Michel Leiris
Michel Leiris (born April 20, 1901 in Paris , † September 30, 1990 ) was a French writer and ethnologist .
Life
Leiris, who came from the educated French bourgeoisie and whose literary inclination came to light early on, was forced against his will by his family to study chemistry . In the period after the First World War he made contact with the avant-garde artist circles of the epoch, especially with surrealism ; he quickly made friends with Max Jacob , André Masson , Picasso , Joan Miró and others. This connection lasted until 1929, after which he left the group in order to achieve greater artistic independence. He only had a lifelong friendship with Masson.
Leiris began studying ethnology and met Georges Bataille , for whose journal Documents he was an editor. In the fourth edition in 1929 he wrote a first appraisal of Alberto Giacometti's work. Together with Bataille, Roger Caillois and Jules Monnerot he founded the religious studies-inspired Collège de Sociologie . From 1931 to 1933 Leiris went on a research mission Dakar - Djibouti under the direction of Marcel Griaule , a colleague from Documents . In Ethiopia he was deeply impressed as a witness to a tsar cult , an obsessive act that he understood as ritual theater: as a staging, but with which real obsession and an imaginary one suffered at the same time from the imagination.
After his return he wrote a long treatise on his experiences ( L'Afrique fantôme ), in which he described this ritual for the first time and stylized the tropical trip as a mode of spiritual redemption, a genre that had already largely prepared Paul Nizan's Aden Arabie . Leiris' monumental travel diary uses the research techniques of ethnography to apply them to his own everyday life (“the sacred in everyday life”) and the experiences on his journey. The publication of this text led to a break between Leiris and Marcel Griaule.
From 1929 to 1935 he submitted to a psychoanalytic therapy by Adrien Borel , in the course of which he recognized the necessity of an intimate autobiography as a prerequisite for a successful healing, that is the basis of L'Âge d'Homme (dt. Manhood ). The book was published in 1939 and was continued in La Règle du Jeu (Eng. The rules of the game ), the four volumes of which were published between 1948 and 1976. In 1957 Leiris became a member of the Institute for Pataphysics . Short stories and poems followed.
He was able to broaden his ethnological career after the Dakar-Djibouti trip. He became a researcher at the newly founded Musée de l'Homme . After 1945 he approached Sartre's existentialism and became a founding member of Les Temps Modernes magazine . Together with Alioune Diop , Aimé Césaire and Georges Balandier , he also founded the Présence africaine in 1945 . As a fierce opponent of colonialism , Leiris co-signed the Manifesto of 121, famous in France . Among his more important ethnological works was a study of the concept of property in northern Ethiopia , which he analyzed from a Sartrian perspective.
Michel Leiris died at the age of 89 and was buried in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise (Division 97) in Paris .
Leiris was a nephew of Raymond Roussel and brother-in-law of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler .
plant
In Germany, Leiris is best known for his autobiographical novel Mannesalter (1939). Techniques from his surrealist apprenticeship years, psychoanalytic self-questioning and an ethnological instrument aimed at interpreting one's own life redefined the autobiography genre. The book is designed retrospectively: the 34-year-old, mentally and physically battered first-person narrator endeavors to unreservedly reconstruct the early childhood sources of his psychological and sexual obsessions. The essay La littérature considerée comme une tauromachie ( literature as bullfight ), which has usually preceded the work since 1946, justifies this: the complete exhibitionistic self-disclosure transforms the writer into a torero who incites the monstrous bull (his own disastrous self) in order to defeat it. The purpose is not so much the nostalgic recovery of a lost past ( Proust ), but rather the questioning of one's own biographical identity, which, composed of deep structural neuroses, linguistic self-reference and clouded, only punctual memory fragments, speculatively generates in a constantly new way must become.
Works
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literature
- Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs : A life as an artist and ethnologist. About Michel Leiris. Fischer, Frankfurt 1992.
- Irene Albers , Helmut Pfeiffer: Michel Leiris - Scenes of Transgression. Fink, Munich 2004.
- Susanne Goumegou: Dream Text and Dream Discourse: Nerval, Breton, Leiris. Fink, Munich 2007.
- Stephan Moebius : The sorcerer's apprentices. Sociological history of the Collège de Sociologie 1937–1939. UVK, Konstanz 2006. ISBN 978-3-89669-532-1 .
- Leiris & Co. Catalog of the Center Pompidou -Metz, Gallimard 2015.
- Michael Peppiatt: Francis Bacon - Michel Leiris. A friendship. Meyer, Bern 2016 ISBN 978-3-905799-39-2 .
Awards
- Satrap of the Collège de Pataphysique 1957
Web links
- Literature by and about Michel Leiris in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by and about Michel Leiris in the German Digital Library
- Site de Michel Leiris (French)
- Constantin von Barloewen: The dreamer. On the death of the writer and ethnologist Michel Leiris. Die Zeit , October 12, 1990
- Cinq études d'ethnologie. Le racisme et le Tiers-Monde, by Leiris, 1969, full text, on the server of the Université du Quebec à Chicoutimi , various file formats possible, here .pdf. In French (from the Zs. L'Homme. Revue française d'anthropologie.)
- Leiris : Who is Aimé Césaire ? (Qui est AC, 1965) Translated into English by A. James Arnold, in A Sulfur anthology. Clayton Eshleman, editor. Wesleyan University Press, Oxbow 2016, pp. 70-76
Individual evidence
- ↑ Irene Albers, Helmut Pfeiffer: The possessed ethnographer and the rituals of writing. Michel Leiri's texts on the cult of the Tsar in Ethiopia. In: Stefan Rieger, Schamma Schahadat, Manfred Weinberg (Ed.): Interculturality. Between staging and archive. Tübingen 1999, pp. 145-163
- ↑ knerger.de: The grave of Michel Leiris
- ↑ again in 1988. Ed. Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs , translated by Rolf Wintermeyer, Heribert Becker, Eugen Helmlé , Dietrich Leube, Hanns Grössel , Helmut Scheffel . Row: Portrait 3. Leiris about: Fred Astaire , Satie , Arnold Schönberg , Sartre , Baudelaire , Mallarmé , Georges Bataille , Raymond Roussel , Michel Butor , Queneau , Paul Éluard , Max Jacob , Limbour , Yves Elléouët, André Masson , Joan Miró , Hans Arp , Marcel Duchamp , Michel Giacometti , the Lascaux Cave , Henri Laurens
- ↑ Werner Spies : Travel to the fragmented self. In: The Literary World . July 25, 2015, p. 8.
- ↑ Histoire de Collège Ý Le 23. clinamen 84 on fatrazie.com (French, accessed on July 29, 2014)
| personal data | |
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| SURNAME | Leiris, Michel |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French writer and ethnologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 20, 1901 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paris |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 30, 1990 |