Edge of Surrealism

The Edge of Surrealism is an essential introduction to the writing of French social theorist Roger Caillois. Caillois was part of the Surrealist avant-garde and in the 1930s founded the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. He spent his life exploring issues raised by this famous group and by Surrealism itself. Though his subjects were diverse, Caillois focused on concerns crucial to modern intellectual life, and his essays offer a unique perspective on many of twentieth-century France’s most significant intellectual movements and figures. Including a masterful introductory essay by Claudine Frank situating his work in the context of his life and intellectual milieu, this anthology is the first comprehensive introduction to Caillois’s work to appear in any language. These thirty-two essays with commentaries strike a balance between Caillois’s political and theoretical writings and between his better known works, such as the popular essays on the praying mantis, myth, and mimicry, and his lesser-known pieces. Presenting several new pieces and drawing on interviews and unpublished correspondence, this book reveals Caillois’s consistent effort to reconcile intellectual rigor and imaginative adventure. Perhaps most importantly, The Edge of Surrealism provides an overdue look at how Caillois’s intellectual project intersected with the work of Georges Bataille and others including Breton, Bachelard, Benjamin, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss.

“Roger Caillois has remained relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. This superb selection of his essays, expertly translated, shows the full range of his thought and should place him next to Bataille and the Surrealists as a major intellectual figure in interwar and postwar France. Claudine Frank's general introduction and detailed commentaries on individual essays provide the necessary contexts for understanding this complex, often paradoxical thinker. A first-rate work that is sure to be of interest to all students of 20th-century French thought.”—Susan Rubin Suleiman, author of Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature, ”The Edge of Surrealism is the Caillois in one volume that is so badly needed considering the very dispersed status of Caillois’s work and that no such volume exists in any language, not even in France. This selection is excellent, done by someone who not only knows thoroughly the production of the author but knows also what’s most relevant for our contemporary interests.”—Denis Hollier, author of Absent without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War

Roger Caillois (1913-1978) was a French social theorist and writer. Claudine Frank is Assistant Professor of French at Barnard College.