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Modernism/modernity, Volume 16, Number 1, January 2009, pp. 61-86(Article)

P bl h d b J hn H p n n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/mod.0.0049

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Joyce Cheng is a

doctoral candidate

in art history at the

University of Chi-

cago. She specializes

in twentieth-century

European avant-garde

art and theory as well

as aesthetics and philo-

sophical anthropology.

She will complete her

dissertation “Mask,

Mimicry, Metamorpho-

sis: Figuration of Alter-

ity in Avant-Garde Art

Criticism 1915–1945”

in the spring of 2009.

modernism / modernity

volume sixteen, number

one, pp 61–86.

© 2009 the johns hopkins

university press

Mask, Mimicry, Metamorphosis: Roger Caillois, Walter Benjamin and Surrealism in the 1930s

Joyce Cheng

However you think of it, it ends up as the fundamental fact of the mask. In this way the primitive, with all its implements and pictures, opens up for our benefit an in-finite arsenal of masks: the masks of our fate—the masks with which we emerge from unconsciously experienced moments and situations that have now, at long last, been recuperated.Impoverished, uncreative man knows of no other way to transform himself than by means of disguise. Disguise seeks the arsenal of masks within us. . . . In reality, the world is full of masks; we do not suspect the extent to which even the most unpretentious pieces of furniture (such as Romanesque armchairs) used to be masks, too. To hand over these masks to us, and to form the space and the figure of our fate within it—this is where folk art comes to meet us halfway. Only from this vantage point can we say clearly and fundamentally what distinguishes it from “more authentic” art, in the narrower sense.

—Walter Benjamin, “Some Remarks on Folk Art,” 19291

It is a fact that all mankind wears or has worn a mask. This enigmatic accessory, with no obvious utility, is commoner than the lever, the bow, the harpoon or the plough. . . . Complete civilizations, some of them most remarkable, have prospered without having conceived the idea of the wheel, or, what is worse, without using it even though it was known to them. But they were familiar with the mask.

—Roger Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, 19642

M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

62 That the experiential dimension and plastic figuration of metamorphosis were at the heart of surrealism in the 1930s can be seen in the two mythic figures that announced the movement’s chief organ of the period, Minotaure (1933–1939): the bull-headed monster in ancient Mediterranean mythology from which the review takes its name and a ritualistic mask made with palm leaves from the Ethnographic Museum of Basel.3 But while the Minotaur on the cover page of the first issue remains a familiar iconog-raphy in the western tradition despite its placement amidst disparate components of a collage designed by Pablo Picasso, the identity of the small, strange face encrusted in the middle of the review’s first page would have been obscure to most readers of the time. (Figs. 1 and 2) All that is available to the eye is three schematic and strategically placed orifices on what looks like a dark mass of wires or bristles. Neither man nor woman, neither bird nor beast, the inchoate face emerging from hair or vegetation is an intermediary being that hovers somewhere between the world of human beings and whatever lies outside of it. No clue as to the possible link between the Minotaur and the mysterious grass mask is available except the four-line poem written by a certain “P. E.,” “Un visage dans l’herbe,” (“A Face in the Grass”) which appears beneath the image of the mask. An analysis of this poem, therefore, is the only way to work out what we might consider the plastic-poetic mission statement of Minotaure as a collec-tive surrealist project.

Après l’insecte-feuille, l’homme-feuille.Un visage éclôt dans un nid de verdure.Le végétal séduit la pluie.L’eau, dans un trou, se livre au premier venu.4

(After the leaf-insect, the leaf-man.A face hatches in a nest of verdure.The vegetal seduces the rain.From a hole, water gives itself to the first to come.)

The main components of the poem—vegetation, insect, man, rain, water—are intertwined; the hyphenated nouns (“insecte-feuille,” “homme-feuille”), as well as the ambiguous use of adjectival nouns (“végétal” in French being both noun and adjective, “le végétal” could therefore mean both “the plant” or “that which is vegetal”), construct for us a world of ambiguous, indistinct beings in a constant process of metamorphosis. Part-man, part-beast, part-plant, the hybrid creatures inhabit a world of inexplicable coupling and birth. Like the hatching of a ready egg, an unknown face emerges spon-taneously from “un nid de verdure” whose architect remains anonymous; the rain and the vegetation are wedded in an amorous union; and water, mediator between the gaseous and the solid, seems ready to take on any form, the way an eager bride offers herself to the first suitor. There is, in other words, a link between composite beings known as chimeras and the fluid identities of things whose interrelations might be characterized as “paraerotic.”

ChENG / mask, mimicry, metamorphosis

63

▲

▲

Fig. 1. Pablo Picasso, “Collage for

the review Minotaure.” (C)2008

Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights

Society (ARS), New York. All images

are taken from Minotaure, facsimile in

three volumes (Geneva, Switzerland:

Editions d’Art Albert Skira, 1981).

Fig. 2. Ritualistic mask from Nias Island

(Sumatra, Indonesia), accompanied by Paul

Eluard’s poem, “Un visage dans l’herbe.”

Published in Minotaure 1 (1933), 1.


64 The above analysis brings me to my main concern in this essay, namely the aes-thetic and anthropological efforts in the 1930s by surrealism to come to terms with the phenomenon of mimetic-metamorphosis, in the course of which it becomes possible to identify a corpus of iconographies corresponding to various experiential modalities of passivity. The bull-headed monster Minotaure and the Nias Island grass mask only announce a long list of mythic and paramythic figures—ancient and modern, manmade as well found in nature—that tie together a review whose scope encompasses “arts plastiques—poésie—musique—architecture—ethnographie et mythologie—specta-cles—études et observations psychanalytiques.”5 I shall discuss some examples in the review’s first three years: images of Dogon maskers brought back by the surrealist turned ethnographer Michel Leiris from his two-year voyage in Africa (to which Minotaure dedicated a special issue); Salvador Dalí’s “êtres-objets” (“object-beings”), and photo-graphic clichés of mystic faces; and Roger Caillois’s anthropomorphic praying mantis and mimicking insects. That these figures serve as a means for the surrealist circle to recuperate forms of passivity is evidenced by the fact that each of these figures cor-responds to a particular theoretical discourse on a specific mode of depersonalization or hors-de-soi, which in “Un visage dans l’herbe” takes the form of impersonality.

The other striking feature of the short poem is the plainness of its idiom, all the more accentuated by the concealment of the poet’s name behind two initial letters. Possibly, the surrealist poet Paul Eluard minimized his authorial presence in order to approxi-mate his work to the anonymity of the grass mask, made by the people of the volcanic Nias Island near Sumatra, Indonesia.6 But anonymity is also linked to impersonality. The absence of verbs in the first line, “Après l’insecte-feuille, l’homme-feuille,” keeps us in the dark regarding the logical relationship between the leaf-insect and the leaf-man. If the preposition “après” designates a temporal sequence, whereby the leaf-man descended from the leaf-insect as in a filial relationship, it can equally mean that the leaf-man was made after, or in the manner of, the leaf-insect, thereby deferring its ori-gin to its qualities. In the three lines that follow, each a complete sentence in the basic order of subject-verb-object, all suggestion of psychology and subjectivism is suppressed starting with the qualifying part of speech, the adjective. (The use of “nid de verdure” only betrays the poet’s effort to avoid its adjectival form, “nid vert.”) In short, we are faced with the matter-of-fact language of fairytales and sacred texts, characterized by the condensation of events and elimination of details and psychology.

