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

(Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/mod.0.0049

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Mask, Mimicry, Metamorphosis:

Roger Caillois, Walter Benjamin
and Surrealism in the 1930s

Joyce Cheng

modernism

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 infinite arsenal of masks: the masks of our fatethe 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 itthis 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

/ modernity

volume sixteen, number

one, pp

6186.

2009 the johns hopkins

university press

Joyce Cheng is a
doctoral candidate
in art history at the
University of Chicago. She specializes
in twentieth-century
European avant-garde
art and theory as well
as aesthetics and philosophical anthropology.
She will complete her
dissertation Mask,
Mimicry, Metamorphosis: Figuration of Alterity in Avant-Garde Art
Criticism 19151945
in the spring of 2009.

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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 movements chief organ of the period, Minotaure (19331939): 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 iconography 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 reviews 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 lherbe, (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 collective surrealist project.
Aprs linsecte-feuille, lhomme-feuille.
Un visage clt dans un nid de verdure.
Le vgtal sduit la pluie.
Leau, 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 poemvegetation, insect, man, rain, waterare

intertwined; the hyphenated nouns (insecte-feuille, homme-feuille), as well as the
ambiguous use of adjectival nouns (vgtal in French being both noun and adjective,
le vgtal 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 spontaneously 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.

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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:

Fig. 2. Ritualistic mask from Nias Island

(Sumatra, Indonesia), accompanied by Paul
Eluards poem, Un visage dans lherbe.

Published in Minotaure 1 (1933), 1.

Editions dArt Albert Skira, 1981).

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The above analysis brings me to my main concern in this essay, namely the aesthetic 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 figuresancient and modern, manmade
as well found in naturethat tie together a review whose scope encompasses arts
plastiquesposiemusiquearchitectureethnographie et mythologiespectaclestudes et observations psychanalytiques.5 I shall discuss some examples in the
reviews 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 Dals tres-objets (object-beings), and photographic clichs of mystic faces; and Roger Cailloiss 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 corresponds to a particular theoretical discourse on a specific mode of depersonalization
or hors-de-soi, which in Un visage dans lherbe 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 poets name behind two initial letters. Possibly,
the surrealist poet Paul Eluard minimized his authorial presence in order to approximate 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, Aprs linsecte-feuille, lhomme-feuille, keeps
us in the dark regarding the logical relationship between the leaf-insect and the leafman. If the preposition aprs 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 origin 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 poets 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 birthunless, 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 between two elements (rain and vegetation). This union, however, would not have been

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mask, mimicry, metamorphosis

possible 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, Eluards 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. Benjamins
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 Andr Breton and Louis
Aragon. By 1937, Benjamin was attending meetings at the secret society organized by
the dissident surrealists and their friends, Collge de Sociologie, although he quickly
suspected the group of protofascist tendencies as certain participantsin particular
the young Caillois and Georges Batailleprofessed 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 passivity, 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 Benjamins
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
Eluards Un visage dans lherbe, Picassos 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 iconography.9 The presence of living ritualistic artifactsmost 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 clichs in the western
tradition as figures of alterity. The Minotaur, no less than the Sphinx and the chimera,

65

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can now be demystified and their experiential basis better understood thanks to living 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:
Archologie, Beaux-Arts, Ethnographie, Varits 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 Eluards poem, the main concern of avant-garde or
surrealist philosophical anthropology in the 1930s has to do with the experiential dimension 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 dimension of mimetic-metamorphosis, which would otherwise be difficult to assess by simply
looking at iconography or an artifact in isolation. Leiriss 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 dgu,
masque bz, 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 animalheaded 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 Leiriss and Griaules ethnographic accounts. But, as shown by
Leiriss 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 Leiriss 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 tats scondaires, or altered
states of consciousness.
In La Croyance aux gnies zar en thiopie 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).

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67

Fig. 3. Masked dancers of Ireli, Bandiagara, southern Sudan. Photographer unknown, possibly Marcel Griaule.
Published in Minotaure 2 (1933), 45.

