MLN Volume 120 Issue 4 2005 (Doi 10.2307 - 3840660) Charles Palermo - French Issue - Michel Leiris On Knowing

Michel Leiris on Knowing
Author(s): Charles Palermo

Source: MLN, Vol. 120, No. 4, French Issue (Sep., 2005), pp. 825-848
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
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Michel Leiris on Knowing
Charles Palermo*
To one who asked me right now which one

of Picasso's works I prefer, I would answer
that, at each moment, it is the latest.'
Michel Leiris's 1930 essay "Toiles recentes de Picasso" opens by

considering the failure of Picasso criticism in general. The problem is
Picasso's genius, which his critics see as putting him in a position
incommensurable with their own. This causes them either to circle
Picasso as though he were a dangerous object or to dive headlong
into crudeness ("Toiles," 24). The Surrealists, worst of all, try to make
Picasso one of their own, casting him as "a sort of man in revolt, or
indeed rather in flight (try as we may, words often say something
quite different from what one would at first have liked them to),
before reality" ("Toiles," 26). Leiris says that Picasso is a realist, and
that we should assume the same approach to him that he takes to
reality. Leiris tells us that Picasso "stands toe-to-toe with everything,
* The
following essay is part of a larger project that began as my dissertation, "Fixed
Ecstasy: The Early Artistic Maturity of Joan Miro and Michel Leiris," The Johns
Hopkins University, 2000, and is now forthcoming from the Pennsylvania State
University Press. I am grateful for a Dedalus Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and a
Bourse Chateaubriand that funded much of the work behind the present essay. I would
like to thank friends and former colleagues at The Johns Hopkins University, Williams
College and the Clark Art Institute for their thoughtful comments on this project,
especially Harry Cooper, M. J. Devaney, Brigid Doherty, Michael Fried, Peter Low,
Stephen Melville and Walter Benn Michaels.
1 Michel Leiris, "Toiles recentes de Picasso," Un Geniesans
piedestal,et autresecritssur
Picasso, presentation par Marie-Laure Bernadac (Paris: Fourbis, 1992; originally
published in Documents2.2 [1930]) 31; hereafter cited in the text and abbreviated as
"Toiles."Passages from this essay are my own translation, as are all other translations,
except where noted.
MLN 120 (2005): 825-848 ? 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
826 CHARLES PALERMO
treats things as familiarlyas it is possible to" ("Toiles,"25), and can do

so because "nothing that is human-and no greater portion of that
which is inhuman, either-is strangeto him"("Toiles,"25; emphasis in
original). Leiris goes on to insist that "one must therefore be able to
behave the same way" toward Picasso ("Toiles," 25) and strike an
attitude toward his work that is "absolutely direct, free, spontaneous,
naive" ("Toiles,"24).
Against the Surrealists, and anyone else who takes the (perhaps
commonsense) view that Picasso rebels against reality in his work,
Leiris claims that Picasso's pictorial invention
has less to do with [. . .] remaking reality for the sake of remakingit, than
for the sake, incomparably more important, of expressing all the possibili-
ties, all the imaginable ramifications, so as to press it a little closer, really to
touch it. Instead of being a vague relationship, a distant panorama of
phenomena, the real is thus illuminated from all its pores, one penetrates
it, it becomes for the first time and reallya REALITY. In most of Picasso's
pictures one notices that the "subject"(if one may use such an expression)
is almost always completely down-to-earth, at any rate never borrowed from
the hazy world of dreams, nor immediately available to be converted into
symbol-that is to say, in no way "Surrealist."("Toiles,"26-27)
It is striking, and of prime importance, that Leiris represents Picasso's
realism not merely as a style, but as related to metaphysical realism. As
Leiris sees it, Picasso's realism is a corollary of-or means to-the
conviction that the true nature of things manifests itself to our
perception (i.e., that the world as we see it is "real"). Moreover, it is
Picasso's genius to make the reality of the world plainer to us-to
allow us "reallyto touch it." (Yet,one might ask, what does it mean for
someone espousing a realist position, as Leiris seems to here, to speak
of our access to reality being contingent upon anything, let alone a
painter's ability to represent it forcefully? I hope the present essay will
explain the point of such an implicitly self-contradictory formulation.)
Similarly, Leiris's claim that understanding Picasso's work depends
on approaching it (indeed, approaching Picasso) directly and naively
suggests that Leiris thinks Picasso's critics are mistaken in under-
standing their task. Leiris says that they can simply see what Picasso
means to express-that they needn't circle Picasso's paintings as if
they were traps or decipher them as though they were symbols.
Leiris's idea of interpretation is analogous to his treatment of
metaphysics. He insists that understanding Picasso through his paint-
ing is like understanding the nature of reality through the world-
M L N 827
one need only approach the world candidly. This amounts to claim-
ing that Picasso achieved what Leiris would later term "presence."2
Much recent work on Leiris engages, directly or indirectly, the issue