If we read the poem as a kind of schematic narrative, we get a chain of tableaux that takes us from the chimeric creatures to a scene of birth (the hatching of the face in the green nest), and then to the seduction of rain by the earth. Finally, in the last line, nothing is left but water, alone yet ready to give itself to “le premier venu.” This order of events is peculiar because we are accustomed to its reverse. Technically, seduction should precede union, and union should precede birth—unless, that is, the poem is a genesis myth filmed backwards, which in turn reveals the origins of chimeric figures such as the Nias Island “leaf-man” and the bull-man Minotaur. In short, the chimeras can be traced back to a spontaneous, mythic creation that results from the fusion be-tween two elements (rain and vegetation). This union, however, would not have been


65possible had there not been an existential passivity inherent in the elements themselves, whose poetic figuration is the fluid, ardent water animated by the feminine principle (“from a hole”). In other words, Eluard’s poem not only pays homage to mythic figures but more importantly suggests the link between the phenomenon of metamorphosis and the experience of passivity.

The valorization of this experience, whose condition of possibility is a temporary suspension of the self, is not unequivocal in the interwar period. This was a moment when the European intelligentsia were greatly alarmed by the mass hysteria that fascist movements deliberately manipulated to their own political ends, and among these worried minds was the German-Jewish critic and thinker Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s presence in the avant-garde milieu of Paris dates back to around 1927, when he began to write in response and in dialogue with the surrealism of André Breton and Louis Aragon. By 1937, Benjamin was attending meetings at the secret society organized by the dissident surrealists and their friends, Collège de Sociologie, although he quickly suspected the group of protofascist tendencies as certain participants—in particular the young Caillois and Georges Bataille—professed a fascination with carnival, war, and sacrifice that went beyond mere sociological interest.7 And yet, his wariness about aestheticized collective effervescence notwithstanding, Benjamin worked throughout the 1930s on a deeply personal project concerned with the creative forms of passiv-ity, whereby a person is momentarily released from his or her quotidian identity and transformed into other beings. Berlin Childhood around 1900, which Benjamin worked on for nearly as long as the review Minotaure lasted, is therefore not simply Benjamin’s autobiographical album; it is equally an ethnographic study of childhood with a focus on the paratotemic identification with animals and the magical wanderings in the “arsenal of masks,” the name Benjamin gives to his parents’ west Berlin household.8 I shall discuss this essay in the context of Minotaure as a way of uncovering the value of metamorphosis and passivity at the heart of surrealism.

Mask and Alterity in Artistic and Ethnographic Surrealism

The debut of Minotaure as a review, animated by the triangular relation between Eluard’s “Un visage dans l’herbe,” Picasso’s Minotaure cover page, and the Nias Island ritualistic mask, indicates the predicament of the avant-garde in the 1930s; namely, it is with the aid of existing animist and totemic cultures (mostly from Africa, Melanesia, and North America) that the Europeans were able to relate to similar forms of life that had long become marginalized in the west. Had it not been placed next to the Nias Islander grass mask, had the Tsimshian chief of the British Columbian coast not referred to it as an “European totem” to the Swiss surrealist painter Kurt Seligmann, the Minotaur would have remained a trope in western classical literature and iconog-raphy.9 The presence of living ritualistic artifacts—most importantly the apparatus of the mask, that time-honored, transcultural technology for creative transformation—now makes possible the recovery of an onslaught of worn-out clichés in the western tradition as figures of alterity. The Minotaur, no less than the Sphinx and the chimera,


66 can now be demystified and their experiential basis better understood thanks to liv-ing practices of metamorphosis, such as the elaborate West African masquerades that Leiris witnessed in his voyage with his friend the ethnologist Marcel Griaule in the Mission Dakar-Djibouti.10 It is in this respect that we are obliged to extend what James Clifford describes as “ethnographic Surrealism” beyond the “perverse collection” of ethnographic artifacts in surrealist publications (notably the eccentric Documents: Archéologie, Beaux-Arts, Ethnographie, Variétés from 1929 and 1930) or the “sheer incongruities” of the surrealist collage, which constitutes merely the rhetorical (that is, provocative) aspect of what I would call “avant-garde philosophical anthropology.”11

If, as indirectly suggested by Eluard’s poem, the main concern of avant-garde or surrealist philosophical anthropology in the 1930s has to do with the experiential dimen-sion and figuration of metamorphosis, then there is an unmistakable link between the Minotaur, the Nias Island grass mask, and the photographs of Dogon masking rituals in the second issue of Minotaure, dedicated entirely to ethnographic reportage from Mission Dakar-Djibouti. The latter provides the means to understand the social dimen-sion of mimetic-metamorphosis, which would otherwise be difficult to assess by simply looking at iconography or an artifact in isolation. Leiris’s report of the Dogon initiation ritual in Bandiagara (formerly in French Sudan, today part of Mali), for example, shows the extent to which the technical aspect of socialized metamorphosis depends on a complex network of taboos, rules, and practices accompanied by a corpus of material artifacts. The variety of mask forms, each bearing a distinct name (“masque dégué,” “masque bézé,” “masque gomintogo”), derives from an old savoir whose development and sedimentation over time within a community produce a tradition. It is the practice of tradition and a corpus of well-made props which make possible the majestic final production that we see in the photographs of Dogon maskers, whose profile as animal-headed mythic beings recall classical figures on Attic vases. (Fig. 3)

There are, without a doubt, epistemological limits to the poetic recurrence of classical imageries in Leiris’s and Griaule’s ethnographic accounts. But, as shown by Leiris’s later research, his aesthetic appreciation of African masquerades is animated by a serious interest in the cognitive value of creative forms of depersonalization. The evidence I shall give here is Leiris’s study of the experience of possession and trance in the northern Ethiopian cult of zar, which he takes seriously as a socially integrated form of theater that incorporates technical mastery of états sécondaires, or altered states of consciousness.

In La Croyance aux génies zar en Éthiopie du Nord (1938), Leiris offers a brief but instructive phenomenology of how the entry into gurri, the possessed pose signifying the arrival of the spirit zar, is preceded by a series of inchoate (but utterly predictable, even systematic) experiences of emasculation, described by the women themselves as fatigue, oppression, shoulder pains, and the sensation of “being invaded by bees.”12 That the cult has long known how to artificially induce these symptoms and, more importantly, create proper names for them in connection with supernatural beings upheld by the community, suggests that ritualistic possession is as real (in the sense of producing physiological changes in the bodies of the participants) as it is theatrical (insofar as it is performative, therefore always conducted in group).


67

That possession is a technique that can be perfected is clear in the cases of great shamans, who make a living out of what might be called a skilled performance of per-sonality dissociation. Several months in the company of the reputable medium Mälkam Ayyähu, who, even when not in trance, “never speaks of herself other than in the third person,” convinced Leiris that the elderly lady had mastered what is essentially a the-atrical technique: “Her zars consist for her a kind of wardrobe of personalities that she can put on according to various needs and circumstances in her quotidian existence, personalities that offer her ready-made behaviors and attitudes that hover between life and theater.”13 The zar is therefore not so much the fantasy of a superstitious, primi-tive people as it is a “mythic figuration” (“figuration mythique”), “a sort of theatrical mask that the person [in trance] no more than puts on, and becomes the zar simply by virtue of putting it on.”14

By understanding the zar as a kind of mask, Leiris not only sheds light on the fre-quent connection of masquerade with the practices of trance and possession, he also contributes to uncovering the reasons for which mythic figures in countless traditions entail altered or composite identities. Part of the challenge that Minotaure takes up consists in recovering, without resorting to revival of old clichés, the possibility of new metamorphic figures in modern life, for example Brassaï’s evocative view of the twilight silhouette of the statue of Maréchal Ney in the Luxembourg quarter of Paris. The artful photographic transformation of a neoclassical commemorative statue into the apparition of a mythic warrior may have little to do with the profile of a masker in

▲

Fig. 3. Masked dancers of Ireli, Bandiagara, southern Sudan. Photographer unknown, possibly Marcel Griaule.