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 personality dissociation. Several months in the company of the reputable medium Mlkam
Ayyhu, 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 theatrical 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, primitive 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 frequent 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 clichs, the possibility of
new metamorphic figures in modern life, for example Brassas evocative view of the
twilight silhouette of the statue of Marchal 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

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the initiation ritual Kor 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 Dal contributed to this project with his famous 1933
montage, Phnomne de lextase, in which he identifies an array of forms and figures
corresponding to erotic and mystic ecstasy. In the full-page montage, cropped photographs 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 clichs 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
Dal follows up this exercise in a 1935 piece entitled Apparition arodynamiques des
tres-Objets (published on the page facing Brassas Marchal Ney), where he modifies the category of ecstasy with an even more carnal descriptionas the sensation of
an actively devouring space. In his characteristically megalomaniac, crypto-pornographic
language, Dal 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-beingswhich
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 Millets paintings
Angelus (on the chest) and The Gleaners (on the head, like a mask). Despite Dals
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.
Dals particular formulation of extase and tres-objets illuminates the link between 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 Bellmers sadistic poupe, Marcel Duchamps
mechanical bride (praised by Andr Breton), robots that the poet Benjamin Pret
derived from a 1928 material history of automatons (Fig. 6); Ren Crevels Grande
Mannequin illustrated by a bodiless garment ghost, even the rediscovery of Paolo
Uccellos 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 Picassos half-formed sculptures in the studio; the evocative photographs by Brassa of incomplete nudes, close-up of the organic ironwork of the Paris

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69

Fig. 4. Masker in the Kor initiation rite, southern Sudan. Published in Minotaure 2 (1933), 20-21.

metro entrances, and sculptures involontaires; Man Rays photographs of rippling,

edible Barcelona faades; works by Andr Masson, Georges Braque, and Joan Mir
that can be said to share a specifically 1930s surrealist idiom of dreamlike, metamorphic 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.

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Fig. 5. Salvador Dal, Le phnomne de lextase, Minotaure.

(C)2008 Salvador Dal, Gala-Salvador Dal Foundation/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Mimicry, Metamorphosis, Psychasthenia: Roger Cailloiss Mythic Insects

Minotaure was not the only avant-garde locus of the 1930s concerned with alterity,
the other being Acphale, the journal put out by Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Jules
Monnerot between 1936 and 1939 in conjunction with their activities in the Collge.18
But in contrast to Acphale, whose only figurative features are Andr Massons 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 Chnieux-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 poupes, de gnies, de totems
et autres golems mais aussi au sens demblmes qui servent donner forme la difference, in contradistinction to the tendency in Batailles 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 (lordre symbolique). Not unlike

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71

Fig. 6. Automatons, illustrating Au paradis des fantmes by Benjamin Pret. Published in Minotaure 3-4 (1933), 35.

Crevels 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 Collge and between Minotaure and Acphale, the two milieux were never quite far apart throughout
the 1930s. This is demonstrated by Batailles 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 instrumental encounter with surrealism.21 Although Caillois soon left surrealism to pursue the
question of ecstasy and collective effervescence in the Collge in mainly sociological
terms, his lifelong reflections on impersonal forms of creativity in nature began in the
context of surrealism. On their own, Cailloiss two essays on insects in the 1930s, La
mante religieuse. De la biologie la psychanalyse (1934) and Mimtisme et la psychasthnie lgendaire (1935) might read like two obscurantist entomological studies

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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 natures 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 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 Dal alike, qualifies as the machine woman, artificial, mechanical, inanimate, incommensurable with
living mankind and creatures (MR, 25).
That the female mantis synonymouslyand homonymouslyembodies love
(lamour) 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 Bellmers cadaverous 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 Eluards 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
cltre describes the birth of birds, reptiles, and the like, and sduire 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 Eluards 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 transformationone that is as independent from human motivation
and purpose as it is from mechanical causality. To emphasize the enigma of the praying

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Fig. 7. Praying mantis, illustrating La mante religieuse by Roger Caillois, photographer unknown. Published in Minotaure 5 (1934), 23.

