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The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader
The Edge of Surrealism is an essential introduction to the writing of French social theorist Roger Caillois. Caillois was part of the Surrealist avant-garde and in the 1930s founded the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. He spent his life exploring issues raised by this famous group and by Surrealism itself. Though his subjects were diverse, Caillois focused on concerns crucial to modern intellectual life, and his essays offer a unique perspective on many of twentieth-century France’s most significant intellectual movements and figures. Including a masterful introductory essay by Claudine Frank situating his work in the context of his life and intellectual milieu, this anthology is the first comprehensive introduction to Caillois’s work to appear in any language. These thirty-two essays with commentaries strike a balance between Caillois’s political and theoretical writings and between his better known works, such as the popular essays on the praying mantis, myth, and mimicry, and his lesser-known pieces. Presenting several new pieces and drawing on interviews and unpublished correspondence, this book reveals Caillois’s consistent effort to reconcile intellectual rigor and imaginative adventure. Perhaps most importantly, The Edge of Surrealism provides an overdue look at how Caillois’s intellectual project intersected with the work of Georges Bataille and others including Breton, Bachelard, Benjamin, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss.
440 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 19, 2012
[Update, Jan 28, 2013: In response to a comment by Claudine Frank, the editor of The Edge of Surrealism, I have removed from this review a passage in which I mistakenly characterize "The Structure and Nature of Totalitarian Regimes" as having been constructed from notes made by attendees at Caillois's lectures rather than as having been authored by Caillois himself. For Frank's comment and my response, please see the comments section following this review.]
While popularly known for its melting clocks and psychic automatisms, the Surrealist movement had an academic side as well, perhaps best represented in work by theorists like Georges Bataille and his College of Sociology colleague Roger Caillois. The latter is probably best known for “The Praying Mantis,” an essay on analogues in abnormal human psychology and myth of the mating ritual of the cephalophagic insect. That essay is included in The Edge of Surrealism, along with others on a variety of subjects such as secret societies, Satanism, Paris, and “the noon complex.”
The essays are organized chronologically such that one can trace the development of Caillois’s thought as it was shaped both by his personal experiences and by larger historical events. For instance, one text entitled “The Structure and Nature of Totalitarian Regimes” represents a series of lectures Caillois gave in 1940 in which he discussed the sociological and cultural meanings of the fascist movement that had been gaining power in Europe through the previous decade.
One can also trace the maturing of Caillois’s literary style through this book: while the writing in the early essays can sometimes be a little mechanical or clunky, somewhere around the middle of the book a much more flowing and poetic style emerges that seems to gain in polish and self-assurance from one essay to the next.
As a thinker, Caillois is an interdisciplinarian, typically employing in his writings ideas from many different fields including sociology, psychology, biology, history and political science. In some of his later essays, Caillois reflects on his own methods and argues for the significance of interdisciplinarity in academic research (while employing interdisciplinary techniques to make his argument, as in “The Bridgemaker,” which juxtaposes ideas from architecture, etymology, Roman history and anthropology, among other disciplines, in order more fully to explore the issue under discussion).
For each essay, editor Claudine Frank includes an introductory note supplying cultural and intellectual context. If I have a problem with the book, it is with these notes, which sometimes seem to me enthymematic in their alluding to issues and events that might be familiar to an audience already acquainted with Caillois’s work, but not to the general reader in need of a little more expository detail. For the essays, though, this book is a good general introduction to Caillois’s thought.
Acquired Apr 16, 2012
amazon.com
While popularly known for its melting clocks and psychic automatisms, the Surrealist movement had an academic side as well, perhaps best represented in work by theorists like Georges Bataille and his College of Sociology colleague Roger Caillois. The latter is probably best known for “The Praying Mantis,” an essay on analogues in abnormal human psychology and myth of the mating ritual of the cephalophagic insect. That essay is included in The Edge of Surrealism, along with others on a variety of subjects such as secret societies, Satanism, Paris, and “the noon complex.”
The essays are organized chronologically such that one can trace the development of Caillois’s thought as it was shaped both by his personal experiences and by larger historical events. For instance, one text entitled “The Structure and Nature of Totalitarian Regimes” represents a series of lectures Caillois gave in 1940 in which he discussed the sociological and cultural meanings of the fascist movement that had been gaining power in Europe through the previous decade.
One can also trace the maturing of Caillois’s literary style through this book: while the writing in the early essays can sometimes be a little mechanical or clunky, somewhere around the middle of the book a much more flowing and poetic style emerges that seems to gain in polish and self-assurance from one essay to the next.
As a thinker, Caillois is an interdisciplinarian, typically employing in his writings ideas from many different fields including sociology, psychology, biology, history and political science. In some of his later essays, Caillois reflects on his own methods and argues for the significance of interdisciplinarity in academic research (while employing interdisciplinary techniques to make his argument, as in “The Bridgemaker,” which juxtaposes ideas from architecture, etymology, Roman history and anthropology, among other disciplines, in order more fully to explore the issue under discussion).
For each essay, editor Claudine Frank includes an introductory note supplying cultural and intellectual context. If I have a problem with the book, it is with these notes, which sometimes seem to me enthymematic in their alluding to issues and events that might be familiar to an audience already acquainted with Caillois’s work, but not to the general reader in need of a little more expository detail. For the essays, though, this book is a good general introduction to Caillois’s thought.
Acquired Apr 16, 2012
amazon.com
June 8, 2008
Brilliant: an excellent overview of Caillois's life and work. The only surrealist biologist I know.
October 3, 2020
Caillois—centrist, dedicated to lucidity and effort in the face of the looser, potentially obscurantist transports of Surrealism and its descendants—never managed to shake the reputation of fuddyduddydom. But his dream of a hard-won, rigorous imagination and inspiration remains instructive, a guide for the kind of expansive thinking our moment requires. His lifelong engagement with the question of order and enchantment across the human and the nonhuman now yields new insights as humanity's "geologic" status enters the frame.
Frank provides a great overview here, nuancing his relationships to many major figures and his politics (e.g. clarifying that his hierarchical dreams don’t equate to anything like fascism), offering paths across an elusive oeuvre, and out into the intellectual landscape he was a part of.
Frank provides a great overview here, nuancing his relationships to many major figures and his politics (e.g. clarifying that his hierarchical dreams don’t equate to anything like fascism), offering paths across an elusive oeuvre, and out into the intellectual landscape he was a part of.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews