out of the cracks.
The innocence of such activity itself stands in playful contrast to the
signication of this opening passage. La Regle du jeu begins by happily
displaying how the subject originates in diversion and is structured by
differance. The supposed rst event of intentionality, whose climax is
self-expression, is immediately seen to depend on a prior space of
deviation or interval. Autobiographys rst presence is not that of a
subject or an object, a self or a world, intention or intentum; it is that of
a structural relation which pre-exists the existent, setting conditions of
existence that lead to the other. The immediate structural patterns of
. . . Reusement! reveal how, in the largest sense, autobiographical
identity emerges only within what Foucault calls a discursive formation
(which is not to say that this referential network in turn can ever attain
or even suggest a pure, prediscursive world of silent self-sufciency).
Structurally as well as linguistically, the je begins and ends only
in relation with the other. This is ultimately the proposition that is
accorded a truth value at the end of . . . Reusement! when Leiris
acknowledges the presence of a cycle semantique and a fundamental
realite . . . commune et ouverte . . . , partagee . . . , socialisee (Bi ).
There is both nostalgia and exuberance in this ethnographic recogni-
tion. The nostalgia results from the little death represented in the climax
to the paragraph, a jouissance that marks the interruption of a natural,
preconscious structure of being, a primordial play, by the equally myth-
ical rst moment of knowledge, leclatement de quelque verite (Bi ).
Both the pure interjection (ibid.) of . . . Reusement!, a fractured word
that represents the fracturing of primordial happiness, and the founding
event of consciousness which comes to fracture this happiness, still seek,
of course, to absorb the non-identical into the identical. The exuberance,
on the other hand, is obviously reected in the language of pure joy used
in the passage (including, most importantly, the term . . . Reusement!
itself, which, as an impure formulation, manages to suggest verbally a pre-
discursive state of pure feeling) and the fertile, overowing biffures which
the text playfully releases and through which the subject emerges in play.
As can be seen in their simultaneous representation, there is ultimately
no question of choice being made between these two outlooks. Such a
question would, in fact, entail an attenuation of the subjects historicity.
The event stands, rather, as a metaphor of the structural condition of the
present je of autobiography, one that results dramatically from a combi-
nation of recollection and protension, loss and projection, memory and
learning. The ow which this suggests indicates how . . . Reusement!
acts nally not in a representational but in a functional and productive
manner. The fundamental movement of the event, a distinguo revealing
difference to be the condition for individuality, as we now see, climaxes
not in a cardinal representation or expression of the self s essence but
in an ordinal conguration or interjection of the subjects disposition.
Function and diachrony therefore both form the structural heart of
subjectivity, and generate a rst moment of non-intentionality and
duration.
Texts and contexts
. . . Reusement! demonstrates, then, how autobiographys rule of the
game is an innite signifying form originating in the other rather than
a totalizing signied content posited by the ego. The nal truth and
mystery facing Leiris at the end of the episode is therefore the simulta-
neous sense of impossible freedom and impossible responsibility gener-
ated by this rst event. In the rest of Biffures the self-proclaiming centre of
autobiographical structure, namely the idea of the subject as a control-
ling and reducing identity, will represent itself as charting this revelation
of the structure of structure, the subjects own (double) structuration.
The representation of such a double bind therefore involves the contin-
ued use of a phenomenological narrative, in which Leiris confronts and
reacts to a series of objects, but in each case the object (like the word
. . . Reusement) is in some sense impossible. None of the objects repre-
sents something as such; instead, each one embodies a further dening
event in which the autobiographical subject nds himself in a hetero-
geneity without ontological foundation. Most signicantly, then, each
impossible object is also primarily an ambiguous name.

In subsequent chapters, Leiris learns the complexities of signicant
names encountered in childhood: Clairet, Blaise, tetable, Mose,
Saul. Each acts as a productive meconnaissance for a self-consciousness
which only then comes into being, in lieu of designating any stable
pronominal identity for either subject or object. The names, then, form
matrices of an equally unlocalizable productivity. We cannot say where
Clairet, Blaise or tetable lie, any more than we can say what they
represent as intentum. Instead, just as each name is seen to result from
a combination and then to create a network, so each forms part of
an autobiographical education in the nature of the subjects position
within a discursive formation rather than in the nature of the world. It is
Alphabet which shows this most clearly. Leiriss early education centres
on a reading of Genesis, and he is fully aware of the pedagogical and
ideological reasons behind the choice of text:
Genese: modelage de la nature et de lhomme dans leur prime jeunesse; peut-on
rever lecture plus astucieusement appropriee au tout premier modelage de
lesprit dun enfant que cet A.B.C. si antique et si fruste de lenfance du monde?
(Bi )
In particular, this Histoire sainte places each proper noun in a divinely

established structure of hierarchy and development. This squares
perfectly with the general pedagogical aim of the programme to which he
is subject, which involves being able to recognize the place of ones own
name through the ability to name all other things: la cruelle conquete
de ce moi qui devait dabord se perfectionner dans lart de nommer les
choses (Bi ). But as Leiris reads through the divine ordering of names,
Can, Mose, Esau, Saul, the meconnaissance thrown up by the dieresis ex-
poses the biffure that exists within the elocutionary afrmation of a stable
pronominal identity. Leiris conrms that what is at stake is therefore not
just the nature of the name, but the very identity it produces:
Echangeant Moisse pour Mose, jeprouvais un vertige, parce que ce netait

pas seulement un mot qui se defaisait, mais une partie des choses qui se
metamorphosait, un changement subit didentite qui, dans la personne meme
du prophete, soperait. (Bi )
Educations attempt to perfect an intentional structure in Leiris comes

up against his awareness of the ramications, decalage, ecart, lesion
and resonances diverses existing at the heart of the Mose/Moisse biffure
(Bi ). It is this latter eld that will dictate what Foucault has called son
lieu et sa loi dapparition.
One of the best examples in Alphabet of such a place and law of
emergence is encapsulated in the name of Esau (Bi ). Leiris recalls
how Jacob buys the birthright (le droit danesse) 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 bete ) to imitate his brothers hirsutism. The word bete not
only confers a bestial character on Jacob in Leiriss eyes but also reminds
him of Bethleem, the place where the child Jesus, born in a stable, was
surrounded by beasts, entre le boeuf et lane. 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 anesse, echoes
birthright or anesse. All of this takes place, of course, at Christmas,
Noel, another word with a dieresis, whose two dots not only recall
le boeuf et lane but equally resemble deux pointes de glace (since in
France it is cold at Christmas) or une paire detoiles (one for the Three
Wise Men, one for the shepherds). In containing and releasing all of this,
therefore, the dieresis of Esau functions as a mecanique de precision.
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 incul-
cate 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
Texts and contexts
into Leiriss bourgeois childhood, and the signiance which particular de-
tails take on, transform the moral tale in both narrative and structural
terms into a clear exemplication of the distortion, dissimulation and
usurpation at the very heart of an order designed to confer legitimacy
on a name.
Leiris now goes on to tell us that the name Esau was inextricably
linked in his childhood with two items of furniture. These were owned
by his elder sister, a soeur anee who in reality was a rst cousin
raised as a sister within Leiriss 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 rst
homophonically linked in Leiriss mind to Esau via the hiatus a-u;
the second also (erroneously) called a bahut by the young Leiris. In this
way, the word Esau takes on a number of physical qualities associated
with the furniture: the smell of pitchpine, the creak of the wardrobe
door, the momentary ash of the mirror as the door opens and closes.
Leiriss concluding description resembles an instance of le sacre dans la
vie quotidienne, in blending the religious dimensions of Esau with the
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 mobiliere a leclat de miroir ou au luisant de vieux bois sature

dencaustique le nom dEsau est, par nature, chose deglise, puisque tire de la
Bible, et (comme celui dIsae, son homologue a peine transpose, il recele en sa
blondeur ligneuse un peu du buffet dorgue. Un certain parfum dencens, aussi.
Ces redondances de fumee, orchestralement, se melent aux volutes de la grande
bibliotheque tapageuse, surchargee de moulures dont chacune, au moment de
la messe, exsude une cire de musique quand souvre tel ou tel de ses multiples
registres. (Bi )
The mecanique de precision operated by Esaus dieresis ironically gen-

erates an overloaded structure, in which the subjects place and law of
emergence is created from transposition and dissimulation operating on
several simultaneous levels. The name of Esau 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 xed and the movable; the written and the
experienced. The overriding impression created by the mecanique de
precision, however, is one of the subversion of pedagogical structure:
the alphabet is dramatized and subsumed (anesse, ane, anesse,
armoire, bahut, bete, Bethleem, 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 enjoy-
ment 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-reective
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
name Esau, therefore, by which I mean both the structural productiv-
ity generated by its dieresis and the situated yet free autobiographical
identity lying behind the names misapprehension and subsequent cre-
ation 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 cre-
ates: Saul is described as having lexterieur de la force but remaining
creux a linterieur (Bi ); while Persephone 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 re-
spect, it is particularly tting that Biffuress nal object and signicant
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 drums
membrane resonating in reaction to the trumpet), in other words, can
permit a commentary on its own representations. As such, this gure
marks the point at which Biffuress dualist world gradually gives way to
the more socio-historical situations of Fourbis.
This is anticipated in Biffuress closing chapters, the last of which is
Tambour-trompette. Here the book comes full circle in opening with
a reafrmation 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
Texts and contexts
or fragments of words used to express the childs 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 dArcole laissant jaillir au contact des baguettes, en meme
temps que la cascade bien rhythmee des coups, une sonnerie comparable a celle
du cor de Roland mais plus haute et plus gaie, jouet-surprise dont linterieur
semblait secretement pourvu dun astucieux mecanisme faisant de ce corps
cylindrique pareil a celui de tous les autres tambours le receptacle dou pointait
la voix acide dun instrument de cuivre, tel fut le tambour-trompette dont jeus
envie assez longtemps, allant peut-etre jusqua le chercher (mais en pure perte)
dans les catalogues detrennes. (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 tting emblem of the autobiographical
identity to which Biffures is vainly devoted. Leiriss 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 Leiriss musings on the signicance 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 Leiriss tendency to reduce several
things into one while seeking to retain the option of bifurcating towards
one or other of this new objects 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, egare pour un
temps et que je souhaite ardemment retrouver. Reve de pur desir [. . .],
piece unique perdue au milieu dune collection (Bi ) which focuses on
increasingly unreal and symbolical toys brings forth the most insistent of
his childhood dreams, the phantasmic presence of Leiriss own identity:
Et quand je procede a cette chasse qui naboutit qua des raptures decevantes
(maigres fantomes de realites toujours en retard sur moi-meme et circulant
deja parmi des ruines a linstant ou jecris), je reproduis, transpose sur un plan
abstrait, la quete que dans mes reves comme dans la vie courante je fais si
souvent dun objet. (Bi )
Leiriss failure to nd the absolute, impossible object leads to the in-
termediate manipulation of real and banal objects: manier des objets,
faute davoir trouve lobjet. (Bi ). The implications of this statement
for the construction of autobiographical identity are conrmed when
Leiris goes on to assert that the common desire underlying each manip-
ulation is the establishment of a trafc between the world and the self,
and concludes:
Dans un sens oppose, mais de meme nature . . . , lacte decrire 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 childs manipulation
of objects, including language, the presence of absolute, impossible ob-
jects 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 au-
tobiographical terms:
Cette voie que je suis, me ant a ces lignes comme a des guides qui doivent
me conduire vers un pays ou tous les etres me paratraient plus vivants, est-elle
vraiment la bonne? Ou nest-elle pas plutot un l trompeur qui senroule et
semmele, meloignant nalement du point vital que je voudrais atteindre au
lieu de my mener apres quelques inevitables 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 rst 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 Leiriss literary
enterprise that now openly stresses the constructed and structural nature
Texts and contexts
which we have already seen at work. Leiriss 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 appetit
de juxtaposition ou de combinaison, analogue sans doute a ce qui me
faisait trouver si attirant, quand jetais 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 reseau or noeuds de faits, de sentiments, de notions or un abon-
dant lacis de traits (Bi ). One of the more amusing features of Leiriss
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 faconner . . . ,
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 litterateur qui voit se transformer en boulet ce
quil avait choisi comme devant etre son jouet ou linstrument de sa
liberation (Bi ). As Tambour-trompette draws to a close with a
number of such metatextual statements (which ironically point to the
works non-nite and autonomous structure), the combinatory nature of
the tambour-trompette resurrects two nal polarities commented on
earlier. The rst 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 signi-
ed content and the presentation of the subject as a signifying form.
Instead of concluding by reviewing the autobiographical self of Biffures
as the signied content of a logical, progressive and now complete
prose narrative, conrmed by self-presence and culminating in silence,
Leiris presents a subject spaced out functionally and indexically across
a eld 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:
Dans ma quete dun gage daccord je naurai nul prot a mettre ma plume
au rancart si le passage dune conduite bavarde a une conduite taciturne
ne signie pour moi rien autre que le remplacement dune certaine facon ver-
beuse de se baratter soi-meme par une autre facon tout aussi complaisante et
encore plus connee, privee quelle est meme du semblant dissue que represente
le soliloque. Mais quelles montagnes a remuer pour que, eloigne tout autant de
la bouche hermetiquement cousue (reine du quant-a-soi) que de celle qui devide
intarissablement son monologue, jen arrive a formuler un chant qui fasse son
chemin hors de moi et soit comme ces airs dont furent accompagnees certaines
minutes de ma vie que jestimai cruciales! (Bi )
As a nal example of the productivity being suggested here, Leiris offers

a number of closing images of mechanical musical instruments (une
vieille bote a musique . . . , un piano mecanique (Bi )), neatly mov-
ing from their status as toys to their presence in different cities of the
world (London, Barcelona). This move offers the nal 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 auto-
biographical 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 fundamen-
tal heterogeneity, given its normally assumed function of specication.
In Biffures the name itself is thus already an unstable identity within a
uctuating 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 nal page of the book, like a loco-
motive en rase campagne, apres avoir lache une bordee de coups de
sifet (Bi ). The machine-like productivity of La Regle 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 nego-
tiated, Leiris has yet to enter into the large structures of history which
are looming ever closer in the books nal chapter. This entry into the
structure of history occurs in the next volume, Fourbis.
Texts and contexts

Dimanche
The shift from Biffuress dualist structure of subject and language into
Fourbiss dialectical interaction of individual and group is anticipated also
in Biffuress penultimate chapter, Dimanche. First published in Les Temps
modernes, its reception is in part the subject of the nal chapter Tambour-
trompette. Together, these two chapters existential ethnography of the
signicance of the bourgeois Sunday, and subsequent metalinguistic
analysis of the reactions to the piece, shift La Regle du jeus structural
conception of subjectivity more into the realm of social transformation.
This works in tandem with a move away from an oracular or nominalist
thrust in language towards the socially signicant themes which will form
the guiding obsessions of Fourbis: death, authenticity and full communi-
cation. These rst and overriding considerations, namely the permanent
possibility of non-being, the question of freedom within the context of
social, rather than individual existence, and the projection of oneself to-
wards the Other in a structure of surpassing constitute the specic praxis
of Fourbis, but appear already in prototype in Dimanche. As is so often
the case in La Regle du jeu, Dimanche is therefore on one level a subtle
rewriting of the opening . . . Reusement! chapter. Within the context
of the bourgeois Sunday ritual, the mysterious force of language (here
Leiriss earliest orisons), far from encouraging a cabbalistic loss of self,
becomes the meaningful expression of a reunion ceremonieuse (Bi );
while the familial vision of such formulae is now observed as evidence of
a binding social practice that persists in spite of or even because of the
locutions secular banality:
Plates atteintes au langage, comme a seule n de constituer un argot dans lusage
limite duquel quelques-uns se sentiront solidaires; jeux de mots qui ont pour but
moins de faire rire que de se reconnatre, a la maniere dinities, entre membres
dune meme famille; locutions purement conventionnelles autour desquelles
laccord des usagers se scelle, si fermement quil se montre encore efcace et que
je ne puis songer aujourdhui a lune quelconque de ces miserables plaisanteries
sans etre emu (et confus de mon emotion) detre ainsi dun seul coup plonge
dans une vieille franc-maconnerie familiale. (Bi )
From this a chain of recollections builds into a more consciously socio-

economic analysis of Leiriss formation. The religious and the secular
coalesce in the childs telling prayer: Mon Dieu, je vous remercie davoir
fait nommer mon pere fonde de pouvoirs (Bi ). Recognition of this
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 doree. 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 realite 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 self-
expression, 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:
Cest moi tel que je suis et non un etranger que je vise a faire accepter. A
rien ne servirait duser de fausse monnaie pour le reglement de ce compte, a
rien ne servirait de tenter de donner le change: il me faudra, litteralement, payer
de ma personne si jai conclu ce marche qui est commerce avec moi-meme autant
que transaction avec autrui. (Bi )
This form of commodication not only explains some of Leiriss obses-

sions (his meticulous attention to dress, his uneasiness in the presence of
the others gaze), which lead him to uctuate between a tendency to pet-
rication (quoi detonnant a ce que ledication de ma propre statue soit
devenue le but conscient (et ici meme avoue) de mes tentatives litteraires?
(Bi )) and the desire to avoid any xed identity (le desir que javais
depuis longtemps de rompre mon horizon, tentative daffranchissement
(Bi )). It also provides painful new insights into the reality of social
structures: the chauffeur of a wealthy banker dies through the latters
demand for speed (Bi ); a family maid is dismissed and subsequently
drowns herself (Bi ); the relationship between wealth and anti-
semitism 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
Texts and contexts
tandem with a chronological series of signicant socio-historical events
and gures designed to mark stages in a writers political engagement:
D-day, liberation, Picassos 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 lan-
guage (je suis bien loin de lepoque ou je voyais dans lacte decrire
quelque chose de sacre (Bi )) and accepting that the conditions and
regulations of the orniere commune, including, ironically, the fact that
he has literally become a Sunday writer, constitute the social structure or
vie reglee 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 ttingly as-
serts that Leiriss path to literature has above all been the effect of a
series of negations, nally records the repressed knowledge at the heart
of the bourgeois Sunday and the logic determining both the besoin de
negation (Bi ) and cette statue que je pretends edier (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 dinmes entreprises or distraction as
primary structure, namely the apprehension of death: en avant de moi-
meme. 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 signicant that two-thirds of Fourbis was originally published in

Les Temps modernes. For an existentialist morality dominates La Regle
du jeus second volume which leads to an attenuation of Biffuress nomi-
nalist celebrations and a reafrmation of the poetics and ethics explicated
in De la litterature consideree comme une tauromachie. The fact that
Fourbis takes its cue for this from Biffuress closing pages, however, is borne
out by the stark enunciation of the books aims in the priere dinserer:
Apprivoiser la mort, agir authentiquement, rompre le cercle du moi.
These themes form the basis of Fourbiss three chapters: Mors reveals
death, not language, to be the bedrock of consciousness; Les Tablettes
Sportives presents the language and imagery of courage and authen-
tic behaviour, from the child at play to the adult at war; Vois! Deja
lange . . . 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 drole de guerre. The
existential necessity of obtaining truth, realism and authenticity, already
seen to govern self-representation in LAge dhomme, 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
rst volumes linguistic speculations (Fo ). Death is now seen as the
rst 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 Levinass 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:
Isole insolitement eveille quand tout le reste est (ou parat) endormi. Vertige
de celui qui croit etre parvenu a contracter (ou nier) le temps. Regard sur
une immensite en vase clos, au sein de ce monde a lenvers quest le monde
souterrain. Joie davoir joue les Daniel descendus dans la fosse et revenus sans
blessure du commerce des lions. (Fo )
Fourbiss opening recognition of facticity, le simple fait detre la, in

Sartres terms, was perhaps already implicit in Biffuress linguistic
presentation of a certain contingency, but here it openly involves a funda-
mental revision of the oracular status accorded language in La Regle du
jeus rst 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 con-
tingency of the body revealed by the childs apprehension of death and
his consequent anxiety at the beginning of Mors removes the gure
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 dom-
inated by an existential act represented here as the fraternal bravery
of Daniel in the lions den. As in De la litterature consideree comme
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. Fourbiss second
chapter, Les Tablettes sportives, can therefore also be read as a revi-
sion of Biffures. Leiriss positional play with his soldier was primarily a
linguistic education in the rst volume. But Fourbiss sociological review
of Leiriss real situation as a soldier during the drole 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 as-
sociated with poetically ambiguous signiers: Le mot E . . .
est donc peut-etre pour moi le plus vivant (Fo ); Fraternite, certes,
est lun des mots les plus emouvants (Fo ). The moral injunctions of
De la litterature resurface through this guiding signier, and the realism
demanded (realism is also a key term in Leiriss 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 modalites devrait etre vecue cette fraternite? [. . .] je devrais alors
travailler a faire passer en actes ces idees, et certainement ecrire, ecrire en-
core, pour les formuler de facon toujours plus claire, plus communicative, plus
convaincante. . . . (Fo )
A committed autobiography henceforth will be devoted less to the cre-

ation 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 enonce, rather than a
glamorous enonciation, which now creates self-identity. Two important
qualications emerge at the end of this chapter, however: Leiris recog-
nizes the oversimplication involved in contrasting efcacity of commu-
nication 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 seless act of solidarity. Both of
these qualications have implications for the writing of the self in general:
they remind us that self-consciousness and the intuition of ones own
facticity, however realist, can be presented authentically only in affec-
tive rather than purely cognitive language. And they equally determine
the presentation of the specic act of solidarity in Fourbiss nal chapter,
Vois! Deja lange . . . . Here Leiriss 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 storytellers formula, Et cric! Et crac!, introduces
and periodically punctuates the love story, so placing Leiriss identity
rmly 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 Biffuress
abstract linguistic education. The fabular approach is an existential en-
actment of the academic explorations of Biffuress Il etait une fois; while
the early formal play on biblical names, such as Moses and Saul, signi-
ers 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 communica-
tion avec autrui, sous sa forme litteralement la plus nue (Fo ). If this
were simply a celebration of a genital accession to the realite derniere,
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
Leiriss 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 shumilier, ou dechirer. Il ny a plus de douceur ni meme de purete. Nous ne
voulons (quand je ne veux, nengageant que ma propre personne, eut seul ete
conforme a la verite) plus le parfum marin des algues (qui auraient ete mieux dites
varechs) mais lodeur des chairs en rut. (Fo )
Leiriss 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 poets
Texts and contexts
sexual achings. The scene is further enhanced and related to Khadidjas
role as authentic lover by the contextual signicance 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: Enleve 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 nally 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 Leiriss relationship with Khadidja and the
doomed passion of Radames and Aida, expressed at the end of Verdis
opera as a lyrical triumph over immurement. For Leiris, existential reci-
procity 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 temoignage, therefore, is still expressed in
terms that are metaphysical, imaginary, negative and aesthetic:
Vedi? . . . di morte langelo
Radiante a noi si appressa . . .
chantent suavement Radames at Ada, presque joyeux quoique a demi morts
dasphyxie dans leur caveau funebre; comme si, au sein des tenebres ou lamour
les illumine, ces deux amants tels que jusqua present, toutefois, on nen a
guere recontre hors les romans et operas imaginaient sous laspect eclatant
dun unique archange cette brulure quAda aura ete, du moins, pour Radames
et Radames pour Ada. (Fo )
Though Vois! Deja lange . . . may supercially 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 subjects
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 depassement. This total-
izing movement, which seeks to achieve a fully affective form of political
consciousness, leads inevitably in terms of history to the poetic fervour of
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 con-
tent, 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 commit-
ment is facilitated by a change in Les Temps moderness policy towards
poetry: from on, when Sartre published Orphee noir, poetry was
no longer regarded existentially as the absolute valorization of failure,
as it had been viewed by Sartre in Quest-ce que la litterature?, but became
recognized as creating (especially in the context of negritude) the necessary
form of subversive engagement with an alienating language. Leiris him-
self, whose view of poetry was never as reductionist as that of Sartre, and
who was already a colleague and friend of Aime Cesaire, introduced nu-
merous 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
Fibrilless four sections: La Fiere, la ere . . . , a phrase recalled from a
childhood book about pirates that exemplies the feverish rantings of a
hero who has diced with death in exotic locations.
The priere dinserer 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 reects on and dis-
mantles the pretensions of a poetic and political programme that seeks
to totalize reality. Central to this totalization is the representation, in
Fibrilless rst section, of Leiriss literary output to date as the subjective
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 espece de revolution 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 ve weeks in China. This reexive 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 conrm 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 Lenine (Fi ),
and the union of self with other, desired in Fourbis, is nally achieved:
Jamais a un degre aussi haut que lors de ma decouverte de la Chine, je nai
vu une contree ou aspects naturels, facies des choses fabriquees et exterieur des
gens semblent unis par une complicite allant au besoin jusqua se materialiser
en une harmonie visible. (Fi )
This fabulous harmony even affects the structure of Leiriss reaction

to the Chinese national festival, which he chooses to describe in musi-
cal 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 cre-
ated, however, the mere persistence of Leiriss intellection (in the form
of tensions revealed through misunderstanding, as in the case of the un-
questionable 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 fondee quelle soit sur des realites sociales et non sur des nuees religieuses,
une telle communaute nen est pas moins uide, car ce monde-la lui aussi
possede ses theologiens qui ont tot fait dexcommunier ceux quils regardent
comme heretiques. (Fi )
At the height of his recension chinoise, therefore, Leiris records a se-

ries of dreams which present a theatre of anxious anticipation featuring,
among other things, a frightful cliff-face and the imminent collapse of
an etonnant chapelet de constructions vertigineusement accrochees a
des hauteurs diverses (Fi ). As Leiriss ideal structure of revolution-
ary 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 ). Leiriss 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 re-
actions 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 transcend-
ence 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.
Leiriss subsequent convalescence presents yet another version of the
childs mythic original moment in . . . Reusement! With the collapse of
the total structure of Revolution, an entire new person must be consti-
tuted:
Quant a la structure meme de ma personne (fondation de tout ledice que sur
le mode ou non du chateau en Espagne il me fallait batir a neuf ), plusieurs
jours furent necessaires pour quelle achevat de se remembrer, tant lavaient
bousculee ma longue periode dinconscience et les diverses drogues dont jetais
sature. (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 bour-
geois as opposed to revolutionary identity. The somnolent Michel Leiris
rstly becomes a couple of highly snobbish English writers, one male,
one female, with whom he identies 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 Friche (described as Tante Lise in LAge dhomme) who specialized
in heavy, ornate roles such as Salome, Elektra, Carmen and Tosca. What
these wholly bourgeois and superannuated couples reveal to Leiris is the
Texts and contexts
pre-history of his revolutionary project, one that contradicts architec-
turally, ideologically and affectively the conscious identity of a committed
poet towards which he had striven:
Ce quils portaient ainsi comme une richesse de contrebande, ce netait pas la

vie artiste telle que jai pu limaginer lorsque jai pris a coeur detre un poete,
mais un pan beaucoup plus archaque de ma vie vecue: celui qui, par-dela les
splendeurs dont mavaient primitivement ebahi le pont Alexandre III (comme
dore sur tranche) et le carosse du comte de Chambord (rutilant a legal du nom
de son royal proprietaire), me permit dentrevoir ce monde a part que le petit
mot art sert a poser comme un tout, bien quinapte a resumer la fantastique
diversite 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 datonie et de repli to which his phantoms have
now led him. He is capable of recording more brutally than ever the socio-
historical events that condition his existence (Crise au Laos. Tentative
de debarquement contre-revolutionnaire a Cuba. Putsch militaire en
Algerie, heureusement avorte apres menace de son extension a la France.
(Fi )) but can no longer react feverishly as though he were at the centre.
Instead, the sense of indifference and withdrawal leads Leiris to focus
on the most immediate and highly cultural form of discursive formation
sustaining his identity, a reection back on the positionality of play: that
is, on the rule of the game of autobiography itself.