Published in Minotaure 2 (1933), 45.


68 the initiation ritual “Koré” in southern Sudan in a photograph taken by Griaule, but by comparing these two chimeric silhouettes in Minotaure, we perceive the ethos of aesthetic and ethnographic surrealism in the 1930s, a project consisting in developing a corpus of figures of alterity in conjunction with phenomenological description of the experience of hors de soi. (Fig. 4)

In the artistic sphere, Salvador Dalí contributed to this project with his famous 1933 montage, Phénomène de l’extase, in which he identifies an array of forms and figures corresponding to erotic and mystic ecstasy. In the full-page montage, cropped pho-tographs and film stills of faces of women bearing voluptuous expressions are placed amid sculptural figures of nymphs and saints with delirious smiles. A vertiginous series of clichés of the right ear, the carnal equivalent of the spiral art nouveau object found in the lower right, suggests that “Extase” is as much modeled after erotic and mystic rapture as it is formally constructed via organic motifs. (Fig. 5) The following description of ecstasy is therefore as experiential as it is plastic, visual, or formal: “During ecstasy, with the approach of desire, pleasure and anguish, all opinion and judgment (moral, aesthetic, etc.) changes sensationally.—All image equally changes sensationally.”15

Dalí follows up this exercise in a 1935 piece entitled “Apparition aérodynamiques des ‘Êtres-Objets’” (published on the page facing Brassaï’s Maréchal Ney), where he modi-fies the category of “ecstasy” with an even more carnal description—as the sensation of an actively devouring space. In his characteristically megalomaniac, crypto-pornographic language, Dalí calls ecstatic space “this good meat, at once colossally arousing, voracious and personal, which at every moment, with its soft, disinterested enthusiasm, presses against the smooth finesse of ‘strange bodies’ and the bodies of ‘object-beings’—which are also bodies that are more or less strange.”16 “Bodies that are more or less strange” include, among others, the three montage male figures who, dressed in white slacks and a dark felt coat, seem to have suddenly kicked off their shoes and hopped upon an ornate writing table, wearing what look like cushion covers bearing Millet’s paintings Angelus (on the chest) and The Gleaners (on the head, like a mask). Despite Dalí’s clownish posture, there is a serious attempt to establish the connection between the ecstatic experience of devouring space and the dissolution of bodies, which eventually results in the emergence of “strange,” metamorphic “object-beings.”

Dalí’s particular formulation of “extase” and “êtres-objets” illuminates the link be-tween two genres of interrelated iconographies in Minotaure. On the one hand, we are faced with figures of alterity or “transformer beings” such as masks, mannequins, and automatons, among which are Hans Bellmer’s sadistic “poupée,” Marcel Duchamp’s mechanical bride (praised by André Breton), robots that the poet Benjamin Péret derived from a 1928 material history of automatons (Fig. 6); René Crevel’s “Grande Mannequin” illustrated by a bodiless garment ghost, even the rediscovery of Paolo Uccello’s Quattrocento robot-warriors in the battle scenes of San Romano.17 On the other hand, we are given the means to imagine the process of their formation through distorted, fluid, intermediary form in a moment of becoming. Examples from the first three issues include Picasso’s half-formed sculptures in the studio; the evocative pho-tographs by Brassaï of incomplete nudes, close-up of the organic ironwork of the Paris


69

metro entrances, and “sculptures involontaires”; Man Ray’s photographs of rippling, “edible” Barcelona façades; works by André Masson, Georges Braque, and Joan Miró that can be said to share a specifically 1930s surrealist idiom of dreamlike, metamor-phic forms; and highly mannered baroque paintings by painters such as Tintoretto and Peter Paul Rubens. That the central preoccupation of Minotaure is plasticity becomes clear in its emphasis on form, which, as in the aqueous receptivity that Eluard evokes in his short poem, yields, melts, and stretches beyond its original shape. Just as Leiris does not stop at the verbal testimonies for the arrival of the zar but inquires into the physiological symptoms of trance that prepare the bodies for possession, Minotaure is not only interested in figures of alterity but also plastic figuration of the very process of metamorphosis that makes their genesis possible.

▲

Fig. 4. Masker in the Koré initiation rite, southern Sudan. Pub-

lished in Minotaure 2 (1933), 20-21.


70

Mimicry, Metamorphosis, Psychasthenia: Roger Caillois’s Mythic Insects

Minotaure was not the only avant-garde locus of the 1930s concerned with alterity, the other being Acéphale, the journal put out by Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Jules Monnerot between 1936 and 1939 in conjunction with their activities in the Collège.18 But in contrast to Acéphale, whose only figurative features are André Masson’s drawings of the headless man and the bull-headed Dionysus (serving as an insignia for a largely philosophical publication), the heavily visual Minotaure is resolutely committed to the polymorphous world of form and figuration. Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron therefore argues that the surrealist investigation of alterity in the 1930s is characterized by the proliferation of “des figures, au sens de figurines, de poupées, de génies, de totems et autres golems mais aussi au sens d’emblèmes qui servent à donner forme à la dif-ference,” in contradistinction to the tendency in Bataille’s group to pursue alterity in the mystical form of the “sacred,” that key term that drives their sociological study of rituals and secret societies.19 Surrealism, by contrast, is first and foremost concerned with anchoring alterity in the order of the symbolic (“l’ordre symbolique”). Not unlike

▲

Fig. 5. Salvador Dalí, “Le phénomène de l’extase, Minotaure.”

(C)2008 Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation/Artists

Rights Society (ARS), New York.


71

Crevel’s Grand Mannequin “looking for and finding her skin,” surrealism searches for ways to render alterity “plastiquement.”20

Nevertheless, despite the differences between surrealism and the Collège and be-tween Minotaure and Acéphale, the two milieux were never quite far apart throughout the 1930s. This is demonstrated by Bataille’s submissions to Minotaure, including an unpublished piece entitled “Le masque” in 1934; the joined forces of Breton and Bataille in the anti-fascist coalition “Contre-Attaque” in 1936; and the contributions of young Caillois to the figuration of alterity in Minotaure during his brief but instru-mental encounter with surrealism.21 Although Caillois soon left surrealism to pursue the question of ecstasy and collective effervescence in the Collège in mainly sociological terms, his lifelong reflections on impersonal forms of creativity in nature began in the context of surrealism. On their own, Caillois’s two essays on insects in the 1930s, “La mante religieuse. De la biologie à la psychanalyse” (1934) and “Mimétisme et la psy-chasthénie légendaire” (1935) might read like two obscurantist entomological studies

▲

Fig. 6. Automatons, illustrating “Au paradis des fantômes” by Benjamin Péret. Pub-

lished in Minotaure 3-4 (1933), 35.


72 that bizarrely try to contradict all evolutionary explications for animal cannibalism and mimicry. Their publication in the context of Minotaure makes it possible to see them as the search for figures that evidence the possibility of intelligence without thought, creativity without art, and agency in the absence of the (human) agent.