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 Cailloiss 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 nature examples of organisms performing creative functions in the absence of a central
nervous system.
Nowhere is Cailloiss reasoning clearer than in his adamant rejection of the evolutionary 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 Cailloiss cruelty that had
disturbed Benjamin), we see that it is crucial for Caillois to view the mating behavior of

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the praying mantis as non-procreative, non-utilitarian, and thereby creative, because

so his reasoning goesif 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 Cailloiss 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 Cailloiss 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 experience of passivity and the most creative, art-like phenomenon in nature, namely,
animal mimicry and metamorphosis. In Mimtisme et psychasthnie lgendaire,
Cailloiss 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, Cailloiss argument 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 flowersbut 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 exaggration de prcaution, 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 nature as decadent, as an artist. What takes Cailloiss anti-evolutionary view beyond the
commonplace notion that nature contains art-like phenomena is its distinctly surrealist
flavor, in particular Cailloiss claimallegedly backed by entomological researchthat

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Fig. 8. Phillus insects, illustrating Mimtisme et psychasthnie lgendaire by Roger Caillois, photograph by
Le Charles. Published in Minotaure 7 (1935), 5.

the virtuosity of animal mimicry is the result of an act of pure automatism (un acte
dautomatisme 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 organisms 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 psychasthenia, 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 Dals 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, Cailloiss 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 esotericism. Convinced of the complete identity between the animal world and the world of

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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 mimtique) 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 gestures 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 Eugne 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 documents the testimonies of participants in the cult of zar, Caillois uses his self-ethnography
to confirm Minkowskis phenomenological description of the experience of emaciation
in many psychotic episodes. In both cases, depersonalization is characterized by spatial and temporal disorientation, in which the person has the sensation that I know
where I am, but I dont 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 lespace
noir) where one cannot put things. He is similar (semblable), not similar to something,
but simply similar. (M, 89)

Although Caillois does not go so far as to claim that this depersonalization by assimilation 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, 89).
Nevertheless, the fact that Caillois could have documented and reconstructed his
own psychasthenic attack from introspective notesan act unimaginable in the animal
worldindicates 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-

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tially 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, Dal, and the philosophical anthropology
of surrealism.

Of Butterfly, Otter and the Arsenal of Masks:

Walter Benjamins Childhood Animism
If, as I have been suggesting, mimetic-metamorphosis is the leitmotif of the avantgarde 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. Benjamins 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 childrens 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 Benjamins 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 childs proximity to creaturely life. Benjamins 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 persons
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 hippopotamus 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

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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, 8081).
But so intense is the childs link to the rainwater god that it is as if every rainy day
brings the presence of the otter to him. Here Benjamins 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 otters cage, mesmerized like
the child Benjamin, who
waited. Not until it stopped raining, but until it came down in sheets, ever more abundantly. 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 wouldnt 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 childs 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
childs identification with butterflies in the gardens of Brauhausberg has more in common 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, 5051). 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 animalthe more butterfly-like I became in my heart and
soulthe more this butterfly itself, in everything it did, took on the color of human volition; and in the end, it was as if its capture was the price I had to pay to regain my human
existence. (BC, 51)

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What follows the fusion of identity between the butterfly and the child is the combat,
whose erotic intensity is accessible to us only through the victors 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 heedlessly after his butterfly net. And borne aloftover so much destruction, clumsiness, and
violencein 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, 5152)

Here Benjamins 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. Benjamins 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.
Benjamins autobiographical phenomenology of animal identification in childhood
suggests that the experience of depersonalization occurs in forms other than the socialized technique of trance and the pathological condition of psychosis. Insofar as the
childs elastic sense of self and his readiness to play, provoke, and master elements of
his habitat constitute a quotidian form of mimetic-metamorphosis, Benjamins 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, 99100).
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:

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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 shelljust 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 Benjamins 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 illuminated 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 thatwithin manseparates man and animal. And if, as Agamben realizes, 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 Benjamins
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 Benjamins understanding 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 photographers 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

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skepticism 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 Jamess humorous, yet serious, tribute to the
making of a king, the discourse of metamorphosis is fully mobilized as means of critiquing the false travesty of fascism. Published in 1936, Le chapeau du peuple et les
chapeaux de la reine is partially the Englishmans 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 supernatural 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 Jamess essay, consisting of postage stamps
put together to form a Minotaurs 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 Jamess 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 (Dal 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, 5667). 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 Mlkam Ayyhu,
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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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. Published in Minotaure 9 (1936), 54.

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. Jamess prediction of the inevitable failure of fascismin 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 kinga king whose pacifism did
not prevent him from criticizing those horrid fellows Gring 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 Collge 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

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hierarchical power (as a thinker like Georges Dumzil would have thought).34 Instead,
it was the understanding of mimetic-metamorphosis as a protracted and therefore enduring 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 person 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 transcultural 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

Notes
This 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 AvantGarde 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, 19271934, 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, Mduse et Cie (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).
3. All citations from articles in Minotaure derive from the facsimile of the complete collection,
E. Triade, Minotaure. Rdition en trois volumes (Geneva: Editions dArt 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 lherbe, in Minotaure 1 (1933), 1. I am indebted to Michael
Stone-Richards for helping me with the final translation of Eluards text and for many interpretative
insights including the double meaning of aprs/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
Lart sauvage, in Varits. Revue mensuelle de lesprit contemporain. Le surralisme en 1929 (June
1929), 3637.
7. See Pierre Klossowski, From Entre Marx Et Fourier, in The College of Sociology (19371939),
ed. Denis Hollier (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 389. Benjamins opinion of
Caillois was ambiguous, and although Benjamin wrote scathingly of Cailloiss pathological cruelty
in a letter to Horkheimer, Benjamins English editors point out that there are clear correspondences
between important aspects of Benjamins own work and that of Bataille in particularnot least their
mutual adherence to a kind of late surrealism. It is also significant that Caillois is cited extensively in the

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Arcades Project. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, Chronology, 19351938, 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 1213 (1939), 6667.
10. As Jean Jamin points out, Leiriss 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
lExposition Coloniale. Thisand not the petty fact of becoming a dissident surrealistwas the subject
of Alberto Giacomettis reproach when Leiris returned from Africa. See Jean Jamin, Prsentation
de lAfrique Fantme, in Miroir de lAfrique (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, Lethnographe devant le colonialisme, in Cinq tudes dethnologie (Paris: Denol/Gonthier,
1951), 83112.
11. James Clifford, On Ethnographic Surrealism, in The Predicament of Culture: TwentiethCentury Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press,
1988), 11751. I would suggest comparing Cliffords work with that of Jean Jamin, who calls attention
to the fundamental methodological differences between the surrealists and their ethnologist. See Jean
Jamin, Lethnographie, mode dinemploi, in Le mal et la douleur, eds. Jacques Hainard and Roland
Kaehr (Paris: Muse dEthnographie, 1986), 4579.
12. Michel Leiris, La croyance aux gnies zar en thiopie du Nord, in Miroir de lAfrique, 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 thtraux
chez les thiopiens de Gondar, in Miroir de lAfrique, 9471061.
13. Leiris, La croyance aux gnies zar en thiopie du Nord, 942.
14. Leiris, La croyance aux gnies zar en thiopie du Nord, 945. For a similar account of
theatrical personality dissociation in the western context, see the study of acting in the Royal Shakespeare 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), 2945.
15. Salvador Dal, Le phnomne de lextase, in Minotaure 34 (1933), 76. An image of La statue
du marchal Ney dans le brouillard by Brassa can be found in the exhibition catalog, Alain Sayag and
Annick Lionel-Marie, eds., Brassa (Paris: Centre Pompidou and Editions du Seuil, 2000), 114.
16. Salvador Dal, Apparitions arodynamiques des tres-Objets, in Minotaure 6 (1935), 34.
17. These figures appear accordingly in: Hans Bellmer, Poupe. Variations sur Le montage dune
mineure articule, in Minotaure 6 (1935), 3031; Andr Breton, Phare de la marie, in Minotaure
6 (1935), 4549; Ren Crevel, La grande mannequin cherche et trouve sa peau, in Minotaure 5
(1934); Georges Pudelko, Paolo Uccello, peintre lunaire, in Minotaure 7 (1935), 3241; Benjamin
Pret, Au paradis des fantmes, in Minotaure 34 (1933), 2935. The images of robots come from
Alfred Chapuis and Edouard Glis, Le Monde des automates. tude historique et technique (Paris:
Haraucourt, 1928). For the surrealist reception of Uccello and Quattrocento paintings, see Andr
Breton, Surrealism and Painting (1928), in Surrealism and Painting (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts,
2002), 148.
18. See Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Jules Monnerot, Acphale. Religion, Sociologie,
Philosophie. 19361939 (Paris: Jean Michel Place, 1995).
19. Jacqueline Chnieux-Gendron, Laltrit et ses modles dans loeuvre de Georges Bataille,
Andr Breton, Ren Daumal, in Lautre et le sacr. Surralisme, cinma, ethnologie, ed. C. W.
Thompson (Paris: LHarmattan, 1995), 46. Chnieux-Gendrons observation would obviously have to
be qualified by Batailles stunning figurative phase in Documents and Batailles own lifelong interest
in art as loci of psychic and physical expenditure (dpense). 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