Easter in Kumasi, Sunday in Peking: Leiris begins section of Fibrilles
by comparing two dramatic and ultimately religious rituals, whose al-
ternative structures of history have offered him the possibility of going
beyond the connes of the self in a shamanistic or scientic way. Of the
latter, Chinese experience, Leiris now judges MarxismLeninism to be a
true religion in terms of the liberating capacity of its messianism, and a
dangerous mysticism to the degree to which it is founded on a dogmatic
metaphysics of pure reason and economic positivism. What emerges
above all from this next stage of depassement is Leiriss perception of time
itself, as his ability to view these periods from which he now feels disen-
gaged leaves him, rather like the narrator near the end of A la recherche du
temps perdu, situe dans le temps mais deja hors du temps (Fi ). Moving
up and out of the underworld of the previous section, he emerges onto
a metatextual plane from which he openly analyses the professional
morality that has (fallaciously) attempted to unir les deux cotes en-
tre lesquels je me sens partage, formuler une regle dor qui serait en
meme temps art poetique et savoir-vivre (Fi ). This analysis is antici-
pated by the reiteration (Fi , , ) of key phrases used in section
(Fi , , ) to relocate Leiriss project within the structure of revolution,
and in itself obviously represents a further stage in the endless spiral of au-
tobiographical reection. But Leiriss analysis of this morale de la parole
(Fi ) reveals the contradiction in terms involved in seeking to es-
tablish and full a programme of poetic transcendence, when the latter
necessarily must exceed recuperation. What emerges from the taboos
or rules which he lists and tests at the end of Fibrilles, therefore, is at
best a structural rather than transcendental conception: quelque chose
comme le gros oeuvre dun art de lautobiographie (Fi ). Section
of Fibrilles concludes, then, with a double self-denition, wherein Leiris
attempts and fails to nd the rule of the game of the autobiographers
moral position but simultaneously characterizes this failure as the shell
or structural outline of the genre of autobiography. This works in tan-
dem with the following, nal sections closing observations, which are
that there is no rule (Fi ), but that there is time (Fi ). Together,
these metatextual statements, which at the close of Fibrilles underline
the very problem of closure, point to the highly signicant approach of
Frele Bruit, a volume that acts primarily as an open comment on the archi-
tecture and operational procedures of autobiography as an enunciative
modality.
F R E L E B R U I T
It is signicant that the provisional title, Fibules, was dropped in favour

of the more modest Frele Bruit: taking its cue from Fibrilless conclusion
that it is futile to search for the rule of the game, Frele 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: re, 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
Texts and contexts
ethical decision to accepter des choses (FB ) and the poetic decision
to opt for une maniere plus incisive: explosion daphorismes, phrases
ou petits groupes de phrases qui disent beaucoup en peu de mots et
maintiennent a lincandescence la matiere mise en oeuvre (FB ). If
the philosophical structure of Fourbis and Fibrilles owes most to Hegelian
marxism, the philosopher of Frele Bruits table rase is above all Nietzsche:
Comme nitchevo, le nom de Nietzsche fait songer a une table rase dun ordre
assez particulier: . . . une totale mise a ras, an quil ne reste pas pierre sur pierre
et que la phrase soit nette pour tout recommencer. (FB )
Frele Bruits rebeginning is therefore designed to be yet another reread-

ing of Biffuress opening pages. Instead of displaying an original tension
between language and world, Frele Bruit recognizes that merveilleux,
poesie, amour, nexistent que si je mouvre, sans marchandage, a quelque
chose evenement, etre vivant, objet, image, idee que mon desir
dillimite coiffe dune aureole durable ou momentanee (FB ). The
key word here is merveilleux, which is discussed at length in the books
largest section (FB ). Instead of seeking to achieve authenticity
by forging intellectual links between poetics and ethics, Leiris indi-
cates how Frele Bruit will record those happy points of rapprochement be-
tween the merveilleux inscrit dans les evenements and the merveilleux
which is cree par limagination. This looser rule of the game allows
Frele Bruit to register a multiplicity of miraculous moments in the real
world: merveilleux a letat brut, merveilleux distille . . . Merveilleux a
couper bras et jambes, merveilleux sans virulence . . . Merveilleux ab-
solu, . . . 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 echelle . . . , et qui
nest donc merveille que dans le reve que jen 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 quil y ait pleinement , [quun] autre vive
lexperience avec moi . . . Que je fasse partie dune collectivite 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 mans dying words in alterna-
tive styles: style Rigaut, style bravache, style Harpagon, style courtois, and so on),
and even words beginning with particular letters, or indicating a com-
mon material (literally, in the case of the terms homespun, handwoven,
thornproof , sharkskin and herringbone). Interspersed with these for-
mal 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 Lenins dictum about getting ones 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, legende, realite (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 nal volume of La Regle du jeu gradually emerges from a slow conver-
gence of scenes: Faust, Don Juan, the gates of Hell, Dresden, Paracelsus,
une espece de diable vert [qui] crache le feu, and so on. And the general
nature of such afliations also means that the three previous volumes of
La Regle du jeu need not be denigrated, but instead can be vaguely inte-
grated into Frele Bruits endorsement of poetry and revolution ( Poesie,
Revolution: 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 specic examples of this accommodating approach at
work comes when Leiris analyses a single phrase from one of his dreams:
Ici fruit a la tete se dit: la on senlise (FB ). It is signicant that three
interpretations are proposed. The rst privileges the inner life of the im-
mortal 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 tete) which take shape in the form of words
(se dit) speak of an external site (la) where the subject is threatened (la on
senlise). But the shortcomings of this interpretation are soon revealed.
According to Leiris, since fruit a la tete se dit, the reexive nature of
the verb equates the ici, interpreted as the inner sanctum of the self,
with the la, any external threat, and therefore allows them to be inter-
changeable. The rst 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
Texts and contexts
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 (la), and the eld
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 Lacans 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 denition, then, resulting from a dissatisfac-
tion 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 nal 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 in-
ertia. On the contrary, it still operates as a form of depassement, for it
preserves and overcomes the nominalist, realist and revolutionary for-
mations of identity in the three previous volumes. But there is a greater
concentration on and enjoyment of the autobiographical process of struc-
turation as opposed to the synthesizing goal of a total autobiography as
product. Enjoyment, indeed, very much comes to the fore in this nal
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 to-
tality has become a much more generous and affectionate space which
still incorporates the dialectical process (Mais je dois, une fois de plus,
biffer apres avoir avance (FB )) but has deliberately moved autobi-
ography beyond a bitter and closed logic of conict. It is perhaps in
this sense that Sartre and Nietzsche are combined in a closing volume
that seeks to nd the total harmony linking art, legend and reality in
a non-synthetic manner. From the nominalist mysteries of Biffures right
through to Frele Bruits closing reference to what has not been, or could
not be, presented, the autobiography remains, to use Sartres 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 Frele Bruit
belie its real importance, therefore. On the level of signifying form rather
than signied content, it stands as a tting nal exemplum of the play
of difference which has remained the place of subjectivity throughout
La Regle 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 autobiographys 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 au-
tobiographers 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 Regle du jeu and the supratextual soli-
tude deriving from the knowledge of mortality, in the designedly modest
and unnished nature of the posthumous Journal.

On rst reading, Leiriss posthumously published Journal re-

sembles 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 conrmation and destabilization,
a lulling deja 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 encoun-
tered; the chronology of our Leiris is suddenly contradicted by Leiriss
most intimate voice. Thus, for example, we encounter the Fourbiss
Khadidja at the physical rather than textual moment of her meeting, in
( J ); or we nd that the Dernieres paroles section of the valedic-
tory Frele Bruit of (FB ) was in fact written in ( J ). Ones
rst reaction, I feel, is unconsciously to neutralize this potentially disrup-
tive effect. Rather than opt for estrangement, so allowing the Journal to
overturn Leiris and become the matrix of a somehow new and orig-
inal reading, the instinct is surely to absorb the journals 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 unnished. Thus we read at one point:
Espece de mot dauteur, comme jen ai malheureusement laisse glisser

quelques-uns dans ce journal, en principe non destine a la publication, mais
dont je compte pourtant quil paratra post mortem (--). En verite, et cest
la mon excuse, ce journal est devenu une espece de fourre-tout, contenant a
cote de notes de journal au sens strict, des notes de travail: marginalia, projets,
idees a developper eventuellement, etc. (--). ( J ).
Typically, this description conrms the Journal as preliminary or sup-

plementary, rather than original or essential, through its technique and
context as well as its content. For this self-description comes belatedly

(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 jour-
nal 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 fties and
early sixties) not as the magnicently pure impulse of a Fibrilles, say,
but as a tentative testing of possibilities that almost inevitably demands
qualication 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 encapsu-
lating title,) its general architecture and dynamics, which are those of
a non-nite 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 denitively
takes place anywhere in Leiris, and that a dynamic of instability produc-
tively 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 es-
tablished Leiris (rather like the way in which after only twenty pages
the journal offers a coup dil retrospectif ( J )). The content of
Leiris is for evermore changed with the journals intimate additions or
exclusions. The evolution of Leiris is shifted by the new chronologi-
cal relations revealed. The ofcial 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 perfunc-
tory 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 journals sporadic existence in the present, and the
Texts and contexts
precedence this often gives solely to self-absorption or banality over what
proves to be of historical signicance. 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 in-
teraction 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, Leiriss 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 journals blurring of generic boundaries, with its
undifferentiating resemblance to a diary, an ethnographers notebook,
a prototype autobiography and a simple scrapbook, together with its
uncertain, unnished and posthumous message and the ambiguous sta-
tus which this creates for any supposed addressee, return the patiently
crafted resolutions of the Leirisian uvre at once to the massive meli-melo
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 ac-
complished, since it does not rm up the distinction between interiority
and exteriority: within the volume, identities remain caught in the ebb
and ow of intimacy and exteriorization; in the context of the whole of
Leiriss output, the text is equally undifferentiated, acting as the germi-
nating 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 im-
plicit in Leiriss resolutions and in his critical reception which the Journals
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-nality. It lacks the resolute entelechy which, in Alain Girards
words, would confer on an intimate work son ni et son eclat. 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: Nest-il pas outrecuidant de se regarder comme
un homme ni quand, en fait, on na jamais vraiment commence?
( J ). As the quotation suggests, the only denite 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 unrened or unnished: as Jamins presentation notes ( J ),
the journals 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 rst 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 Aragons death, Leiris notes of
that writers committed hope: il ny a pas eu delite a une idee, mais
delite a une eglise (dont pourrait-on dire mechamment il avait besoin
pour sa gloire). ( J ); and he muses the following year: Je puis dire
que jadis jesperais. Mais quest-ce que j esperais? Je ne saurais le
dire . . . Or je serais incapable de dire ce quautrefois jai attendu au juste
du surrealisme non plus que, plus tard, de lexistentialisme ( 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 corre-
spondences ( 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, impermeable
degoutant, deuxieme bac and revelation erotique ( J ). Later,
as this resistance to the temptations of historical schemata nds its way
into Leiriss own productions, the Journal reects an interest in non-nite
artistic forms: opera buffa, happenings, free jazz ( J ); these exam-
ples, from , show Leiriss concern to follow the authentic artistic
form that accommodates the political mess of May . The jour-
nal 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-nite structure. And in a related manner, we
can observe in Leiriss work as a whole how this non-totalizing approach
belatedly becomes exemplary, such that from having been somewhat dis-
missively referred to in Biffures as an album de souvenirs, keepsake, bien
plutot que journal ou recueil de pensees (Bi ), the Journals reactive
Texts and contexts
nature becomes the model for Frele Bruits deliberately inconclusive con-
clusion to La Regle du jeu. The journals non-nality is, then, a massive
conrmation 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 hetero-
geneity does, of course, result in one overriding sense of nality: the
possibility of non-being. I discuss later how Leiriss autobiography is fun-
damentally 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 journals standard procedure of bearing personal witness to chrono-
logical 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 Leiriss generation, occasionally climaxes in a frenzied simul-
taneity (six deaths on page , a further six on page ). The violence
of the listing reects the anguish with which his colleagues disappearance
places his wife and himself en premiere ligne ou (comme on dit aussi)
aux premieres 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
matiere a necrologie ( J ). That moment in particular will deploy
the technical effacement which lies at the centre of Leiriss autobio-
graphical practice: Mourir, cest voir ou plutot ne pas voir biffe
dun [coup] trait de plume tout ce quon croyait avoir vecu. ( J ).
In a further complication, the defeat of technique for Leiris comes to
describe not only the inevitable advent of death but the ultimate indi-
cator 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, tres exactement,
tout ce qui se situe en dehors de la sphere de la vie utile, autrement
dit: tout ce sur quoi les techniques qui sapprennent nont pas de prise
( J ). Non-being therefore describes the rule of the game, an idea which
Leiris gures geometrically and metatextually by repeatedly referring to
Sir Thomas Brownes 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
Brownes line: Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the
mortal right-lined circle must conclude and shut up all. Notwithstanding
Leiriss loose rendering of it, it is telling that the author of Glossaire should
have retained the moment when Browne is alluding to the literally in-
scribed character of death (namely the Greek letter theta, ), so-called
by Browne since it is the rst letter of thanatos. Later, in the year of Biffures
publication, Leiris retrospectively spells out the phenomenological sig-
nicance of this mortal circle for his whole work:
Quelquefois, je regarde quelle epaisseur de pages separe le point ou jen suis,

dans ce cahier, du fragment de traduction des Hydriotaphia que javais copie
a la n quand je ne le destinais pas encore a la tenue dun journal intime.
Caractere, bien entendu! symbolique quont pris pour moi ces pages consacrees
maintenant aux pierres tombales gurent dans ce qui constitue maintenant les
derniers feuillets dun cahier ou sont notes, au jour le jour, des details de ma
vie: il semblerait que l epaisseur de pages qui men separe encore est la mesure
exacte du temps qui me reste a vivre. ( J ).
If the notation of this consciousness is the writers traditional victory

over mortality, the brute interruption of deaths into this text, of which
Zettes is the most dramatic ( J ), shatters the illusion of poetic
sublation. The thematic and formal non-death around which the jour-
nal revolves makes Leiris essential only in his unnishedness. This is
something which Leiris occasionally tries to make emblematic of an au-
thentic existence, as in the excited narration of the liberation of Paris, or
when justifying his affair with Lena on the grounds that his life is toute
construite, tracee, xee. Droit vers le marecage 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 denitive
virile or artistic denition. Instead, as we have noted, Leiris is an un-
resolved if narratologically necessary effect of the journals 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 uvre. 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
speechact theory, was here placed in abeyance by the intervallic con-
struction and agonistic judgement of Leiris. At least three laws of
communication were appealed to by specic 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 rst is essential to the
Texts and contexts
humanist vision, the second to speechact 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 uvre navait pas ete leur but unique. Elle nepuise
pas a leurs yeux leur secret, quils brulent de decouvrir enn et de livrer au de-
hors, comme si leurs autres ecrits ne portaient pas un temoignage sufsant deux-
memes, . . . non pas materiaux pour un travail futur, mais eclairs qui passent,
susceptibles dapporter la revelation attendue.
Jean Rousset, in a well-known book on Le Lecteur intime. De Balzac au
journal asserts that la clause du secret gure explicitement . . . dans lacte
qui ouvre ou scande le journal. Secrecy is indeed key to Leiriss general
interests, providing a logical link between his autobiographical revela-
tions, his ethnographic examination of ritual and secret language, his
enthusiasm for the work of Rousset, his favourite operas, and even his
love of bullghting. But it is presented differently by a range of crit-
ics. At one extreme, Blanchot views this dimension of Leiriss work as a
form of Orphic phenomenology: il y a quelque chose a dire quon ne
peut pas dire . . . , une lacune, un vide, une region qui ne supporte pas la
lumiere parce que sa nature est de ne pouvoir etre eclairee: secret sans
secret dont le sceau rompu est le mutisme meme. 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, Francois 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
promiscuite lobligation de vivre avec soi-meme. Alors, elles ecrivent des
autobiographies pour forcer les secrets de ce partenaire tres intime, qui
les incommode et les intrigue. Cetait la principale occupation de Michel
Leiris. For Bott, then, the Journals secret du secret is its own evasive
heart, Leiriss unisolatable sense of self-identity. At the opposite extreme
to this notion of a blind secret of becoming, the journalistic presenta-
tion of the Journals scandalous content is typied by Maurice Nadeau
in Quinzaine litteraire:
Lui, qui, publiquement, avait pris le parti de tout dire, ne reculant pas devant
limpudeur, non seulement naurait pas tout dit, mais aurait reserve pour la
posterite des secrets, qui ne pouvaient quetre inavouables.
The unspeakable secrets in this reading were the hitherto deliberately
withheld facts that Leiris had had an affair with Helene Gordon (named
Lena in the Journal, no doubt after the heroine of Conrads Victory;
critics enjoyed noting the homophonic relation between Gordon, Dogon
and Godon, the last being the maiden name of Leiriss 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 char-
acterize Leiris as lhomme du secret discret. The term discretion itself
acts here discretely, indicating both middle-class mores and underlying
patterns. Thus Jamin calls Leiris quelquun de profondement correct
and Zettes 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 lafrmation 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 leau (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 Presentation that Zette was illegitimate ( J ).
Noting that Leiris nowhere ever revealed this fact, that the dissimula-
tion was des lors endossee et interiorisee ( J ), he then speculates that
this interiorized secret generated Leiriss entire interest in totemic rela-
tions 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 rstly 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 rst 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 Leiriss books are
blanchis, amidonnes, issus de pages raturees, biffees, froisees, ecrites dans
sa chambre ( J ). The huge charge, elegantly put, is that Leiriss work
is fundamentally a whitewash. As Leiriss literary executor, Jamins use
of the logic of the secret is crucial. His immediate ethnographic analysis
exploits social taboo and structural signication in order to present the
Journal as a fundamentally important text, one that nurtures narrative
for the mature autobiographies but also and more radically inuences
their material and methodologies through the productive displacement
of its repressed secrets. On a less direct level, though, Jamin does two
Texts and contexts
further things. In glossing la clause du secret which he himself has sup-
plied (he readily afrms in the interview that ce journal est tout sauf
un journal de confessions ou daveux. Point de revelations 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 afrms his own pertinence in the face of
what would otherwise be a journal intimes nullication of his signicance.
Secondly, in completing a right-hand/left-hand ethnographic structura-
tion of Leiriss social identity (one which Leiris himself in other contexts
might well have produced) by exposing the fact of Zettes illegitimacy,
he encourages the heterosexual personication 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 norma-
tive and transgressive practices become gendered (and banalized) as the
difference between marriage (Zettes secret) and adultery (here Lenas
secret). Jamin then further develops this heterosexual model by alle-
gorizing the movements and locations of Leiriss intimate writings as a
form of bedroom farce. These two self-preservatory desires inherent in
the Journals 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 cest a peu pres entendu
entre nous), que ce cahier lui est destine, comme une sorte de testament.
Que va-t-il en resulter quant a sa redaction? ( J ). It is signicant,
if understandable, that these admissions are prompted by periods of
crisis involving absence and possible annihilation. For as Leiriss 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, Leiriss journal also actively absented her in order to full
its own drive. As Jamin tells us, the journal does not speak of Zettes
illegitimacy and was never read by her. In keeping with the nature
of a drive, this predication of the subject on the absentication of the
female other is a general feature of Leiriss work rather than a particular
treatment of Zette. One is reminded of the statement in LAge dhomme:
Je madresse ici a cette femme uniquement parce quelle est absente
(a qui ecrirait-on sinon a une personne absente?) (AH ). The probable
object of this observation the woman called Kay in LAge dhomme and
Daisy S . . . in the Journal is in fact confused in Leiriss dreams with
Zette ( J ). Nor is his wife immune to the mythological abstractions
performed on real women most clearly in LAge dhomme. As the journal
bluntly puts it: Quand je suis avec Z[ette], je la reduis automatiquement
au plan social. Seul, elle me devient mythologique ( J ).
This ambiguous treatment of the supposed main addressee was pre-
served, perhaps unwittingly, by certain critical reactions. I have noted
how it was Jamin who exposed Zettes illegitimacy and, as it were, il-
literacy. 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 jour-
nal 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 temoin de vie avec qui il
va, une annee, en , lannee inondee du nom de Lena, jusqua cette
mechancete quil nomme la mechancete de limpuissance. Else-
where, in more elegiac tone, this association with impotence is replaced
by one with death: He never failed to address himself to Louise, his rst
destinataire [addressee], whose recent death had divided her from a work
which would thereafter be regarded as a longue lettre a cette coutumiere
et tendre condente, sa compagne au clair regard. These character-
istics duplicate the ambiguities of Leiriss designation. Both Leiris and
the critics isolate Zettes function in order to establish a reading relation
for themselves. To this end, both associate her with silence, incommunicabil-
ity, failure and death. And, in a subtle reactive twist, the process whereby
Leiris writes by preserving and annulling Zettes 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, dinner-
table 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 Bonapartes reaction to LAfrique fantome ( J ).
A series of addressees, such as Jouhandeau, Bataille, Colette Peignot,
Sartre, and so on, provide the necessary pretext for his artistic and polit-
ical reappraisals. In more general vein, he progressively reviews surreal-
ism ( J ), ethnography ( J ) and existentialism ( J , ) in
order to clarify and adjust his own position. Grammatical recognition of
Texts and contexts
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 in-
corporation of whole sections of books by other authors which obviously
offer an oblique portrait of Leiris ( J ). Lastly, the partial ebauches
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 inuence of many addressees deep
within the journals private testimony. They personify, in fact, the rituals
of destination or address, to adapt Calle-Grubers critique of Rousset,
that precondition the journal as writing, and without which Leiris would
not be able to dene any interiority or formulate any secret clause.
It is remarkable how these characterizations of the Journals mode
of communication and reserve are all gendered and indeed heterosex-
ualized. They are typied by another review in Magazine litteraire, 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 journals 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 facon dont elle est citee dans la proximite immediate
des autres relations feminines de son mari laisse supposer quelle nen
ignorait rien. Such engendering is deeply cultural rather than simply
conspiratorial. This is presumably the reason why, at a more abstract
level, Beatrice Didier can describe the journal intime as a lieu du replie-
ment sur soi, du refus de lexogamie, . . . un univers incestueux (p. ),
adding that the writer is protege dans cette prison matricielle (p. )
which nurtures a vocation that is admirablement feconde (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 Lena 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 identication. The object of
his attentions, Lena, will act as accomplice in his attempt to escape
linanite dune 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
coyness (Sera-ce . . . , dont je ne sais pas encore si cest quelquun de bien
ou mal? ( J )) and subsequent enthusiasm: Lena et sa gate. Lena et sa
tristesse. Lena et sa frivolite. Lena et son mari. Lena et ses amis. Lena et ses
amours. Lena et son ennui. Lena et ses impossibilites ( J ). A crucial
feature of this passionate resolution for Leiris is the wilful overturning
of his intellectual and aesthetic standards: he sheepishly notes that Lena
does not like Nerval, adding sans doute est-ce une lecon et dois-je la
mediter ( J ); conversely, she does like Peguy and Anatole France
( J ), Hamsun, Hemingway and Le Grand Meaulnes ( J ). It is telling
in this context that the affairs duration is demarcated by Leiriss own
books, beginning in the aftermath of LAfrique fantome and concluding
with the start of LAge dhommes production ( J ). Taken together,
these details indicate how the desired destiny to be a real rather than a
reexive man is itself part of a long literary process of self-construction.
Far from representing the dissolution of crafted introspection, Lena is
one point in a play of positions running from Louise to Lena, 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 Lena is therefore best read not as an isolatable ex-
treme 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 intro-
spection and achieve authentic exteriorization. (Attempting to do so via
a bourgeois affair and a secret diary also reects 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 ex-
pression in the journals entries for the period surrounding the second
world war, where Leiris manages to incorporate problems encountered
in his secret relationships with Zette and Lena into more open exis-
tential and aesthetic concerns. Thus Leiriss 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 dagression: incapable de prendre une femme . . .
A cause de ce manque de virilite, je ne peux meme plus ecrire.
Comment Le Rouge et le Noir me montre avec acuite mon erreur: dans lamour
jai toujours cherche le bonheur, jamais la puissance et la domination. Jai
Texts and contexts
toujours recherche un etat dans lequel comfortablement minstaller, jamais une
aventure, un drame, un acte.
Cest a cause de ce manque de courage que je me meprise. ( J )
The following affair with Lena will therefore hopefully ood his life with
a sense of the sacred, helping him to overcome the fear of death and
so emerge from himself. As Leiris clearly states: Cest donc entre ce
double processus de repulsion et dattirance que se joue tout le drame
( J ). This determination explains the proto-existentialist character-
ization of the affair: the irruption of Lenas physical presence into his
cerebral world, his (literary) desire to become a grand costaud genre
Hemingway, his Roquentin-like reections:
Je ne prendrai pas dautre demi de cette biere francaise que je naime pas. Ce
quil faut maintenant cest appeler le garcon, payer, me lever, partir. Demain
ou quelque autre jour si demain je ne puis pas jirai dans un autre cafe et je
continuerai. Puis, il y aura Lena qui rentrera. A ce moment tout se decidera et
je saurai peut-etre enn si pour toujours je dois me comparer a une quelconque
bestiole prisonniere dun mesquin parallelepipede de verre. ( J )
From this point on until , apprehensions of war, which mark the