By identifying the praying mantis and mimicking animals as nature’s automatons and masquerades, Caillois begins to formulate in his peculiarly naturalist fashion what it would mean to act and create without the intervention of the sovereign ego, that magnificent artifact of the modern west that surrealism and the avant-garde have taken such drastic measures to counteract. Automatism, the well-known exercise in poetic thinking that Breton devised to free the human mind from rational constraints, is taken to a radical level by Caillois, whose impetuous remedy against human subjectivity is to dispense with the human altogether and to look into the insect and animal world for models of alterity. In “La mante religieuse. De la biologie à la psychanalyse,” the praying mantis is identified as a kind of automatic android found in nature, whence its status as a mythic being in various cultures in Provence, Mexico, Melanesia, Africa, and ancient Greece. (Fig. 7) Its anthropomorphic yet rigid appearance is striking even to scientists, one of whom describes the insect as a robot, “a machine with perfected wheelwork, capable of functioning automatically.”22 The female mantis, whose habit of devouring the male during mating fascinated Breton, Eluard, and Dalí alike, quali-fies as “the machine woman, artificial, mechanical, inanimate, incommensurable with living mankind and creatures” (“MR,” 25).

That the female mantis synonymously—and homonymously—embodies love (“l’amour”) and death (“la mort”) has often been cited as the reason for its allure for the surrealists, who have a taste for “uncanny” artifacts such as Hans Bellmer’s cadav-erous montage dolls.23 But I would suggest that the ultimate interest of the praying mantis is the following: it appears to prove that complex movements and intelligent operations can occur in raw nature, in the complete absence of human agency. If we return momentarily to Eluard’s poem, we will notice that the world it depicts, depleted of what we might call human motives, is nevertheless moved by some form of agency, which can only be described as the inexplicable nudging and shoving of things that blur the boundary between the animate and inanimate. The choice of verbs in the last three lines deliberately confuses the human, animal, and inorganic realms. While “éclôtre” describes the birth of birds, reptiles, and the like, and “séduire” the erotic enouncter between of human beings, “livrer” (“to give,” “to yield,” “to lend”) in the last line brings the poem back to a neutral movement applicable to living things as well as inanimate objects.

I bring back Eluard’s poem because, just as Eluard is more interested in the neutrality of movement than a lyrically personified nature, Caillois is struck by the praying mantis not so much because it humanizes nature, but because it seems to belong to a world where the very opposition between brute nature and what is commonly understood as human agency fails. In this world, we are asked to confront an alternative source for movement and transformation—one that is as independent from human motivation and purpose as it is from mechanical causality. To emphasize the enigma of the praying


73

mantis, Caillois calls attention to the most eerie aspect of the insect: its ability to act intelligently with or without its head:

In fact, not only does the jointed rigidity of the mantis resemble that of an armor or an automaton, there is in fact no reflex that it is not capable of performing just as well even when decapitated, in the absence of all center of representation and voluntary activity. Even under these conditions, it is able to walk, find its balance, sever an endangered limb, take up a spectral posture, mate, lay eggs, build an ootheca . . . . (“MR,” 26)

Here, it becomes clear that Caillois’s notion of the praying mantis as an automaton in nature cannot be considered simply another version of the scientific view of nature as a realm governed by objective, impersonal laws. His point is not so much to show that nature is autonomous of human consciousness, but rather that there exists in na-ture examples of organisms performing creative functions in the absence of a central nervous system.

Nowhere is Caillois’s reasoning clearer than in his adamant rejection of the evolu-tionary view of many entomologists, who argue that the female mantis instinctively devours the male before mating in order to obtain nutrients necessary for laying eggs. In his counterargument, Caillois recalls the prolonged spasmodic reflexes of decapitated crickets and wonders “if the mantis that decapitates the male before mating were not aiming to remove the inhibiting centers of its brain in order to obtain a better and longer execution of the movement of coitus” (“MR,” 25). Without being distracted by the perversity of this hypothesis (perhaps an instance of Caillois’s cruelty that had disturbed Benjamin), we see that it is crucial for Caillois to view the mating behavior of

▲

Fig. 7. Praying mantis, illustrating “La mante religieuse” by Roger Caillois, photogra-

pher unknown. Published in Minotaure 5 (1934), 23.


74 the praying mantis as non-procreative, non-utilitarian, and thereby creative, because—so his reasoning goes—if the praying mantis can continue to make love when deprived of a head, then the surrealist hypothesis that poetic or artistic activity could operate according to “pure psychic automatism” (“automatisme psychique pur”) is far from implausible. That Caillois’s understanding of automatism is incomplete becomes clear when he realizes to his incomprehension that the surrealist poets actually worked on their poems and discussed them openly in the company of their friends.24 But for our discussion here, the most important aspect of Caillois’s phantasmagorical entomology is the extent to which it points to the figurability of the experience of suspension of consciousness.

In fact, not only might there be forms and figures in nature corresponding to the experience of radical passivity, there might be a direct, causal link between the ex-perience of passivity and the most creative, art-like phenomenon in nature, namely, animal mimicry and metamorphosis. In “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire,” Caillois’s second publication in Minotaure, he goes so far as to argue that psychic and physiological paralysis is directly responsible for mimetic-metamorphic phenomenon in the natural world. As in the case of the cannibalistic praying mantis, Caillois’s argu-ment for the presence of creativity or “lyricism” in nature obliges him to show that the phenomenon of animal mimicry cannot be fully justified by utilitarian advantages. The argument of camouflage as organic defense can explain the mimicry of the leaf insects, whose spotted and veined wings blend imperceptibly into the foliage in which they find refuge; and that of mantises whose legs simulate petals or flowers—but not the degree of their virtuosity. Since the predators are often warded off by a rudimentary level of resemblance, no vital need demands the complete illusionism performed by the Caligo butterfly from the Brazilian forests, whose wings bear oculi and feathery patterns that resemble the face of an owl, or that of the Kallima butterfly in Indonesia and Malaysia, whose wings “in fact bear gray-green stains resembling infestation of lichen mold as well as reflective surfaces that give them the look of perforated, torn leaves.”25 And what function of self-defense could justify the case of the leaf insects (Phyllium bioculatum), whose spotted and veined wings blend so imperceptibly into the foliage that they end up being trimmed by the gardeners? (Fig. 8) Worse, Cailois suggests, for the miserable creatures end up “graz[ing] among one another, taking each other for real leaves in such a way that one would consider it a kind of collective masochism leading up to mutual homophagy” (“M,” 7).

What is extraordinary is that this case of imperfect natural adaptation, which actually no more than affirms the random character of natural selection, is interpreted by Caillois as a phenomenon of excess, “une exaggération de précaution,” as some entomologists claim. As known to biologists, mimicry is no surefire defense and not all instinctual behaviors are optimal for the species. But to Caillois, this fact proves that “we are thus dealing with a luxury, even a dangerous luxury” (“M,” 7). Or, we are dealing with na-ture as decadent, as an artist. What takes Caillois’s anti-evolutionary view beyond the commonplace notion that nature contains art-like phenomena is its distinctly surrealist flavor, in particular Caillois’s claim—allegedly backed by entomological research—that


75

the virtuosity of animal mimicry is the result of “an act of pure automatism” (“un acte d’automatisme pur”; “M,” 8), instigated by the physiological and psychic paralysis of the organism leading to a breakdown of the boundary between the organism and its milieu. In what can only be understood as a derangement of the perception of space and loss of orientation, the organism

is no longer the origin of [spatial] coordinates but a point among others; it is stripped of its privilege and no longer knows where to put itself, in the strong sense of the expression. . . . The sense of personality, that is, the organism’s sense of distinction in the environment, and the sense of a link between consciousness and a particular point in space, soon become seriously threatened under these conditions. We then enter the psychology of psychas-thenia, more precisely of legendary psychasthenia, if we agree to give this name to the derangement of the above definitive relations between personality and space. (“M,” 8)

This account of the absorption of an organism into space clearly has many features in common with Dalí’s “strange objects” being devoured by the “colossal meat” of an ecstatic, devouring space, not least its culmination in mimicry, more precisely in mimetic-metamorphosis. As a result of the psychic emaciation, of the dissolution of the psychic skin of the organism, as it were, the organism transforms completely into the main component of its environment or the creature that it seeks to imitate.

