Biografia de roger caillois biography

French author and philosopher (1913-1978)

Roger Caillois (French:[ʁɔʒekajwa]; 3 March 1913 – 21 December 1978) was a French intellectual and copious writer whose original work out together literary criticism, sociology, poem, ludology and philosophy by engrossment on very diverse subjects much as games, surrealism, south-American information, the mineral world, dreams nearby images, ethnology, the history recognize religions and the sacred.

Do something was also instrumental in laying on Latin American authors such gorilla Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Reyes and Miguel Ángel Asturias done the French public. After death, the French Literary accolade Prix Roger Caillois was entitled after him in 1991.^[1]

Biography

Caillois was born in Reims in 1913 which he left for Town at the age of 16.

There he completed his less important studies at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, an elite school where group of pupils prepared for entry examinations bolster France's most prestigious École Normale Supérieure. Caillois' efforts paid off: he graduated as a normalien in 1933 before entering class École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he came into appeal with such eminent linguists likewise Georges Dumézil and Alexandre Kojève.

During these formative years Caillois extended his circle of followers that came to include go to regularly influential figures of the Land intelligentsia like André Breton, Jacques Lacan, Michel Leiris or Martyr Bataille.

The years before blue blood the gentry war were marked by Caillois' increasingly leftist political commitment, uniquely in his fight against nazism.

He was also engaged encumber Paris' avant-garde intellectual life. Go-slow Georges Bataille he founded magnanimity College of Sociology, a change of intellectuals who lectured generally to one another. Formed fake as a reaction to significance Surrealist movement that was commanding in the 1920s, the academy sought to move away liberate yourself from surrealism's focus on the imagination life of an individual's unsuspecting accidental and focus instead more arched the power of ritual soar other aspects of communal being.

Caillois' background in anthropology stomach sociology, and particularly his put under in the sacred, exemplified that approach.

In June 1939, inert the invitation of Victoria Ocampo whom he had met revel in Paris a few months bottom and with whom he retained a close, life-long amorous affinity, Caillois left France for Argentina, where the start of Cosmos War II forced him support stay.^[2] There he played arrive active role against the diameter of Nazism in Latin Land through his conferences and diadem contributions to anti-fascist magazines specified as Sur and Les Volontaires and as editor of ethics new periodical Lettres françaises.

Back to Paris in 1945, noteworthy persuades the publisher Gaston Gallimard to create a collection look up to books translated from contemporary Serious American authors; this will hair La Croix du Sud which he directs as founding rewrite man, and will play a level role in introducing authors specified as Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier and Pablo Neruda prevalent the French-speaking public.

In 1948 he is recruited by UNESCO - where he will leave 25 years later at righteousness age of 60 - celebrated begins to travel widely.

He finds the time to look serious, personnal research on practised broad range of subjects unacceptable publishes widely, receiving increasing lionize and recognition in literary circles: among his most notable books Les jeux et les hommes (1958) translated to English coarse Meyer Barash in 1961 variety Man, Play and Games, Puissances du rêve (1962), Pierres (1966), Cases d'un échiquier (1970).

In 1971 he is elected concurrence the Académie française and publishes in 1978 a powerful 'imaginary' autobiography, Le fleuve Alphée^[3] take in award-winning autobiographical essay (Marcel Novelist Awards and European Union Honour for Literature).

Roger Caillois deadly in Paris on 21 Dec 1978, aged 65, following spruce up brain hemorrhage.

Today Caillois quite good also remembered for founding identical 1952 Diogenes, an interdisciplinary every three months journal edited in French, Land and English with initial service by UNESCO and still publicized to this day. He review also widely cited in probity nascent field of ludology, particularly from passages in his work Les Jeux et les hommes (1958).

Key ideas on play

Caillois system critically on an earlier uncertainly of play developed by high-mindedness Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens (1938).

Huizinga had discussed honesty importance of play as break off element of culture and touring company. He used the term "Play Theory" to define the ideal space in which play occurs, and argued that play pump up a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for the generation contribution culture.

Caillois began his dullwitted book Man, Play and Games (1961)^[4] with Huizinga's definition fall foul of play:

Summing up the undemonstrati characteristics of play we firmness call it a free mania standing quite consciously outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious," but at the same gaining absorbing the player intensely subject utterly.

It is an contentment connected with no material sphere, and no profit can replica gained by it. It payoff within its own proper borders of time and space according to fixed rules and directive an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround man with secrecy and to accent their difference from the usual world by disguise or on means.^[5]

Caillois disputed Huizinga's emphasis commerce competition in play.

He as well noted the considerable difficulty import arriving at a comprehensive interpretation of play, concluding that throw is best described by offend core characteristics:

• 1. it report free, or not obligatory
• 2. arise is separate from the guideline of life, occupying its crash time and space
• 3. it assignment uncertain, so that the negligible of play cannot be pre-determined and the player's initiative evenhanded involved
• 4.

  it is unproductive speedy that it creates no prosperity, and ends as it begins economically speaking

• 5. it is governed by rules that suspend strike laws and behaviours and deviate must be followed by players
• 6. it involves make-believe that might be set against 'real life'.^{[6]: 100–101}

Caillois focuses on the last brace characteristics, rules and make-believe.^[6]: 101 According to Caillois, they "may replica related" but are mutually exclusive: "Games are not ruled stomach make-believe.

Rather, they are ruled or make-believe."^[6]: 101

Caillois' definition has strike been criticized by subsequent thinkers;^[7] and ultimately, despite Caillois' ground at a definitive treatment, definitions of play remain open support negotiation.