beginning and end of each year in the journal, combine with a devel-
oping programme of artistic authenticity, of which Picassos ( J ) and
Peignots ( J ) approach to poetry are the models. The result is a new
base de representation, a virile self-image whose performance is the
antidote to the elevation of the inner world by surrealism and psycho-
analysis ( J ). This heroic myth, which recognizes the truth of
such expressions as ne pas bander and ne pas avoir de couilles
( J ) will arrest Leiriss devirilization (Muscles mous, tete 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. Batailles position is resumed as Ce que jai toujours compte pour
lessentiel releve de ma vie interieure; je nai pas a me soucier de ce qui est
exterieur a moi (sic) , against which Leiris argues: quoi quen disent les
B[ataille], et autres partisans dune mystique, poetique ou non, mais a
coup sur de tout repos je suis decide a me raidir ( J ). These
Sartrean and sexual terminologies achieve their nest hour in the Liber-
ation period, where Leiriss entry, written up later, reects in its eventful
and extroverted narration the living-out of the act and the dissipation of
intellectual repli. He adds the telling postscript:
Retombe, avec la Liberation, dans mon marasme dautrefois. A croire que ceux
qui disent que les nevropathes se sont mieux portes pendant les quatre annees
doccupation, ont raison. ( J )
If we really need to place the domestic secrets known as Louise and Lena
in this larger context of the attempt to achieve (virile) exteriorization, it
is equally necessary for us to examine what has been left interiorized
within their heterosexual colouring. Jean Jamin himself provides the
pretext for this investigation by revealing the apparently formative in-
uence of Melvilles Pierre, a translation of which Zette had sent to him
in , during his mobilization in Beni-Ounif. His claim, supposedly
substantiated in letters to his wife, is that the novel gave Leiris an inspir-
ing literary model for an oblique, structural exposure in Biffures of Zettes
secret status. It is certainly true that Pierre presents complex familial rela-
tions. The novel concerns Pierre Glendinning, and his peculiar dealings
with women: his mother, with whom on the linguistic level he entertains
a rather incestuous relationship; his illegitimate sister, Isabel, whom he
passes off as his wife; and his original ancee Lucy, who scandalously
moves in with Pierre and Isabel. In addition, the novel offers much
that could be viewed as typically Leirisian: an obsession with decipher-
ment, with social mores and correctness, with the signifying properties
of words and names (p. ), with the power of the written word in how-
ever insignicant a form (pp. ), with the mystery and doubling of
representation (pp. ).
What has been masked in this comparison, however, is the much more
profound analogy of a secret that remains. It has been convincingly argued
that the ostensible deciphering of the bizarrely heterosexual complexities
of Pierres storyline is in itself an encrypting of the homosexual. In the
words of James Creech: In Pierre, homosexuality is explored from the
perverse perspective of its impossible place, and thus its closeted space.
In other words, its cryptology is indeed related to a sexual secret, one
which logically is occluded by the texts stiing drama. This elaborate
encrypting recalls in turn the work of Raymond Roussel, one of Leiriss
acknowledged mentors. According to Foucault, who constantly empha-
sizes the link between Roussel and Leiris and argues at one point that the
latter sought to preserve the formers work by encoding it in his own as
well as writing about it, the process employed by Roussel transformed
what is revealed into an enigma. The link allows us to reinforce this
different view of the Journals intimacy: like Comment jai ecrit certains de
mes livres, the Journal can be viewed as secret and posthumous, hiding as
Texts and contexts
much as it reveals, in the specic context of homotextuality. In Foucaults
words: Perhaps beneath the process revealed in this last text, another
set of laws governs even more secretly and in a completely unforeseen
way . . . , telling a kind of salutary lie a partial truth, which signies
that one must look further and in greater depth (pp. ). And in the
Postscript to the English-language edition, he adds: Between cryptogra-
phy and sexuality there is certainly a direct relationship (p. ), afrm-
ing that (sexual) life and work are related not because the latter translates
the former but because the former is part of the latter: The work is more
than the work: the subject who is writing is part of the work (p. ).
Such insights bring home how concerted cultural forces have pre-
sented the Journal as implicitly heterosexual. Leiris himself has con-
tributed, somewhat obsessively, to this resolution. In the process, what
has become ignored is the presence of the homosexual and the effect of
the homographic in the totality of his work. It is especially important to
investigate such inuence in the context of the Journal, where the expo-
sure of the secrets dictating Leiriss writing has reinforced the secrecy of
a constituent homographesis. The work of homographesis has been ex-
plained by Lee Edelman, who uses the term to denote relations between
representations of gay male sexuality and the logics and anxieties of
representation as such. Believing that sexuality is constituted through
operations as much rhetorical as psychological (p. xiv), Edelman concen-
trates on homosexualitys textual or semiotic overdetermination. As with
any gural logic, this results in metaphoric and metonymic manifesta-
tions. For Edelman, these are reductive and deconstructive respectively:
in the former, homosexuality is essentialized as secondary, sterile and
parasitic in relation to heterosexualized totalization; in the latter, the
desire-generated metonymy which emerges out of such a xed system
of identity results in homosexuality coming to signify the potential per-
meability of every sexual signier and by extension, of every signier
as such (p. ). The term homographesis therefore indicates the work of a
hermeneutics of suspicion that resists the silent hardening of sexually
contingent connections into essential equivalences (p. ) and logically
de-scribes itself in the very moment of its inscription (p. ).
While such an operation resembles in general Leiriss biffural logic, a
close attention to the specic dimension of homographesis in the Journal
brings out at once how the rhetorical and formalist mechanism of secre-
tion and exposure deployed by Leiris and critics is propelled in part by
the homographic differance that remains secreted but inaccessible inside
the text.
The Journals literal beginning is a secret, one whose existence and
supposed content provide the pretext for the initial act of exposure. After
the opening words [Sans doute] ( J ), which are actually those of
Jamin, we are referred at once to the rst of endnotes also by Jamin.
This one informs us that Leiris tore out the rst pages of manuscript
number one, and erased (biffees) the subsequent ve lines to such a
degree that they became indechiffrables, de sorte quil nest possible de
dater precisement le commencement de ce journal ( J ). By way of
elucidation, Jamin refers to the journal entry for February and
to page of Fourbis, from which he extracts that the entries were later
excised since Leiris considered their concern with hermetic science to be
trop betes. As Jamin himself notes, though, the reference to alchemy
in Fourbis simply prefaces the exact recollection of another, this time
unexpurgated, journal entry, originally dated October :
Notre mort est liee a la dualite des sexes. Un homme qui serait a la fois
male et femelle, et capable de se reproduire seul, ne mourait pas, son ame se
transmettant sans melange a sa posterite.
La haine instinctive que les sexes ont lun pour lautre vient peut-etre de la
connaissance obscure de ce fait que la mortalite est due a la differentiation des
sexes. Rancune violente, balancee par la tendance a lunite seul chiffre de
vie quils tentent de satisfaire par le cot. ( J )
We can see that the entrys real concern is with the inevitable death
caused by heterosexual recognition and activity, the instinctive hatred
which this obscure knowledge produces, and the specic magical ideal
of total sexual union within one mans body. Turning now to the journals
entry, we nd again that an attendance to the whole passage brings
out the nature of the concern later dismissed as stupid. Leiris remarks
that he has been to see the Albert Lewis lm version of Dorian Gray for
the second time in as many days, adds that he read the book (together
with A rebours) around , and then recalls that the stupid pages had
noted avec, bien entendu, beaucoup de vanite, que je me conduisais
ou tendais a me conduire a legard de mes amis comme Dorian Gray a
legard de Sibyl Vane ( J ). To this he adds a complex literary context:
Cote Dorian Gray de tout un aspect de Jouhandeau: Ximenes Malinjoude, LAmateur
dimprudence, Astaroth. Cf., egalement, ce que Proust dit du cote Haroun al-
Rachid de Charlus, quant a son noctambulisme special. Tout ceci, remontant
au prince Rodolphe des Mysteres de Paris et meme a Restif de la Bretonne.
The ostensible link between these disparate writers is arguably a rened
individuals semi-detached observation of society, but once we add to this
Texts and contexts
ad-hoc tradition the entry, the sexual charge within each disjunc-
tion clearly emerges. This ceases to be incidental when Leiris concludes
the entry by placing Biffures in the tradition thus created: Les Biffures en
tant que portrait de Dorian Gray peint par lui-meme et qui ne serait pas
moyen de garder sa jeunesse. So the journals repressed beginning now
returns, via a regressing (remontant) alternative canon that many would
view as a homotextual mapping, in order to offer up a previously unac-
knowledged model for Biffuress self-portrait. Between this new text, and
Jamins proposed model, Pierre, of course, the link is the cryptography of
a homosexual secret. Given the intricate nature of Leiriss act of secretion
and exposure here (indirectly revealing repressed references in a secret
diary to private links to oblique representations) and the fact that it has
not been commented, it is worth pursuing in part this cote Dorian Gray.
It is fair to say that, of the writers cited by Leiris, Jouhandeau is the
least canonic. He merits a passing reference in the most recent histories
of literature in French; while a cursory glance at those works which
these Histories superseded shows that this present passivity is in part the
result of a more knowing exclusion. The work of Henri Peyre, for ex-
ample, has been instrumental in the growing acceptance by the canon of
the centrality of the literature of sincerity. His French Novelists of Today,
one of the rst and most inuential assessments of the contemporary
eld produced after the war, and also largely contemporary in its re-
visions with the central volumes of La Regle du jeu, places Jouhandeau
in the negative category of unclassiable outsiders (p. ). Once this
seemingly innocent view is adumbrated, however, an astounding ho-
mophobia emerges. Jouhandeau is called one of those demented and
ranting extremists (p. ) who display the exhibitionism which delights
[. . .] Catholics [. . .] dwelling in Sodom (p. ). Peyre here obviously
derives satisfaction from subjecting Jouhandeaus mystique de lenfer
to a professorial nal judgement. More generally, it is instructive for us
to recall that canons by their institutionalized nature are constructed in
large measure out of such determined biffures. But this concerted efface-
ment makes Jouhandeaus position at the head of Leiriss list all the more
signicant. It is easy to trace both Jouhandeaus formative presence in
Leiriss life up to the production of LAge dhomme, and Leiriss determined
effacement of this mystique thereafter from his self-representations. In
other words, Leiris concurs with the critical obliteration of Jouhandeau,
as part of a process of autobiographical orthodoxy. We can argue, then,
that Jouhandeaus disappearance represents a more authentic level of
secrecy, one to which the Journal seems actively dedicated. As a signier
of homographic difference, Jouhandeau reveals an aim which runs con-
trary to that of an autobiographers supposedly artless journal intime but
precisely forms part of the prefatory claim in The Picture of Dorian Gray,
namely [t]o reveal art and conceal the artist.
The largest block of references to Jouhandeau offers an oblique record
of an intimate relationship that reached an intense point between March
and July . At their most enthusiastic, Leiriss allusions become mys-
tical, lyrical and poetic:
Mercredi a jeudi mars
Nuit chez Jouhandeau. Le starets (Pere Laberthonniere).
Quand nous levons la tete, le ciel nous bande les yeux (Andre Breton).
( J ).
The relationship is brief and to the death. The following days regis-
ter: Purete de la haine ( J ), Le meurtre spirituel ( J ), Liens de
linimitie ( J ), and Jouhandeau vaincu: il me voit en assassin ( J ).
Its physical climax occurs at the end of March, an event marked in the
journal only by a row of dots (inserted by Jamin) indicating that the
page of the original cahier had been ripped out by Leiris. This is sim-
ply the least subtle manifestation of a biffure which Leiris has by this
stage already brought into play. Viewed negatively, it shows that Leiris
attempts almost at once to erase or disperse Jouhandeaus homosexual
presence. Read more positively, it is one of many gestures manifest-
ing how Jouhandeau becomes an inuential homographic signier in
Leiriss self-construction.
Pursuing the negative side rst, it is easy to reconstruct the repressed
homosexual event. Leiris provides a clue in a note written at the
beginning of his analysis with Borel:
La gene dont je me plains est apparue sous forme de gene physique (douleur
et contraction anormale dun des testicules) apres une aventure dordre
pederastique relatee dans le cahier jaune (n mars-debut avril ). ( J ).
This detail is also mentioned in the closing sections of LAge dhomme. Leiris
explains here that his testicular pain (which he claims to be a material
source of psychological impotence resulting in almost no sexual relations
with women) arose a la suite dune grande fatigue, apres plusieurs nu-
its presque blanches passees a vaticiner sur un plan indecis entre la
passion, le mysticisme et le lyrisme avec lami homosexuel dont jai
parle a propos des diverses incarnations de Judith (AH ). This in
turn refers us back to the scene where Leiris encounters a tart in a bar
Texts and contexts
where he was drinking en compagnie dun ami plus age et pederaste
(AH ). A violent scene ensues during which the companion scratches
the womans face, following which Leiris sees him home and then sleeps
with him apres avoir humilie ma bouche et la sienne dans un reciproque
egarement (AH ).
Having relocated this absent event of the secret journal by, ironically,
rereading a public confession and virile programme such as LAge
dhomme, we can begin to appreciate the subtle written strategies em-
ployed within the Journal itself in order to suppress the events aesthetic
implications. Firstly, the relationships direct expression as a prophetic
adherence to poetry, mysticism and lyricism is deliberately turned against
Jouhandeau in order to generate his artistic and moral biffure. Thus he
is literally written out as
Ni mystique ni poete ( J), un [mystique]
chretien ( J ), and someone for whom [L]e mysticisme catholique est
la forme conventionelle quil a choisie pour lexpression de son lyrisme
( J ). At the same time, Leiris takes his distance, so that the denigration
of Jouhandeau acts as the afrmation of both Leiriss physical innocence
and his artistic superiority. Thus Jouhandeau is [p]as poete: son lyrisme
nest jamais quune declaration damour ( je le sais car la seule fois que
jai voulu me transporter avec lui sur le plan lyrique, cela a tourne en
declaration damour) ( J ); and we are told that whereas Jouhandeau is
iconoclatre, Leiris and his friends are iconoclastes ( J ). Leiriss break
with idolatry is quite literal in this context: endnotes by Jamin tell us that
a comment on the pederastie du professeur ( J ) and two large sections
which reect a partial reconciliation with Jouhandeau ( J ) were
dropped by Leiris when he copied manuscript number one, the cahier beige,
into the crucial manuscript number two, the cahier bleu. He reinforces
such actions with a specic recommendation to himself: Supprimer tout
ce qui me lie: souvenirs, fetiches de toutes sortes . . . Bruler tout derriere
soi ( J ). Henceforth, this virile determination results in a silence
surrounding Jouhandeaus name that is broken only by the occasional
derogatory adjective: scandaleux ( J ); mythomane ( J );
epouvantable ( J ); sinistre ( J ). The most complex suppression
by far, though, occurs when a entry suddenly declares: La veritable
inversion de Jouhandeau: faire de la pederastie le prototype du Mal
alors que lantisemitisme est regarde comme un bien ( J ). This
inversion of inversion, which allows Jouhandeau the pederast to be
condemned for other reasons, is repeated much later, and this time with
an attendant aesthetic Judgement, as a footnote commentary added
six months after the event to the record of Jouhandeaus funeral:
Oui, malgre son talent indeniable decrivain stricto sensu (encore que le classi-
cisme de sa langue soit assez proche dun academisme), fait aujourdhui gure
dhomme incroyablement narcissique qui durant toute sa vie est passe a cote
de tout, ne sinteressant guere qua ses petites histoires dalcove ou de famille
et se preoccupant seulement de les transformer litterairement en bijoux. Plus
mechamment: un homme qui parlait de mal a propos de son homosexualite,
mais na jamais juge bon de battre sa coulpe a propos de lantisemitisme auquel
il avait temporairement cede (--). ( J ).
We can see that, as the erasure of Jouhandeau becomes more general,

complex processes of rearrangement, realignment and reinvention be-
come more operative. This replaces an initial reactive erasure with a
politico-cultural containment. At later points in the text, Jouhandeaus
presence becomes thematized and his signicance neutralized within
a web of overdetermined relations. In , Leiris records: Zette perd
lanneau en corne de bufe (quAsammanatch mavait donne a Gondar),
anneau quelle portait au poignet avec une chanette dor que mavait
donnee, il y a plusieurs annees, Jouhandeau ( J ). In , he notes:
Vendredi dernier, le Castor saoule chez Gallimard ou se fetait le prix
de la Pleiade. Je lui tiens le front pour laider a vomir. Autres person-
nages 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 Khadidjas 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
Leiriss previous recollection of holding Peignots head, where he spec-
ies 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 etre un homosexuel regarde lamitie comme une
espece damour et suis probablement quelque degout que jaie pour
la sublimite des amours platoniques lhomme des amities feminines
plutot que celui de la passion (Fo ). This homosexual denial per-
mits us lastly to observe how both instances involve the absorption and
Texts and contexts
abstraction of Jouhandeaus physical presence into symbolical and in-
stitutional 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 signicant 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 ofcial 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 signicance 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 in-
stead is a heterosexual and professional attainment of the death-drive.
Equally, in the reference, the gesture which may well have im-
mediately preceded Leiriss sexual act with Jouhandeau is now part
of the (disgusting) sublimation of passion into a feminine friendship
whose specic pretext for intoxication is the scarcely transgressive Pleiade
awards and whose permitted practice in general is almost completely
literary.
This determined secretion of Jouhandeaus signicance, 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 che-based approach of Leiriss 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 gener-
ates 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 autobio-
graphical practice. This homosexual abgrund of autobiography obviously
challenges the inuential view that Leiriss marriage (and hence by im-
plication his heterosexual self-determination) marks the birth of Leiris
the autobiographer.
Returning to the row of dots marking the repression of the homo-
sexual act, we see rstly that the framing hereby created out of the rest
of that days 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 record-
ing of an incomplete narrative, entitled Le Lycanthrope (in homage
to Petrus Borel), whose formal, grammatical and narrative particular-
ities have obviously inuenced Le Point cardinal and Aurora ( J ). The
connection with the latter is particularly telling: the rst-person voice of
Le Lycanthrope closely resembles Auroras Damocles 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 cir-
cumstances relating to his liaison with Jouhandeau. The opening of the
mini-narratives second section, Cest en sortant du bar du Crabe que
jeus lidee premiere de lassassinat ( J ), echoes a twice-recalled quo-
tation of Rimbauds 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 (signicantly 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 assas-
sins. ( J ), recurs in the third section of the apparently earlier story:
Je regardais stupidement le paquet quelle mavait donne et vit [sic]
quil etait orne dun as de pique ( J ). In addition, several elements in
Le Lycanthrope echo Jouhandeaus Ximenes Malinjoude, a work that was
completed only during Pentecost , was dedicated to Leiris, and is
in part an obvious and highly diabolical portrait of Leiriss cote Dorian
Gray (as Leiris later indirectly acknowledges). Beyond the general in-
tertextuality of their spiritual Gothic, reected in each tales fantastical
journey through cruelty and massacre, there are concrete links: the re-
spective 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 Ximeness statement Voici lheure de lAssassin (XM ). It is very
tempting, therefore, to read the description of Ximeness secret desires
Texts and contexts
and fears as also referring to the Leiris here portrayed only through his
parergon:
Une voix interieure lui soufe quil cherchait par la a etouffer quelque voix
plus interieure qui eut bien voulu le faire entendre, sil se fut repose un instant
pour lecouter . . . Quand il agissait, il ne faisait que reagir, tantot contre un desir
poignant, sauvage, aveugle, encore a demi inconnu, qui montait, bride de ses
entrailles, tantot contre un absolu qui, descendu trop vite des splendeurs de son
intelligence, eut risque dilluminer par surprise ce desir obscur. (XM ).
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 coun-
terpoint to his adventure with Jouhandeau, Leiris sets up a reactive,
indeed openly repressive, self-portrait. He begins by referring to the ad-
venture in the future perfect before penning a preface for Simulacre, his
rst 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, fetiches de toutes sortes . . . ( J ). And the unused
preface itself notes, like an abstract acknowledgement of the conceal-
ment and inference of Jouhandeau at work here: De la double connais-
sance du poids et de lordre des mots, nous pourrons donc, par le calcul,
inferer lexistence de mondes invisibles (les Idees innommees, que la
raison nest pas directement capable de reveler) ( J ). He then imme-
diately offers a coup dil retrospectif which also concerns a lack of
open admission ( J ), before continuing with a bilan de ma vie senti-
mentale, each of whose four subsections contributes to an aggressively
yet abjectly heterosexualist Bildungsroman: idioties pour des putains [;] je
neus pu tirer nulle vanite de lavoir pour matresse [;] [s]tupide tentative
de mariage ( J ). This he follows at once with the richly ambigu-
ous remark: Jouhandeau avait raison lorsquil me disait: Tu noses pas
aller au bout de tes desirs ( J ), before following with a long passage
( J ) which is recalled at the head of chapter of LAge dhomme
(AH ) and which includes the line: Comment oserais-je me re-
garder si je ne portais pas soit un masque, soit des lunettes deformantes
( J ). This in turn is followed by the reproach: Jai fait plus de mal a
Jouhandeau quil ne men a fait ( J ) This dialectic generally informs
the chronology of Leiriss sexual life as revealed in the Journal, such that
Louise and Lena 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
homosexual is thus homotextually inuential, however much Leiris seeks
to place the adventure within the period of non-writing: Notre aventure
sera deroulee dans le temps compris entre la correction des epreuves
des Pincengrain et la parution du volume ( J ). Evidence of this inu-
ence emerges if we focus on the textual effect when Leiriss relationship
with Lena comes to an end and he seeks to continue by presenting it as
the entre-temps of writing. A recognizable protoype of LAge dhommes
opening is immediately recorded ( J ), closely followed by a further
oblique reference to Dorian Gray: Je suis un point qui se deplace le long
dune ligne. La glace casse, cest la mort; le portrait est ni ( 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 Jacobs LHomme de chair
et lhomme reet ( J ) and Jouhandeaus Ximenes Malinjoude ( J )
which obviously exploit an oblique portrait of Leiris. Of the latter, two
details are particularly striking. The rst is that Jouhandeaus por-
trait has obviously become engrained in the prototype opening of
LAge dhomme. This inuence goes beyond Leiris simply recollecting por-
traits at this moment. Leiriss self-description: jai honte dune facheuse
tendance aux rougeurs et a la peau luisante. Mes mains sont maigres,
plutot velues, avec des veines dessinees. Jai les jambes trop courtes pour
mon torse, les epaules trop etroites pour mes hanches ( J ), has obvi-
ously incorporated Jouhandeaus description of Ximenes: Le corps etait
moins beau que la tete dont le trop dampleur faisait paratre lepaule
[etroite] et le bras velu un peu court. La main demesuree, rougie par le
sang a eur de peau et veinee 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 Ximenes. Immediately before the
beginning of Leiriss second quotation ( J ), Jouhandeau had written:
Ximenes, depuis sa treizieme annee, sadonnait a une coquetterie, chez un
homme, chez un homme robuste et a cet age, bien etrange, surtout dans une
ville de province, a une coquetterie qui interessait particulierement 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 levres, et il peignait
ses ongles attentivement comme des griffes de Chimere. Les poudres precieuses
dont il se servait, tenues a linni, ocres, saumon, soufre, dans lesquelles il broyait
Texts and contexts
quelques atomes dor, ses fards, ses parfums, lui venaient directement dune
maison de prostitution sacree du Pandjab. (XM )
Within the paragraph break occurring near the bottom of the page in
the Journal ( J ), Jouhandeau had actually added:
[I]l etait lunique amant de lEtre, lamant de Dieu nu quil poursuivait, nu
lui-meme, dans lombre des choses comme derriere un buisson pour ly etreindre
et letouffer. Oh! le terrible amant de Dieu! Etait-ce pour tenter Dieu? Cetait
pour Dieu seul que se grimait Ximenes. (XM ).
And where Leiris breaks off again at the bottom of the page ( J ),
Jouhandeau had continued:
[A]pres des annees dhumiliation et de renoncement devant lui, il avait admis
une bouche en delire a toucher pour la premiere fois et la derniere afrmait-il,
sa bouche hauteine, parfumee et peinte. (XM )
It is obvious that Leiris has quite simply desexualized Jouhandeaus

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 Leiriss entry
for the day before the recording of Le Lycanthrope:
La nuit derniere, jai tente le meurtre spirituel de Jouhandeau. Il a ete plus fort
que moi: Tu ne pourras jamais mempecher de taimer ma-t-il dit. Ma forme
de vengeance: jouer le personnage que lon veut me faire jouer, mais dune
facon toute differente de celle que lon attendait {Ex.: si lon veut faire de moi
une femme, je deviendrai femme mais en empruntant uniquement ce quelle a
de diabolique: coquetterie, horrible ingeniosite pour decouvrir les paroles qui
peuvent faire le plus de mal.} ( J ).
As we have seen, what has not been suppressed has been absorbed
into LAge dhommes virilization and petrication of self. Here it is sig-
nicant that Leiris records how Jouhandeau reproaches him for LAge
dhommes abstractions, confesses that Jouhandeau is right to hate the
books egotism ( J ), but attempts to justify its approach as a
liquidation and cette volonte de se depasser . . . qui est le signe de sa
valeur poetique [mais qui] na pas a prendre necessairement une forme
poetique ( J ). The formulation encapsulates what was to become,
of course, the central plea of the preface added to LAge dhomme for its
republication in . It therefore demonstrates once more how Leiriss
biffure of the homosexual portrait has generated a subterranean homo-
textuality, with its own covert and highly inuential addressee.
It is clear on examination that the homosexual apprenticeship con-
cealed within the Journal is more profoundly operative than those het-
erosexual secrets of Lena or Louise which criticism is happy to endorse.
We can see also how the homosexual persists as a negative grounding
in Leiriss most accomplished work, underlying, for example, the reso-
lute heterosexualization of LAge dhommes form, content and prefatory
programme. More generally, it is evident that Jouhandeaus signicance
really lies in the permeability and instability which, as a signier, it is
capable of releasing into the text. Its determined erasure therefore ex-
poses the existential and institutional desire to totalize and essentialize
that obviously tempts both Leiris and his professional readers. As we
come now to the end of our chronological review of Leiriss work, it
is crucial for us to bear this lesson in mind. As a text, the Journal itself
confounds the imposition of any simple evolutionary pattern by showing
how complex derivative operations of the biffure have been active from
the beginning of Leiriss writing. Similarly, if we attend to the journals
dynamics of admission rather than to its degree of narrative completion,
we cannot maintain hierarchical distinctions based on genre or apparent
complexity. In both these complications, the Journal, far from being the
marginal ebauches of the polished uvre, emerges in retrospect as a major
Vorbild. And as it operates with an unresolved and persistently secretive
nature, this model text undermines the work of totalization even as it
compiles a massive record of its constituent elements. At the origin and
end of the major autobiographies, therefore, we are obliged to recognize
non-nitude, heterogeneity, and repression rather than revelation, and
so to revise our reading of Leiriss whole confessional and contractual
undertaking. Such an aporetic conclusion is at least consistent with the
nature of the Journal. But, more positively, it directs our attention towards
what none the less drives all of Leiriss writing, namely the obsession with
self-presence. What we need to do now, therefore, is to supplement our
chronological assessment with a specic examination of the thematics of
Presence in Leiris.

The quest for presence in La Regle du jeu

Excess of joy: the beginnings of presence

in . . . Reusement!
Nearness and presence, not the magnitude of separation, is what is es-

sential. Heideggers remark could stand as a denition of the guiding
obsession of autobiography. Just as Western philosophy since Plato, ac-
cording to Heidegger, has been grounded in parousia, or permanent self-
presence, so the classical metaphysical origin and aim of autobiography
is arguably the desire to conrm the autobiographers 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 autobi-
ographical 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 represen-
tation merely conrms an absolute primary consciousness existing prior
to reection. From this rst, 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 Heideggers (and Levinass)
destruktion of Husserl, deconstructs in his essay La Differance. Derrida
posits presence, la forme matricielle absolue de letre, as in fact always
being a determination and an effect within a system of differance. This
system, moreover, does not view consciousness and effect or determi-
nation simply as opposites: that, according to Derrida, would be still
to operate according to the lexicon of that which is de-limiting (p. ).
Differance, 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 differance cannot be satisfactorily dened
other than by its contextual work. But we have already seen it operate in
the technical features of Leiriss autobiography. The opening pages of
La Regle du jeu reveal not only the desire to conrm the subjects nearness
and presence but also the differance inherent in the language and

structure of self-representation. (Representation is one of the terms
Derrida uses to describe the deferring action of differance). From the
very beginning of . . . Reusement!, self-presence is revealed to be the
determination or effect of an already existing linguistic biffure and an ir-
reducible structural deviation or decalage. And as the autobiography
progresses, far from reaching the point where representation becomes
nally superuous or supplementary to an instantly self-conrming con-
sciousness, La Regle du jeu constantly shows how its rule of the game, the ab-
solute presence assumed and quested as already-thereness, at the heart
of self-representation, is at best the determination and effect of the auto-
biographical games own temporal process. By the same token, La Regle
du jeus autocritique, which in reassessing and realigning the origins and
ends of Leiriss autobiographical practice attempts to regain the essential
nearness and presence occulted by the imperfections and screens of rep-
resentation, has the effect, as we saw in Fibrilles, of further accentuating
not only the inadequacy but also the irreducibility of that representation.
Once La Regle du jeu begins, therefore, it is already too late: the foreignness
of representation intrudes immediately on the autobiographical ideal of
a silently self-reecting parousia, an ideal that in itself can be known to
exist only by virtue of the sign. La Regle du jeus 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 con-
rms, in the writing of the text, the irreducibly metaphorical relation
within self-presence, and the primordial biffure and decalage already there
in already-thereness. Perhaps the most radical feature of Leiriss work,
then, is not simply the representation of self-presence. Instead, it shows
how the impossible goal of autobiography, whether it be the continuous
conrmation of a permanent self-presence, or the reappropriation of an
inevitably lost presence, ows 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 rst confrontation with the possibility of a fall, a
loss, a damage or impairment, that would break the closed world of self-
contained play. Leiriss reaction is to express his relief, to send up praise,
an imperfect hallelujah or neume. This rst act of self-expression, gram-
matically imperfect, points to two already existing perfections: that of the
self behind the expression; and that of the potential pure, absolute voca-
tive of the exclamation, turned to an addressee who is not Augustines
God (the object of the Confessions opening praise) but is the listener within
Leiris himself: Il netait pas casse, et vive fut ma joie. Ce que jexprimai
en mecriant: . . . Reusement! (Bi ). Nothing appears to be broken
(into), and Leiris as pure self-presence can use an imperfect expression
as a pure praise of the Eden prior to a fall, the (non)time before the
movements, ignorances and engagements with the Other that exist in
language and structure. Language is not felt to be necessary to this per-
manent moment, it is merely a luxurious hosanna for the pure play
which has been saved. The joy and mystery of being as pure, closed play,
a play which makes its own regulations and praises itself, a play existing
prior to grammar (language) or an independently adjudicated pattern
(structure). The hand, the eye, the voice, the ear are all complicit in this
conrmation of self-presence and draw no attention to themselves as
such. The scene conrms that Leiris is. What joy.
Such a play, however, is conceptually impossible other than as an al-
ready lost and fervently desired represented ideal. La Regle du jeu does not
begin, therefore, by showing that Leiris is. It begins, rather, with the lin-
guistically and structurally necessary knowledge that to show that Leiris is
is already to indicate the ideality of pure self-presence. The autobiogra-
phy therefore opens with a complex temporal and spatial differentiation
which will permit the rst expression of a self-consciousness arising from
a fall which has already taken place. It closes by realizing this space and
time of differentiation, this belated self-representation and this imperfect
state as a shared and socialized existence, mysteriously represented by
the insectile otherness already inherent in language: le langage [. . .] me
depasse, poussant de tous cotes ses antennes mysterieuses (Bi ). The
supposed rst moment of pure self-intuition at the beginning of La Regle
du jeu is therefore in fact preceded by the acknowledgement within pre-
sentness that the now is already other, that is to say, part of the complex of
time. It is time which begins at the beginning of La Regle du jeu, a fact which
autobiography and its sequential nature can only serve to emphasize,
even as the paragraphs single sentence acts as an attempt to reduce the
other of temporal and spatial difference opened up within representa-
tion to a unique point of presentness. As a result, Leiriss identity is now
and simultaneously seen to be indissociably related to an otherness, a
foreign intrusion that generates the rst instance of self-representation.
The false alarm of the potential violence done to the toy soldier (let alone
by a soldier), which was used to conrm an unbreachable presence is a
reappropriating repetition of the real violence done to the nontempo-
ral and nonspatial sphere of self-presence which is the autobiographys
impossible ideal, impossible because the commencement of the autobi-
ography marks the movement of time and space, and the relation to the
Other which necessarily arises from that instant. In this opening chapter,
this much greater violence is already in language (the already broken
. . . Reusement!) and structure (the physical and pedagogical contain-
ment of the child). But ultimately it exists already within the child, from
the moment that the objectifying equation between self-intuition and
childhood has been made. This equation, and the even more sober dif-
ferentiation between childhood and adulthood which the temporal and
spatial preliminaries of . . . Reusement! bring about by the chapters
conclusion, introduce the idea of negativity into pure play, a negativity
well represented by the broken . . . Reusement!
However, this is not how La Regle du jeu begins, either. This incuba-
tory scene, in which Leiriss entry into consciousness is represented as
conceived, gestated and laboured over as well as involving a death of
pure self-presence, simultaneously offers the sign of self-presence. Play
is, indeed, this very rst sign, a representation of the mastery of nega-
tivity within a structure of presence and absence. The fall of a toy and
the willed reafrmation of the toys undamaged state is an appropriate
rst representation of how, through autobiography, being is, again. It is at
this point, in fact, that consciousness begins in La Regle du jeu: presence
is restored and reappropriated by this primary autobiographical mo-
ment, primary in the sense of marking the beginning of representation.
If the rst stage, pure presence, is not in need of language, given the
absolute immediacy within which presence perceives itself in this ideal
state, and if the second stage, that of negativity, or the reprise (Je me
suis ecrie: . . . Reusement!. Lon ma repris. (Bi )), is revealed by lan-
guage, showing that it is in words and language that things rst come
into being and are, then this third stage is the philosophical moment,
the reasonable use of words in thinking, which can recognize, dialecti-
cally, the second stage, the negation of parousia, and so regain presence by
representing this knowledge as the moment of the emergence of Being.
This representation is therefore what leads for the rst time to the meaning
of Being, a meaning which can therefore take up and subsume the fall
of primordial presence into derivitive consciousness, and use this fall to
represent its own coming into presentness. In this way, La Regle du jeus
opening is still completely metaphysical: it still assumes the precedence
of autos over bios, the joy of spirit or essence over invading otherness.
This otherness is remembered, interiorized and overcome by becoming
the experience that opens up childhood to representation. Autobiog-
raphy recovers presence by way of proximity, then, and in this regard
the representation of the joy and mystery of childhood at the beginning
of La Regle du jeu completely and impressively dominates its linguistic
form, returning its revelations to the service of the sign. This is fur-
ther assured by all the cultural resonances of the scene, each of which
conrms . . . Reusement!s representation of self-presence. Proust and
Rousseau have already been mentioned in connection with language,
but my reference above to Augustine is particularly pertinent here to
the ontotheological culture to which La Regle du jeus representation of
presence ultimately makes appeal. (This also further illuminates the role
of biblical exegesis in Alphabets representation of Leiriss early edu-
cation.) These cultural forms of repetition and reappropriation indicate
how the pure presence of play is being regained by Leiris via his rep-
etition of this originary play on the level of the sign itself, the playful
complexity imposed on the syntax of the opening paragraph being used
to dominate the alterity and negativity of language. This leads to one
further, paradoxical strategy. This opening chapter seeks to overcome
the impossibility of pure self-presence not only by subsuming but in fact
by emphasizing the repetitive element in representation which precisely
involves exile from the pure state of parousia. Within a series of syntac-
tic repetitions, backtrackings and overlappings, then, we are presented
with a setting that is varied subtly as it is repeatedly placed before us,
the repeated fall of the toy, the repetition of Leiriss joy both as feeling
and as expression, several repetitions of the reprise, and, of course, the
repetition of the childs repetitive play on the level of the practice of this
repetitive form of writing. If the presence preceding representation can
be shown only as lost or desired, then the representation of presence
can perhaps suggest a pure origin by overemphasizing its own impure,
decadent circumvolutions. This sublation of repetition has the effect of
re-presenting presence as the still pivot of autobiography.
But the purpose of this representation is outdone from the beginning
by what this writing practice uncovers. For prior to the constitution of
the autobiographical subject by the . . . Reusement! scene, there exists
the double movement of the biffure and the decalage which are gured by
the scene as already operating within the law and structure of the rst sign
of self-presence. La Regle du jeu does not begin, therefore, with the dialec-
tical manipulation of nonpresence by representation in order to conrm
the original ideal of self-presence through a self-effacing act. What exists
even prior to this beginning is the already operative biffure and decalage
whose temporal and spatial nature is not denable as a modalization of
presence. The constantly attempted nowness of La Regle du jeus open-
ing, which from the beginning has to negotiate a series of temporal and
spatial hurdles, is the closest representation that can be offered of the
real beginning of autobiography: the rst moment as forever attempted
reduction of an original biffure. This scenario operates otherwise than
on the level of the representation of presence and can only be glimpsed
through it. An original bifurcation and an original erasure, already dif-
ferent and beyond denition, to which the act of presencing comes in
an attempt to reappropriate Being. An original interval and an original
deviation, already elsewhere and beyond the point of Being, to which
the act of presencing comes in an attempt to systematize the absolutely
Other of Being. This impossible non-conceptualization of Being can only
be conceived as the pre-original moment of autobiography, a moment
erased and reproduced as the founding unthought of self-representation.
. . . Reusement! shows how autobiography must posit a moment prior
to biffure and decalage in order to bring the concept of difference, and
hence of identity, into being. It is this rule which forms the opening sol
impitoyable (Bi ) of autobiographys game, the rst and necessary limi-
tation with which to effect self-presence. For the aboriginal structure and
time of biffure and decalage cannot be represented as such. They can only
be revealed in the course of autobiographys mise-en-scene of childhood
and a coming into presentness.
At its most radical level, therefore, La Regle du jeus opening shows up the
preoriginal biffure and decalage of a self-presence which can only be given
as already split and effaced, spatialized and projected. This is the real and
greatest violence of autobiographys opening, an opening of the abso-
lutely other which does not simply offer an origin of nonpresence subse-
quently reappropriated by a philosophical turn. This opening has no site
of its own, and cannot be thought as such. Erasure and displacement exist
within it, prior to the dialectical movement that would reappropriate it.
It is the absolutely unconscious of autobiographical representation, an
alterity that does not think itself in terms of presence or absence.
The absolute opening of autobiography is therefore that of the in-
conceivable arch violence of the absolutely other. Such an absolute
vertigo can only be handled by representation, presented metaphysi-
cally as the excessive effect of a biffure and decalage that marks the advent
of self-presence. In a circular manner, then, this excess in the sign of
self-presence is shown to condition the rst emergence of presence, time
and representation from a moment subsequent to self-presence: lespece
de deviation, de decalage qui sest trouve de ce fait imprime a ma pensee
(Bi , my emphasis). Representing the vertigo in this way, that is to say
erasing the biffure prior to presence allows self-presence to posit itself as the
beginning of self-representation. On the most original level, therefore, be-
yond anything conceivable as an autobiographical project, La Regle du jeu
once more shows how representation precedes presence, in revealing
within the metaphysics of self-presence the workings of an unthinkable
primary biffure.