That psychasthenia, Caillois’s preferred term for experiential passivity, is linked to most if not all mimetic-metamorphic phenomena in the world is the crux of this discourse, which at time risks becoming a vertiginous labyrinth of scientific esoteri-cism. Convinced of the complete identity between the animal world and the world of

▲

Fig. 8. Phillus insects, illustrating “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire” by Roger Caillois, photograph by

Le Charles. Published in Minotaure 7 (1935), 5.


76 human beings, Caillois suggests that the latter, too, are subject to the laws of mimicry and metamorphosis in their practice of “psychological virtualities” (“M,” 7). In the anthropological studies of “mimetic magic” (“magie mimétique”) and incantation by Tylor, Hubert, Mauss, and Frazer, the principle of “association by contiguity” often goes hand in hand with “association by resemblance.” Just as “things that have once been in contact remain united,” things that resemble one another are often considered equivalent; mimicking, in short, is becoming (“M,” 7). The process from mimetic ges-tures to complete metamorphosis, where “an incantation [is] fixed at its culminating point, having took the sorcerer in his own trap,” is the technique whose general name is magic (“M,” 8).

Paradoxically, however, in order to show the experiential continuity of psychasthenia in animal and human mimicry, Caillois needs to resort to a uniquely human form of evidence, namely, narrative testimonies of the experience of depersonalization. Not only does Caillois appeal to the psychiatrists Pierre Janet and Eugène Minkowski for their clinical accounts of psychotic depersonalization, he reports from his own “attack of ‘legendary psychasthenia,’ intentionally aggravated for the purposes of ascetic exercise and interpretation,” as he tells us in a footnote (“M,” 10, footnote 57). If Leiris docu-ments the testimonies of participants in the cult of zar, Caillois uses his self-ethnography to confirm Minkowski’s phenomenological description of the experience of emaciation in many psychotic episodes. In both cases, depersonalization is characterized by spa-tial and temporal disorientation, in which the person has the sensation that “I know where I am, but I don’t feel like I am at the spot where I find myself” (“M,” 8).26 For individuals in these conditions, space becomes “a devouring force” that “pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantesque phagocytosis,” and, finally, “it replaces them.” Once absorbed by space,

the body then dissociates itself from thought, the individual crosses over the frontier of his skin and inhabits the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself, from any other point in space. He himself feels as if he were becoming space, dark space (“de l’espace noir”) where one cannot put things. He is similar (“semblable”), not similar to something, but simply similar. (“M,” 8–9)

Although Caillois does not go so far as to claim that this “depersonalization by assimila-tion to space” could physically transform the human being into a flower or a plant, but insofar as it experientially blurs the boundary between the subject and his environment, it is in his mind at least comparable to “what mimicry accomplishes morphologically in certain animal species” (“M,” 8–9).

Nevertheless, the fact that Caillois could have documented and reconstructed his own psychasthenic attack “from introspective notes”—an act unimaginable in the animal world—indicates that the animal and human world are nevertheless characterized by certain differences, contrary to what Caillois would have liked to argue. But this does not seem to concern Caillois any more than, for example, the functional difference between sympathetic magic and psychosis. Left theoretically underdeveloped is the contrast between, on the one hand, socially mediated, artfully controlled, and essen-


77tially theatrical forms of metamorphosis such as masquerades, shamanism, and trance and, on the other, the anguished, existentially solitary loss of agency in mental illness. As Caillois will later admit, his account of “psychasthenia” in the 1930s is far from being a satisfactory explanation for mimicry, let alone for creative mimetic activities of human beings.27 But insofar as Caillois has identified a spectrum of experiences of passivity with specific species of phantasmagoric insects, insofar as he has understood the issue of mimicry and metamorphosis in terms of alterity and passivity, his two essays for Minotaure are in dialogue with Leiris, Dalí, and the philosophical anthropology of surrealism.

Of Butterfly, Otter and the Arsenal of Masks: Walter Benjamin’s Childhood Animism

If, as I have been suggesting, mimetic-metamorphosis is the leitmotif of the avant-garde in the 1930s, it should not surprise us that Benjamin too was concerned with this mode of experience, which, as the European intelligentsia of the period seemed to agree, was no longer easily accessible in the modern west without appealing to ethnographic, artistic, biological, and even psychiatric material. Benjamin’s interest in mimicry and metamorphosis can be glimpsed already in the various essays and fragments he wrote in the late 1920s (the period when surrealism began to make a definitive impact on his thinking), not least his essays on children’s play and playthings, as well as the inspired “Some Remarks on Folk Art” from around 1929 (see my first epigraph).28 The latter contains an enigmatic invitation to penetrate quotidian objects such as furniture and inhabit them like masks, thus announcing Benjamin’s autobiographical album Berlin Childhood Around 1900 where Benjamin reconstructs his own childhood and thereby offers us a personal phenomenology of metamorphosis. It is through this text, which demonstrates that a bourgeois, urban childhood nevertheless contains animist if not totemic episodes, that I wish to uncover the epistemological and cognitive value of metamorphosis and experiential passivity, not only for Benjamin but for the surrealist avant-garde to which he serves as a fellow-traveler.

Perhaps the most convincing accounts of animism and totemism in Berlin Childhood have to do with the child’s proximity to creaturely life. Benjamin’s homage to the otter in the pantheon of the Berlin zoo is simultaneously an exercise in magical thinking, which, as the anthropologists tell us through the voice of Caillois, is animated by the principle of “association by contiguity.” Thus, just as “one forms an image of a person’s nature and character according to his place of residence and the neighborhood he inhabits,” the child forms the image of the ostriches as ancient Egyptian gods as they are “marshaled before a background of sphinxes and pyramids” and that of the hip-popotamus as mandarin high priest who “dwelt in its pagoda like a tribal sorcerer on the point of merging bodily with the demon he serves.”29 The otter, for its preference to dwell in the rain-collecting cistern rather than in the rock grottoes prepared by the zoo, becomes the “sacred animal of the rainwater” (BC, 80). “A pampered animal whose empty, damp grotto was more a temple than a refuge,” the otter is only truly in


78 its element when receiving the rain in a mystic union, an event that the child “looked on insatiably” as if experiencing an intense, sensual bliss: “For, to me, the long, sweet day was never longer, never sweeter, than when a fine- or thick-toothed drizzle slowly combed the animal for hours and minutes. Docile as a young maiden, it bowed its head under this gray comb” (BC, 80–81).

But so intense is the child’s link to the rainwater god that it is as if every rainy day brings the presence of the otter to him. Here Benjamin’s text performs the totemic telepathy between the child and his otter-god by unnoticeably changing the scene on us. For a moment we believe to be standing before the otter’s cage, mesmerized like the child Benjamin, who

waited. Not until it stopped raining, but until it came down in sheets, ever more abun-dantly. I heard it drumming on the windowpanes, streaming out of gutters, and rushing in a steady gurgle down the drainpipes. In a good rain, I was securely hidden away. . . . In such hours passed behind the gray-gloomed window, I was at home with the otter. But actually I wouldn’t become aware of that until the next time I stood before the cage. (BC, 81)

That is, catching his readers unawares and stupefied by the torrential rain, Benjamin the adult writer transports us furtively from the zoo to the sheltered bourgeois home, where, with rain drumming on the roof and windows, the child feels as if he were nevertheless “at home with the otter,” now a timeless, placeless mythic figure thanks to the transfigurative power of the child’s analogical thinking.