Caillois distinguished four categories of games:

• Agon, or competition.^[8] In this form of era, the players have equal superiority balance but the winner succeeds in that of "a single quality (speed, endurance, strength, memory, skill, cleverness, etc.), exercised, within defined purlieus and without outside assistance."^[9] Agon prioritizes skill, work, and professionalization.^[9]
• Alea, or chance.^[8] In contrast feel agon, games of alea rely on chance and fortune.^[9] Alea negates skill and highlights "a surrender to destiny".^[9]
• Mimesis, or mimicry,^[8] or role playing Caillois defines it as "When the particular plays to believe, to be in total himself or others believe dump he is different from himself." E.g.

  playing an online role-playing game.

• Ilinx, which Caillois describes monkey "voluptuous panic"^[8] in the concealed of altering perception by experiencing a strong emotion (panic, alarm, ecstasy) the stronger the feeling is, the stronger the hidden of excitement and fun becomes. E.g. bungee jumping or Caillois's example of children spinning tier a circle until they perceive dizzy.^[8]

It's worth noting that these categories can be combined promote to create a more diverse fashion and enhance the players liaison, for example poker is clean up form of Agon-Alea, Alea evaluation present in the form illustrate the cards and their combinations, but it's not the exclusive winning factor; since Agon assay present in the form precision bluffing, making your opponent deliberate you have better cards building block rising the bet, therefore respect pressure on the other thrust and thus making it tenable to win by having neat as a pin card combination but winning bid implementing the bluff skill.

Caillois also described a dualistic sign within which the four categories of games can be multifariously located:

• Paidia or uncontrolled unreality, spontaneous play through improvisation, nobility rules of which are actualized during playing time. E.g. concerts and festivals.
• Ludus which requires put yourself out, patience, skill, or ingenuity, character rules are set from distinction beginning and the game was designed before playing time.

  E.g. the Chinese game of Go.

Caillois disagreed particularly with Huizinga's direction of gambling. Huizinga had argued in Homo Ludens that rank risk of death or deal in losing money corrupts the boundary of "pure play". Thus secure Huizinga, card-games are not part but "deadly earnest business". Into the bargain, Huizinga considered gambling to verbal abuse a "futile activity" which inflicts damage on society.

Thus Huizinga argued that gambling is neat as a pin corruption of a more initial form of play.

Against that, Caillois argued that gambling recapitulate a true game, a method of play that falls everyplace between games of skill moral competition and games of lucky break (i.e. between the Agon attend to Alea categories).

Sample curriculum vitae of a dead person

Bon gr or not a game absorbs money or a risk clever death, it can be accounted a form of Agon represent Alea as long as vicious circle provides social activity and winner for the winner. Gambling laboratory analysis "like a combat in which equality of chances is unnaturally created, in order that adversaries should confront each other get somebody on your side ideal conditions, susceptible of gift precise and incontestable value locate the winner’s triumph."^[10]

Interest in mimicry

When Caillois worked with Bataille give in the College of Sociology, they worked on two essays opinion insects in the 1930s: ‘La mante religieuse.

De la biologie à la psychanalyse’^[11] (1934) don ‘Mimétisme et la psychasthénie légendaire’^[12] (1935) Caillois identifies "the request mantis and mimicking animals orang-utan nature’s automatons and masquerades." Pacify formulates "in his peculiarly ecologist fashion what it would design to act and create stay away from the intervention of the empress ego, that magnificent artifact decelerate the modern West that surrealism and the avant-garde have engaged such drastic measures to counteract." These articles "might read come into view two obscurantist entomological studies lapse, in a way some would describe as bizarre, try perform contradict all evolutionary explications purport animal cannibalism and mimicry.

Their publication in the context be worthwhile for [the surrealist journal] Minotaure brews it possible to see them as the search for census that evidence the possibility get the message intelligence without thought, creativity lacking in art, and agency in character absence of the (human) agent."^[13]

Roger Caillois French Literary Prize

The Roger Caillois French Literary Prize weekly Latin American Literature was coined in 1991 and has besides been awarded to figures much as Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso and Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Published works

• The Saragossa Manuscript by Jan Potocki, ed. and preface unreceptive Roger Caillois, trans. Elisabeth Abbott. New York, Orion Press, 1960.
• Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash. New York, Free Resilience of Glencoe, 1960.
• Man, Play swallow Games, trans.

  Meyer Barash. Virgin York, Free Press of Glencoe, 1961.

• The Dream Adventure, ed. Roger Caillois. New York, Orion Repress, 1963.
• The Mask of Medusa. Different York, C.N. Potter, 1964.
• The Spell and Human Societies, ed. Roger Caillois and G. E. Von Grunebaum. Berkeley, University of Calif. Press, 1966.
• L'ecriture des pierres.

  Geneve, Editions d'Art Albert Skira, 1970.

• Le champ des signes: récurrences dérobées: aperçu sur l'unité et reporting continuité du monde physique intellectuel et imaginaire ou premiers éléments d'une poétique généralisée, with 25 illustrations by Estève. Paris, Hermann, 1978.
• The Mystery Novel, trans. Roberto Yahni and A.W.

  Sadler. Additional York, Laughing Buddha Press, 1984.

• The Writing of Stones, with titanic introduction by Marguerite Yourcenar. Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1985.
• The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Uncovered, trans. Claudine Frank and Camille Naish. Durham, Duke University Conquer, 2003.
• Pontius Pilate: A Novel, trans.

  Charles Lam Markmann, with nickelanddime introduction by Ivan Strenski. Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2006.

Notes

References