Biffuress 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 rst, predetermining response to the
potentially endless biffure of identity. It is this rst response which the
phenomenological drama of La Regle du jeus opening then re-enacts in
the childs response. Each of these responses is designed to promote or
conrm 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 rst and meaningful moment. In order to conceive of
autobiographys 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 gures
that are asked to operate from the beginning in a neutral and invisible
manner in order to represent an original coming into oneself simulta-
neously throw up, in La Regle du jeus congurations, a pregural alterity
within the immediate relation to itself of presence. This alterity per-
sists in standing before and beyond reappropriation, constantly hold-
ing 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 Biffuress opening pages. On the one hand, Leiris
sees, exclaims and hears himself in an ideal advent of the autobiograph-
ical subject. On the other hand, Leiris is seen, exclaimed (in the sense
of being answered and constrained: interloque (Bi ); interdit (Bi ))
and heard in a realist situating of the narratives innocent hero. In nei-
ther of these cases, the one displaying a condent interiority and the
other an equally solid exteriority, is the presencing effected by the organ

realized at rst 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 objectication of mimesis). In each case,
the organ acts for self-presence, and the metaphorical operations of rep-
resentation, whether completely internal or external to consciousness,
are assumed by autobiographys metaphysics.
La Regle du jeu begins with seeing. In spite of the vocal afrmation that
marks an obvious break for self-presence and gives the rst chapter its
title, the rst 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
conrms 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 reected in the grammar of the opening paragraph:
instead of a rst-person description in the present, the subject is beheld
as a personal pronoun, an indirect object and the subject of a reexive
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 rst visual act, but it also has the effect of emphasizing
how autobiographys rst visualization of the subject inevitably involves
the biffure and decalage 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 rst observed
event to follow from the advent of vision, can be seen to mark a tting
opening for autobiography: it embodies existentially and grammatically
the fall which brings presence into self-representation, and a prelapsar-
ian ecstasy and potential visualization, which Leiris can later suggest
pre-exist this rst event (Peut-etre metais-je deja extasie . . . Peut-etre
avais-je deja xe mes yeux.(Bi )), into the rst eye-opening moment of
knowledge.
The book begins, then, with vision, and while the rst 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 autobio-
graphical I emerges into the light in order to mark itself as its own source,
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 al-
ready contains a trope, leads on inevitably to the language of presence.
Vision and voice are linked from the beginning of La Regle du jeu, the
latter naturally and logically conrming the discoveries of the former:
Il netait pas casse, et vive fut ma joie. Ce que jexprimai en mecriant:
. . . 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 ad-
vantage over being seen that it seems to obliterate the doubling inherent
in visual representation: no objectication intrudes on the immediacy
of Leiriss exclamation. As with vision, the metaphorical operation in-
volved in this self-conrmation (en mecriant) speaks everything but
itself, everything but the space and time which Leiriss 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 re-
alization 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 iden-
tity 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 pre-
cisely 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 absentication. Even more powerfully than the supposedly
neutral and abstract emergence into the light of Being, La Regle du jeus
original vocal presentation of presence shows how the autobiographi-
cal 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.
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 self-
reception and upon which the simulacrum of presence is therefore at
best projected. The conclusion to the third chapter, Habille-en-cour,
reads the rule of the game for which the autobiography is searching as a
ickering series of hieroglyphs, zigzags declairs inscrits sur un ecran qui
netait ni nuit ni jour (Bi ). The fth chapter, Persephone, 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 memes ecrans me separent de la

realite . . . , jeprouve trop souvent limpression afigeante detre separe de la
nature par une multiplicite decrans . . . , mes phrases [se revelent] comme une
serie decrans, qui sinterposent entre mes idees et moi . . . , de meme que trop
de sensations accumulees, . . . loin de . . . representer autant de debouches sur le
reel sont des halos qui lembuent ou des membranes qui men separent. (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 objectication of visual
representation only to raise a linguistic biffure, then perhaps the com-
pletely intimate hearing of oneself against the inner membrane avoids
both the linguistic and the visual external split. Between the commence-
ment of the cry . . . Reusement! and the objectifying reception of the
expression lies an ideal aural registration of ones own presence that is im-
plicit in the reexive verb of expression: Ce que jexprimai en mecriant:
. . . Reusement! (Bi ). Within the endless round of this present par-
ticiple, 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 repre-
sent 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,
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 ears membrane can paradoxi-
cally represent the autobiographical dream of the successful joining of
consciousness to nature. This question of aural presence is illustrated by
the whole of the Persephone chapter, as its conclusion makes plain:
Persephone, puits artesien plante dans lepaisseur de la nature et revelant les
secrets souterrains sous les especes dun jet roucoulant ou suraigu, serais-tu
vraiment ce jaillissement, o Persephone! ou ne le deviendrais-tu quau hasard
seul dune metaphore? (Bi )

The chapter opens with a visual and vocal recognition of the conditioning
detours of identity. Leiris scrutinizes and describes the social and geo-
graphical details of his new address, bis quai des Grands-Augustins,
and views himself in his new study ou avec force detours, retours, ra-
tures, biffures, bifurcations diverses presentement jecris (Bi ). What
this writing itself also afrms is the intersubjective nature of the je and
the impossibility of a pure and unaffected vocalization of self-presence:
quest-ce quun je un je unique et isole sans un tu, sans un nous, sans
un il gravitant autour de lui . . . ? (Bi ). In spite of these visual and vocal
screens, however, Leiris persists in afrming that certain experiences offer
a pure presentation of Being, and places these moments under the sign
of the oral and subterranean name of Persephone (Bi ). The exam-
ples which Leiris provides of the spiralling nature implicit for him in the
name constitute one of the most famous passages of La Regle du jeu, and
include the following:
La feuille dacanthe quon copie au lycee quand on apprend a manier tant bien
que mal le fusain . . .
lhelicode inscrite sur la coquille dun escargot . . .
le simulacre infect quune legere pression des doigts tire dun pere-la-colique,
les jaspures etalees sur les tranches de certains livres relies . . .
les circonvolutions cerebrales . . .
la conque dune oreille . . .
tout ce qui est feston, volute, rinceau, guirlande, enroulement, arabesque . . .
(Bi )
What is most immediately striking in these disparate images of a unique
spiralling effect is the relation they establish between representation
(books, inscriptions, writing, drawing, a simulacrum produced by the
ngers), consciousness (cerebral circumvolutions) and the ear. In effect,
the spiralled name of Persephone attempts to overcome the original
movement of the biffure and decalage by locating it as a visual shape and
a sonic roar within the conch of the ear. The name Persephone itself
furthers this link between a metaphysical circuit and the actual organ
of the ear: on the level of the cultural signied, it evokes the organic
myth of death and rebirth embodied in the daughter of Demeter, who
spent half of each year in the underworld with Pluto; while on the level
of the resonant signier, its proximity to perce-oreille or earwig evokes
the penetration of the open organ by an insect doubtless related to the
one representing language in the opening . . . Reusement! scene. This
piercing of the ears membrane by the earwig of language leads Leiris in
turn to establish a suture between the throat and the tympanum. The
tympanum can be shattered by an excessive outburst from the throat
(perhaps the result, he adds, of an overjoyful game), an outburst that can
break the vocal chords in the process. But the two equally belong to the
same cavernous region, one in which the pure vibration of a spirit an-
nounces a presence. This cartilaginous cavern, an ear with the latency
of the voice, directly linked to nature (Persephones myth is normally in-
terpreted as the birth and death of seed, while Leiris imagines the earwig
boring into the heart of a fruit) yet before it and beneath it, a subter-
ranean kingdom full of the immanence of presence, therefore suggests
an absolute organic source. This cavernous space is premetaphorical,
for with its original emptiness it acts as a resonating chamber for all
other things. Externality and alterity cannot surprise it, for it envelops
all differentiation with the same absolute passivity. All things come to this
matrix, but within itself no dividing movement marks its own registration.
Instead, it lies between inside and outside:
Et les cavernes, en n de compte, deviennent le lieu geometrique ou se re-
joignent divinite chtonienne, insecte perceur de noyaux, matrice ou se forme la
voix, tambour que chaque bruit vient frapper de sa baguette dair vibrant; les
cavernes: obscures tuyauteries plongeant au plus secret de letre pour conduire
jusqua la cavite toute nue de notre espace mental les bouffees de temperature,
consistance et agrement variables qui se propagent en longues vagues hori-
zontales apres etre montees tout droit des fermentations du dehors.
Dune part, il y a donc le dehors; dautre part, le dedans; entre les deux, le
caverneux. (Bi )
The original cavernous space of the ear in Persephone has by now ex-
panded to incorporate the throat and the entrails, all of which is charge
de vibrations qui ne sont que les exhalaisons dont il sest impregne durant
sa periode de latence dans ce monde souterrain (Bi ), in other words,
a total registering and reproducing organ, full of the spirit and breath of
a mysterious presence. Leiris emphasizes this mystery by the way he im-
mediately goes on to describe the (singing) voice which can produce this
vibration within the cavernous region: it is mysterious, and its mystery, if
one had to give a gure of speech to what cannot by denition have one,
could be represented as a margin surrounding the object, simultaneously
isolating it and underlining its presence (Bi ) precisely the function
of the ear. Persephone therefore proposes the ear as the ideal spiritual
organ for a resounding self-presence.
But the above description of the cavernous already shows clearly how
this absolute region of self-presence is in fact the effect of an astonish-
ingly complex metaphorical mechanism linking inside to outside, brain
to body, ear to voice, the vertical to the horizontal, and limit to passage.
These movements are all the more absolute for being interior. Within
the vibration that marks a spiritual presence, temporality and spatiality
are already evident. As this wand of vibrating air strikes the mem-
brane, moreover, exteriority and alterity are inevitably gured, if only
as the experiences to which the tympanum fearfully remains open (lon
peut sinquieter a lidee du tympan, membrane fragile menacee detre
trouee (Bi ). This membrane, meanwhile, is busy distorting, amplify-
ing, deadening and diverting the supposedly premetaphorical vibration
of pure spirit, and it is this biffure which autobiography then postulates
as the origin of a self-presence that is aux prises avec lineffable, la ligne
melodique se presentant comme la traduction, en un idiome pure-
ment sonore, de ce qui ne pourrait etre dit par le moyen des mots
(Bi ).
On the one hand, then, Leiriss autobiography offers itself a pure
source that exists prior to vocal and visual representation in the form
of the original breath of presence within the cavernous depths of an
absolute ear, a chthonian immanence revealed in all its latency within a
pretemporal and prespatial matrix. On the other hand, this subterranean
source still cannot sink below or exist prior to the biffure that marks
a differentiation within the pure point of Being, for the amplications,
obliterations, passages and pulsations of the vibration and the membrane
are still required to bring this most spiritual identity into being. Within
the cavern of the absolutely same, a trembling otherness has already
happened.
In an attempt to restore the pure mystery of the source and its singing
voice, however, Leiris now goes on to represent two cultural versions
of this notion of pure sonic presence. The rst appropriation of the ear
takes the form of an evocation, in Persephone, of a childhood phono-
graph. In addition to being obviously a mechanical reproduction of the
mechanism of the ear which Leiris has just dismantled, the value of
this machine for Leiris is the unlocalizable origin of the presence it pro-
duces: it supplements the mystery insubstantially framing the voice with
the mystery of the machines disembodied reproduction of the recorded
sound. In this way, cest avec un mystere presque pur quon se trouvera
face a face (Bi ). This double mystery of production and reproduction
centres on the strange wax rolls which are inserted into the machine.
Sound is reproduced by transmitting the vibrations inscribed like a tight
helix in the wax cylinder to a sensitive membrane or diaphragm, thus
transforming into sound waves the oscillations communicated by the roll.
Even more importantly, however, Leiris recalls an awesomely superior
version of the same machine, belonging to his father, un instrument
quasi miraculeux, rebelle par denition a toute espece danalyse (Bi ).
This marvellous mechanism, which has the signicantly inverted name
of Graphophone, is capable not only of reproducing recordings but
also of recording freshly onto a roll of still virgin wax. The analogy
with the mythical ear, capable of recording its own immanence, is exact,
even to the point of retaining the sexual dynamics of the original. But
in appropriating the notion of sonic presence, Leiriss representation of
the mechanism of aural being also restores presence and purity of in-
tention to its own operations. Leiris the child listens to the marvellous
recording and reproduction of the graphophone. Leiris the adult listens
to Leiris the child, and records with images the childs experience of
sonic presence. The image offered of the experience represents directly
the ghost of immanent presence which the original notion of vibration
had sought to suggest; while the organ propagating his image, Leiriss
own autobiography, partakes of the mystery and purity of the original
process of recording and reproduction which the child experiences, and
so appropriates for itself the same aural purity and immediacy of pres-
encing which had taken place in the original night of the cartilaginous
passage:
Assez longtemps trace, peut-etre, dun phantasme auquel javais cru comme
a une realite positive alors que je netais pas encore initie aux mysteres de
lenregistrement? il me fut impossible decouter un air chante, tel quun duo
par exemple, reproduit au phonographe, sans me representer aussitot les deux
voix, qui alternaient et parfois se melaient, comme issues de deux creatures
minuscules se tenant debout dans la nuit de ce corridor. (Bi )
The second cultural appropriation of the ear takes place in the fol-
lowing chapter, Il etait une fois . . . . The chapter actually opens with a
denition of its own heading:
Il etait une fois . . . (de toutes ces locutions, il est vrai, la plus vague, celle
qui ne se refere meme a nul passe precis), formule traditionnelle evoquant des
temps en marge de lhistoire et que nous connaissons elle-meme de si longue
date pour lavoir lue ou entendue, maint et maint jour de notre enfance, au
commencement dun conte. (Bi )
The phrase encapsulates the whole teleology of presence already wit-

nessed in the move to the ear. It designates the immediate eruption of
a magical presence whose origin and justication lie not in the specic
external events of history but in the already traditional internal recogni-
tions 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 rst attempt to nd 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 Beni-Ounif, during the drole de guerre,
Leiris the soldier purchases a block of writing paper on which is printed
in archaic script the phrase: Il etait 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 oue, toute oreille
(Bi ) in which the object nds 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 sig-
nies is the nature of the person whom it has affected: Ce qui etait une fois,
cest lenfant que je fus, a qui lon contait des histoires commencant par
Il etait une fois . . . (Bi ). The sense of hearing as source of the child
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 etait une fois
un soldat coiffe dun calot sous le soleil dAfrique et ce soldat sappelait
Julien-Michel Leiris; une bote de papier a lettres lui appartenant, sur
laquelle etait ecrit: Il etait une fois . . . (Bi ). The biffure of representa-
tion 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 uctuates 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 Viroay,
Auteuil, Montmorency, Saint-Pierre-les-Nemours whose sonorousness
matches the potentiality of presence in Il etait 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: lenfant que javais
ete et que je ne serais plus jamais . . . , le civil que javais cesse detre et
que je netais pas certain de redevenir un jour. (Bi ). In between
the lost pretemporality of the child and the unfullled 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 in-
ternal division within the autobiographical gure. It is in this light that
the chapters conclusion is a tting 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 etait 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. Cest, sans doute, en egard a cette anciennete-la que je
suis toujours reste bouche bee devant les choses qui semblaient me dire:
Il etait une fois (Bi ). This return to the womb at the close of the
chapter is touching in part because of its nal 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 tting closure to the phrase Il etait une fois . . . and
its search for a pure aural source, Leiris drew up a list of the alternative
accommodations of time which he can now offer in the hope of nding
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 gure 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 signicant 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 nding a pretem-
poral 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 Regle du jeu
We have already reviewed earlier how La Regle du jeu moves from its
opening nominalist celebrations to a sense of communication embody-
ing an existentialist morality. This logic inevitably reects the structure
of autobiography itself, as Leiris comes to perceive and assess himself as
a speaking and writing subject. The desire for pure presence is therefore
intimately bound up with the possibility of pure communication, a pos-
sibility thwarted by the irreducible biffure within any expression of this
ideality. It is paradoxical, then, that it is in recognizing the inevitable
failure of the attempt to achieve the permanent presence of a pure in-
temporal expression and in resolving as a result to break the boundaries
of introspection through action that Leiris appears successfully to sublate
the biffure within interiority, most notably in Fourbis. For the resolution arti-
culated in the second volumes desire to transformer le verbe humain en
un vivant trait dunion avec les auditeurs (Fo ) sufces in itself as an
act of presencing. This presencing views the word as an outward-tending
act of generosity, and so transcends all internal self-division. In addition,
it represents, on the level of pure event, the goal of ideal self-presence, for
it is an illocutionary act whose expression fulls its own desire. In both
cases, a moral resoluteness uses the biffure of language to overcome the
aboriginal biffure within presence, and restore an authentic feeling of being
ones self, a state in which one is not detached from the world or isolated
as a free-oating I, but bonded to the Other (and intimately to ones own
identity) in the brave, open-faced act of being in the world. As Heidegger
writes in Being and Time: Resoluteness brings the Self right into its current
concernful Being-alongside what is ready-to-hand, and pushes it into so-
licitous Being with Others. This double act of union (with others and
already with oneself) most importantly contains no sense of an internal
biffure as part of its structure, for as resoluteness it exists only as the pure
moment of resolution, as the constantly reafrmed and permanently
present event of Being. With resoluteness, Being is a pure event, one that

purges any notion of an internal biffure through its afrmation of the
integrity and authenticity of the event.
If resoluteness fulls itself, however, by the same token the pure event of
being is conceptually impossible. It cannot be lived and known simulta-
neously. From the start, it is necessarily compromised by representation.
Leiriss autobiography must enmesh the pure event within the structure
of the biffure in order to think the pure event. Such a thought can at best
produce the image of a permanent sublime, a continuous crisis with its
own completely internalized (that is to say non-existent) morality and
gratication. Even to think of it as continuous, however, is to suggest a
temporality it refuses to inhabit, while to think of it as crisis is already
not to be in crisis.
In representational terms, then, the pure event of Being is a crisis
beyond crisis, an event unto itself. Such a permanent resoluteness re-
presents nothing, in fact it presents nothing, it just is, in a permanent
state of non-self-knowing. Pathologically, this might be called psychosis;
philosophically, it would be an absolute Ereignis, a pure event of appro-
priation not present to itself, even though tending permanently towards
death as its ownmost possibility, to use Heideggers phrase.
A permanent autobiographical authenticity is an impossible concept,
therefore. If a constant and complete state of self-realization or authentic
awareness is an autobiographical ideal, it is equally something that would
wipe out autobiographical presence in a permanent white light. The au-
tobiographical representation of authentic self-presence must necessarily
reside in an intermediate space, one in which a presence ickers, within
a general eld of dull inauthenticity, as a series of dramatic realizations.
The representation of ones ownmost possibility requires this dramatic
focusing of time, if resoluteness, authenticity, and the true autobiograph-
ical presence which they indicate are to be realized.
One of the traditional dramatic moments which realize an authentic
self-presence is that of the fall. In cultural terms, this event is virtually a
rite de passage of the autobiographical canon: to mention only those whose
names have already been cited, one thinks immediately of the religious
teleology of Augustines Confessions; or of the way in which this theological
concept of falling is given a natural reinterpretation by Rousseau at
the end of the second promenade of Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire. In
phenomenological and existential terms, such a particular scene of falling
betokens the general condition of falling. The latter is a denite existential
characteristic of Dasein itself. In Heideggers view, an existential mode of
Being-in-the-World is documented in the phenomenon of falling.
The condition of falling, and the event of a fall, carry all the para-
doxes of authentic presence within themselves. On the one hand, falling
reveals an essential ontological structure of Dasein, in Heideggers view.
On the other hand, the fall, through which being in the world, authen-
ticity and resolution are realized, must be experienced as an unexpected,
and therefore unnecessary, event, this unexpectedness, indeed, being the
necessary guarantee of the events authenticity. On the one hand, the res-
oluteness of self-present authenticity, which acts in itself as a pure event
of presencing in the world with others, is anticipatory, in the way that
resolutely self-presence declares itself and sets itself before the world of
potential events. The resolute event of assuming and taking over ones
own facticity is a presentation of ones present constructed from a reap-
propriation of ones past and a projection of ones possibilities. Therefore
resoluteness gains its authenticity as anticipatory resoluteness. On the
other hand, however, the incident of a fall exists as a necessary disappoint-
ment of anticipation, which means that to some degree the anticipatory
nature of resoluteness evinces an inauthenticity by seeking to prescribe
the nature of an authentic, unforeseen event, such as a fall. In this way the
event manifests both a full presence in the world and a certain absenti-
cation from it. The paradox of presence in autobiography is therefore
fully encapsulated in the ambiguity of this pure act.
This accounts for the obsessive return of the fall in all of Leiriss works
which reveal an autobiographical presence. In Aurora, Leiriss desire for
an inaccessible purity and his horror of xation (A ) generate an
obsessive confrontation with death in which the hero (epitomized by
the anagrammatic character Siriel) suffers repeated dismemberment
and revivication while in the thrall of a dangerous surrealist muse,
Aurora. Imminent annihilation threatens each male character who dares
to approach the pure surrealist thought embodied in Aurora. Yet this is
precisely what permits the self-conscious presence in the text to stand
before itself, unscathed and transformed, within a general situation of
perpetual falling punctuated by confrontations with death. In LAfrique
fantome a rst, conscious series of falls is enacted: the intellectual tourist
resolves to escape from old Europe and to reject the legacies of Western
imperialism. But these are quickly revealed to be inauthentic events in the
face of the ethnographers true fall, a fall that comes with the gradual
emergence of Africas true signicance for the disillusioned ethnogra-
pher. His jaded voice may announce: voici enn , la terre
des a lombre, des convois desclaves, des festins cannibales, des
cranes vides . . . (AF ). Yet Africa persists in existing even beyond
this image of Europes death. By resisting both scientic analysis and
surrealist immersion, Africas phantom forces Leiris to confront what
lies beyond the ethnographic muse. Like Aurora, Africa acts as a disclo-
sure to Leiris of the impending possibility of his own distinctive death.
In Africa, therefore, Leiris resolutely ees a European death in order to
realize his own authentic Being-towards-death. In LAge dhomme a series
of falls dramatizes the entire virile falling of the young man into man-
hood. Any number of examples could be selected from this catalogue of
wounds, transgressions and abject failings. A very clear example is the
already cited incident in which Leiris lies bleeding profusely from a blow
to the head. His immediate reaction raises the event onto the level of the
existential falling of the subject into tragic authenticity, in which he may
assume the existential destiny so obsessively pursued by the volume as
a whole, that of becoming, in Heideggers words, a Being-towards-the-
end:
Comment pourrai-je aimer? me disais-je, sentence qui memplit tout entier,
montant de mon coeur a ma tete, et sous le coup de laquelle jaurais certainement
defailli, si par sa formulation meme je ne metais senti place sur un certain plan
de tragedie, ce qui me donnait et la erte davoir a jouer un role et la force
necessarire pour le tenir a peu pres correctement. (AH )
But it is in La Regle du jeu that the experience of the fall is most fully repre-
sented, for it combines Auroras drive for epiphany, LAfrique fantomes socio-
political melancholy and LAge dhommes psychoanalysis of the bourgeois
sacred. And yet again we nd that Biffuress opening . . . Reusement!
scene encapsulates the general drama of the whole autobiography. For
with . . . Reusement! Biffures begins with a pure event and a primary
resolution.
. . .
My previous interpretations of La Regle du jeus opening scene have high-
lighted how the desire to begin from an established presence is undercut
by the preoriginal biffure within interiority. In terms of coming into being
in the world, however, this same rst scene provides the opening authen-
tic event of Being. In this eventful form of presence, the undercutting
effect of the biffure is dramatically dominated by a primary appropria-
tion. Here, self-presence is experienced as an original situation, one in
which Leiris comes to assume with resolution a simple line of existence
out of an undetermined and unhistorical eld of possibilities.
Leiris drops a toy soldier, picks it up, sees it is not broken, and cries
. . . Reusement!. He is corrected, and comes to a new awareness.
This rst event, conducted against a background which is pitiless and
indisputable, and which provides the forum for privilege and ritual,
reveals to Leiris the possibility of his nitude. In a primary clearing or
opening which sets in question but is not in itself questioned, La Regle
du jeus beginning represents the rst autobiographical moment as being
the questioning of the truth of Leiriss assumed being. Within an original
clearing, Leiris grasps the question of Being and through this comes into
his own authentic existence. Read in this light, such a grasping can be
seen to be conrmed, rather than undone, by the linguistic and structural
representation of the event. The rst sentences gradual emergence now
resembles less the presence of an already established biffure than the au-
thentic negotiation of an existential situation. Leiris grasps his existence
by confronting and appropriating the shock of the event which opens the
autobiography, and in this grasping achieves self-presence. A recognition
of fallenness and a resolute representation of the event gives autobiogra-
phy its basis and validation. . . . Reusement! is therefore the authentic
grasping of Leiriss fall into time.
The fall of the toy soldier, and the grasping of the event by represen-
tation, are therefore intimately related in terms of authentic presence.
The signicance of the toy lies in its belonging to Leiris: Lessentiel
netait pas quun soldat fut tombe . . . , cetait quil y eut quelque chose
mappartenant qui fut tombe (Bi ). The signicance of the toys fall
therefore lies in Leiriss struggles literally to grasp, handle and manipu-
late this event of falling which belongs to him, including on the level of
a writers apprenticeship:
Un soldat vraisemblablement francais. Et qui etait tombe. Echappe de mes

mains malhabiles, encore inaptes a tracer, sur un cahier, meme de vulgaires
batons . . . Lun de mes jouets, du fait de ma maladresse cause initiale de la
chute se trouvait sous le coup davoir ete casse. . . . Rapidement je me baissai,
ramassai le soldat gisant, le palpai et le regardai. Il netait pas casse, et vive fut
ma joie. Ce que jexprimai en mecriant: . . . Reusement!. (Bi )
The utterance of this term marks an intellectual grasping whose tri-