But the identification with creaturely life in Berlin Childhood cannot be mistaken as a sentimental love for animals. The episode entitled “Butterfly Hunt” suggests that the child’s identification with butterflies in the gardens of Brauhausberg has more in com-mon with the predatory sympathetic magic of hunting societies. The process begins with the extreme concentration of the predator who, with “butterfly net upraised,” hovers next to the unwitting prey, “waiting only for the spell that the flowers seemed to cast on the pair of wings to have finished its work” (BC, 50–51). But the weightless agility of his prey overcomes the frustrated child-hunter, “made a fool of” by the “hesitations, vacillations, and delays” of a cunning vanessa or sphinx moth until he realizes that his success would depend on a transformation of his identity. His first wish is to “have been dissolved into light and air, merely in order to approach my prey unnoticed and be able to subdue it” (BC, 51). Thus, transforming himself into the atmosphere that wraps around the butterfly, so that “every quiver or palpitation of the wings I burned for grazed me with its puff or ripple,” the child proceeds to get ever closer until he feels himself metamorphosing into his prey:

Between us now, the old law of the hunt took hold: the more I strove to conform, in all the fibers of my being, to the animal—the more butterfly-like I became in my heart and soul—the more this butterfly itself, in everything it did, took on the color of human voli-tion; and in the end, it was as if its capture was the price I had to pay to regain my human existence. (BC, 51)


79What follows the fusion of identity between the butterfly and the child is the combat, whose erotic intensity is accessible to us only through the victor’s description of the aftermath:

And what a state the hunting ground was in when I left! Grass was flattened, flowers trampled underfoot; the hunter himself, holding his own body cheap, had flung it heed-lessly after his butterfly net. And borne aloft—over so much destruction, clumsiness, and violence—in a fold of this net, trembling yet full of charm, was the terrified butterfly. On that laborious way back, the spirit of the doomed creature entered into the hunter. (BC, 51–52)

Here Benjamin’s narrative makes the transition from the first person (“what a state the hunting ground was in when I left”) to the third person, referring to himself as “the hunter” (“his lust for blood,” “his confidence,” etc.), the way the great Ethiopian shaman does, as Leiris tells us. Benjamin’s transition of voice is all the more curious as it occurs precisely at the moment when the child/hunter/Benjamin allegedly regains his human consciousness, as if the annihilation of the enemy simultaneously brings about the defeat of the self in the first person. Thus the knowledge acquired through his metamorphosis consists not so much in the acquisition of an actual tongue by which the creatures of the world communicate (“the foreign language in which the butterfly and the flower had come to an understanding” [BC, 52]) but rather the entry into the realm of the third person, the world of impersonality that Eluard described with such simplicity and plainness.

Benjamin’s autobiographical phenomenology of animal identification in childhood suggests that the experience of depersonalization occurs in forms other than the so-cialized technique of trance and the pathological condition of psychosis. Insofar as the child’s elastic sense of self and his readiness to play, provoke, and master elements of his habitat constitute a quotidian form of mimetic-metamorphosis, Benjamin’s remark in the 1929 fragment that “the world is full of masks” demands to be understood from the point of view of the Berlin child, for whom every object in the “arsenal of masks” of his parents’ home promises an experience of transformation (BC, 100). Thus, “the child who stands behind the doorway curtain himself becomes something white that flutters, a ghost,” and “the dining table under which he has crawled turns him into the wooden idol of the temple; its carved legs are four pillars.” When hiding behind a door, “he is himself the door, is decked out in it like a weighty mask and, as sorcerer, will cast a spell on all who enter unawares” (BC, 99). The only way to trap the magician is to uncover his mask, to catch him red-handed in his ruse: “whoever discovered me could hold me petrified as an idol under the table, could weave me as a ghost for all time into the curtain, confine me for life within the heavy door” (BC, 99–100).

In a world where every object is a mask, the self becomes a plastic material, ready to take on the form of all things, including snowflakes, soap bubbles, watercolors, and even a custom-made desk at home, to which the child becomes united against the alienating bench in school:


80 And hardly had I regained my desk after a dreary day at school, than it gave me new strength. There I could feel myself not only at home but actually in my shell—just like one of those clerics who are shown, in medieval paintings, kneeling at their prie-dieu or sitting at their writing desk, as though encased in armor. (BC, 151)

That is, the desk is not only a mask but a full-bodied costume that allows the child to break out of his fragile skin and metamorphose into an almighty desk-man, not unlike the Dogon maskers whose complex apparatuses allows them to momentarily become other-worldly beings. Here Benjamin’s account of profane childhood animism aligns with the surrealist figuration of alterity, only it is neither psychasthenic insects nor possessed shamans who are the protagonists of the drama of metamorphosis. Instead, it is children, not yet hardened by social constraints and endowed with incomparable psychic and physical plasticity, for whom otherness and the suspension of the self constitute a genuine source of joy.

Recently, the philosopher and Benjamin scholar Giorgio Agamben has interrogated the “anthropological machine” of the modern west by appealing to an unusual image of animal-headed figures at a Messianic banquet, found in the thirteenth-century il-luminated Hebrew Bible in the Ambrosian Library in Milan. Agamben proposes that this rare moment of Judaic totemism can be seen as an invitation to “render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man . . . to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that—within man—separates man and animal.” And if, as Agamben real-izes, such a project to overcome the alienation of humankind from creaturely life has been precisely tackled by Benjamin and other critical thinkers of the 1930s, then I would suggest that within the surrealist discourse on mimicry and metamorphosis can be found the answer as to why such an overcoming might be of ethical and political urgency, and why Agamben should urge us, at the end of the twentieth century, “to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man.”30

As a way of concluding my discussion, I would like to bring together Benjamin’s reflection on mimicry and the subtle yet pointed response of the review Minotaure to a social, political, and ethical issue specific to its time, the crisis of sovereignty that had caused the failure of European political culture and was on the brink of bringing on a second, devastating world war. Since, as shown above, the child Benjamin’s understand-ing of mimetic-metamorphosis centers around the emulation and transformation into otherness, it makes far more sense to become similar “to dwelling places, furniture, clothes” than to be “similar to models of good breeding,” and “never to my own image” (BC, 131). The child thus finds himself “at such a loss when someone demanded of me similarity to myself,” as in the photographer’s studio, where “I saw myself surrounded by folding screens, cushions, and pedestals which craved my image much as the shades of Hades craved the blood of the sacrificial animal” (BC, 131). The incomprehension of the child toward an enterprise that consists not of metamorphosing into another being but of producing an artificial image of himself as an ennobled Alpine shepherd—“brandish[ing] a kidskin hat” that “cast[s] its shadow on the clouds and snowfields” of “a crudely painted prospect of the Alps” (BC, 131), is, I suggest, comparable to the


81skepticism of the surrealist milieu toward the rising dictators of Europe, who believed themselves to be sovereign leaders simply by donning themselves in the superficial attributes of power.

