Figures of the Imagination
The French sociologist and philosopher Roger Caillois discusses the importance of the imagination in our actions. His book “The Myth and Man” is published in German for the first time.
During a surrealist group meeting in December 1934, André Breton was surprised by the sudden movement of the so -called jumping beans that Benjamin Perret had brought him from Mexico. In fact, inside the plant, the larvae of a certain kind of moth begin to move when heated. Only one person rebelled against Breton’s desire to leave the seeds closed to speculate freely about the likely causes of a miracle: Roger Cayis, then 22, who later explored the boundaries between aesthetics, anthropology, religious studies and Biology as no others had explored. Another author about surrealism.
Caillois was never a positivist in the classic sense. Instead of discarding the irrational and discarding it as an illusion or superstition, he wanted to show his inherent rationality and consistency. The unity of nature was at the center of his thinking. The assumption of a continuous continuity of all phenomena has allowed a former student of Marcel Mauss and Georges Dumezil to place forms of living and inanimate matter in various relations with creations of imagination.
The Quality of Connecting Myths and Legends
Caillois provided the first examples of such phenomena for fiction in the volume der Mythos und Der Mensch, published in 1938 and now available in an excellent translation by Peter Geble. The internal connection of the seven essays, which were initially published scattered between 1934 and 1937, may not be immediately apparent, given the variety of subjects covered – from mocking insects to Chinese emperor Shi Huangdi and primitive minoic culture. It’s on the way.
According to Caillois, the collective and binding quality of myths and legends cannot be reduced to social factors or individual psychological struggles. It will only become understandable as a complex of influences, images and obsessions within a biological perspective. Caillois impressively shows what this means in its famous study of the praise, the most comprehensive text of vol.
The Tendency to Dissolve the Individual in the Environment
The humanoid form of the animal and the behavior of females devouring males during or after mating always surprised people. Caillois attributes the fact that the insect has managed to become a paradoxical universal figure of fantasy and confer its traces to many demonic lovers of myths and epics to a non -purely symbolic, but ontological equivalence between nature and imagination. The myth replaces the animal instinct, reenacting real action as a ghost. In this sense, the praise is “an objective ideogram that seizes in the external world what remains hypothetical in the emotional world.”
Caillois analysis of the simulated appearance of different insect species is no less surprising. For him, the mechanisms of natural selection could not adequately explain the astonishing replicas of leaves, flowers, stones or other animals. It is not the use that is decisive for such camouflage costumes, but the tendency to the dissolution of the individual in the environment, to depersonalization, which Caio wants to admit in the struggle for equality in magical thinking as well as in certain cases of schizophrenia. . Whole cultures are subject to this struggle between self -affirmation and self -abandon and, despite all the controversy that Caillou dedicates to psychoanalysis, the reason for Freud’s death is not far away.
No Matter here “Enjoy the Beauty”
In what may be the most interesting essay of the volume literary studies today, Cayis deals with the survival of myth in modern times – an issue that was in the center of the Collège de Sociologie, which he founded with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. Nineteenth -century popular literature, with its representation of a night paris ruled by invisible villains and secret societies, produced a literary myth of great suggestive power.
Caillois does not argue in terms of aesthetics, but in terms of literary sociology and deliberately opposes “focusing on masterpiece”. What interests you is neither the “enjoyment of beauty” nor the limitation of modern literature to your “independent world.” Instead, it requires the creation of a collective consciousness through the “invasion of imagination in life.”