S aturday , January
8 , 1 93 8
[The text read by Leiris a t this meeting of the College would be his only impor
tant contribution to the institution 's activities . It certainly seems that whereas for others the College was the focus of many ambitions and afterthoughts, Leiris never supported the former heart and soul, nor shared in the latter. The first sign was the absence of his signature at the end of the ' 'Note ' ' in Acephale . By the time we have reached the correspondence of July 3, I 939 (see the Appendixes:
Four Letters), there are no longer just signs: There is overt disagreement. Cail
lois, moreover, in recollections to which he returns in Approches de l' imag
inaire, reports that "Michel Leiris participated rather little in the activities of the College . " In the eyes of many co/ltemporaries, the consequence of this with
drawal will be to transform the triumvirate into a duumvirate . For Denis de Rougemont or Benda , for example, the College was Bataille 's and Caillois 's thing . One historian who followed this adventure in vivo would go so far as to speak of the College of Sociology of Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Jean Wahl (Henri Dubief, Le Declin de Ia Troisieme Republique ( 1929- 1 938) , vol . /3 of Nouvelle Histoire de la France contemporaine [Paris, I972-76], p . I4/) .
' 'The Sacred in Everyday Life ' ' was published in July I 938 in ' 'For a College of Sociology, ' ' six months after the meeting at which Leiris read it. That is where it appears in the present volume . It seems, however, that the text read aloud by the author had been reworked or, at the very least, touched up after the lecture, with publication in mind. In the account of the event given to the next month 's NRF ( no . 293, February I, 1 938), Jean Wahl, in fact, mentions several points not found in the text we know . Among others, there is no mention of the
"Pari-98
THE SACRED IN EVERYDAY LIFE D 99
sian peasant, " Aragon 's beloved brothels, nor any reference to the "spells of Abyssinian sorcerers . " (This is, doubtless, the 'medico-magical ' rite of the jet du danquara that Leiris studied during the Dakar-Djibouti mission 's Ethiopian stay, and on which he reported to the Societe des Africanistes in Febmmy I 935 and published a study in Aethiopica the same year) .
A t the time of the College 's founding, Leiris (except for several small volumes that were surrealist-inspired and of very limited printing) had written only one book, L' Afrique fan tome, which is, moreover, not a literal)' work in the tme sense of the word. It is a personal journal of the Dakar-Djibouti mission that Malraux published in the collection "Les Documents b!eus " at Gallimard (Paris, I 934) .
The Miroir de la tauromachie would be published by the press G . L . M. (Guy Levis Mana) at the end of I938, illustrated by Andre Masson . The writing of this essay- which must be considered as the first and most important of the manifes
tos defining a postsurrea!ist aesthetic-only shortly preceded the beginning of the College 's public activities . It is dated October-November I937, and it was November 20 of the same year that the first lecture took place . (Prior to its pub
lication several pages of the Miroir would appear in the NRF for November I938, the issue ending with the "Declaration of the College of Sociology on the Intemational Crisis, ' ' cosigned by Leiris) . The Miroir appeared in the collection
"Acepha!e " (in the series "L 'Erotisme "). It was, however, the sole publication of the collection . (It seems that Tableau de l ' amour macabre by the sadologist Maurice Heine was supposed to follow but finally had to be abandoned because of its excessive length). This publication , which Leiris dedicated to the memory of Colette Peignot, the friend of Bataille 's who had just died, constitutes Leiris 's only (and rather .feeble) act of allegiance to the endeavors sponsored by "good old Acephalus " - the Bataillesque equivalent of larry 's Pere Ubu . Although he always refused (as did Caillois) to take part in the activities of Acephale, the se
cret society, it tums out that even his signature (unlike Caillois 's) does not ap
pear in the contents of the review that was homonymous with it.