In the surrealist art patron Edward James’s humorous, yet serious, tribute to the making of a king, the discourse of metamorphosis is fully mobilized as means of cri-tiquing the false travesty of fascism. Published in 1936, “Le chapeau du peuple et les chapeaux de la reine” is partially the Englishman’s eccentric answer to the editors of Minotaure, having been asked to write on a phenomenon in modern life that qualifies as the surrealist “marvelous.” Although the essay begins by espousing the wonders of kings in general, who “like gods, are personages so important in the order of super-natural things that there is always at least one king in every fairytale, just as there is nearly always a forest,” it soon becomes clear that James has in mind not all kings but the recently deceased English monarch George V and his spouse Queen Mary.31

The montage printed above the title of James’s essay, consisting of postage stamps put together to form a Minotaur’s bull-horned head (Fig. 9), eloquently summarizes a phenomenon as perplexing as it was fascinating to its contemporaries: how an ordinary, not exactly brilliant, stamp-collecting man with essentially middle-class taste could slowly but surely evolve to become a beloved sovereign.32 James’s dialectical answer to this enigma is as plain as it is profound: the making of not simply a king but a good king depends as much on the impersonal love of a collective identification as it does on the willingness of the monarch himself to surrender his individuality to the people. Like any phenomenon of metamorphosis, this one requires a milieu that applies certain external pressure on the individuals (Dalí exaggerates this factor by calling it voracious), in the form of “demanding ideas that surround them in concentric circles starting from the farthest to closest persons in their entourage,” until the king and the queen finally succumb to “the sum of abstract esteem fixed and directed to them by the general ensemble” and “became really greater than they were” (“C,” 56–67). The king and the queen are therefore no other than living mascots that stand for the ensemble of the wishes of their people, “similar to effigies, living totems and big puppets” (“C,” 57). Like the complete erasure of the first person that Leiris observes in the Ethiopian shaman Mälkam Ayyähu,

nothing is left from [the] original ego [of the king and the queen] other than the surface, of which even the unconscious gestures and physical contours have become stereotypes by virtue of seeing themselves so often in photographs. They are no longer purely personal traits as they would be in ordinary citizens; on the contrary, they are official attributes and property of the state. The King and the Queen are two urns filled with the idea of what their people want them to be. . . . They are metamorphosed like butterflies delivered from the cocoon of their individual, often simple and bourgeois tastes. . . . Removed from their own normal, human and average nature, projected against the popular screen like enormous shadows, they see themselves with such immensity until they become, by virtue of the sole fact of what they represent, super-human beings. (“C,” 57)

Thus it is hardly surprising that James and the surrealist milieu, with their kind of understanding of the protracted making of a king, should remain unimpressed by the


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overnight successes of fascist regimes. The difference between the fascist dictator and the authentic sovereign or the venerated shaman is the difference between he who sacrifices his individuality to become “the hat of his people” and he who “creates the effect of a hairdo for a short time” (“C,” 57) or applies the steel helmet of brute oppression. James’s prediction of the inevitable failure of fascism—“in the long run, no doubt a chef like Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini will weigh down like a helmet too heavy to wear and injure the forehead like a helm too hard or too narrow” (“C,” 57)—is therefore not an underhanded endorsement of monarchy as an institution but a tribute to one ordinary man who became a decent king—a king whose pacifism did not prevent him from criticizing “those horrid fellows Göring and Goebbels” and the “mad dog which must bite somebody” that was Mussolini.33 By locating the “marvelous” aspect of kingship in the metamorphosis that it produces in an individual, James avoids the pitfall of a generalized fascination with monarchy that burgeoned in the Collège de Sociologie (its anarchistic, acephalic icon notwithstanding). From the point of view of surrealism, what might save European civilization was not the return of a traditional

Fig. 9. Montage of Edward VIII postage stamps forming a bullhead, illustrating

“Le chapeau du people et les chapeaux de la reine” by Edward James. Pub-

lished in Minotaure 9 (1936), 54.

▲


83hierarchical power (as a thinker like Georges Dumézil would have thought).34 Instead, it was the understanding of mimetic-metamorphosis as a protracted and therefore en-during kind of transformation, which in turn would help to recognize the faux-culture and faux-revolution that is fascism.

The reflections on metamorphosis and alterity presented in Minotaure go to show that no genuine transformation is possible if we refuse to enlarge the notion of the per-son beyond that of a sovereign individual with rational mastery of the self. In this sense the surrealist avant-garde can be said to have accomplished what their contemporary Marcel Mauss also sought to do in 1938, to restitute the excessively subjectivist notion of the “person” in the West to its origin in the Latin word “persona,” meaning the mask through which the voice (of an actor) is projected. And if the social anthropologist and philosopher is right to call attention to the parallel between the pre-Christian notion of the persona/mask and the neuter notion of the person as “soi,” which in countless cultures in the world still take precedence over the first-person “moi,” then it might be said that the avant-garde recuperation of the mask has at least resuscitated the tran-scultural value of the third-person, whose historical marginalization in the West must be held partially responsible for the rift between modern Europe and the cultures that became victims to its various forms of social, political, and spiritual violence.35

NotesThis essay derives from my dissertation on interwar avant-garde art criticism. I presented a fraction

of this essay at the conference “Europa! Europa?” organized by the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies in Ghent, Belgium in May 2008. My thanks go to my colleagues at the University of Chicago Paris Center interdisciplinary workshop for responding to the first full-length version of this essay in October 2007, and above all to Rainer Rumold for his tireless reading and critique of its various drafts.

1. Walter Benjamin, “Some Remarks on Folk Art,” in Selected Writings, 1927–1934, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 279. Henceforth abbreviated as SW.

2. Roger Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, transl. George Ordish (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1964), 106. Originally published in French as Roger Caillois, Méduse et Cie (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).

3. All citations from articles in Minotaure derive from the facsimile of the complete collection, E. Tériade, Minotaure. Réédition en trois volumes (Geneva: Editions d’Art Albert Skira, 1981). All translations from the original French are mine unless otherwise noted. All images are taken from the same edition.

4. Paul Eluard, “Un visage dans l’herbe,” in Minotaure 1 (1933), 1. I am indebted to Michael Stone-Richards for helping me with the final translation of Eluard’s text and for many interpretative insights including the double meaning of “après”/“after.”

5. See inner cover of the first issue of Minotaure.6. An admirer and avid collector of ritualistic art from Melanesia, Eluard praises this tradition in

“L’art sauvage,” in Variétés. Revue mensuelle de l’esprit contemporain. Le surréalisme en 1929 (June 1929), 36–37.

7. See Pierre Klossowski, “From ‘Entre Marx Et Fourier’,” in The College of Sociology (1937–1939), ed. Denis Hollier (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 389. Benjamin’s opinion of Caillois was ambiguous, and although Benjamin wrote scathingly of Caillois’s “pathological cruelty” in a letter to Horkheimer, Benjamin’s English editors point out that “there are clear correspondences between important aspects of Benjamin’s own work and that of Bataille in particular—not least their mutual adherence to a kind of late surrealism. It is also significant that Caillois is cited extensively in the


84 Arcades Project.” Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, “Chronology, 1935–1938,” in Walter Benjamin, SW, 443. (I suspect that by “Bataille” the editors had meant to write “Caillois.”)

8. First drafted in 1932 while Benjamin was in exile and its final version completed only in 1938, Berlin Childhood around 1900 is nearly the exact contemporary of Minotaure, which lasted from 1933 to 1939.

