MICHEL LEIRISSongs were to come and go, leaving no traces. Each object looked at us with a
child’s eyes, before the birth of fear.
Now the mountains are burning, and I am a country laid waste.
—mary ann caws
Michel Leiris 1901–1990
paris, france
L
eiris was a poet who, on the side of the Surrealists, sought to change the
world via humanism and, on the side of the existentialists, sought to
found a morality based on authenticity. He broke with Surrealism in- In 1931 he joined the ethnologist Marcel Griaule and a group of linguists
and ethnologists in the Mission Dakar-Djibouti. Together the team explored
sub-Saharan Africa and its cultures, bringing back to Paris more than three
thousand objects destined for the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, a witness
to the negrophilia omnipresent in that period. During the two-year expedition
he wrote his first book, L’Afrique fantôme, discovering through the process his
dual passion for ethnography and autobiography. He continued to study the
various facets of subjectivity in his prolific autobiographical writings. In 1938 he
founded the Collège de sociologie with Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois.
When he died, he left a great deal of his work unpublished. Principal works: Le
Point cardinal, 1927; Tauromachies, 1937; L’Age d’homme, 1939; Glossaire, j’y serre
mes gloses, 1940; Haut mal, 1943; Nuits sans nuit, 1945; Aurora, 1946; La Règle du
jeu: Bi√ures, 1948; Fourbis, 1955; Grande fuite de neige, 1964; Fibrilles, 1966; Autres
Lancers, 1969.