umph immediately suffers the rst of an obviously endless series of
revisions and further graspings. Leiris falls from a mythical fullled tem-
porality into a grasping of lexistence exterieure a moi-meme et remplie
detrangete (Bi ). Strangeness here expresses the realization that the
falling and grasping of what belongs to Leiris is in fact permanent and
continuous. But the grasping of the fact that the event of falling is es-
sentially what belongs to Leiris equally marks the successful existential
opening of the autobiography. From now on, Leiris knows that, like
his rst word, he is part of a whole sequence of precise signications
(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 decouverte, comme le dechirement brusque dun voile ou
leclatement de quelque verite (Bi ).
In this rst event of appropriation, then, it is ultimately Leiris himself
who is the potentially damaged soldier (given which it is not surpris-
ing that he reappears as a soldier in the Tablettes Sportives section
of Fourbis). The literal and intellectual grasping of the soldiers fall is
an outward-projected grasping of self-presence. This is not to say, of
course, that this rst event of an existential consciousness represents the
self completely as an object of reection. 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 reective consciousness and reected identity into some
glorious totality. Leiriss grasping afrms and in fact intensies the gap
between these two elements of a pure and primary intra-subjective pro-
cess. 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 Leiriss
consciousness in fact from being completely overwhelmed by a primary
attack, an attack experienced rst of all affectively. The interruption of
Leiriss 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 conrm 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-scene which
presents consciousness as constructed from a drama of freedom and in-
ertia, activity and passivity, but also in the terms which Leiris associates
with the interruption of joy and the sensation of vertigo: interloque
(Bi ) and interdit (Bi ) respectively. Read literally, these words di-
rectly state the inter-subjective nature already existing within a particular
consciousness.)
Existentially, then, self-presence is grasped at the beginning of Biffures
in a rst event of Being, one in which both internal and external divisions
appear to be overcome. In relation to interiority, this event and its
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 subjects emergence within the text, are transformed by Leiriss
attitude into the authentic anxiety of a face-to-face encounter with the
possibility of ones own non-being. This possibility is what charges the
whole of the rst chapter: it is in anticipation of an ultimate impending
event to be faced, that of nal non-being, that existentially the auto-
biography 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 reafrm Leiriss whole
potentiality for being. This authentic event takes place in Fourbiss 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 ac-
tivity of sport. This shift of approach, which ties in generally with Fourbiss
existentialist ethnography of bourgeois life, achieves several things.
Firstly, it is used in order to introduce a playful engagement with the world
into a more socio-political chronology: the chapter opens by explaining
that its title is derived from a pre-rst world war yearbook; it concludes
with Leiris attending the World Peace Congress in Vienna, and
resolving as he watches iceskaters henceforth to play a full part in the
great human game and above all to act; and in between it covers Leiriss
participation in the Second World War and the Occupation with a
constant appeal to the participatory and contestatory aspects of sport.
Secondly, this stress on the social dimension of the game serves to empha-
size the primacy of the Other, choice and action over the self-centredness
of a playful exclamation of being. Thirdly, the historical and negotiated
nature of this general metaphor of sport, in contrast to the apparent un-
historical immediacy of . . . Reusement! s cry, permits Leiris to frame
the chapters central moment of socio-political self-presence with a gen-
eral series of false or inauthentic engagements with history, such as those
which constituted his experiences of the drole de guerre. And lastly,
Leiris can use this suspenseful structure, in which he may or may not
achieve a moment of authentic consciousness, to protect (as well as nego-
tiate and expose) himself with the image of a timorous player who comes
to embrace the games risk in an intoxicating moment of direct physical
self-presence (an experience of his position in the system which, given
the sporting allusions, is ttingly confronted while seated on a bicycle).
This authentic event occurs when Leiris is caught in a crossre during
the Paris Occupation (Fo ). Signicantly, it is framed by two par-
odic or inauthentic versions of being in the ring line. The rst of these
is presented as a running joke on the subject of Leiriss pusillanimous if
fraternal participation in the activities of an artillery battery stationed in
North Africa during the drole de guerre. He is happy enough to practise
shelling with the company when his only job is to count the spent cases
and when the only casualties are his ears (in itself an ironic twist to the
lessons of Persephone) and a distant ock of sheep, one of which is actu-
ally blown into the air. Unfortunately, however, his commanding ofcer
presents him with a coup dhonneur, which entails actually detonat-
ing a cannon himself, a privilege he dare not refuse. Leiriss fear delays
this engagement until one of their last sessions when, having nally
accomplished the action, he immediately begins to experience a certain
disappointment for these jeux militaires qui nont ete pour moi quune
comedie toute exterieure (Fo ). The fear preceding this initiation
now gives way to the sensation that his intact body is still that of an
impubere. Nor does he nd an authentic, virile being-unto-death later,
during the triumphal procession of the Free French along the Champs-
Elysees to celebrate the liberation of Paris, when he is forced, along with
the other participants, to dive to the ground as snipers open up from
the rooftops. Like the coup dhonneur, this incident amounts merely to
an intermede pittoresque dans le tohu-bohu dune fete (Fo ). These
interludes therefore merely serve to frame a real dramatic incident dur-
ing the liberation of Paris in which Leiris feels space to be transformed by
the immediate presence of danger. Within this structure of the possibil-
ity of non-being, Leiris experiences with extreme intensity both his own
body and its proximity to other objects. Turning the corner, as he puts it,
pour mengager sur le pont de la Concorde, he suddently nds himself
caught between a German armoured car and an ominous pool of blood:
Durant quelques secondes jeus conscience de moi comme dun corps expose
au vent, desarme, denude, avec la sensation aigue du poids de mes fesses sur
la selle et de la pesee de mes pieds sur les pedales, les dimensions spatiales se
resumant en les distances qui me separaient, vers la droite, de la mare sanglante,
vers la gauche, du vehicule dacier, et le temps, lui aussi, reconnu comme une
dimension: cela donnee par le mouvement du velo actionne par leffort de mes
jarrets et ameliorant, a chaque instant, ma position dans le systeme. (Fo )
Identity (spatio-temporal existence) and difference ( the drama of dan-

gerous choice, political and historical action, and the recognition of the
Other which these entail) here fuse into a single conscience corporelle
portee 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 dorganisme actuellement debout. The dangerous
situation in which Leiris nds himself is therefore one which can make
us all intensely aware of our esh. In quasi-Sartrean language, Leiris
adds that even le lache can derive a certain voluptuousness from this
laying bare, given that the constraints and dangers of war and occupa-
tion 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 ofcial 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 deca: 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 citys liberation (feter), a cause for which Leiriss gestures have at
best been incidental (froler).
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 regle dor will involve de-
termining with whom and for what to express solidarity. This contract
with others, who stand as a conscience morale personalisee (Fo ),
offers at least a personal liberation over the tyranny of fear. Signicantly,
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
Musee de lHomme. 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 out-
weighed the actual event, to a close with a long denition 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 remini-
scient of LAge dhommes prescription: faire passer en actes ces idees, et
certainement ecrire, ecrire encore, pour les formuler de facon toujours
plus claire, plus communicative, plus convaincante . . . (Fo ). These
imperatives are in turn rened into one rule of thumb (echoing the
books priere dinserer) which emphasizes how the drive to fraternity will
henceforth constitute a basic self-proposition: briser sa gangue, sortir
de soi, se fondre avec les etres du dehors (Fo ). This necessary con-
tact with others will not only establish the self s presence, it will create a
multiplication enivrante de soi, a personal intoxication which coincides
in Leiriss 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 signicant, for in several profound ways, which are
merely indicated by the shift of emphasis from solitary play to solidar-
ity 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
rst event of self-presence by correcting Leiriss exclamation, that is to
say by entering onto the scene after the event of self-expression, at least
on the narratives rst reading, on the pont de la Concorde Leiriss
acute consciousness of his own bodily existence is the result, on the nar-
ratives rst reading, of his confrontation with the primary presence of
the others real body. Whereas facticity follows on as the abstract les-
son of . . . Reusement! s shattered play, in Les Tablettes Sportives it
is present from the beginning as the body of the Other. This in turn re-
lates to the primacy of action over words in the latter event. Whereas in
. . . Reusement! the eventual recognition of ones participation in soci-
ety seemed to emerge out of an initial metaphysical temptation in which
words alone mysteriously constituted the world (a struggle repeated con-
stantly in the ensuing chapters of Biffures), the pont de la Concordes
rst moment of consciousness and its subsequent lesson reassert a moral
pragmatism which must be served by words. It is not rstly in language
but rather in the anguish of potential action that Leiris discovers what
Sartre terms the absentpresence 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 conrmed
by a further emphasis in the latter scene, namely the manner in which
Leiris explicitly recognizes the overcoming of abjection inherent in a po-
litical prise de conscience: pour [. . .] les sortir de labjection qui consiste a
sen remettre aux evenements du dehors non voulus mais subis pour
quun changement sopere dans votre vie (Fo ). This grasping of
le dehors was again already implied in the conclusion to . . . Reusement!,
where the child moved from a uid and ambiguous (arguably maternal)
uncorrected environment of play into the more ordered, named and
systematized (arguably paternal) corrected world of law. But in Leiriss
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 lache, and the politicization of play
represented by the chapter as a whole and the bridge scene in particular,
to recall the rst reference to play in Sartres LEtre et le Neant, a reference
which helps to clarify the transformation of . . . Reusement! effected by
Les Tablettes Sportives:
Le moi que je suis depend en lui-meme du moi que je ne suis pas encore, dans
lexacte mesure ou le moi que je ne suis pas encore ne depend pas du moi que je
suis. Et le vertige apparat comme la saisie de cette dependance. Je mapproche
du precipice et cest moi que mes regards cherchent en son fond. A partir de ce
moment, je joue avec mes possibles. Mes yeux, en parcourant labme de haut
en bas, miment ma chute possible et la realisent symboliquement.
In the light of this quotation, play can now be read not as the serene state
prior to the disruption which causes vertigo, as in . . . Reusement!, but
rather as that action which represents the reective apprehension of the
self, that is to say an existential anguish resulting from the vision of ones
non-being and the necessity of decisive action which ensues. Such play
therefore destroys the unreective vertigo or fear produced by ones sudden
arrival at a precipice, a power it reveals by imitating and symbolically
realizing the possible fall. The fall of the soldier in . . . Reusement! in
this context therefore becomes a rehearsal for the authentic existential
anguish which marks the new, true beginning of Leiris the soldier in
Les Tablettes Sportives.

The central pont de la Concorde scene from Les Tablettes Sportives
directly represents Leiriss body as exposed to the possibility of non-being
in a socio-historical setting. The interpretation of the scene directly repre-
sents Leiriss presence as the authentic moral consciousness which grasps
this nihilation in a socio-political way. La Regle du jeu thus posits a new
autobiographical point of origin, one in which the primacy of the word
in Biffures is replaced by the primacy of choice or action in Fourbis.
This move is given a further twist when repeated in the nal volume,
Frele Bruit. Leiris recalls Goethes famous translation of divine conscious-
ness into dogmatic rationalism:
Au commencement etait laction. Cest ainsi que Faust, vers le debut du drame
goetheen, paraphrase la sentence initiale de levangile de saint Jean: au com-
mencement etait le Verbe. (FB )
On the most immediate level, this recollection of the primacy of action
bears out Fourbiss major revisions of . . . Reusement!. The statement
would endorse the view that self-presence exists not via the verbal
conrmation of a marvel, but in the physical conrmation of a wilful
intellection. As we have already seen in an earlier chapter, however, this
implied opposition between poetry and politics, which Fibrilles sought
to fuse, is not sustained by Frele Bruit. Instead, the latter volume in
a rhizomatic manner connects passages concerning language, often
of the most simplied, and hence exclamatory, nature, with scenes of
participation in a modern event. The result offers a structural and tem-
poral self-representation not determined by sublation or closure, in which
word and action are not ideologically opposed. It is above all this constel-
latory nature which exposes the ultimate bad faith of Fibrilless attempt
to make poetry and politics coincide in a feverish instant: the earlier
work now not only seems to court the dangers of insanity but to point
to a totalitarian structure which can ultimately only deny freedom, and
hence an authentic self-presence (where freedom is understood as the
space of the Other, that is, the biffures possibilities).
In the context of Frele Bruits accommodating structure, therefore, and
given the metatextual function of the Goethe reference, this allusion to
the revision of . . . Reusement! undertaken in Les Tablettes Sportives
signals less a simple reinforcement of the valorization of decisive action
over revelatory word than the coexistence of action and word in the nal
volumes form and content. Presence will here be marked by an authentic
act of freedom, but this act may well be verbally marvellous. In similar
vein, this mark of presence may be persistently literal and particular,
and simultaneously indicate the whole ethico-political framework for
the production of such a mark. As a sign of this interconnectedness and
of Frele Bruits accommodating nature, it is tting that Leiris employs a
double term which signals both intellectual coexistence and homophonic
singularity: tache/tache.
Three dated events in Frele Bruit rst of all combine to establish a gen-
eral recollection of the moral choice posed by Les Tablettes Sportives.
In the books very rst scene, dated August (FB ), Leiris is
shown witnessing another bloody confrontation between the occupying
Germans and the Free French. He ees in horror to the kitchen where he
automatically washes his hands. Once he becomes aware of what he is
doing, however, he forces himself to return to the window to observe the
rest of the killing. In the second event, dated August (FB ),
Leiris once again recalls the snipers re which sought to disrupt the
celebration of the liberation of Paris. Here in fact he does use the term
tache in reafrming his pleasure at this pure sense of presence in the face
of death, and his subsequent rejection of an inauthentic presence based
on fastidious and cowardly non-involvement: oubliant la crainte des
taches ou autres petits degats qui si souvent embarrasse mes mouvements
(FB ). The third occasion, dated May , connects the previous
occupation and liberation scenes to the May student resistance to
the CRS. Here Leiris explicitly emphasizes how his trips to the kitchen
on this occasion are done not in order to wash his hands of the affair,
but in order to bring out basins of water which are used by the students
to combat the effect of tear gas. Into this general framework Leiris can
now introduce the indicators tache/tache and related actions of washing
ones hands of an affair or else using them to create an authentic pres-
ence. He begins a section of four entries by recalling the suggestion made
by Marcel Mauss (persecuted as a Jew by the Nazis) that the fork was
invented by cannibals who wished to avoid sacriligious contact with their
human esh. This leads Leiris to meditate ethnographically on his own
and others fastidiousness (lon dirait qua faire ainsi la main se tache
vilainement (FB )) before concluding by reminding himself of Lenins
dictum that one should not be afraid to dirty ones hands when one works
for the Revolution (FB ). In spite of this conscious repudiation, how-
ever, the image of washing ones hands persists in the two subsequent
entries. The rst is a direct account of a black girls night-time vision
of two disembodied hands washing. The second is an allusion to Lady
Macbeths sonambulistic attempt to rid herself of the damned spot of
guilt, while regretting that all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten
this little hand. The nal entry interprets all these images as a com-
mentary on Leiriss own moral presence: Coupe de tout ce qui sagite
sous mes fenetres, . . . suis-je plus vivant que deux mains a la derive quon
decouvre en train de se laver sous un robinet, dans la penombre dune
cuisine? (FB ). The solution he offers himself is realist and dogmatic:
descendre dans la rue, but this does not preclude further moral and
metatextual ruminations on these blemishes affecting presence. A series
of blood-spattered women pass before his eyes, each dramatizing Leiriss
own fear of la tache de sang intellectuelle denoncee par Isidore Ducasse
(FB ). One such image, that of Lucia di Lamermoor, leads to the open
statement: Dailleurs, est-il possible de rester sans tache? Et lune des
pires, nest-ce pas de faire en sorte quon nait jamais a expressement se
tacher? (FB ). Thereafter, answers will be found to these questions
on both a conscious and a subconscious level, and it is typical of Frele Bruit
that these levels should be made to overlap. For example, in a dream
(FB ), Leiris is guilty of some kind of event, and is apprehended
by a policeman whose job is complicated but interesting, comme dans
Marcel Proust les feuilles dautomne (FB ). This dream is inter-
preted, however, in a dogmatically realist manner as a moral tale of
commitment. In the course of explication, the theft is thus renamed a
tache and the policemans job a tache dorganisation, while the com-
pressed reference to Proust and Hugo is read as representing a shame-
ful literary topology full of unpronounced words and unmade gestures.
The tache/tache framework produces a damning conclusion: behind a
mask of moral rectitude, which is worn in order to abstain from (possibly
violent) action in the world, Leiris is in fact a weak and contemptible
little coward.
Conversely, when Leiris begins almost immediately after this to record
his real experiences of Cuba and his conscious revolutionary hopes
(FB ), he articulates the tache of a disparity between appearance
and reality more specically in terms of imaginative representation:
Prendre garde a cette tache de sang: conclure abusivement de ce que lon pense
a ce que lon est. Autre tache possible: souhaiter que la Revolution progresse
et setende, alors que progressivement on ne fait rien ou a peu pres rien pour
hater, chez soi, son declenchement . . . Inutile dargumenter, je suis marque par
cette tache, signe entre autres du grave hiatus ouvert en moi entre facon de se
representer le monde et facon de sy comporter. (FB )
This conclusion leads in turn to examples of the correct moral tache left
by writing, examples inspired by the grafti of May (FB ).
As implied in one such famous slogan, Soyez realistes, demandez
limpossible, there is nothing simplistically realist or rationalist about
the poetics envisaged. Leiris immediately produces an example of such
a tache: : un chant de beau navire pour calmer la mer ou je
me meurs, fumee; un vin qui, sans peser, se rie de ma tristesse et me
fasse rever; (FB ). A real revolutionary situation has been properly
answered by a demand for dreaming.
On both these levels, therefore, the typical Leirisian tension between
poetry and politics is absorbed into a presence whose teleology is that of
the tache/tache. Frele Bruit concludes with the hope that the tache de sang
representing Leiriss complicitous and cowardly presence in the world be
vitiated by those gestural taches which he has managed to make in the
service of an authentic revolution dened as un desir daffranchissement
maximal [. . .] ou taches et biens seraient equitablement repartis
(FB ).
These concluding representations of the tache/tache of presence are
among the most afrmative moments in Frele Bruit, yet they could hardly
be considered a successful nal sublation of the biffure within interiority.
At best such intermittent ashes emphasize the sense of mortality which
increasingly darkens Frele Bruit. The nal volume of La Regle du jeu after
all opens and closes not with the primacy of action, but with a crepus-
cular sense of resignation that names interruption, lack and absence as
its limits. This is Frele Bruits original and ineffacable tache. Given that
La Regle du jeus opening offered a similar conception of the preoriginal
biffure, this conclusion to the autobiography is not surprising. Moreover, it
is logical to phenomenological autobiography, since self-representation
will involve Being apprehending itself as not being its own foundation.
Equally, it conforms to the dynamics of the tache, in the sense that
the representation of the nihilating movement of reection as character
isolated by a deed, to engross the present and dominate memory will
inevitably involve the violent erasure of rejected possibilities. In auto-
biography, where these erasures must be self-inicted, the paradox is
therefore that the presence represented by the tache constantly conrms
its own death.
This returns us, nally, to the fundamental paradox of representation
itself. In general, Frele Bruits continued love of verbal marvels precludes
any simply performative view of authentic self-presence in which a word
is dogmatically an intentional act (as in Sartres Theatre de Situations). And
the embarrassment of words inherent in any realist aesthetic is simply
made more acute by the particular term tache. This tache is meant
to stand for the death of introspection and for a vital being in the world.
But its intimate associations with death (whether when owing like blood
from death, or surging like violence towards it, or indicating even in its
imminent coagulation the advent of a nal death) ultimately conrm
less the wilful intellection of an abgrund than the ineffable mark of death
which ontologically and poetically is the true grund of presence as event.
This death of autobiography marks the ultimate limit of life for both the
subject and the genre of autobiography. Presence as self-determination
must still be represented within the culture of a general thanatography.

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 Regle du jeus philosophical and technical limits. Leiris writes about
death in three major ways: on the most obvious level of content, his au-
tobiographical discourse constantly lists and discusses instances of death
as an important part of the awareness of ones own temporality; more
fundamentally, La Regle du jeu revolves philosophically about the unknow-
able, unlivable personal death at its heart; and most particularly in Leiris,
this content and philosophy are both affected by Leiriss consideration
of autobiographys technical splitting of the self, a process reected in
the operations and movements of the biffure.
I have already chronicled death as content when discussing the obses-
sive return of the fall in Leiriss 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 Leiriss being. Beyond the level of
this discourse, however, it is technically that La Regle du jeu most radi-
cally reveals the gure of the fundamental death existing already within
the operations and the sign of self-presence. Here the philosophical and
the technical limits of La Regle du jeu conrm one another. From the
biffure of . . . Reusement! to the tache of Frele Bruit, the sign represent-
ing self-presence points up the objectication and mortication 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 gured 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 thresh-
old onto a nal wholeness; it may constitute the unbreachable limit of

autobiography, but by the same token it denes the existence and the
value of the work. Leiriss relationship as autobiographer to the biffure is a
case in point: the operations of the biffure are contained by the controlled
representation of Biffuress typically worked rst 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 irrevoca-
ble disruption of the rst paragraphs 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 biffures
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 Biffuress opening recognition that Being in-
volves being with others from the beginning, and provides one strong
pedagogical link between La Regle du jeus 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 others death to knowing ones own
death as a feverish poetic resolution. The bathos to which this leads
carries over into the resigned metatextual apercus of Frele Bruit, where
Leiriss 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 con-
cept of the others death in order to come closer to the personal death
which cannot be lived. Theoretically, this should mean that La Regle du
jeu progresses towards that fully successful self-representation in which
one lives ones own being-towards-death. In fact, as we can see from the
resume 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
volume employs the deferrals and reprises of the biffure in an attempt to
amass a full representation of self-presence, the biffures disseminations
simultaneously undo this xation. This rhythm returns Leiriss work not
simply to self-presence, but to a self-presence constituted by the constant
conrmation of the impossibility of knowing its own death or wholeness
via the representation of the others death, even while the autobiogra-
phy 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 allegor-
ical, level on which death is still written about in La Regle du jeu. The
representation of different events, as in . . . Reusement! or Mors, can
be read as offering up an insistent gure 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 dif-
ferent philosophical ways, but in each case this pure being is known only
on the basis of a return. Whether Leiriss 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 funda-
mentally 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 ex-
acerbated 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 dra-
matic 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 Augustines 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 nd rest, when you ad-
mit us to the great holiness of your presence). This tension is another
reason for the recurring non-denitive readings which create such a dis-
tinctive rhythm in La Regle du jeu and which I have already read in terms
of failure and the biffure. Leiris is constantly tempted to bring his Being to
a natural termination and the holy rest of a nished work, while simul-
taneously 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 Regle du jeu. Biffuress opening chapter displays not simply an original
nostalgia but more fundamentally a rst evidence of the absentication
within self-presence which takes place from the beginning of conscious-
ness. La Regle du jeus original moment of self-observation cannot view
itself wholly as a moment of presence; at best it manages to open up
a rst moment in the world by placing all non-original moments in
parenthesis. The rst paragraphs move from this initial parenthetical
negativity to the concluding image of the already fallen toy soldier there-
fore does more than set the terms for the emergence of a particular
consciousness. It represents the general lesson of the biffure, the fact that
self-representation can only open up on the basis of a self-effacing space,
a space generated not only by those external limits of presence towards
which autobiography progresses and from which it feels it emanates, but
also more intimately by the internal death inherent in self-presence.
As in so many other matters, . . . Reusement! here adumbrates many
of La Regle du jeus later narratives. Logically enough, this thanatography
is especially apparent in the autobiographys metatextual sections. As
the object of its own analysis, the narrative at these points can be read
as a single enormous gure of the non-coincidence within self-presence.
A common pattern emerges: the section becomes dead in leaving the
time and landscape of action; it moves to a discussion of death as a
phenomenon; and it offers in the process some abiding image, network
of images or structuration of the event of death which gurally suggests
what cannot directly be lived or faced, namely the death inherent in the
structure of self-intuition.
It is in Dimanche that Biffures reverses the normal chronological evo-
lution of the life which it has hitherto charted in order to work back to the
source or soubassement (Bi ) of what might otherwise seem entirely
the result of chance. This professional negative of a personal life quickly
leads to a number of dispiriting conclusions. Leiriss original conception
of the poet as spiritually and socially en marge has not withstood his slow
absorption into paid work and regulated habits. Writing is no longer a
sacred moment; instead, Leiris has become in every sense an ecrivain du
dimanche who produces autobiography for various deathly reasons:
Je necris presque plus de poemes et plus aucun recit imagine, tendant a adopter
lautobiographie en prose pour unique moyen dexpression. Je ne sais sil ne faut
imputer cette sterilite relative a lexistence trop ordonnee que je mene, au fait
de navoir plus tout mon temps (ce qui, quant a la poesie, pourrait bien revenir a
nen avoir plus aucun) ou si ce nest pas, plutot, parce que la veine poetique etait
deja plus qua demi tarie et ma foi emoisee, que jai pris lhabitude de faire un
usage quasi scientique de la litterature en meme temps que je me xais dans
mon actuel metier. (Bi )
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 imagi-
native prose; it evinces a relative sterility resulting from the death of an
absolutely free time; it represents a quasi-scientic professionalism that
survives a tarnished spirit. However, Leiris does not claim that auto-
biography 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 barriere
aucune pour me defendre contre lidee de la mort, comme si le fait
detre libre et de disposer entierement de mon temps, le fait detre
grand ouvert et vacant me livrait au vertige de rien, par cette impres-
sion meme de carte blanche (Bi ). To this we can add that the
negative qualities associated here with autobiography are indeed nor-
mally part of the genres denition (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 fur-
thermore conrmed by the very techniques of this present self-analysis.
In this rst metatextual turn, then, a certain death (one that is not simply
a chronological phenomenon) is already conrmed as externally and
internally present in the reasons for autobiographys existence. Leiris
then adds a further series of deaths to this rst, personal list by point-
ing out how his writing is also inspired by a socio-political version of
negation:
Un certain besoin de negation, comme si mon but ultime etait de me soustraire,
de me mettre hors datteinte, en inventant un monde ou, toutes lois naturelles
et humaines se trouvant abolies, sont tranchees a la fois attaches avec les classes
sociales et corde soigneusement tressee que passe autour du cou letat civil,
grefer sinon bourreau pour tout ce qui est humanite engendrable, corveable
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 etait 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-meme. Vivant, non a lindicatif present, mais (quand je ne
me replie pas sur le passe) a ce futur absolu dans lequel on est precipte par
lapprehension de la mort. (Bi )
For all these acknowledgements of the death at the heart of self-
apprehension, 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 difcult to bear, but more funda-
mentally 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 gures of death. Firstly, Leiris recalls a dream
(an obvious gure 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 ring 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 reglee, before closing with two death-
lled references to other writers. The rst of these writers is Desnos, who
could stand for the whole early surrealist period of Leiriss writing which
has just been examined in this chapter. Leiris has just read of his death
and remarks that one cannot properly react to such an event with any-
thing 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 navoir aucune idee
de leur condamnation a mort (Bi ). After a gap in the text, the entire
chapter nishes on an historical image (one of ending and failure as well
as relief): cest la n de la guerre car le Japon vient de capituler. But the
abiding image of this whole metatextual chapter is that of the complex
gure of death within the structure of self-intuition which Biffures has had
to present in such an oblique fashion the nal capitulation so barely
articulated here belongs properly to this chapters impossible struggle to
represent the death within self-apprehension.
The nal chapter, Tambour-trompette, approaches this same impos-
sibility in a slightly different way. Leiriss 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:
Lun des plus insistants parmi les reves de mon enfance je lai note a diverses
reprises sitot que la vision dun avenir sans cesse raccourci eut commence de
minciter a fourgonner dans le passe qui saccumule derriere moi avait pour
base ce theme tres simple: recherche dun objet connu, egare pour un temps et
que je souhaite ardemment retrouver. Reve de pur desir. (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 chapters 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 signies his abstract desire to isolate himself
as a pure object of self-representation:
Quand je procede a cette chasse qui naboutit qua des captures decevantes
(maigres fantomes de realites toujours en retard sur moi-meme et circulant deja
parmi des ruines a linstant ou jecris), je reproduis, transposee sur un plan
abstrait, la quete que dans mes reves comme dans la vie courante je fais si
souvent dun objet. (Bi )
Instead of uncovering the pure object of selfhood, however, Leiris nds
himself wandering in the underworld of his own dead selves, an image
once again presented in parenthesis. This failure to nd 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 davoir trouve lobjet . . . , je metais mis a ranger,
a faire de lordre, an que fut masque tant bien que mal le manque de ce
que primitivement javais cherche (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 reve de pur
desir. So perhaps the marvellous object could be produced as the cir-
culating 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, ou son destin est quil mechappe
(mis en circulation contre especes sonnantes) et continue sa carriere en-
tre 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 conrmed and widened by the insertion into it of a writing that
signies his difference from the concrete. Far from creating an internal
coincidence, it conrms an elementary and logically unbridgeable gulf:
Tout cela revient a la notion elementaire dexil, ou de coupure, de faille
se creusant entre moi-meme et ce que japprehende (Bi ). Leiriss
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 ant a ces lignes comme a des guides qui doivent
me conduire vers un pays ou tous les etres me paratraient plus vivants, est-elle
vraiment la bonne? Ou nest-elle pas plutot un l trompeur qui senroule et
semmele, meloignant nalement du point vital que je voudrais atteindre au
lieu de my mener apres quelques inevitables lacets? (Bi )
Similarly, in the case of temporality, the patient and increasingly weari-

some constitution of an autobiographical object eventually has the effect
of destroying even any compensatory marvel produced by words by
burying it under a mountain of details, none of which contains the im-
mediacy 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 enlise dans ma besogne de raboteur de ches et trouve un gout de