9. Kurt Seligmann, “Entretien avec un Tsimshian,” in Minotaure 12–13 (1939), 66–67.10. As Jean Jamin points out, Leiris’s participation in a mission sponsored by the French colonial

government went against the surrealist anti-colonial stance, defined when the group sided with the Moroccan rebels in 1925 and when they staged the counter-exposition in 1931, “Ne visitez pas l’Exposition Coloniale.” This—and not the petty fact of becoming a dissident surrealist—was the subject of Alberto Giacometti’s reproach when Leiris returned from Africa. See Jean Jamin, “Présentation de l’Afrique Fantôme,” in Miroir de l’Afrique (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 1996), 79. Leiris eventually adopted an explicit anti-colonial position toward the end of the 1940s, notably in the essay Michel Leiris, “L’ethnographe devant le colonialisme,” in Cinq études d’ethnologie (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1951), 83–112.

11. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 117–51. I would suggest comparing Clifford’s work with that of Jean Jamin, who calls attention to the fundamental methodological differences between the surrealists and their ethnologist. See Jean Jamin, “L’ethnographie, mode d’inemploi,” in Le mal et la douleur, eds. Jacques Hainard and Roland Kaehr (Paris: Musée d’Ethnographie, 1986), 45–79.

12. Michel Leiris, “La croyance aux génies zar en Éthiopie du Nord,” in Miroir de l’Afrique, 936. Written in 1935 and first published in 1938 in Journal de psychologie normale et pathologie, the essay anticipates a much more extensive study in 1958, Michel Leiris, “La possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les éthiopiens de Gondar,” in Miroir de l’Afrique, 947–1061.

13. Leiris, “La croyance aux génies zar en Éthiopie du Nord,” 942.14. Leiris, “La croyance aux génies zar en Éthiopie du Nord,” 945. For a similar account of

theatrical personality dissociation in the western context, see the study of acting in the Royal Shake-speare Company in Kirsten Hastrup, “Theatre as a Site of Passage: Some Reflections on the Magic of Acting,” in Ritual, Performance, Media, ed. Felicia Hughes-Freeland (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 29–45.

15. Salvador Dalí, “Le phénomène de l’extase,” in Minotaure 3–4 (1933), 76. An image of “La statue du maréchal Ney dans le brouillard” by Brassaï can be found in the exhibition catalog, Alain Sayag and Annick Lionel-Marie, eds., Brassaï (Paris: Centre Pompidou and Editions du Seuil, 2000), 114.

16. Salvador Dalí, “Apparitions aérodynamiques des ‘Êtres-Objets’,” in Minotaure 6 (1935), 34.17. These figures appear accordingly in: Hans Bellmer, “Poupée. Variations sur Le montage d’une

mineure articulée,” in Minotaure 6 (1935), 30–31; André Breton, “Phare de la mariée,” in Minotaure 6 (1935), 45–49; René Crevel, “La grande mannequin cherche et trouve sa peau,” in Minotaure 5 (1934); Georges Pudelko, “Paolo Uccello, peintre lunaire,” in Minotaure 7 (1935), 32–41; Benjamin Péret, “Au paradis des fantômes,” in Minotaure 3–4 (1933), 29–35. The images of robots come from Alfred Chapuis and Edouard Gélis, Le Monde des automates. Étude historique et technique (Paris: Haraucourt, 1928). For the surrealist reception of Uccello and Quattrocento paintings, see André Breton, “Surrealism and Painting (1928),” in Surrealism and Painting (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2002), 1–48.

18. See Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Jules Monnerot, Acéphale. Religion, Sociologie, Philosophie. 1936–1939 (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1995).

19. Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, “L’altérité et ses modèles dans l’oeuvre de Georges Bataille, André Breton, René Daumal,” in L’autre et le sacré. Surréalisme, cinéma, ethnologie, ed. C. W. Thompson (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 46. Chénieux-Gendron’s observation would obviously have to be qualified by Bataille’s stunning figurative phase in Documents and Bataille’s own lifelong interest in “art” as loci of psychic and physical expenditure (“dépense”). See Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, transls. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Zone Books and MIT Press, 2005) and Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death


85& Sensuality (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986). A fine account of Bataille’s theorization of the anthropomorphic informe is found in Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe, ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995).

20. Crevel, “La grande mannequin cherche et trouve sa peau.”21. Thinking his own commitment to the exact sciences at odds with surrealism’s emphasis on poetic

activities, Caillois broke with Breton in genteel fashion (promising support in place of collaboration with the movement) in 1934, only to acknowledge years later the path that surrealism had opened up for him, “une voie que j’eus sans doute tort d’abandonner pour . . . ce précaire amalgame de savoir et de passion que devait être le Collège de Sociologie.” Roger Caillois, “Argument,” in Approches de l’imaginare (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 13. See also “Procès Intellectuel de L’art” in the same collection, 35–54. For a selection of Caillois’s work in English, see Claudine Frank, ed., The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

22. Roger Caillois, “La mante religieuse. De la biologie à la psychanalyse,” in Minotaure 5 (1934), 25. Léon Binet cited by Caillois. Henceforth abbreviated as “MR.”

23. See Rosalind Krauss’s comparison of the praying mantis with Bellmer’s dolls in Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 172.

24. Only years later did Caillois indirectly acknowledge that surrealist automatism could not have meant the definitive abolishment of reflection and work, and that human artistic activities might resemble but ultimately differ from phantasmagoric animals and astonishing rock formations read-ily found in nature. See Roger Caillois, “La voie humaine est autre . . . ”, in Images du labyrinthe, ed. Stéphane Massonet (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 69–71; Roger Caillois, “Testimony (Paul Eluard),” in The Edge of Surrealism, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 60–65.

25. Roger Caillois, “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire,” in Minotaure 7 (1935), 6. Henceforth abbreviated as “M.” An English translation of the essay can be found in Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” John Shepley, transl., in October 31 (Winter 1984), 16–32.

26. Caillois is quoting from Eugène Minkowski, “Le Problème Du Temps En Psychopathologie,” in Recherches philosophiques (1932–33), 239.

27. Caillois later reproaches “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire” for having delved into a far-fetched (“fantaisiste”) explication for mimicry. See his footnote in Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes (Le masque et le vertige) (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1958), 62–63.

28. For Benjamin’s comments on surrealism, see Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snap-shot of the European Intelligentsia,” in SW, 207–221. For the relationship between Benjamin and surrealism, see in particular Richard Wolin, “Benjamin, Adorno, Surrealism,” in The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, eds. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 93–122. See also Benjamin’s writings, “Toys and Play. Marginal Notes on a Monumental Work,” “On Astrology,” “Doctrine of the Similar,” “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in SW, 117–21, 684–85, 694–98, 720–22.

29. Walter Benjamin, “The Otter,” in Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 78. Henceforth abbreviated as BC.

30. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, ed. Werner Hamacher, transl. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 92.

31. Edward James, “Le Chapeau du peuple et les chapeaux de la reine,” in Minotaure 9 (1936), 55. Henceforth abbreviated “C.”

32. For a biography of George V, see Kenneth Rose, King George V (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984).

33. Rose, King George V, 387 and 388.34. For a critique in English of Dumézil’s attraction to traditional kingly or priestly hierarchies,

and his influence on Caillois and other Collège members, see Bruce Lincoln, “Dumézil’s German War God,” in Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 121–37. I would suggest a comparison between the Collège’s discourse on sovereignty with the fine analysis of the question of authority and community in surrealism by M. Stone-Richards, in “Failure and Community: Preliminary Questions on the Political in the Culture of


86 Surrealism,” in Surrealism, Politics and Culture, eds. Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 300–36.

35. See Marcel Mauss, “Une catégorie de l’esprit humain: la notion de personne, celle de ‘moi’,” (1938) in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Quadrige/Presse Universitaire de France, 1989), 331–62.