As for L'Age d'homme, the work that in some way would make Leiris 's lit
erary existence official, it would not come out until i939, a year after the "Sa
cred in Evel)'day Life " was published in "For a College of Sociology . " It should be remembered that, as first published, this autobiographical volume (re
viewed by Pierre Leyris in the NRF) is not yet preceded by ' 'De Ia litterature consideree comme une tauromachie " -to be its preface after the war . And it does not yet open with the dedication to Georges Bataille that is contemporal)' with this preface . However, the publication of L' Age d'homme came after that of the "Sacred, " it was written before . The manuscript of the book had been completed in November I935 . Moreover, several extracts had already ap
peared in reviews: Mesures ( 1 936, no . 3) published the chapter "Lucrece et Judith, " and SUR, the review published by Victoria Ocampo in Buenos Aires,
100 0 THE S ACRED IN EVERYDAY LIFE
translated "La Tete d 'Holopheme " ( "La Cabeza de Holofernes ") in its March 1938 issue .
Leiris continued to remain rather close to surrealism and to Breton despite their hostility to the College . In 1938, the Cahiers G . L. M . (no . 7), composed by Breton and devoted to the dream, published sixteen of Leiris 's dreams . It was also the year in which Breton traveled to Mexico, where, with the painter Diego Rivera , he founded the FJARJ (Federation internationale de ! 'art revolutiomwire independant) . The review Cle, published after Munich, would be its mouthpiece . Among the reactions to the manifesto published in its first issue is that of Leiris . ( ' 'Dear friend, Thank you for your appeal which I read with sympathy. But why Diego Rivera, whose painting [what little 1 know of it] seems the sort to foster the worst confusion about what we could mean by revolutionmy art? Even more, isn 't it this ve1y expression "revolutionary art " that is open to all the confusion ? Sincerely yours, Michel Leiris . ") Leiris is the only member of the College who replied. His letter is introduced in vel)' diplomatically courteous terms: "This is a specious argument that Michel Leiris, to whom we are bound by the many ways that we think in common despite the confused activity of the 'College of Soci
ology, ' attempts against us. ") (It is also in 1939 that Leiris puts together, at the Galerie Simon , in Glossaire: j ' y serre mes gloses, the "lyric puns " [as he would later call them] that he had published in La Revolution surrealiste in 1925 and 1926. This volume would be included in the collection Mots sans memoire, in 1969. But, though a reactivation of the surrealist past, this publication is no less a symptom of the fact that the gestation of La Regle du jeu has now begun . The interest in language events to which this testifies, nevertheless, puts it at a great distance from the preoccupations of the College; here it had no other backing than the lapidmy linguistics of Paul han, that "outsider. ")
It is in 1 939 that Leiris and Bataille finally will publish, in a noncolnmercial edition, a first collection of the notes left by Colette Peignot, who died at the end of the preceding year. It would appear under the name of Laure, a pseudonym she had taken for herself. Its title, Le Sacre is also the title c�f the article on which Bataille was working while his companion was dying . Several of the notes gath ered i n Laure 's volume can b e seen a s the more o r less direct echo of the 'Sacred in Everyday Life . ' One can even flnd there a page that begins with the question with which Leiris 's text concludes: " What color does the vel)' notion of the sa
cred have for me? " (see the volume edited by Jerome Peignot: Laure, Ectits , fragments , lettres [Paris, 1 978}, pp . I l l ff. )
' 'The Sacred in Everyday Life ' ' (a title in which one may read a discreet hom
age to Freud 's Psychopathology of Everyday Life, on which La Regie du Jeu could be said to be modeled) because of its date and its material, constitutes the pivot linking L' Age d' homme to the future La Regie du Jeu, without, however, belonging to either one or the other. Leiris, who never reprinted this text (it does not appear in Brisees), seems to have felt as uncomfortable with it as he did with
THE SACRED IN EVERYDAY LIFE D 101
participating in the College itself. The only reference that La Regie du jeu makes to it is found in "Tambour-trompette, " the final chapter of the first volume, Biffures (1948) . It takes the form of an allusion, as short as possible and hardly e,\plicit, to a text that the author visibly finds it dificult to take into account. In the pages where he retraces the genesis of the autobiographical project that was to occupy more than thirty years, he reviews the various essays that he thinks have a right to be considered as antecedents of'La Regie du jeu. Then , in paren