Cheng /

mask, mimicry, metamorphosis

& Sensuality (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986). A fine account of Batailles 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 surrealisms 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 jeus sans doute tort dabandonner pour . . . ce prcaire amalgame de savoir
et de passion que devait tre le Collge de Sociologie. Roger Caillois, Argument, in Approches de
limaginare (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 13. See also Procs Intellectuel de Lart in the same collection,
3554. For a selection of Cailloiss 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 la psychanalyse, in Minotaure 5 (1934),
25. Lon Binet cited by Caillois. Henceforth abbreviated as MR.
23. See Rosalind Krausss comparison of the praying mantis with Bellmers 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 readily found in nature. See Roger Caillois, La voie humaine est autre . . . , in Images du labyrinthe,
ed. Stphane Massonet (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 6971; Roger Caillois, Testimony (Paul Eluard),
in The Edge of Surrealism, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press,
2003), 6065.
25. Roger Caillois, Mimtisme et psychasthnie lgendaire, 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), 1632.
26. Caillois is quoting from Eugne Minkowski, Le Problme Du Temps En Psychopathologie,
in Recherches philosophiques (193233), 239.
27. Caillois later reproaches Mimtisme et psychasthnie lgendaire 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), 6263.
28. For Benjamins comments on surrealism, see Walter Benjamin, Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia, in SW, 207221. For the relationship between Benjamin and
surrealism, see in particular Richard Wolin, Benjamin, Adorno, Surrealism, in The Semblance of
Subjectivity: Essays in Adornos Aesthetic Theory, eds. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 93122. See also Benjamins writings, Toys and Play. Marginal Notes
on a Monumental Work, On Astrology, Doctrine of the Similar, On the Mimetic Faculty, in
SW, 11721, 68485, 69498, 72022.
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 Dumzils attraction to traditional kingly or priestly hierarchies,
and his influence on Caillois and other Collge members, see Bruce Lincoln, Dumzils German War
God, in Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 1999), 12137. I would suggest a comparison between the Collges 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

85

M O D E R N I S M / modernity

86

Surrealism, in Surrealism, Politics and Culture, eds. Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss (Aldershot:
Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 30036.
35. See Marcel Mauss, Une catgorie de lesprit humain: la notion de personne, celle de moi,
(1938) in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Quadrige/Presse Universitaire de France, 1989),
33162.