Michel Leiris

Le réalisme mythologique

"Not only one of the frankest of autobiographies, but also a brilliantly written book, Leiris' Manhood mingles memories, philosophic reflections, sexual revelation, meditations on bullfighting, and the life-long progress of self-discovery."—Washington Post Book World "Leiris writes to appall, and thereby to receive from his readers the gift of a strong emotion—the emotion needed to defend himself against the indignation and disgust he expects to arouse in his readers."—Susan Sontag, New York Review of Books

A Journey from Childhood Into the Fierce Order of Virility

Manhood

Short fragments and essays that explore how a seemingly irrelevant aesthetic detail may cause the eruption of sublimity within the mundane. That the nude painted by Manet (in a painting so conceptually new that it created a scandal in its day) achieves so much truth through such a minor detail, that ribbon that modernizes Olympia and, even more than a beauty mark or a patch of freckles would, renders her more precise and more immediately visible, making her a woman with ties to a particular milieu and era: that is what lends itself to reflection, if not divagation! —from The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat In The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat, Michel Leiris investigates what Lydia Davis has called the “expressive power of fetishism”: how a seemingly irrelevant aesthetic detail may cause the eruption of sublimity within the mundane. Written in 1981, toward the end of Leiris's life, The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat serves as a coda to his autobiographical masterwork, The Rules of the Game, taking the form of both shorter fragments (poems, memory scraps, notes) that are as formally disarming as the fetishistic experiences they describe, and longer essays, more exhaustive critical meditations on writing, apprehension, and the nature of the modern. Rooted in remembrance, devoted to the kaleidoscopic intricacies of wordplay, Leiris draws from his own aesthetic experiences as writer and spectator to explore the fetish that “exposes and disarms the sinister passage of time,” conferring “an undeniable realness upon the whole by essentially causing it to crystallize in a reality it would never have possessed if that sturdy fragment hadn't acted as bait.”

The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat

Nights as Day, Days as Night

A dazzling translation by Lydia Davis of the first volume of Michel Leiris’s masterwork, perhaps the most important French autobiographical enterprise of the twentieth century Michel Leiris, a French intellectual whose literary works inspired high praise from the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and Claude Lévi-Strauss, began the first volume of his autobiographical project at the age of 40. It was the beginning of an endeavor that ultimately required 35 years and three additional volumes. In Volume 1, Scratches, Leiris proposes to discover a savoir vivre, a mode of living that would have a place for both his poetics and his personal morality. “I can scarcely see the literary use of speech as anything but a means of sharpening one’s consciousness in order to be more—and in a better way—alive," he declares. He begins the project of uncovering memories, returning to moments and images of childhood—his father’s recording machine, the letters of the alphabet coming to life—and then of his later life—Paris under the Occupation, a journey to Africa, and a troubling fear of death.

The Rules of the Game

Scratches

Aurora

One of the towering classics of twentieth century French literature, Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of one man's compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal--by turns melodramatic, self-deprecating, ecstatic, and morose--as well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition to visit sub-Saharan Africa. In 1930, Michel Leiris was an aspiring poet drifting away from the orbit of the Surrealist movement in Paris when the anthropologist Marcel Griaule invited him to serve as the "secretary-archivist" for the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, a major collecting and ethnographic journey that traversed the African continent between May 1931 and February 1933. Leiris, while maintaining the official records of the Mission, documenting the team's acquisitions, and participating in the research, also kept a diary where he noted not only a given day's activities and events but also his impressions, his states of mind, his anxieties, his dreams, and even his erotic fantasies. Upon returning to France, rather than compiling a more conventional report or ethnographic study, Leiris decided simply to publish his diary, almost entirely untouched aside from minor corrections and a smattering of footnotes. The result is an extraordinary book: a day-by-day record of one European writer's experiences in an Africa inexorably shaded by his own exotic delusions and expectations, on the one hand, and an unparalleled depiction of the paradoxes and hypocrisies of conducting anthropological field research at the height of the colonial era on the other. Never before available in English translation, Phantom Africa is an invaluable document. If the book is "a stone marking a bend on a path that is entirely personal," as Leiris himself described it years later, it is also a book whose broad canvas bears witness to the full range of social and political forces reshaping the African continent in the period between the World Wars.

Phantom Africa

Michel Leiris was a poet, novelist and ethnographer. After leaving the Surrealist group, he was associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Georges Bataille. Leiris acquired his enthusiasm for bullfighting (a life-long passion) with Bataille, Andre Masson and Pablo Picasso. Here, he describes the geometry of the bullfight, its choreography, art and structure, the notions of beauty and magic that underpin its ritual, and the idea that this can be a real mortal confrontation. The illustrations by Andre Masson were drawn especially for this book.

Mirror of Tauromachy

Georges Bataille

In the autumn of 1924, just before André Breton published the Manifeste du surréalisme, two young men met in Paris for the first time. Georges Bataille, 27, starting work at the Bibliothèque Nationa≤ Michel Leiris, 23, beginning his studies in ethnology. Within a few months they were both members of the Surrealist group, although their adherence to Surrealism (unlike their affinities with it) would not last long: in 1930 they were among the signatories of 'Un cadavre,' the famous tract against Breton, the 'Machiavelli of Montmartre,' as Leiris put it. But their friendship would endure for more than 30 years, and their correspondence, assembled here for the first time in English, would continue until the death of Bataille in 1962. Including a number of short essays by each of them on aspects of the other's work, and excerpts on Bataille from Leiris' diaries, this collection of their correspondence throws new light on two of Surrealism's most radical dissidents.

Correspondence

L'Afrique fantôme

Idade de homem

Francis Bacon

Overzicht van het werk van de Engelse kunstenaar Francis Bacon (1909- ).

Full Face and in Profile

Wifredo Lam

A cor et à cri

"Michel Leiris (1901-1990) was a profoundly influential and versatile French intellectual. His four-volume autobiographical essay, The Rules of the Game, serves as a primary document of artistic life in the twentieth century. Lydia Davis has received numerous awards as a translator of works from the French and as an author. She lives in upstate NY." -- publisher's description.

Rules of the Game: Scratches

Wilfredo Lam

Wilfredo Lam. Text by Michel Leiris

Surrealism, Existentialism, Art, Autobiography, Politics, Ethnology, Psychoanalysis

Joan Miro

The Prints of Joan Miro. Michel Leiris: (Autour de Joan Miro. Engl. U. Franz. Engl. Transl. by Walter Pach.) - New York: Valentin 1947. 16 S., 40 Taf. 4°

Michel Leiris

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