theses, as if he were mentioning in extremis a text he was going to forget, he slips in an allusion to the ' 'Sacred in Eve1yday Life ' ' : ' ' Without taking into account, ' ' he writes, "a few old pages where the description of several of these events took shape . " (These are the "language events " footnoted in this volume with the in
dications of the passages of La Regie du jeu in which Leiris picked them up again and developed the description rapidly sketched of them in ' 'The Sacred. ' ')
But "The Sacred " is also the pivot betJVeen Leiris 's litermy activity and his
"second profession, " his ethnographic career. Not only the institutional struc
ture where this essay has come to fit (for which it is intended, within which it is read, by which it is published) , but also the thematics organ izing most of its analyses can be identified as falling within the province of what is understood by secret society. A theory and practice of cryptology jointly develop there . The se
cret, just as much as the sacred, under the cover of celebrating an idiolect, leaves its scarcely perceptible mark on the swface of eve1yday life . Under these circumstances, it is not without interest to remember that the study of marginal groups structured by initiation had also become the specialty of Leiris, the eth
nographer. Without its being necessary to make more use than is proper of the etymological sense of the word ' 'secretmy, ' ' it was as such that Leiris was in
vited by Griaule to join the Dakar-Djibouti mission . At the same time as he found himself entrusted with the office of secreta1y to the undertaking (L' Afrique fantome was to come of this), he also was given the specific task of studying "so
cieties of children, senile societies, and religious institutions " (Marcel Griaule,
"Mission Dakar-Djibouti. Rapport general, " Journal de la Societe des Africanistes, 2 [ 1932], p. I20) . It is the same interest that led him to choose the subject of his doctoral thesis : La Langue secrete des Dogons de Sanga .
Jean Jam in has placed "The Sacred in Evel)>day Ltfe " in relation to all of Leiris 's work: "Quand le sacre devint gauche, " L ' Ire des vents , nos. 3-4, (1981) , pp . 98 1 /8 .
Afer Leiris 's lecture, Wahl put together his impressions for the NRF (Febm
ary 1 938, no. 293, "L 'Air du mois ") in the following note . ]
A t the College o f Sociology Jean Wahl
I am the worst student of the College of Sociology , but a very assiduous one .
102 D THE SACRED IN EVERYDAY LIFE
Here is this sociology , of which I was never a very devoted follower, taking hold of young minds that are eager for rigorousnes s , who think they have found in it an answer to questions that they previously thought could be resolved by smTe
alism , by revolution , and by Freudianism. We must try to understand this phe
nomenon , which is itself sociological .
B ataille and Caillois , who preside over the destinies of this college , had in
vited Michel Leiris to speak. It was , I believe , the first meeting in which one had the feeling of some intensity from the beginning to the end of the lecture . From his father' s top hat, from the salamander stove that was the spirit of his child
hood' s winter day s , to the cries and spells of Abyssinian sorcerers , by way of those houses that a night walker who was a Paris bourgeois formerly celebrated , he pulled out the disparate forms of the sacred without any sleight of hand. And little by little he defined it as something heterogeneous and ambiguous with which we are in collusion.
At certain moments in earlier meetings - when Caillois brought up secret so
cieties and the solitude of the great beasts , and all that was irrational (the obses
sive fear of which drove him toward investigations that were , perhaps, either too rational or not rational enough) , or when B ataille spoke of sacrilege-each time one could make out the secret motives leading them in the direction of what they believe is science , the audience already had this sense of some reality . Some among them , however, still had some doubts about the rigor of the positive re
sults . No doubt it will still take a long time for a science of human realities to be constituted , and even for us to have some inkling of the form it might take. B ut with Leiris , and with Landsberg ' s observations , 1 for lack of science (is ' ' for lack of" even right?) we are rather continuously in contact with something real .