plus en plus amer a ce ressassement perpetuel dobservations et devenements,
ressortissant tous au passe le plus mort. Nulle ambee poetique ne monte,
je perds de vue mon but ultime quetouffe la foison de details plutot quelle
ne concourt a y mener, et je mengonce, a chaque pas, davantage dans mon
lugubre petit traintrain de collectioneur. (Bi )
By way of conrming 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 publica-
tion in Les Temps modernes. Friends, writers and critics with virtually one
voice appear to condemn the ineffectual narcissism, snobbery or sim-
ple inaccuracy of what had been offered as a true gage de vie. Such a
negation of the preceding self-reexive 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 nal autobiographical object, he nds himself drawn into an-
other series of paradoxes and negations. Such an act of abandonment
ipso facto turns the autobiography into a nal object, one all the more
associated with death for being the result of a failure: mon livre comme
ma vie meme vouee maintenant a loisivete est donc une chose parv-
enue au bord extreme du vide et qui, deja, nexiste plus quen silhouette,
en decoupure depourvue 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. Leiriss momen-
tary 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 point-
less vacancy beyond moral self-representation: Moralement, je goute
un bizarre suspens: comme si, jamais, je ne devais mourir ou comme si,
deja, je netais plus vivant; une marge de grandes vacances, sans voyage,
au point mort (Bi ). The lack or void or hole which Biffures had
sought to ll by nding or building the self as object will be conrmed,
then, whether Leiris completes or abandons his task. This unavoidable
fact, together with the image of a moral journey suspended, explain the
peculiar object which intrudes on Biffuress closing page: une locomotive
qui trouve la voie fermee et stoppe en rase campagne, apres avoir lache
une bordee de coups de sifet (Bi ). Like the previous mechanical
objects in this chapter (the tambour-trompette and the carte postale
disque de phonographe) the trains stoppage on the metatextual level of-
fers a gure of the autobiographical impossibility of closing the circuit of
self-capture or self-transportation. Biffuress autobiographical machine
(Bi ) has therefore not brought Leiris to a denitive 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 tantot. 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 objecties presence. The whole of Fourbis therefore
envisages non-existence, and nowhere more directly than in the opening
chapter, Mors.
Il me faut donc remonter: Leiriss undertaking at the beginning of
Fourbis presents itself rstly as a quasi-Proustian awakening a return
to the conscious world from the depths of sleep which parallels the
Proustian echoes already noted at the beginning of Biffures. But more
generally it refers to the gulf into which Leiris had sunk by the end of
Biffures, in terms both of the Orphic failure on which it had closed, and
the mortifying effect which its denitive publication as an autobiography
has had on him. Leiris determines, therefore, to lift the veil on these
failures in the hope of transforming the value of his work and life. The
images of curtains or clouds or partitions or guipures with which Mors
is punctuated are therefore all forms of a fundamental psychological
leucoma whose blindspot Leiris must remove if he is to come clearly face
to face with his future and past non-being and so attain the authentic
existentialist freedom of anguish. If this sounds Sartrean, it is because,
immediately prior to the undertaking quoted above, Leiris expresses his
physical, artistic and ideological reawakening in terms that are in part
highly reminiscient of LEtre et le Neant:
Angoisse, sitot tire du noir par ce signal, de se sentir petrie, redevenu presque
conscient mais sans controle sur des membres inanimes, ossements epars atten-
dant un jugement dernier; desespoir, sans cri qui vienne lattenuer, de jamais
emerger de ce matelas de sommeil confondu avec le matelas materiel lui-meme
epais et oconneux sur lequel la nuit, avec nous, sest allongee; avenement bru-
tal, enn, nous arrachant a ces affres quand (sans quon sache comment pareille
vapeur aux rouleaux etouffants a pu, dun coup, se dissiper) lon se trouve les
yeux dessilles. Seuil, donc, assez deplaisant a franchir que celui de leveil, chaque
fois que ce retour exige que nous restions ainsi lucidement suspendu dans les
limbes durant un temps indetermine. Incubation dans la penombre, attente
anxieuse avant levanouissement des brouillards ou le retrait soudain du rideau
comme quand, par exemple, arrive apres une periode de confusion et de tor-
peur leclaircie qui fait quon se met a ecrire, pousse ainsi par quelque chose qui
demeure etranger bien que cela soit interieur, et moyennant un saut dont nous
ne sommes jamais assures quil pourra saccomplir parce quil ne depend que
partiellement de notre volonte. (Fo )
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 posi-
tive lacunae, which in fact reveal one fundamental form of deciency,
a manque absolu or defaut originel (Fo ). (Leiriss account at this
point quite clearly recalls LEtre et le Neant, and specically 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 rst
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 doutre-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: Cest une voiture qui est tres
loin, tres loin, frightens him even more. He would have preferred to be
told that the noise was that of an insect. The comparison with Biffuress
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
give rise rstly not to exuberance but to fear. Leiris emphasizes the pri-
mal nature of the situation: prior to the event taking place, he is en proie
deja a une crainte vague; while the object of his fear is not a particular
noise but an unique presence 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 lunique signe dune unique obstination trop solitaire pour
se situer autrement quau dela (Fo ). So insistent is this au-dela, indeed,
that in the course of its obstinate being even the meaningful or project-
ing origins of presence proposed in . . . Reusement! and Persephone,
namely the voice and the ear, are appropriated by a perpetual neutrality
and externality which refuses to yield any message:
Faible chant lance pour soi et quon devine etre laccompagnement ou le produit
direct de quelque occupation qui, elle, ne se laissera pas deviner; fragile son qui,
a travers le labyrinthe que constituent les parties interieures de lorgane de loue,
naura charrie nul message. (Fo )
This lack of message is a message, however, in the sense that it pro-

duces consciousness of a fundamental and repressed lack. It is the total
indifference of the noise which creates the anguished recognition of fac-
ticity in Leiris. (A most peculiar conuence between Leiris and Sartre
occurs here: in La Nausee, Roquentin describes the unclassiable root
which makes him experience his own contingency as cette peau dure et
compacte de phoque; Leiris compares the word Mors to le morse,
mammifere aquatique du meme ordre que le phoque (Fo ).)
The negative message of the sounds nocturnal intrusion produces in
Leiris a new sequence of childhood scenes and a resumption of the jour-
ney metaphor interrupted at the end of Biffures. The voiture or acre
itself is rst of all associated with the signier Mors and the signied
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 acre 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 Viroay towards a new
series of outdoor locations along the Picardy route. None of these loca-
tions has featured in Biffures, and each of these previously abolished rep-
resentations conrms the permanent presence of non-being at the centre
of self-perception. The rst stop is at the guinguette du Pere lAuto ,
which Leiris naturally associates with consomme 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 siecles) and sacred (tout est consomme). The sec-
ond 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 gure
would be a tting presence. But I am tempted to establish a more ten-
uous, psychoanalytical link: Gambettas death, which was caused by an
accidental wounding, could stand as a thanatographical gure 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
chapters 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 au-
tobiographical existence: endroit dhabitation ou un homme a vecu et
dont on ne sait plus, parmi tant de souvenirs quon y voit rassembles,
lesquels etaient choses a lui, qui lentourerent de son vivant, et lesquels
nont ete mis la que plus tard, souvenirs impersonnels de lHistoire et
non pas reposoirs dune memoire humaine (Fo ). This abstract view
of self-perception is typically made concrete by the way in which Leiris
now recalls the consomme of the restaurant in order to link the yeux du
bouillon which are shortly to be ingested with the deux lentilles a eur
de peau through which we look out. Moreover, the deathly landscape
which we view when we do look out (lair doutre-tombe) is, for Leiris,
merely a projection of the dark chamber which already exists within our
heads, a cavite bien close qui est la realisation imaginaire de ce quon
nomme for interieur soudain illuminee et passee a une espece de
xite mortuaire de musee Grevin. Leiris then establishes a further con-
nection between the eyes of this cavity and the eyes of the food by
speculating that ones fear of all cavities, grottoes or dark spaces rests on
the childs fear of being eaten, an act representing the most elementary
form of aggression to which we can imagine our presence in the world
exposes us. Consomme and consommation now represent the direct
and violent possibility of ones 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 cliched
representation of death:
La mort, que les allegories chretiennes representent comme un squelette aux
orbites vides et aux dents bien apparentes, ne serait-elle pas avec les deux
trous noirs qui lui servent dyeux et son rictus dogre sadique la chose obscure
et sans regard qui un beau jour vous mange? (Fo )
This appearance of an engulng death marks the transition from out-
door to underground scenes, the latter combining the formers external
sense of location with a gural sense of the inner, mental cavite 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:
Cest un souvenir de veritable incursion dans les visceres de la mort (comme
si javais ete devore tout cru par le monstre de meme que le sont censement
les inities de nombreux cultes archaques), un souvenir de prise de contact avec
labme ou de descente aux enfers que je conserve de certaines promenades
touristiques ou circonstances diverses qui mamenerent a visiter des grottes, des
carrieres. (Fo )
Given the autobiographical location of the rst moment of consciousness
in a childhood pastime, as at the start of Biffures and Fourbis, it is not
surprising that the rst cave is remembered as displaying a sign over it
reading Entree du Gouffre, as though it were a fairground attraction
complete with train fantome (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 caves rst 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 gure of the vertige of self-consciousness. Leiris enters into an
immensite en vase clos and stares giddily at the double vault created by
the caves perfect reection in the water. The scene graphically illustrates
the internal dilemma of pure reection, representing in an external and
yet internal space (one in which innite space appears as a content and
not as an envelope) how self-reection opens wider the gulf between
reexive and reected consciousness which Leiriss 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 ini-
tially in a somewhat carnivalesque way: the cliched skeleton of death
mentioned above crops up as a gigantic grafto on the wall of a quarry;
and on one occasion Leiris and his wife visit a Grotte aux Fees. But more
quickly than before (apres quelques sinuosites et une breve descente),
Leiris comes face to face with a pure threshold unto nothingness:
Je me trouvai tout a coup en face dun immense ecran de noirceur: obscurite
totale, surgie dun bloc et parfaitement impenetrable; [. . .] apparue de maniere
si soudaine et fermee a tel point au regard quelle etait bien plutot portail
donnant sur le neant. (Fo )
So pure is this nothingness that it engenders no sense of a fall or colli-
sion, 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 repre-
sented, it can equally be more impressively played with, conceptualized,
drawn into the eld of moral reection. Leiris returns several times to
this last site, and replaces the anxiety of his rst 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
ou cordages, portants, praticables joints a ce quon divine des trappes et
des dessous donnent limpression dun voyage dans les spheres infernales
ou dune epreuve maconnique (Fo ). In other words, the representation
of Leiriss confrontation with nothingness is now at its most powerful,
allowing Leiris to imagine himself at the end of this whole section as
having penetre dans lantre des mysteres et en etre 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 continu-
ation of La Regle du jeu with the testimony of a series of autobiographical
deaths. It rewrites the beginning of consciousness, transforming it from
a quasi-Proustian notion of waking into a more directly Sartrean con-
frontation with contingency. It balances the original pleasure, nostalgia
and ideality of the rst of these effects with the original fear, resolve and
materiality of the second. It creates a new list of cultural precedents
and inuences in the process, recalling only in passing Biffuress crucial
abecedaire, changing or rearranging the rst volumes biblical, operatic
and fabular references, and introducing the Comtesse de Segur and
Jules Verne on account of their mise-en-scene of subterranean exploration.
Above all these reassessments of a rst moment of consciousness are
based on an entirely new set of early memories. This fresh series of
presuppositions for self-representation in itself constitutes a remarkable
enough thanatography, given its explicit theme of a primary confronta-
tion with non-being. But its real logic offers an even more profound
thanatography, for it involves the progressive move from staging the ex-
ternal appearance of nothingness to guring the internal death within
pure reection, a death increasingly recognized to be the precondition of
presence the more Leiris attempts to reach and represent the mysterious
heart of self-inquiry.
Both Biffures and Fourbis have therefore begun with a reassessment, and
further rejiggings, of an ontological, moral and aesthetic kind, will con-
tinue throughout the rest of La Regle du jeu. Even while the autobiography
progresses towards its end, Leiris will continue to search for the authen-
tic origin or approach, prior to any ressassement, which would permit the
nal emergence of a pure rst presence. Such a moment would most
absolutely mark autobiographys death. And, indeed, the next occasion
on which Leiris plunges himself into the mouth of the Gulf is when
he attempts suicide, as recorded in Fibrilles: je menfoncai decidement
dans le noir (Fi ). The subsequent continuation of the autobiography
of course bears witness to the failure of this desire here to live both the
poetics and the politics of Orpheus as a pure timeless fureur; and in
fact, on reawakening from his post-suicidal coma, Leiris determines to
complete his unnished article on the evolution of Aime Cesaires po-
etry and political theses, something which neatly encapsulates both the
wish to emulate this prime example of Sartres black Orpheus and the
inevitable death of pure intuition and expression entailed in this intel-
lectual depassement. Following Fibrilless failure to reach and represent
a pure death, then, Frele Bruit can be read in turn as a further ascent and
reassessment. As a sadder and a wiser Orpheus, Leiris abandons trying
to nd and inhabit the instantaneous point of convergence between
poetry and political commitment (FB ),and instead emphasizes, in
a series of melancholy reections, ou (quy puis-je?) le noir domine
(FB ), the enormous temporal gap which Leiris the subject traverses
on his journey from the anxiety of waking (FB ) to the nameless
horror of a nal sleep (FB ). As we have seen in this section, the ex-
ternal nature of this journey offers a gure of the fundamental internal
gap separating representing consciousness and represented conscious-
ness. As it closes, La Regle du jeu therefore recognizes in its own enor-
mous presence a permanent monument to this primordial death within
self-presence which already pregures the existential apprehension of a
forever approaching nothingness.
Existing between two deaths, the rst inherent in the original apprehen-
sion giving rise to self-consciousness, and the second projected in the
nal and unknowable termination of selfhood, Leiriss autobiographical
practice emerges at the end of the twentieth century as a comprehensive
and exemplary achievement in writing the self, to be placed historically
in a lineage including Montaigne and Rousseau. Progressively exploring
and exhausting inherited metaphysical or ideological resolutions to self-
identity and the place and form of its writing, Leiriss autobiographical
quest moreover arguably stands as a classic example of the centurys
most radical intellectual investigations, to be ranked here alongside key
texts by Freud, Sartre, or Levi-Strauss. Though historically grounded
assertions about canonic status are still premature, such claims will cer-
tainly be boosted by the forthcoming publication in Pleiade form of the
entirety of Leiriss uvre. What is certainly clear already is that Leiris
represents one of those key French writers of his time who, in the words
of Michel Foucault, shattered a founding self-evidence of the subject,
and generated exemplary and transgressive forms for an interrogation
of delimitations that demonstrated how this subject could no longer be
taken to have cette forme originaire et autosufsante que la philoso-
phie classiquement lui supposait. In this context, we can add that what
makes Leiris an exemplary postmodern instance of writing the self is
the singular assumption of a plurality of formal and philosophical ap-
proaches, and the generation of autobiographical integrity within and
through this critical and cultural dispersion of identity.
Such historical and strategic features account in part for the wide-
ranging critical appreciation of Leiriss work. Two extreme examples
offer a clear illustration of this point. Georges Mays LAutobiographie is
a well-established reading of the genre that reects rather than chal-
lenges conventional denitions of the form (p. ), generally endorses
the referential tenets of humanist criticism, including intentionality,

identication, and universalism (pp. ), and ultimately supports
the utopian vision of humanity to be found in his work as a whole,
including his many analyses of the Enlightenment. Within this con-
ventional framework, May sees the goal of autobiography as the
attainment of an impossible truth or sincerity (pp. ), within
which all protean or polymorphic instances can be understood as
the repeatedly deformed and incomplete reection of individualitys
irreducible unicity (pp. ). Such a philosophy of individuation
can therefore easily absorb the example of Leiris, ignoring its reduc-
tion of the radical biffural effect. The case of Leiris is therefore pre-
sented by May as both abnormal and exemplary (p. ), and its
intellectual and formal ruptures a typical product of their age (p. )
notwithstanding which La Regle du jeu le range a cet egard dans une
tradition autobiographique parfaitement reconnaissable (p. ). At the
extreme end of this conventional approach, the contemporary decon-
structive project of Jacques Derrida, as demonstrated in Marges de la
philosophie, works to challenge conventional denitions of a form, pri-
marily that of philosophy, through the detailed foregrounding of the
onto-theological establishment of limits and margins. Far from being a
philosophy of individuation incorporating and nullifying abnormal and
exemplary types, this approach works within and beyond the margin
of the philosophical text, in order to de-place, de-limit and de-termine
the space of (philosophical) registration, as Derrida makes plain in the
books introduction, Tympan: deplacer le cadrage, par la philosophie,
de ses propres types [. . .]. Delimiter la forme dune cloture qui nait
plus danalogie avec ce que la philosophie peur se representer sous
ce nom, [. . .] Determiner, tout contre le philosopheme, lintraitable
qui lempeche de calculer sa marge [. . .]. Manger la marge en luxu-
ant le tympan, le rapport a soi de la double membrane (pp. xxxxi).
This relationship to itself of the double membrane is precisely one that
we have seen Leiriss work consciously negotiate as part of the paradoxi-
cal constitution of autobiographys self-presence, and the references here
to limits, spaces, eating and hearing are designed to recall the myth of
Persephone, on which Leiris drew, in the central chapter of that title,
in Biffures. In fact, Derrida makes the inspiration explicit, in citing as
a marginal text to the whole of Tympan an extract from Persephone
(Bi and ) that begins with Leiriss description of that nom tout
a la fois oral et souterrain. Tympanizing philosophy through the incor-
poration of Leiris as part of the double membrane, and a crucial extract
from Leiris at that, wherein he attempts to gure the chthonian otherness
Michel Leiris
of self-constitution, relating it to personal, mechanical and social forms
of registration, Derrida displays a very different appreciation of Leiriss
abnormal and exemplary ability to facilitate a strategic programme of
formal and philosophical rupture by writing otherwise (p. xx).
These opposing approaches, of unicity and dispersal, lead naturally
to a larger and concluding consideration of the generic way in which
Leiriss work in the future might be located. As we have repeatedly seen,
Leiriss writing and ideas involved a constantly unsettling shift between
margins and centre. The movements he championed, like the disciplines
on which he drew, were importantly driven by the overturning of con-
ventional collective representations. His literal migrations and their ac-
companying politico-aesthetic rejection of eurocentrism were mirrored
textually by his exploration of genres. This constant revolution in self-
recognition, brought to its most complex exemplication in La Regle du jeu,
was in turn symptomatic of the wider contemporary epistemological ex-
plosion, generated in Europe by a shift from modernist to postmodern
conceptions of space and time, and beyond Europe by a growing af-
rmation, which Leiris promoted, of the experience and expression of
metissage. By the same token, of course, this immersion in fragmenta-
tion was predicated on the tenacious attempt to maintain deep-rooted
ideals of lucidity and integrity, evidenced in Leiriss case by the persistent
desire to renew and inhabit the integral aspirations of the latest vision,
be it surrealist or ethnographic or existentialist or post-colonial.
In other words, Leiris can be located abstractly as an effect of globaliza-
tion, offering a dramatic autobiographical registration of its conceptual
framework as well as, on a technical level, what Anthony Giddens de-
scribed in the year of Leiriss death as its complex relations between local
involvements (circumstances of co-presence) and interaction across dis-
tance (the connections of presence and absence). Just as the dialectics of
globalization have causally intensied local afliations and afrmations
of difference (to the point of this becoming the new post-imperial eld of
conict), so Leiriss biffural dynamic of univocity and internal dissent can
be read in this context not just as the autobiographical preservation of
the twin Enlightenment ideas of the universal and the particular, or the
dialogic complicity of colonizer and colonized, but also as the symptom
of accelerating globalization and its obvious contribution, beyond any
psychic principles of identication (as detailed clearly in, for example,
Homi Bhabhas Lacanian reading of Frantz Fanon ), to the increasing
dis-location of the intellectuals identity and role in globalized society.
Read in this specic context, Leiris can be appreciated as once more
offering an individual yet exemplary lesson. Permanently vacillating be-
tween deep involvement in the intricate textuality of autobiographical
consciousness on the one hand, and the moral impulses of the secular
and perhaps especially post-colonial critic, on the other hand (to take up
here the terms of a tension propounded polemically by Edward Said ),
Leiriss writing could be held to fail on both counts, given the extreme
sophistication of its anti-hegemonic inhabitation of alterity, and its con-
sequent inability to achieve either textual or critical closure. Yet, as with
all his writing, its association with failure marks the scale of its ambitions
and indicates its ultimate achievement, for the non-resolution of this
tension in his discourse results in the unquiet maintenance of a critical
consciousness that emerges as an exemplary oppositional position in a
globalized culture. This view of Leiris as a model of postmodern dis-
located consciousness is indirectly given credence by James Clifford, in
The Predicament of Culture. Here Clifford focuses acutely on the methodo-
logical ambivalence within Saids postulation (involving his deployment
of the tools of a culture he oppositionally rebukes), before raising the ob-
vious following question regarding the possibility of any cultural iden-
tity being classied as native in a globalized culture (pp. ). By way
of indirect reply, the whole of Cliffords book repeatedly advances the
positions of Leiris as evidencing an exemplary exploration and reten-
tion of the complexities inherent in oppositional projects, and his often
pioneering work as an early formulation of a dis-located identity and
critical role in the general culture of conjuncture arising out of this new,
heterogeneous historical situation (pp. , ). At the beginning of the
twenty-rst century (and post-globalization), then, the new and emerging
locations of Leiris should conrm his status as a major French writer of
his age, an exemplary intellectual of the postmodern period, and, above
all, a revolutionary contributor to the exercise of writing the self.
Notes
:
Liberation, October , pp. , p. .
Edouard Glissant, Michel Leiris: the Repli and the Depli, in Yale French Studies
(), pp. , p. .
Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, Seuil, , p. .
:
See Un entretien avec Michel Leiris: Breton le patron, in Le Nouvel Obser-
vateur, May , pp. , p. .
Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surrealisme, Paris, Seuil, .
Andre Breton, Manifeste du surrealisme, in uvres completes, Paris, Gallimard
(Pleiade), vol. , , p. .
Louis Aragon, Traite du style, Paris, Gallimard, , p. .
See Andre Breton, Second manifeste du surrealisme, in uvres completes, vol. ,
p. .
See Andre Breton, Dictionnaire abrege du surrealisme, in uvres completes, Paris,
Gallimard (Pleiade), vol. , , p. .
Le Surrealisme et lunite, collected in Zebrage, pp. .
See Leiriss preface to Max Jacob, Le Cornet a des, Paris, Gallimard, ,
pp. , p. . I examine these early inuences in more detail in an article
which also repeats some of my other claims in this chapter. See The sorcerers
apprentice: Leiris and surrealism, Aura (), pp. . In a future work,
I examine more closely the homotextual dimension of Leiriss mentors.
I touch on the theme later in this book, in my reading of Leiriss Journal.
Glossaire jy serre mes gloses, Paris, Editions de la Galerie Simon, ; reprinted
(without the illustrations by Andre Masson) in Mots sans memoire, Paris,
Gallimard, , pp. . All references are to this latter edition, which
is referred to in parenthesis as MSM.
See: La Revolution surrealiste ( April ), pp. and (which include
Brisees, pp. and ); La Revolution surrealiste ( October ), p.
(reprinted in Glossaire jy serre mes gloses, pp. and ); La Revolution surrealiste
( March ), pp. .

Notes to pages
Reprinted in Brisees, p. .
Reprinted in Brisees, p. .
See Le monde des mes reves est un monde mineral, Le Disque vert, Paris,
Brussels, (March ), pp. , p. .
. Andre Breton, Les Mots sans rides, Les Pas Perdus, in uvres completes, vol. ,
p. .
Originally the pseudonym of Marcel Duchamp, subsequently adopted by
Robert Desnos. See Robert Desnos, Corps et biens, Paris, Gallimard, ,
pp. .
Ibid., p. .
Brisees, p. .
Un entretien avec Michel Leiris, ibid., p. .
Jacques Lacan, LInstance de la lettre dans linconscient, Ecrits I, Paris,
Seuil, (Points), , p. .
uvres completes, vol. , p. .
Cf. Brisees, p. .
Andre Breton, Point du jour, in uvres completes, vol. .
Second Manifeste du surrealisme, in uvres completes, vol. , p. .
Sarane Alexandrian, Le Surrealisme et le reve, Paris, Gallimard, , p. .
I pursue this intertextuality further in a separate article. It is obvious that,
through the inuence of the Les Aventures de Telemaque, which is a
rewriting of Fenelons novel, Le Point cardinal retains a paradoxical
trace of canonic derivation. See Louis Aragon, Les Aventures de Telemaque,
Paris, Gallimard, . Leiriss quotations in the Journal are on pp. and
, and refer without full referencing to Les Aventures de Telemaque, p. ,
and Le Paysan de Paris, pp. . This latter quotation, from the section
Le Songe du paysan reproduces almost the entirety of Le Paysan de Pariss
nal two pages, fragments of which were originally published under the
title Idees in La Revolution surrealiste, no. , April , p. . In the same
issue, Leiris published La Revendication du plaisir, co-written with Jacques
Baron (pp. ) and, more signicantly, two pages of entries from the even-
tual Glossaire jy serre mes gloses (pp. ), plus the article [Une monstrueuse
aberration . . . ] (p. ) which was added by Artaud.
For a full examination of this paradox, see Paul de Man, Literary history and
Literary modernity, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary
Criticism, London, Methuen, , pp. .
Aurora, Paris, Gallimard, ; reprinted (coll. LImaginaire), . Page
references are to the latter edition, referred to in parenthesis as A.
Dictionnaire abrege du surrealisme, in uvres completes, vol. , p. .
Le Cinquentenaire de lhysterie (), La Revolution surrealiste
(March ). Included in Andre Breton, uvres completes, vol. , pp. .
Manifeste, p. .
Notwithstanding this, Marie-Claire Dumas has importantly documented the
transformation of the manuscript in the book in Commencer et
nir. Le manuscrit dAurora de Michel Leiris, in Didier and Neefs, Manuscrits
Notes to pages
surrealistes, , pp. . Here is perhaps the moment to note that I am
obviously not following the categorization of the texts of this period given
by Catherine Maubon in this same collection: A cette periode dintense
creativite appartiennent dun cote Simulacre, une partie des gloses de Glossaire
jy serre mes gloses et des poemes de Failles; de lautre, Le Point cardinal, Grande
fuite de neige, et Aurora; ainsi que, dans lentre-deux, Le Pays de mes reves, et
certains des recits de reve de Nuits sans nuit. (See Le Forcat vertigineux
de reve ou du bon usage du surrealisme, in Didier and Neefs, Manuscrits
surrealistes, , pp. , p. .) Although this exploits a legitimate if un-
examined and contestable generic differentiation (poetry versus prose with
the dream-work between the two), it strangely does not permit the poetic
texts to be included in the convincing correlation between the chronological
development of textual sequentiality and autobiographical expressivity, of
the kind noted by Maubon herself ( on p. ) in relation to the moment in
Le Forcat vertigineux where Leiris writes: . . . M comme la
mer, I comme un rire [etc.] (see Michel Leiris, LEvasion souterraine, Mont-
pellier, Fata Morgana, , p. ). In the Journal, p. , Leiris also gives the
collective term Autocritique to Simulacre, Le Point cardinal, Le Forcat vertigineux,
and Aurora.
Gerard de Nerval, uvres, Paris, Gallimard (Pleiade), , vol. (where
Pandora is named La Pandora), p. .
Andre Breton, Nadja, in uvres completes, vol. , p. .
See Jacqueline Chenieux, Le Surrealisme et le roman, , Lausanne,
LAge dhomme, , pp. . Certain other details in Aurora may have
been inuenced by Georges Limbours work in Soleils bas and Le Cheval de
Venise.
Second Manifeste, p. .
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
My reference here is obviously to the covers of the rst and last editions of
La Revolution surrealiste, which gathered the (male) surrealist gang around a
female icon: in the rst issue, this female was Germaine Berton, a woman
who had killed a proto-fascist; by the twelfth and nal issue, the female gure
signicantly had become a classical academic nude.
See the serene version of this same state given at the end of Bretons con-
temporary Exposition X . . . , Y . . . in Point du jour, uvres completes, vol. ,
p. .
See Marie-Claire Dumas, in Didier and Neefs, Manuscrits surrealistes, ,
p. .
Andre Breton, Manifeste du surrealisme, in uvres completes, vol. , pp. .
See Jacqueline Chenieux, Le Surrealisme et le roman, p. .
Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour, Paris, Gallimard, . Henceforth
referred to in parenthesis as N. The retention of the full title in my text
is necessary in order to distinguish it from an earlier version, published as
Notes to pages
Nuits sans nuit, Paris, Fontaine, . For details of the differences between the
two editions, see Catherine Marbon, Michel Leiris en marge de lautobiographie,
Paris, Corti, , pp. .
The publication of material, eventually contained in Glossaire jy serre mes gloses
and Nuits sans nuit, in La Revolution surrealiste is as follows:
no. , April , pp. : seventy-ve entries collectively entitled
Glossaire jy serre mes gloses.
no. , July , p. : four sketches of dreams published in expanded
form in the Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour (pp. , , , ).
no. , July , pp. : sixty-one further entries entitled Glossaire
jy serre mes gloses (suite).
no. , October , p.: calligrams from the edition of Glossaire
jy serre mes gloses (pp. and ).
no. , October , pp. : ve sketches of dreams republished in
expanded form in Nuits sans nuit et quelque jours sans jour (pp. , , , , ).
no. , March , pp. : sixty-seven further entries again entitled
Glossaire jy serre mes gloses.
no. , June , pp. : a dream republished, in slightly augmented
form, in Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour (pp. ).
Langage tangage ou ce que les mots me disent , Paris, Gallimard, .
The rst issue of La Revolution surrealiste contained dreams by Giorgio de
Chirico, Breton, and Renee Gaulthier. Louis Aragon, Une vague de reves
(Commerce, , Autumn, ), Paris, Seghers, . For a lyrical evoca-
tion of the emancipatory power of dreaming, see in particular pp. . In
this celebration of dreams, there are several statements which interestingly
anticipate later cultural theories, such as: il ny a pas de pensee hors des mots
tout le surrealisme etage cette proposition . . . (p. ). Given the date, it is
not surprising that Leiris is not included in the list of dreamers on page .
Aragons contributions to the rst two issues of La Revolution surrealiste stress
the notion of perpetual revolution. It is perhaps this which inspired Leiriss
rst entry in his Journal regarding Aragon: Actuellement, je ne vois quun
litterateur dont on puisse dire quil ecrit au participe present, cest Aragon
(p. ), an appreciation apparently betrayed, to judge by the disillusioned
tone of the nal entry on Aragon ( December ), written two days
after the latters funeral: Chez Aragon, il ny a pas eu delite a une idee,
mais delite a une eglise (dont pourrait-on dire mechamment il avait besoin
pour sa gloire) (p. ). This tendency to denigrate an original enthusiasm
is another aspect of the dynamic of the naissance a lenvers in Leiris. We
shall see it return several times in this book.
See Louis Aragon, Traite du style, Paris, Gallimard (), , pp. :
La purete du reve, linemployable, linutile du reve, voila ce quil sagit de
defendre contre une nouvelle rage de ronds de cuir qui va se dechaner. Il ne
faut pas permettre que le reve devienne le jumeau du poeme en prose, le
cousin du bafouillage ou le beau-frere du ha-ka.
Roger Caillois, LIncertitude qui vient des reves, Paris, Gallimard, , p. .
Notes to pages
For just one example of each, see respectively Marcel Noll, Reves, La
Revolution surrealiste, , June , p. ; and Leiriss Journal, p. .
I am obviously referring to Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne,
uvres completes, Paris, Gallimard, Pleiade, , pp. .
Ibid., x. La Femme, p. .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Harmondsworth, Penguin
(Pelican Freud Library vol. ) , chapter , pp. .
For an interesting discussion of these theories in the general context of moder-
nity and with occasional reference to surrealism, see David Frisby, Fragments
of Modernity, Cambridge-Oxford, Polity, , especially pp. , , .
Freud, ibid., p. : The form of a dream or the form in which it is dreamt is
used with surprising frequency for representing its concealed subject-matter.
Andre Breton, Manifeste du surrealisme, in uvres completes, vol. , p. .
Ibid., p. .
Freud, ibid., p. .
Compare Eluards publication notice for Les Dessous dune vie: Les reves,
nul ne peut les prendre pour des poemes. (Paul Eluard, uvres completes,
Paris, Gallimard, Pleiade, , pp. .) Breton considered this generic
division to have distanced Eluard from the fundamental tenets of surrealism.
See Andre Breton, Entretiens , Paris, Gallimard, , pp. .
:

