Jean-Pierre Brisset

Jean-Pierre Brisset as Prince of Thinkers in front of the Paris Panthéon on April 13, 1913

Jean-Pierre Brisset (born October 30, 1837 in La Sauvagère , Orne , † September 2, 1919 in La Ferté-Macé ) was a French writer , inventor and linguist .

Brisset is a saint of the pataphysical calendar and was included in the anthology of black humor by André Breton in 1940 . His work exerted a significant influence on Marcel Duchamp .

Life

He spent his childhood in the commune of La Sauvagère in the Orne department in north-western France. At the age of twelve he had to leave school to help his parents with the fields. When he was fifteen, he was to become a pâtissier in Paris . Soon released due to a two-year harvest crisis, Brisset undertook seven years of military service in 1855 and took part in the Crimean War that same year . In 1859 he was during the Italy campaign Napoléon III. hit in the leg in the Battle of Magenta and used the time of recovery to learn Italian. During the Franco-Prussian War he was wounded in the head as a second lieutenant in the Fiftieth Infantry Regiment in the Battle of Sedan and was brought to Magdeburg as a prisoner of war . There he quickly learned the German language.

In 1871 he published a swimming instruction ( La Natation ou l'Art de nager ), resigned from military service and settled in Marseille as a swimming instructor, where he applied for a patent for a swimming belt, which turned out to be a commercial failure. He returned to Magdeburg, where he worked as a language teacher for five years and in 1874 published a method for learning the French language at his own expense .

In 1876 he rejoined the army in Paris, but already resigned the following year in protest against the dissolution of the republican Chamber of Deputies by Patrice de Mac-Mahon . He applied for a patent for a calligraphic stencil and worked again as a language teacher. Hoping to make a name for himself as a linguist, he published a French grammar ( La Grammaire logique ) in 1878 .

In 1879 he started working in Orchies and then a year later in Angers Saint-Serge as a supervisory commissioner for the state railway. In 1883, while he was working on a new edition of the Grammaire Logique, a revelation happened to him : man is descended from the frog , the analysis of language proves it.

In 1890 he published Le Mystère de Dieu est accompli and gave lectures in Paris on his discovery of the amphibious origins of man. In 1895 he moved to the Saint-Laud d'Angers passenger station and was transferred to L'Aigle in Orne following a verbal argument with a former employee . At the beginning of 1900 he had a leaflet distributed in the format of a daily newspaper entitled La Grande Nouvelle in the Parisian boulevards , which announced the publication of his work La Science de Dieu .

In 1904 he retired and in 1906 published the biblical exegetical study Les Prophéties accomplies on the book of Daniel and the Revelation of John . He also gave lectures again in Paris and in La Ferté-Macé. The audience's reactions disappointed him.

In 1912 the writer Jules Romains discovered two of his works and decided, with reference to the then fashionable literary prizes, to organize an election for the prince of thinkers, from which Brisset emerged as the winner on January 6, 1913 with a clear majority. As part of a day organized by Romains and his friends - among them Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire - on April 13, 1913 , Brisset gave a speech in front of the Panthéon, among other things . Before the thinker Rodin , he realized that you don't have to be naked to think.

Brisset bequeathed his fortune to Jules Romains, with whom he held an annual memorial dinner until 1939.

effect

As the prince of thinkers, Brisset became known to wide circles of Parisian artists and intellectuals. Ezra Pound, for example, mentions him in one of his cantos :

"And they elected a Prince des Penseurs
Because there where so damn many princes,
And they elected a Monsieur Brisset
Who held that man is descended from frogs [...]"

In a conversation with James Johnson Sweeney in 1946 , Duchamp commented on the influence of Roussel and Brisset on his work as follows:

"Brisset and Roussel were the two men I most admired in those years for their fantasy delirium. Jean-Pierre Brisset was discovered by Jules Romains through a book he picked from a box on the banks of the Seine. Brisset's work was a philological analysis of language - an analysis worked out with the help of an incredible web of puns. He was a kind of Rousseau tax collector of philology. Romains introduced him to his friends and they, like Apollinaire and his cronies, organized an official ceremony to celebrate him before honoring Rodin's thinker in front of the Panthéon, where he was greeted as 'Prince des penseurs'.
But Brisset was one of the real people who lived and who will be forgotten. "

For Michel Foucault , Brisset belonged to "that shadowy family that picked up what linguistics left behind without heirs. The denounced rubbish of speculations about language should become a treasure of literary speaking in these pious, eager hands".

Quotes

"Water created everything, even language, which is made of water, insofar as every word that is uttered produces an expulsion of water vapor."

"There is already something human about the sound of the voice and the modulation of the frog's song. Its eyes and gaze resemble ours; and no animal possesses a physical grace from heel to neck that would approximate the human body; few people, even the young, are so elegant. "

"Since the truth is most easily known when a person speaks without being master of his speech, it is interesting to know what the madmen say."

"At the age of eleven we had surprised a frog and with the malevolence of the kid we crushed him with a wooden handle that we pressed against his stomach when the poor animal, which suddenly stretched out his arms and legs, astonished us in a speechless manner We bent down to see better: They would have said a person, went through our minds, and we ran off in amazement, very thoughtful, and regretted our barbarism. "

Work editions

• Œuvres complètes , réunies et préfacées par Marc Décimo, Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2001.
• Jean-Pierre Brisset. Prince of Thinkers: A Documentation , Berlin: zero sharp, 2014 [contains Brisset's texts, a biographical introduction, historical documents and essays by Marc Décimo and Michel Foucault].

literature

• Breton, André: anthology of black humor , translated by Rudolf Wittkopf, Munich: Rogner and Bernhard, 1972, pp. 290–305.
• Décimo, Marc: Jean-Pierre Brisset. Prince des Penseurs. Inventeur, grammairien et prophète , Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2001.
• Duchamp, Marcel: Interviews and Statements , collected, translated and annotated by Serge Stauffer, Stuttgart: Cantz, 1992.
• Foucault, Michel: "The cycle of frogs", translated by Hans-Dieter Gondek, in: Writings in four volumes , Vol. 1, Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​2001, pp. 282-283.
• Foucault, Michel: "Seven theses about the seventh angel", translated by Michael Bischoff , in: Writings in four volumes , Vol. 2, Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp 2002, pp. 17-32.
• Romains, Jules: Amitiés et Rencontres , Paris: Flammarion, 1970, pp. 97-107.

Web links

• La vie illustrée de Jean-Pierre Brisset by Eléonore Saintagnan
• Literature by and about Jean-Pierre Brisset in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ezra Pound: The Cantos , New York: New Directions Books, 1996, Canto XXVII, p. 129.
2. ↑ Marcel Duchamp: Interviews and Statements , collected, translated and annotated by Serge Stauffer, Stuttgart: Cantz, 1992, p. 38.
3. ↑ Michel Foucault: “The cycle of frogs” (1962), translated by Hans-Dieter Gondek, in: Writings in four volumes , Vol. 1, Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp, ​​2001, p. 283.
4. ↑ Jean-Pierre Brisset: The Science of God , in: Jean-Pierre Brisset. Prince of the Thinker: A Documentation , Berlin: zero sharp, 2014, p. 181.
5. ↑ Ibid, p. 202.
6. ↑ Ibid., P. 247.
7. ↑ Ibid., P. 264.