See, for example, Denis Holliers remarks in Un homme du secret discret,
an interview by Aliette Armel with Denis Hollier and Jean Jamin, Magazine
litteraire (), pp. , p. .
See Georges Bataille, uvres completes , p. .
One of the best intellectual reviews of the inuence of Negro art on West-
ern culture from this period on is given by Leiris in The African negroes
and the arts of carving and sculpture, in Interrelations of Cultures, Unesco,
, pp. . See also James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-
Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge, Mass. and London,
England, Harvard University Press, , p. , and James Clifford, ,
February: negrophilia, in A New History of French Literature, edited by Denis
Hollier, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England, Harvard University Press,
, pp. , p. . For a clear and admirably cynical account of the use
of the term negre during this period, see Jean Jamins introduction to his
edition of ethnographic writings by Leiris, Miroir de lAfrique, Paris, Gallimard
(Quarto), , pp. .
Leiris contests the common myth that this took place at La Revue Negre,
claiming that he saw Baker dance in the Revue in , and that the famous
bananas appeared only after she had moved to the Folies-Bergere. See Jazz
Magazine, no. , January , pp. . I am grateful to Jean-Michel
Besnier for bringing this interview to my attention.
Notes to pages
For evidence of this point, see Minotaure (), a special issue devoted to
the Mission. Leiris was in fact the real editorial and directing spirit of this
special issue, organizing and supervising every aspect of its publication with
Skira. But as he was loyal to the idea of a collective spirit, the issue does not
credit him as editor. For conrmation of this point, see Jean Jamin, On the
Human Condition of Minotaure, in Focus on Minotaure, Geneva, Musee dArt
et dHistoire, , pp. , p. , footnote . For a similar photograph, see
Miroir de lAfrique, p. . Jamins introduction (pp. ) provides an excellent
contextualization of Leiriss preoccupation in the light of the work of the
Musee de lHomme and the Mission Dakar-Djibouti.
Rene Maran, Batouala, Paris, Albin Michel, (edition denitive, ).
Michel Leiris, Instructions sommaires pour les collections dobjects ethnographiques,
Paris, Musee dethnographie du Trocadero, .
Jamins account of this is excoriating, emphasizing the absurd stereotyping of
Brown together with his simultaneous exceptionality, and how his enforced
display made him into one more collected object. See Miroir de lAfrique,
pp. . The following page is devoted to a photograph, taken in the
museum in April , depicting the seated Al Brown gazing with apparent
pleasure at a Bambara mask held by Michel Griaule. Georges Henri Riviere
leans towards Brown; behind them stands Browns match-maker David
Lumiansky.
I document in more detail Leiriss inevitable involvement in this mood of
the period, and its textual trace in some of his early writings, in Hors de soi:
politique, possession et presence dans lethnographie surrealiste de Michel
Leiris, in LAutre et le sacre, ed. C. W. Thompson, Paris, LHarmattan, ,
pp. .
See Claude Levi-Strauss, Introduction a loeuvre de Marcel Mauss, in
Marcel Mauss, sociologie et anthropologie, Paris, PUF, , pp. ixliii.
Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don, Paris, PUF, ; The Gift: The Form and
Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls, London, Routledge,
, p. .
Georges Henri Riviere, A propos de lart negre, Le Figaro artistique, July
August , pp. . Quoted by Jamin in Miroir de lAfrique, pp. .
Denis Hollier notes both the apprehensions of the co-founders and the shifts
in the rubric. See Les Depossedes, Paris, Minuit, , pp. .
See Leiriss somewhat ofcial account of their intellectual collaboration,
De Bataille lImpossible a limpossible Documents, Brisees, pp. . The
article was rst published in Critique (nos. , , pp. ), another
journal founded, after the war, by Bataille.
Jamin points up the anti-historical or fetishistic preoccupations revealed in
the choice of objects collected by the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, almost half
of which were connected with ritual or game, that is, with unicatory rather
than conictual practice. See Miroir de lAfrique, p. .
La vieille taupe, uvres completes , pp. ; La valeur dusage de
D. A. F. de Sade, uvres completes , pp. ; Le Jesuve, uvres completes ,
Notes to pages
pp. ; LOeil pineal, uvres completes , pp. . On the subject of
rivalry, Jean-Francois Farny has even suggested that Batailles motivations
were bound up with the desire to win back a Leiris who had been taken
and seduced by Breton. See A propos de la querelle Breton-Bataille, Revue
dhistoire litteraire de la France, , pp. .
Andre Breton, Second manifeste du surrealisme, in uvres completes, vol. , p. .
Ibid., p. .
Ibid., p. .
And beyond! See for example, from , Batailles La religion surrealiste,
uvres completes , pp. ; and from , Les problemes du
surrealisme, uvres completes , pp. . See also the notes on pp.
and for further ejaculations.
Georges Bataille, Le Langage des eurs, Documents , June , pp. .
Reprinted in uvres completes , . Andre Breton, Manifestes du surrealisme,
p. .
Georges Bataille, Le Jeu lugubre, Documents , December , pp.
. Reprinted in uvres completes , . Given that Breton and Bataille
were ghting this time for possession of Dal and that Dal had not permitted
reproduction in Documents of his canvas for fear of offending Breton, the
charge of cowardice is also being launched against Dal.
Oeil, Documents , September , p. , reprinted in uvres completes ,
pp. ; Bouche, Documents, second year, , , p. , reprinted in
uvres completes , pp. ; Le gros orteil, Documents , November ,
pp. , reprinted in uvres completes , pp. .
Metaphore, in Brisees, pp. , p. .
Talkie, in Brisees, pp. .
On an institutional level, it is interesting in this context to recall Holliers
remark that Batailles exploitation of Marxs opposition of use-value and
exchange-value, pervasive if unmentioned in Documents and more directly
acknowledged in La Valeur dusage de D. A. F. de Sade, in the context
of the museum devait conduire a lintroduction du corps dans lespace du
musee, devait ouvrir lespace apollinien du musee au monde du corps et
des besoins. See Hollier, La poesie jusqua Z, , p. . On a purely
representational level, Jack J. Spector claims that Leiris, along with dissi-
dent surrealists Bataille, Masson and Caillois, during this period rejected
the patriarchal dominance of Breton by welcoming images and myths of
the mother ignored in favour of the mistress in Bretons work. For all its
suggestive nature, this claim seems to me to be outweighed in the case of
Leiris by the profoundly masculine and traditionally libidinous assumptions
inhabiting and structuring his work of this, and indeed every other, period.
See Jack J. Spector, Surrealist Art and Writing, /. The Gold of Time,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, , p. .
LEau a la bouche, in Brisees, pp. .
See Elisabeth Roudinesco, La Bataille de cent ans. Histoire de la psychanalyse en
France, vol. , Paris, Ramsay, , p. .
Notes to pages
For this useful information and further references, see Dean ,
pp. .
For an account of the criticism which LAfrique fantome provoked, see
Jean Jamin, Les metamorphoses de LAfrique fantome, Critique, (),
.
Jamin lists the butin in Miroir de lAfrique, p. . His account of the expedi-
tion rightly stresses its cote Pieds Nickeles: its scheming, theft, and deceit; its
machine guns, political machinations, and media-conscious posturing. See
Miroir de lAfrique, pp. . Most tellingly, Jamin is able to draw on unclas-
sied archive material in the Museum in order to demonstrate the colonial
dimension of the expeditions acquisitiveness. He quotes Rivets December
note to the effect that one of the roles of an ethnographic museum
is to be un instrument de propagande culturelle et coloniale and, pour
les futurs coloniaux ou pour les coloniaux tout court, un centre precieux
et indispensable de documentation sur les populations quils sont appeles a
administrer. See Miroir de lAfrique, p. . This puts into sinister context the
picture of Leiriss socializing given for the same period, December
, in LAfrique fantome.
Reprinted as LAfrique fantome, in Brisees, pp. .
Miroir de lAfrique, pp. .
I am uncomfortably aware of how in my reading of Leiriss Journal, I have
approached him acting as a latter-day Griaule.
:
L A G E D H O M M E
Titres et travaux. Collected in Cest-a-dire. Entretien avec Sally Price et Jean Jamin,
Paris, Jean-Michel Place, , pp. , p. .
Acephales one book publication was the Miroir de la tauromachie,
illustrated by Masson, and published under the Guy Levis Mano
imprint.
For an account of Contre-Attaques equivocal politics, see Denis Hollier,
On Equivocation (between Literature and Politics), October , Winter :
. For an account of Bretons and Batailles collaboration on Contre-
Attaque, see Henri Behar, Andre Breton. Le grand indesirable, Paris, Calmann-
Levy, , pp. .
Georges Bataille, La Structure psychologique du fascisme, La Critique sociale
, November , , and , March , . Reprinted in
uvres completes , .
Georges Bataille, LApprenti sorcier, Nouvelle Revue francaise , July :
; reprinted in uvres completes , .
Denis Hollier describes it as rising from the ashes of the Popular Front.
See D. Hollier, Foreword: collage, The College of Sociology. , ed.
D. Hollier, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, , pp. viiixxix,
p. xiii.
Notes to pages
Acephale , July , . Along with all the major documents relating to
the College, this text is collected in Le College de sociologie, ed. D. Hollier, Paris,
Gallimard, . See pp. .
D. Hollier, Foreword: collage, ibid., p. ix.
Le College de sociologie, p. .
The College of Sociology, pp. .
Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne, Nouvelle Revue francaise , July ,
. Reprinted in Le College de sociologie, pp. .
See Jean Wahl, LAir du mois, La Nouvelle Revue francaise , February ,
quoted in Le College de sociologie, p. .
Le College de sociologie, pp. .
See Le College de sociologie, pp. .
For details of rst publication, see note of the next section.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Un nouveau mystique, Cahiers du Sud , December ;
reprinted in Situations I, Paris, Gallimard, , pp. . References are
to this later edition.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Quest-ce que la litterature, in Situations II, Paris, Gallimard,
, pp. .
Georges Bataille, Reponse a Jean-Paul Sartre, in Sur Nietzsche: volonte de
chance, uvres completes , , pp. .
Georges Bataille, Baudelaire Mis a nu. LAnalyse de Sartre et lessence
de la poesie, Critique , JanuaryFebruary , pp. . Large sections
of this were cut out of the version which became part of La Litterature et le Mal.
See uvres completes , pp. , to which page numbers here refer. Bataille
is more appreciative of Sartres reading of Genet. See uvres completes ,
pp. .
Michel Leiris, Sartre et Baudelaire, preface to Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire,
Paris, Gallimard, ; reprinted in Brisees, pp. . Page references are
to this last edition.
Miroir delAfrique, p. .
Jean-Paul Sartre, ibid., p. .
J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, Paris, PUF, ,
p. .
I give a more detailed version of some of my following observations in The
orchastration of man: the structure of LAge dhomme, Romance Studies , :
.
See Emile Benveniste, Problemes de linguistique generale, Paris, Gallimard, ,
especially chapters and , pp. .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE , pp. .
J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, p. .
See the already mentioned The orchastration of man: the structure of LAge
dhomme.
We know from the Journal that this image was inspired by his affair with
Helene Gordon. See pp. .
Rather more banally, this can also be read as referring to his affair with
Helene Gordon. See Ibid.
Notes to pages
See Cinq Etudes dethnologie, p. .
See Jacques Lacan, La chose freudienne, Ecrits, Paris, Seuil, , p. .
See Sigmund Freud, SE , p. .
: L A R E G L E D U J E U
Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique generale, Paris, Payot, ,

p. .
On this idea, see Jacques Derrida, Force et signication, in LEcriture et la
difference, Paris, Seuil (Points), , p. ; trans. Writing and Difference, London
and Henley, Routledge and Kegan Paul, , p. .
Details of rst publication are: . . . Reusement!, in Domaine francais,
presentation de Jean Lescure, Geneva, Paris, Editions des Trois Collines,
, pp. ; Chansons, Fontaine, no. , Algiers, , pp. ;
Habille-en-cour, LArbalete, no. , Lyons, , pp. ; Lecons de
choses, in Risques, travaux et modes, Paris, Seghers, , n.p.; Dimanche,
Les Temps modernes, :, , pp. .
Emmanuel Levinas, La transcendence des mots, rst published in Les Temps
modernes, (), pp. ; trans. The Transcendence of Words, in The
Levinas Reader, edited by Sean Hand, Oxford, Blackwell, , pp. ,
p. .
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, uvres completes, I: Les Confessions, autres textes autobi-
ographiques, Paris, Gallimard, Pleiade, , p. .
Roland Barthes, Texte (Theorie 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 Regle
du jeu, I shall none the less examine the desire for authenticity governing
each of La Regle du jeus new beginnings very much in terms of this being-
unto-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, LArcheologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard, , chapter
et passim. In the course of this section I consciously describe the subject of
La Regle du jeu as being both a constructed effect whose identity emerges
within a discursive formation, and as a situated yet free subjectivity act-
ing within the dialectic of praxis. The rst description recalls the writ-
ings of Foucault; the second those of Sartre. In using both ideas, I am
aware of how an apparent philosophical irreconciliability is being gener-
ated: Foucaults work appears to contradict that of Sartre in rejecting the
notion that subjectivity has a constituting role and analysing instead the his-
tory 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 simplies the development of ideas in Leiris. Leiriss
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 Regle du jeu, implications which strongly recall conceptual
frameworks in Benveniste, Levi-Strauss and Foucault. Moreover, La Regle
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 childs encounters with language to the adults 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 Regle du jeus experiential structure).
Secondly, such a polarity simplies the development of ideas in Foucault.
While his work certainly problematizes the philosophical link established in
Sartre via German Idealism between consciousness, self-reection and free-
dom, this problematization cannot be viewed as a simple break. Foucaults
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 Foucaults intellectual formation owes more to Hegelianism than
is often pointed out. Similarly, Foucaults late work, LHistoire de la sexualite,
and in particular Le souci de soi, examines a non-Christian ethics of the subject
that no longer assumes an unequivocal correlation between subjectication
and subjection. Here the relationship between event and being can no longer
be explained in a deterministic way.
Lastly, such a polarity simplies the development of ideas in Sartre. For
Sartre, as for Leiris, consciousnesss 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 subjects
ignorance. Moreover, in Sartres later work, the greater recognition given
to psychoanalysis, the opacity of childhood and le vecu (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, Sartres 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 reection and action. See for example:
La Grande Morale: extraits dun cahier de notes (), Obliques, ,
, pp. ; Critique de la raison dialectique (precede de Question de methode),
vol. I, Theorie 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 casse section of the
Confessions in particular (uvres completes, 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 overafrms afrmation 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 lanalyse structurale des recits, Communications
(), pp. . Both help us to see how . . . Reusement! simultaneously
pregures and perpetuates a cellular structure.
Michel Foucault, ibid., pp. .
Chapter , Mors, was rst published in Les Temps modernes, no. , November
, pp. , and no. , December , pp. . Chapter ,
Vois! Deja lange . . . was rst published in Les Temps modernes, no. , April
, pp. , and no. , JuneJuly , pp. .
Emmanuel Levinas, There is: existence without existents, rst published
in Deucalion , , pp. , and subsequently incorporated into the
Introduction and chapter , section of De lexistence a lexistant, Paris, Fontaine
and Vrin, ; trans. The Levinas Reader, edited by Sean Hand, Oxford,
Blackwell, , pp. .
Jean-Paul Sartre, LEtre et le Neant, Paris, Gallimard, , p. .
See LEthnographe devant le colonialisme, rst published in Les Temps
modernes, no. , aout , pp. , reprinted in Brisees, pp. , and
Cinq Etudes dEthnologie, pp. , especially p. .
The original of the piece is to be found in the Journal, pp. .
The former date is ofcial; 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 paren-
thesis as J.
Jean Jamins editorial material displays how this huge text is not only perfo-
rated by gaps, but virtually originates in them. The very rst endnote, qual-
ifying the volumes opening entry which in its entirety reads [Sans date]
( J ), explains how the rst pages of the journals rst manuscript were torn
out by Leiris, after which the rst ve lines were also so heavily erased as to
be unreadable ( J ). And on the previous page, in a preliminary comment
Notes to pages
on editorial policy, Jamin admits that a central concern in the construction
and presentation of the journal from several notebooks was to create rela-
tions and close lacunae, but that further as yet unabsorbed archival material
will result in a necessary modication of the Leiris which Jamin has here
helped to compose.
See J , , , , . Most of these relate to the future LAge dhomme.
For example J , , , , , .
As, for example, in Biffures, pp. :: un journal qui ne sera pas publie
ni meme lu de mon vivant mais constituera seulement, dune maniere
posthume, le dernier signe que jaurai adresse a ceux des miens qui me
survivront.
The term invagination is associated most often with La Double Seance,
in Derridas La Dissemination, Paris, Editions du Seuil, (even though
that essay actually employs more the term hymen). For two discussions of
invagination which are pertinent here to the generic status of the Journal and
to its primarily derivative relation to works such as Regle du jeu, see respectively:
The law of genre, Glyph : Textual Studies, Baltimore, , p. ; and Living
on: borderlines, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. H. Bloom et al., New York,
Seabury Press, , pp. .
Alain Girard, Le Journal intime, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, ,
p. .
Two other posthumous journals of lesser signicance Lhomme sans honneur
(Paris, Jean-Michel Place, ) and the Journal de Chine (Paris, Gallimard,
) bear out many of my characterizations of the Journal . In
the Journal itself, Leiris admits a propos the Journal de Chine that his work was
badly organized since he tried to cover the most diverse questions ( J ), a
remark which Jean Jamin recalls in his presentation to the Journal de Chine in
order to conclude that it is un echec a la fois litteraire et scientique (p. ).
Given that the experience of China is crucial to Fibrilles, the remark suggests
that the Journal de Chine is primarily derivative in relation to Fibrilless artistic
resolution. In the same vein, Jamin notes in his presentation of Lhomme sans
honneur: Cest dune certaine maniere toute La Regle du jeu que le cahier
annonce (p. ).
A trace of this view remains in Girards presentation of the journal intimes
essential failure: Insatisfaction, et misere qui en resulte, retours severes sur
soi, entrecoupes de mouvements dorgueil, ruine des esperances, inanite
de lexistence, vanite de leffort, offrent autant dexpressions dune meme
experience repetee, et ont en lui leur racine commune (Alain Girard,
Le Journal intime, p. ). He adds that this is a relative rather than ab-
solute failure, since the journal by its nature has no pre-established goal,
but none the less suggests a failed autobiographical act, and through it an
unfullled life, with his later remarks that le moi de lintimiste demeure
au conditionnel passe and that sa personne est restee a letat virtuel.
(ibid. p. ).
Notes to pages
Guy Poitry takes a less ironic view of Leiriss schematizations in his
Michel Leiris, dualisme et totalite, Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail,
.
In his presentation, Jamin suggests this relation between structure and clutter
in a different way by pointing out that Leiris kept his manuscripts in the
apartment room known as the lingerie, describing the things found there
as le debarras . . . tous ces objets . . . dont on ne se sert qua loccasion.
( J ), un bric-a-brac dobjets et de papiers ( J ).
Theodore Fraenkel, Tristan Tzara, Andre Lefevre, Braque, Cocteau, Bataille
( J ); Giacometti ( J ); Breton ( J ); Rene Leibowitz ( J ); Jeanne
Godon, Picasso, Asger Jorn, Jean-Marie Serneau, Jacques Lipchitz, lle
anee Lacan ( J ); Queneau ( J ).
The biffure which takes place in the very inscription of this insight is partic-
ularly apposite and logical.
See J footnote .
Cf. Andre Clavels remark in LEvenement du jeudi, September ,
pp. , p. : Son journal fut sa chambre mortuaire, sa torture. Et aussi
sa victoire. The preterite tense adds a further ironic twist.
J.-B. Pontalis, Michel Leiris, or psychoanalysis without end, in On Leiris (Yale
French Studies, ), ed. Marc Blanchard, Yale University, , pp. ,
p. . See J , for a general example of the inevitable disappointment
arising from the simultaneous envie de sortir and envie de me replier, and,
more particularly, J for notation of the marasme into which Leiris falls
again once the Liberation is achieved.
See, for example, the negative and nasty review by Angelo Rinaldi, Leiris
malgre Leiris, LExpress, September , pp. .
Alain Girard, Le Journal intime, p. viii.
Jean Rousset, Le Lecteur intime. De Balzac au journal, Paris, Corti, , p. .
Louis-Rene des Forets relates Leiriss change of opinion regarding the work
of Puccini, and in particular Turandot, whose plot centres on a secret, to
Leiriss family secret. See La passion de lopera, Magazine litteraire ,
September , pp. , p. .
Florence Delay quotes from Leiriss commentary to Pierre Braumbergers
lm on the subject: Pour netre pas touche, le secret est de rester immobile.
See Meditations taurines, Magazine litteraire , September , pp. ,
p. .
Maurice Blanchot, Combat avec lange, in LAmitie, Paris, Gallimard, ,
pp. , pp. .
Francois Bott, Detective story, Le Monde, September , p. .
Maurice Nadeau, Quinzaine litteraire , September , p. .
See, for a partial example of this, Francis Marmande, Michel Leiris: the
letter to Louise, in On Leiris, pp. .
Un homme du secret discret, an interview conducted by Aliette Armel,
Magazine litteraire , September , pp. .
Notes to pages
Jamin was charged by Leiris with the posthumous destiny of his work, and
Jamin and Hollier are joint editors of the forthcoming Pleiade edition of
Leiriss uvres. For the way in which this was settled, see Magazine litteraire,
pp. .
At one point, Leiris writes explicitly: Aujourdhui, la droite et la gauche
sont pour moi nettement incarnes par deux femmes ( J ). Guy Poitry is
exhaustive on these schemata. See Poity, Michel Leiris.
Jamin in Magazine litteraire recalls Holliers well-known linking of Leiriss
autobiographical being to the moment of his marriage: comme la bien
montre Denis Hollier, le mariage constitue pour Leiris le moment ou lauteur
nat a son uvre, a son autobiographie (p. ). An alternative view of the
profound modication effected by his marriage would be that Leiris sought
to close down the homosexual dimension to his life. See my later examination
of this other secret, and Leiriss comments on this period in LAge dhomme,
p. .
See also J , .
For the latter point, see J note .
To judge from the ve references to him in the journal, Jamin seems keen to
promote a relationship with Leiris, based ostensibly on academic exchange:
for his part, he offers Leiris books ( J ), ideas ( J , ), titles ( J ),
even memories ( J ). This indicates, perhaps, that his desire to be Leiriss
addressee predates his presentation of the posthumous work.
Francis Marmande, Leiris au prix des mots, Le Monde, September ,
pp. and , p. .
Francis Marmande, Michel Leiris: the letter to Louise in On Leiris (Yale
French Studies ), ed. Marc Blanchard, Yale University, , pp. ,
p. . Marmande adds a propos LAfrique fantome that Leiris kept a journal
every night, sending her instalments without ever discovering that under-
neath the names which obsessed him (Dogon, Gondar), it was actually her
name he had been rewriting all along: the name of Louise Godon (p. ).
Jamins revelation of Zettes illegitimacy suggests that Leiris did know he was
rewriting her name.
See Mireille Calle-Gruber, Journal intime et destination textuel, Poetique
(September ), . This is a response to the original publication
of some of Roussets ideas as Le journal intime, texte sans destinataire?,
Poetique (), . The essence of her argument is that the addressee
is not merely extratextual.
Aliette Armel, Leiris au jour le jour, Magazine litteraire, p. .
See, for example, J , where Leiris notes his mothers concern over Leiriss
noting of his own heterosexual anxieties.
Beatrice Didier, Le Journal intime, Presses Universitaires de France, . It
is also presumably the reason why my earlier reading of LAge dhomme left
unchallenged its deliberate focus on the heterosexual such that instances
of the homosexual, for example, were silently assigned to preliminary or
marginal or pre-authentic stages.
Notes to pages
( J ), ( J ), ( J ), ( J ).
Bataille was to publish LExperience interieure in . Leiriss determination,
here expressed, not to collaborate by publishing was in fact not entirely
honoured.
Direct and indirect acknowledgement of Sartres inuences become marked
during this period. See J and for citation of his work, J
for his physical presence during the Liberation period, and J for
Leiriss post-war reections on litterature engagee.
Herman Melville, Pierre; or the Ambiguities (). All page references to the edi-
tion by Lawrence Thompson, New York, Hendricks House (Signet Classic),
. For Jamins remarks, see Magazine litteraire, pp. , and J note
. The French translation was by a relative, Pierre Leyris (who crops up
in La Regle du jeu), and published by Gallimard in . Jamin adds in the
Magazine litteraire interview that he himself had included a long note on
Melville in his Les Lois du silence. Essai sur la fonction sociale du secret, Maspero,
, wherein he had postulated that initiatory secrets operated less through
their derisory content than through their status as secret. On explaining
this theory to Leiris, the latter had apparently been interested and amused
(p. ). The reason was obviously then still Leiriss little secret.
James Creech, Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melvilles Pierre, Chicago
and London, The University of Chicago Press, , p. .
Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: the World of Raymond Roussel, translated
by Charles Ruas, Berkeley, Los Angeles, University of California Press, ,
p. .
Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory, New
York and London, Routledge, .
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke
and Proust, New Haven, Yale University Press, , p. . Cited by Edelman,
p. .
For example, the link between orientalist imagery and homosexual simula-
tions in the work of Proust is established by Edward Hughes, The mapping
of homosexuality in Prousts Recherche, in Mapping the Other: Anthropology and
Literatures Limits, Paragraph : (), pp. . On the two occasions
Haroun Al Raschid is mentioned in A la recherche, the context involves a
male brothel. See Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, Paris, Gallimard
(Pleiade), , vol. , pp. , and note . I am very grateful to Eddie
Hughes for these references.
One is inevitably reminded of the massively overdetermined narrative of
The Picture of Dorian Gray. See Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (),
Harmondsworth, Penguin, .
A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Harvard University Press, , gives one incidental reference (p. ) in
the context of Gide; The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French, ed.
Peter France, Oxford, Oxford University Press, , offers lines (p. )
which dene Jouhandeau as an unorthodox mystic Catholic novelist and
Notes to pages
memorialist. Neither of these mentions the works cited by Leiris; the latter
mentions Jouhandeaus homosexuality.
The Oxford Companion to French Literature, eds. Sir Paul Harvey and J. E.
Heseltine, Oxford, Oxford University Press (), , which discusses
Jouhandeau in more detail ( lines, p. ), exposes the secret of his homo-
sexuality by alluding to his mystique de lenfer (a phrase used in by
Claude Mauriac), and by noting that a dramatic marriage features in his c-
tion. Certain French equivalents, while later in date, are similar in approach:
Henri Lematres Dictionnaire Bordas de litterature francaise, Paris, Bordas,
( lines, p. ), refers to Jouhandeaus vie discrete and uvre aux senteurs
voulues de scandales et de soufre, and takes care to mention his tempestuous
marriage to the ex-dancer Caryathis. One of the longest entries is, perhaps
logically, also the most sympathetic: Alain Nidersts entry in the three-volume
Dictionnaire des Litteratures de langue francaise, eds. J.-P. de Beaumarchais, Daniel
Couty, et Alain Rey, vol. (GO), Paris, Bordas, , pp. , is as
coded as the later Bordas work (amities sensuelles, qui se bornent souvent
a de furtives rencontres (p. )) and it still explains his homosexuality
in the context of his marriage, but it at least mentions specic works such
as Astaroth and offers a rudimentary characterization of his literary work:
Dans ses plus belles pages, Jouhandeau nous laisse deviner cette prudente
meticulosite, cette lente demarche vers la verite (p. ). Unfortunately,
I do not here have the space to discuss critical evaluations by writers such as
Blanchot or Sartre. See Faux Pas and Les Temps Modernes, respectively.
Henri Peyre, Literature and Sincerity, New Haven, Yale University Press, .
Henri Peyre, French Novelists of Today, Oxford and New York, Oxford
University Press (), . The snobbery, bigotry and above all homo-
phobia of this work are shocking. Focusing merely on the last of these, no
less a writer than Proust can be admonished on aesthetic grounds [for] a
vision of the world that sets up abnormality as the norm [and for] a justi-
cation of unorthodox sexual behaviour . . . which some of us still refuse to
acclaim as a sign of especial grace and as the privilege of genius (pp. ).
At the same time, we are asked to acclaim Dutards treatise of seduction
Le Petit Don Juan as entertaining and healthy (p. ), Romain Garys Pour
Sganarelle as a good-humored attack against the gloom of unsexed and sedu-
lously tedious modern ction (p. ), and Histoire dO as an impeccable and
fastidious . . . masterpiece of eroticism (p. ). Far from dismissing Peyre as
an idiosyncratic vision, we should recognize how completely he represented
and even helped to mould orthodox opinion. He was born in the same
year as Leiris, contributed to the construction of the canon in his primers
Quest-ce que le classicisme (Paris: Droz, ), Quest-ce que le romantisme (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, ) and Quest-ce que le symbolisme (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, ), and brought the work of Hugo,
Proust and Sartre in particular to a wider American audience via a series of
brief monographs. A measure of his inuence on the interpretation of French
culture can be gleaned from the Festschrift compiled by Mary Ann Caws,
Notes to pages
Writing in a Modern Temper. Essays on French Literature and Thought in honor of Henri
Peyre, Saratoga, California: Anma Libri, . It includes contributions from
Robert Greer Cohn, Jean Hytier, Victor Brombert, Bettina Knapp, Anna
Balakian, J. H. Matthews, Michel Beaujour, Neal Oxenhandler, Edouard
Morot-Sir, Edith Kern and Peter Caws. In French Novelists of Today we can say
that Peyre is reecting accurately since somewhat unconsciously what was felt
by both Right and Left to have been a disastrous period involving the deviril-
ization of French society and culture from the turn of the century to the mid-
thirties. As I state several times, Leiris follows this course of opinion himself.
One recent resistance to such a tendency is Christopher Robinsons
Scandal in the Ink, London, Cassell, . While he seems to disapprove of
Jouhandeaus Christian dimension (pp. , ), Robinson presents the writer
in general as a representative example of a growing post-war celebration
of homosexual culture: his texts become both more open about his own
sexuality and more assertive of the work of the experience across the s
and s (p. ). Robinsons work is valuable not just as a catalogue of gay
writing but also as an instrument with which to reassess dominant cultural
stereotypes: he shows, for example, how it is possible to use Jouhandeaus
Traite de labjection as a starting point for a critique of both the exteri-
orizing and totalizing nature of thirties writing and of its heterosexualism
(all of which, as we have seen, Leiris assumed). As Robinsons primary aim
is to establish an alternative compendium, he does not venture far into
this speculative eld. This does leave him in turn somewhat open to the
charge of enthusiastic aestheticization: we may be warned of Jouhandeaus
Decadent Catholicism and Romantic revolt (pp. ), but we are never
told of his anti-semitism. Robinsons aim appears to be the construction of a
particular positive image of the male gay writer, indirectly a political act, but
more explicitly one with an aesthetic impetus. From Edelmans perspective,
one would have to say that this is an ultimately essentialist approach, for it
uncovers difference without deconstructing the binary logic.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, p. . Jouhandeau is, of course, neither an isolated
nor an original instance the whole point of my argument is to challenge pre-
cisely that structural dimension of doxa. Jacob can be read in the chronology
of events given on page (where Leiris again recalls reading Dorian Gray),
and a relationship with Jacob, which may have been amorous, preceded
that with Jouhandeau. (Leiris later confesses obliquely in LAge dhomme: pour
un peu, je serais alle jusqua partager ses vices, si cela avait ete un moyen
dacquerir son genie (AH ).). Similarly, were we to add the name of
Roussel to the above, we should be obliged to begin a whole enquiry into
Leiriss relation to acknowledged mentors who are generally presented as
marginal by the canon and whose sexuality is always known but rarely
gured.
An endnote indicates that Jamin is not unaware of the content of the
contraction taking place here: Sagit-il de Jouhandeau? ou de Max Jacob?
( J ).
Notes to pages
See J , note and J , notes and . For details of the
overlapping chronologies of the various cahiers, see J .
See, for example, Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, Paris, Cahiers du
cinema, Gallimard, Seuil, , pp. ; and Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier,
Loyola, Paris, Seuil, , p. .
See my earlier note .
Marcel Jouhandeau, Ximenes Malinjoude () in Contes denfer, Paris,
Gallimard, , pp. . Henceforth referred to in parenthesis as XM.
The work was originally published in , the date Leiris gives in his
later selection of extracts obviously referring to himself ( J ), but
noted by Jouhandeau as having been completed at Gueret in . Given
that Leiris elsewhere records his correction of the proofs of other works
by Jouhandeau, and shows indirectly that Jouhandeau read at least LAge
dhomme in manuscript form ( J ), it is reasonable to speculate that
Leiris was familiar with details of Ximenes Malinjoude prior to its publication.
See J ; and AH , .
Bizarrely, Leiris deliberately omits the word etroite. The remote possibility
that J was written before ( Jamin carefully notes that it was colle
dans le journal apres le juin ( J note , my emphasis)) and
that it therefore inuenced Jouhandeaus description does not actually
alter my essential point regarding the retention of the homotextual
secret at the heart of Leiriss autobiography and, indeed, his very journal
intime.
For another example of Jouhandeaus unacknowledged inuence on
Leiriss aesthetic formulations, see the similarities between a entry
( J ) and Leiriss response to an NRF survey (Reves, La Nouvelle
revue francaise, no. , October , pp. ) which is quietly presented
as being part of a letter to M. J..
For a treatment of homosexual love as mystical apprenticeship, see
Jouhandeaus Les Instantanes de la memoire, Journaliers II, Paris, Gallimard,
, p. . See also his Chronique dune passion, Paris, Gallimard, , where
he extols the utility and necessity of passion as the sole agent permitting
him to go beyond himself (p. ). The anti-semitism to which Leiris makes
reference in order to erase Jouhandeau (and for which see, for example,
his horrible Le Peril juif, Paris, Sorlot, ) operates in Chronique dune
passion in an ambiguous way. In the narrative, Marcels passion substitutes
Jacques, whom he must relinquish, for God; Marcels wife, Elise, retorts,
as it were, by presenting her desire to kill Jacques as doing Gods will. It
is then that Jacquess Jewishness is made explicit (p. ). Homosexuality,
murder, anti-semitism and Catholic mysticism become ingredients of the
one necessary Passion. Incidentally, this work also uses the Dorian Gray
device: Jacquess attering portrait of Marcel gradually takes over the
marriage household until Elise, unable to kill Jacques, defaces the portrait
instead. She is persuaded to give up the (castrating) knife she uses by a
priest.
Notes to pages
:
. . .
Martin Heidegger, a late marginal commentary on Being and Time, quoted
in Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Being and Time,
Division I, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, MIT Press, , p. .
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven and London,
Yale University Press, , p. .
For a particularly good example of the absoluteness of consciousness
in Husserl, see the extract from Emmanuel Levinass book, La theorie de
lintuition dans la phenomenologie de Husserl, in The Levinas Reader, pp. .
Jacques Derrida, La Differance, in Marges de la philosophie, Paris, Minuit,
, pp. , p. . The essay is ttingly preceded by Tympan, in which
Derrida employs part of the Persephone chapter from Biffures. There are
two English translations of La Differance, neither of which is completely
satisfactory, though each contributes to an understanding of the essay:
Differance, in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of
Signs, tr. David B. Allison, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, ,
pp. ; and Differance, in Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan
Bass, Brighton, Harvester and Chicago, The University of Chicago Press,
, pp. . My future page references will be to the latter.
Differance is by now a well-known term: with it Derrida denotes the already
differential (active) and deferred (passive) nature of meaning, the -ance
ending (as opposed to -ence) resulting from the fundamental play of language,
acting as the graphic mark of this difference, and indicating how a phonic
impression of presence is already part of a representational system.
Jacques Derrida, La Differance, ibid., p. .
Martin Heidegger, A Letter on Humanism, quoted in George Steiner, Heidegger,
London, Fontana, , p. .
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. .
: BIFFURES
I am aware that the excretory function also serves to represent the spiralling
passage from interiority to exteriority in Leiris, and could be added to
this list. Sufce it to say here that as a function it conforms to the same
dynamics as those of vision, voice and hearing, while undoing their ideal
associations. One inevitably thinks of Bataille in this context.
: ---
L A R E G L E D U J E U
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Oxford, Blackwell, , H. , p. .
My analysis of Leiris in this section uses certain ideas and terms taken from
Heidegger, mostly from Being and Time. I do not pretend to offer a systematic
analysis of these terms, let alone the way in which their meaning evolves
Notes to pages
in Heideggers works, especially after . In associating them with a
Leirisian logic, however, we perhaps gain an interesting critical perspective
on their meaning and signicance.
Martin Heidegger, ibid., H. , p. .
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, uvres completes, I: Les Confessions et autres textes
autobiographiques, Paris, Gallimard (Pleiade), , p. . Here it is the
fall itself which restores Rousseau to life and through which he nally
achieves an original, mythical urstate of authenticity, one in which nature
and existence cooperate in a pure Ereignis:
La nuit savancoit. Jappercus le ciel, quelques etoiles et un peu de verdure. Cette
premiere sensation fut un moment delicieux. Je ne me sentois encor que par la.
Je naissois dans cet instant a la vie, et il me sembloit que je remplissois de ma legere
existence tous les objets que jappercevois. Tout entier au moment present je ne me
souvenois de rien; je navois nulle notion distincte de mon individu, pas la moin-
dre idee de ce qui venoit de marriver; je ne savois ni qui jetois ni ou jetois; je ne
sentois ni mal, ni crainte, ni inquietude. Je voyois couler mon sang comme jaurois
vu couler un ruisseau, sans songer seulement que ce sang mappartint en aucune
sorte. Je sentois dans tout mon etre un calme ravissant auquel chaque fois que je me
le rappelle je ne trouve rien de comparable dans toute lactivite des plaisirs connus.
Martin Heidegger, ibid., H. , pp. .
Martin Heidegger, ibid., H. , p. .
Jean-Paul Sartre, LEtre et le Neant, Paris, Gallimard, , p. .
Cf. Martin Heidegger, ibid., H. , p. . Although I am bringing together
certain similar phrases and concerns from Heidegger and Sartre, I cannot
detail here the important differences which exist between their philosophies
concerning nothingness, anxiety, etc. For one such detailing, cf. Michel
Haar, Sartre and Heidegger, in Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to
his Philosophy, eds. Hugh J. Silverman and Frederick A. Elliston, Brighton,
Harvester, , pp. .
Jean-Paul Sartre, ibid., p. .
In using the term insanity, I am aware of the dangers of equating pure
presence with madness, a romantic, surrealist and ethnocentric ideal which
occasionally surfaces in some of Leiriss work (which is to say that it exists as a
temptation in all of his work). One thinks also of early Foucault. I employ the
term for two reasons: rstly to describe the process of absolute coincidence
between inside and outside which is Fibrilless dream; and secondly to
recall its peculiar presence in a nal footnote to Sartres essay on la liberte
cartesienne in Situations I (Paris, Gallimard, , pp. ). Sartre here
recognizes by way of denegation how such a coincidence causes fundamen-
tal problems for his concepts of freedom and the dialectic (this was its value
in early Foucault). Hence, for Sartre meme le desarroi, cest-a-dire limitation
interieure de lexteriorite, meme lalienation supposent la liberte (p. ).
Sartres response to a romanticization of madness is a dogmatic rationaliza-
tion of it. This is in turn dependent on the essays astonishing opening a
stupidly nationalist historicization of the practice of independent thinking
Notes to pages
which has been implicitly understood and carried out by nous autres
Francais qui vivons depuis trois siecles sur la liberte cartesienne (p. ).
William Butler Yeats, A circus animals desertion. The political and meta-
physical ambiguities inherent in this revisionist account of a writers actions
also recur in Heideggers An Introduction to Metaphysics, when he famously
appeals to the primordial realm of the powers of being and new spiritual
energies unfolding historically from out of the centre (pp. ). I should
argue that one chief value of Leiriss autobiography is the ultimately exem-
plary manner in which its complexities guard against such a simple return
of the spirit. For further reections on Heideggers position in this regard,
see Jacques Derrida, De lesprit, Paris, Galilee, , and Herman Rapaport,
Heidegger and Derrida: Reections on Time and Language, Lincoln and London,
University of Nebraska Press, , especially p. . Presumably, Sartres
intention in Aller et retour (Situations I, pp. ) was to offer a similar
critical judgement of Brice Parain. Interestingly, the conclusion to the
rst part of this essay, which speaks of the dangers of le puissant orgueil
metaphysique qui fut lesprit de lapres-guerre (p. ), mentions Leiris,
but Sartre does not make it clear whether or not he exonerates Leiris from
this tache.
: -

Augustine, Confessions, Book , Harmondsworth, Penguin, , p. .
Jean-Paul Sartre, uvres romanesques, Paris, Gallimard (Pleiade), , p. .
One can also recall here how, in LEtre et le Neant, Sartre denes the dening
look of the Other as given just as well when there is a rustling of branches,
or the sound of a footstep followed by silence (p. ), before going on to
repeat the point that this noise is apprehended by me not as the existence
of someone else but as my own vulnerability (p. ).
:
Michel Foucault, Dits et ecrits , vols., Gallimard, vol. , p. .
Georges May, LAutobiographie, Presses Universitaires de France, .
Cf. Jean Boorsch, Hommage a Georges May: a propos du Dilemme,
in Dilemmes du roman: essays in honour of Georges May, edited by Catherine
LaFarge, Saratoga, California, Anma Libri, , pp. , p. . Of
Mays work, see Quatre visages de Denis Diderot, Boivin et Cie., ; Diderot et
la Religieuse, New Haven, Yale University Press and Presses Universitaires
de France, ; Le Dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siecle, New Haven, Yale
University Press and Presses Universitaires de France, .
Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, Minuit, .
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press,
p. .
Notes to pages
See Homi Bhabha, foreword to Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,
London, Pluto Press, , pp. viixxvi.
E. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge, MA, Harvard
University Press, .
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography,
Literature, and Art, Cambridge, MA and London, England, Harvard
University Press, .
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Unless otherwise stated, the place of publication is Paris.

Only those poems, articles and fragments not collected in book form are listed
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Les Illumines, Clarte (), .
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Index
abjection, , , ; and surrealism, , , ,

Acephale, , , , ; as thantography,
aesthetics, , ; and Leiriss affair with auto-ethnography, , , ,
Helene Gordon, ; post-surrealist, ,
surrealist, , , , Bacon, Francis, ,
Africa, , , , , , , , , Baker, Josephine, , n
, , Ballets Suedois and La Creation du monde,
Algerian war, Baron, Jacques, n
Allendy, Rene, Barthes, Roland, ; and signiance,
anthropology, , , , Bataille, Georges, , , , , , , , , ,
anti-colonialism, , , , , n; L Apprenti sorcier, ; his
antiquity, , , , , break with Leiris, , ; his disagreement
anti-semitism, , , n, n with Breton, , , n; and
Appel des , Documents, ; LExperience interieure, ;
Aragon, Louis, , , n; Les Aventures de his reconciliation with Breton, ; and the
Telemaque, , n; the death of, ; sacred,
Dictionnaire abrege du surrealisme, ; Le Baudelaire, Charles, Ecrits intimes,
Paysan de Paris, , n; Traite du style, Beauvoir, Simone de, ,
, n; Une vague de reves, ; Benjamin, Walter,
archaeology, Berton, Germaine, n
Armel, Aliette, La Bete noire,
Artaud, Antonin, , , n; and Documents, Bhabha, Homi,
Bildungsroman, ,
Auge, Marc, , Blanchot, Maurice, , , ,
Augustine, , , ; Confessions, , , Bonaparte, Marie, her reaction to LAfrique
fantome,
authenticity, ; the aesthetics of, ; Borel, Adrien, , , , , ,
existential, , , , ; poetic, Borel, Petrus,
, ; social, ; stylistic, ; of Bott, Francois,
autobiography, , , , , Breton, Andre, , , , , , , n,
autobiography, , , , , , , ; n; Dictionnaire abrege du surrealisme, ;
Georges May, ; and LAge dhomme, his disagreement with Bataille, , ,
; and antiquity, , , , , ; n; and Documents, ; Manifeste du
and Aurora, , ; authenticity of, , surrealisme, , , , , , , ;
, ; ; cultural, ; death as the Nadja, , ; Les Pas perdus, ; Point du
limit of, , ; and ethnography, ; jour, ; Position politique du surrealisme, ;
and the Journal, ; and names, and psychic automatism, , ;
, , ; and Nuits sans nuit, , reconciliation with Bataille, ; Second
; and Le Point cardinal, ; and La Regle manifeste du surrealisme, , , , ,
du jeu, , , ; and
. . . Reusement!, , , , , Browne, Sir Thomas, Hydriotaphia,

Index
Cahiers detudes africaines, ethics, of ethnography, ; of language , ,
Caillois, Roger, , n; Le Vent dhiver, , , ; existentialist, , ; of
capitalism, ; the social reality of, surrealism,
castration complex, ethnography, , , , , , , ,
Cesaire, Aime, , , , , , , ; of bourgeois life, ;
China, , , n the ethics of, ; as reviewed in the Journal,
Chirico, Giorgio de, n ; and surrealism, , ,
class relations, existentialism, , , , n; as reviewed in
Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture, the Journal,
cold war,
College de sociologie, , , , ; and Fanon, Frantz, ,
Declaration sur la crise internationale, Fascism, , ,
colonialism, , , , ; see also Faust,
neo-colonialism First World War, , , ,
commitment, ; and Sartre, , ; Foucault, Michel, , , , , n,
existentialist, , ; and literature, ; n; LHistoire de la sexualite and Le souci de
political, , , , , , , , , soi, n
, ; revolutionary and fraternity,
anti-colonialist, ; social, , , ; to Freud, Sigmund, , , , , ; and
truth, dream-work, , ; The Interpretation of
communism, , , ; and the Communist Dreams, ,
Party, Friche, Claire,
Contre-attaque, , , n Front populaire,
Creech, James,
Critique sociale, La, , , Gambetta, Leon Michel,
Critique, Gaulthier, Rene, n
Croix du Sud, Genesis, the Book of, and autobiography,
Cuba, ,
Genette, Gerard,
Dal, Salvador, , n Giacometti, Alberto,
death, see mortality Girard, Alain, , , n
decolonization, Glissant, Edward, , n
deconstruction, globalization,
Deleuze, Gilles, n Gnosticism,
Denigration, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, , ,
Derrida, Jacques, , , ; Marges de la
philosophie; Gordon, Helene, , , , ,
Desnos, Robert, , ,
detection, and Biffures, ; and the Journal, ; Gradhiva,
and Nuits sans nuit, , , Griaule, Marcel, , , , ; and LAfrique
devirilization, , , , , fantome, ; and Documents, ; and
Didier, Beatrice, Mission Dakar-Djibouti, ,
difference, , , n; and identity, guilt,
Documents, , , , ; and Antonin
Artaud, ; and Georges Bataille, Heidegger, Martin, , , , , n; Being
; Leiris as the editorial assistant of, and Time,
Don Juan, Hemingway, Ernest; ,
Dorian Gray, , n; Leiriss cote Dorian heterosexuality, , , , ,
Gray , ; The Picture of, ; see also Hollier, Denis, ,
Albert Lewis Holofernes, , , ,
Durkheim, Emile, , homoeroticism,
homographesis, ,
Edelman, Lee, homosexuality, , , n, n; in
Eluard, Paul, n Herman Melvilles Pierre,
engagement, see commitment Hugo, Victor;
Index
Husserl, Edmund, , , , , , , , ,
hysteria, as means of surrealist expression, , , , , , , ;
, , , , Biffures (La Regle du jeu I), , , , ,
, , , , , , , ,
identity, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, ; corporeal, , ; , , , , , , , ,
construction of, , , , , , ; De la litterature consideree comme
, , , n; and difference, ; une tauromachie, , ; LEvasion
and difference, , ; the souterraine, n; Fibrilles (La Regle du jeu
ethnographers, ; and language, III), , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , ; , , n; Fourbis (La Regle du jeu II),
nominal, , ; sexual, , , , , , , , , , , ,
; social, , ; surrealist, , , , , ; Frele Bruit
impotence, see devirilization (La Regle du jeu IV), , , , , ,
Institut dEthnologie, , , , ; Glossaire jy serre
mes gloses, , , , , , , , ,
Jacob, Max, , , , n; LHomme de chair , , , , , , , n; Grande
et lhomme reet, fuite de neige, , , , , , n;
Jamin, Jean, , , n, n, n; and the Journal, , , , , , ,
Journal, , , , , , n, , , ; the reception of, ;
n Langage tangage ou ce que les mots me disent, ,
jazz, , , , , ; Metaphore, ; Miroir de lAfrique,
Jouhandeau, Marcel, , , n, n, n; Miroir de la tauromachie, , ; Mots
n; his formative inuence on Leiris, sans memoire, , , , , ; Nuits sans
; his liaison with Leiris, ; nuit et quelques jours sans jour, , , ,
Ximenes Malinjoude, , ; Chronique n; Le Point cardinal, , , , ,
dune passion, n , n; La Regle du jeu, , , , , , ,
Judith, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , ,
Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, , n, see also Biffures (La Regle du jeu I)
Khadidja, , , , Fourbis (La Regle du jeu II), Fibrilles (La Regle
du jeu III) and Frele Bruit (La Regle du jeu IV);
Lacan, Jacques, , , Le Sacre dans la vie quotidienne, , ,
Lang, Jack, , ; Simulacre, , n; Tauromachies, ;
language, and autobiography, , , ; Titres et travaux, ; Zebrage,
the ethics of, , , , ; and Lejeune, Philippe,
ethnography, , ; and identity, , Lena, see Helene Gordon
, , , ; poetic, , ; the Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, , ,
referentiality of, ; as source of the Levinas, Emmanuel, , , , ; and Biffures,
merveilleux, ; and surrealism, ,
, , , , , , Levi-Strauss, Claude, , , , , n; on
Laplanche, Jean, Mausss Essai sur le don, ; Tristes
League of Nations, Tropiques,
Leenhardt, Maurice, Lewis, Albert, Dorian Gray, the lm, , see also
Leiris, Louise, (nee Godon), the wife of Michel Dorian Gray
Leiris, , , , , , , , , Limbour, Georges,
, , ; as the addressee of the Lucretia, , , , ,
Journal, ; as the main character of Le Lycanthrope, ,
the Journal, ; the death of, ; in
dreams, ; the illegitimacy of, , Man, Paul de, n
n; as Judith, Maran, Rene, Batouala,
Leiris, Michel, Aurora, , , , , , , Marmande, Francis,
, , , , , , , , , Marx, Karl, , , n
n; LAfrique fantome, , , , , , marxism, , Hegelian,
, , n; LAge dhomme, , , , , Masson, Andre, , , n
Index
Mauss, Marcel, , , ; and LAfrique poetry, , , ; and politics, , , ,
fantome, ; Essai sur le don, , ; surrealist, ,
May , , , , Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, , ,
May, Georges, LAutobiographie, possession, , , , , ; linguistic, ;
Mehlman, Jeffrey, surrealist,
Melville, Herman, , Pierre; or the Ambiguities, Presence africaine,
, Proust, Marcel, , , ; A la recherche du
Metraux, Alfred, temps perdu, , , , n
Minotaure, , ; Leiris as the editor of, psychoanalysis, , , , , , , , ,
Miro, Joan, , , , , , , , , , ,
Mission Dakar-Djibouti, , , , , n; , , n; Leiriss rejection of, ,
and Raymond Roussel, ; and surrealism, ; undergone by
modernity, , , Leiris, see Adrien Borel
Montaigne, Michel de,
mortality, , , , , ; in LAfrique racism, , ,
fantome, ; in LAge dhomme, , , ; in reciprocity, existential, ; ethnographic, , ,
Aurora, , ; in Fourbis, , , ;
in Frele Bruit, , ; in the Journal, reexivity, phenomenological, ; linguistic,
, , , , ; self-presence in relativity, linguistic and cultural, ; linguistic,
the face of, , ; and Leiriss suicide cultural and methodological,
attempt, , , , repression, , , , , ,
Musee de lHomme, , ; see also Musee du Reverdy,
Trocadero Revolution surrealiste, La, , , n, n
Musee du Trocadero, , , , ; see also revolution, , , , ,
Musee de lHomme. Rimbaud, Arthur, ,
mythology, see antiquity Riviere, Georges Henri, ; and Musee du
Trocadero,
Nadeau, Maurice, , Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, , , , , ;
names, , , , , , , ; and Les Confessions, , n, n; Les Reveries
autobiography, , , , ; du promeneur solitaire,
and the calligrames, Roussel, Raymond, , , n; Impressions
Narcissus, dAfrique, ; Locus Solus, ; and Mission
negritude, , Dakar-Djibouti,
negrophilia, , , n Rousset, Jean,
neo-colonialism,
Nerval, Gerard de, , , , ; Aurelia, , sacred, the, , , , , , , , ;
and Georges Bataille,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, , , Sade, Marquis de,
Said, Edward, W.,
Oedipus, the myth of, ; oedipal rivalry in Sartre, Jean-Paul, , , , , , , ,
LAge dhomme, , , , , , , n, n;
opera, , , and College de sociologie, ; his criticism of
orientalism, surrealism, , ; LEtre et le Neant, ,
otherness, , , , , , , , , , , , ; La Nausee, ; Un nouveau
, , n; as femininity, , mystique, , ; Orphee noir, ;
Quest-ce que la litterature?, , , , ;
parousia, , and selfness, ; Theatre de Situations,
Peignot, Colette, , , Saussure, Ferdinand de,
Persephone, , Schaeffner, Andre, , Le jazz: la musique
Peyre, Henri, French Novelists of Today, , moderne,
n Second World War, , , , ; and
phenomenology, , , , D-day and Liberation, , , , ,
Picasso, Pablo, , , ; and the Communist ; and drole de guerre, , , ,
party, , , ; and Occupation, , ,
Plato, , , ,
Index
Segur, Comtesse de, co-editor of, ; and the publication
self, the, , , , , , , , , , , of Biffures, ; and the publication
, ; psychoanalytical concept of, ; of Fourbis, ; its policy towards
socio-political concept of, ; as seen by poetry,
surrealism, , ; see also identity thanatography, , , ; see also
shamanism, , mortality
Societe psychanalytique de Paris, thanatos,
sociology, , , Trotsky, Leon,
Spanish civil war, Tual, Roland,
Spector, Jack, J., n Turpin, Ben,
Stalinism,
Stendhal, Henri Beyle, Le Rouge et le Noir, unconscious, the, , , , , , , , ,
structuralism, n ,
suicide, see mortality UNESCO,
surrealism, , , , , , , , , ,
, ; and ethnography, , , Vane, Sibyl, see Albert Lewis
; as reviewed in the Journal, ; and Verdi, Giuseppe, ,
language, , , , , , Verne, Jules,
; and its poetics, , ; and
psychoanalysis, Wahl, Jean,
Wildenstein, Georges, and Documents,
Les Temps modernes, , ; and black poets, ; World Peace Congress in Vienna,
and the critical response to Dimanche,
; the founding of, ; Leiris as a Zette, see Louise Leiris.

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MICHEL LEIRIS

Writing the Self

This is the rst full-length study in English of Michel Leiriss work.

is Professor of French and Head of the School of

Recent titles in this series include

Cambridge University Press 2004

First published in printed format 2002

ISBN 0-511-03959-X eBook (netLibrary)

Introduction: the deaths of Michel Leiris

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

Michel Leiris est enn mort. Liberations reaction to Leiriss death at

Unities and identities: Leiris and surrealism

LAspiration viscerale a un systeme qui serait a la fois esthetique, moral et

This dark metaphysical urge is given its most programmatic exposition

G LOSSAIRE JY SERRE MES G LOSES

This direct equation between the state of language and self-identity

Figure Le plongeoir de Narcisse.

Figure Le sceptre miroitant.

Figure Arbre de stuc.

Breton goes on to state that the absolute self-awareness of this point

Le Point cardinal transforms the typographical star-bursts and self-

Figure Paris, October .

Aurora, written between and , nally appeared in print in

The entry is credited to Louis Aragon and Andre Breton, who in

NUITS SANS NUIT

Recasting the self: from surrealism to ethnography

The beginning of the thirties saw the dispersal of surrealist aesthetics.

Leiriss clear depiction of the frenetic activities of a dying civilization

Autobiographical frameworks: from ethnography

Leiriss ethnographic curriculum vitae, Titres et travaux, describes LAfrique

Linguistic austerity and its artistic parallels (sculpture, photo-montage,

A general body of writing is therefore established at the head of the

La tendresse que je reportai de ma mere a ces livres, et de ces livres pris en

The next three chapters derive from the biblical exemplications of a

He then supplements this accurate if distinctly critical description of the

The autobiography then ends with an epilogue composed of three

Positional play: La Regle du jeu

La Regle du jeu differs from LAge dhomme in one immediately obvious

This move from LAge dhommes synthetic and visual composition of

Central to emergence of the self is the changing perceptions which

This remarkable opening transforms all those elements traditionally as-

Sur le sol de la salle a manger ou du salon, le soldat, de plomb ou de carton-

In particular, this Histoire sainte places each proper noun in a divinely

Echangeant Moisse pour Mose, jeprouvais un vertige, parce que ce netait

Educations attempt to perfect an intentional structure in Leiris comes

Chose mobiliere a leclat de miroir ou au luisant de vieux bois sature

The mecanique de precision operated by Esaus dieresis ironically gen-

As a nal example of the productivity being suggested here, Leiris offers

From this a chain of recollections builds into a more consciously socio-

This form of commodication not only explains some of Leiriss obses-

It is signicant that two-thirds of Fourbis was originally published in

Fourbiss opening recognition of facticity, le simple fait detre la, in

A committed autobiography henceforth will be devoted less to the cre-

Leiriss constant attention to language and technical details, in addition to

Though Vois! Deja lange . . . may supercially appear to conclude with

This ambitious attempt to reconcile the fundamental tension between

This fabulous harmony even affects the structure of Leiriss reaction

At the height of his recension chinoise, therefore, Leiris records a se-

Beginning with an almost physical rebirth (Fi ), Leiris is as helpless

Ce quils portaient ainsi comme une richesse de contrebande, ce netait pas la

It is signicant that the provisional title, Fibules, was dropped in favour

Frele Bruits rebeginning is therefore designed to be yet another reread-

Secreting the self: Journal