of "presence" [presence].3 Leiris used the term throughout much of his
career. In fact, late in his life, Leiris made a concise and explicit
attempt at defining it in his journal:
2 The
essay on Picasso that I've been discussing is among Leiris's first serious pieces
of art criticism, but its position is not unique among his writings on art. It is most
important to me that Leiris's remarks on Picasso that I cite and discuss here not be
taken as pertaining to Picasso alone or to Picasso's work of 1929 and 1930 exclusively.
The kind of directness with which he approaches (and advocates approaching) Picasso
and his concern for Picasso as a person (as opposed to a concern for the paintings that
might bracket Picasso the man) are typical of his writing on Picasso and on other artists
whom he especially admired, such as Andre Masson. For an insightful and comprehen-
sive survey of Leiris's writings on art, see Monique Renault, "Michel Leiris et l'art de
son temps," Revue de l'Universitede Bruxelles1-2 (1990): 73-92.
3 Catherine Maubon's MichelLeirisen
margede l'autobiographie(Paris:Jos6 Corti, 1994)
is a sustained engagement with the issue of presence throughout Leiris's work-in his
autobiography, poetry and art criticism. Central to Maubon's argument is the notion
that Leiris approached the matter of presence differently in each genre within his
ceuvre. I hope to extend her work a little in two directions: first, by considering the way
a desire for presence is at work in early texts, such as Aurora, that Maubon does not
discuss at length; and second, by showing that, early in his career, the different
approaches Leiris later took to presence in different genres were less clearly divided.
Other studies to which I feel my view of Leiris is close are Nathalie Barberger's Michel
Leiris,I'crituredu deuil,coll. "Objet,"dir. Philippe Bonnefis (Villeneuve-d'Ascq [Nord]:
Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 1998), and Roland Simon's OrpheeMeduse:
autobiographiesde Michel Leiris, coll. "Lettera" (Lausanne: Editions 1'Age d'Homme,
1984).
At some points, my argument approaches very closely that of a new book by Sean
Hand, Michel Leiris: Writing the Self, Cambridge Studies in French, gen. ed. Michael
Sheringham (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). In its principal
focus-the issue of presence-Hand's argument and mine seem compatible to me. He
argues: "Just as Western philosophy since Plato, according to Heidegger, has been
grounded in parousia, or permanent self-presence, so the classical metaphysical origin
and aim of autobiography is arguably the desire to confirm the autobiographer's
'being in the sense of already-thereness (presence)"' (Hand, 151; for the quotation
within the passage, Hand cites Martin Heidegger, An Introductionto Metaphysics[New
Haven: Yale UP, 1959] 206). Hand further claims: "The desire for pure presence is [ . .]
intimately bound up with the possibility of pure communication" (Hand, 169). My
account traces what may be Leiris's first struggle with the relationship of autobiogra-
phy, presence and communication. Hand offers a sustained and intense analysis of
Leiris's ongoing effort to cope with the problem he finds and raises to a new level of
difficulty (but also, in a certain sense, resolves) in the early work I discuss.
828 CHARLES PALERMO
April 23rd [1982]

Artistic or literary realism doesn't "thingify" [chosifie]what one in this day
and age calls the referent. [Leiris adds in a note dated two days later: "Put
otherwise: the positive motif or mental image (realistic [vraisemblable]or
not) from which the author takes off (4-25-82).] Far from rejecting this in
the coldness of so-called objectivity, it strives to translate the concrete
relation that we have with it and thus involves a large share of subjectivity!
What I call "presence" is perhaps nothing but the capacity that that object
of plastic art or of literature has to make felt, by the beholder or reader, the
existence of such a relation between the author and his referent. [Leiris
adds in another note dated April 25: "i.e.: ( . .) between the author and
what he has before his eyes or in his head."]4
Clearly, Leiris credits Picasso with achieving-or, at least, with offer-

ing the beholder-the experience of a similar immediacy in those
paintings of 1929 and 1930. The idea that a work of art can
communicate to a reader or beholder anything like the author or
artist's relationship to a referent or to the creator's own mind is today,
of course, very much under attack. What Leiris calls "presence" is
generally held to be the impossible aim of a naive critical approach.
The critical stance that seeks to understand the author or artist's
experience in the way Leiris describes is often called "the trap of
historical reconstruction" or "recovering authorial intention," and its
project is widely considered futile, since the object of such an inquiry
(the author's or artist's prior, inner experience) is, as it were, already
absent from the text or work of art, and therefore can neither
determine the work's meaning nor even reveal itself to the reader or
beholder. Among other things, I want to argue that the way Leiris
arrived at his investment in presence shows his endeavor to be more
sophisticated than one might expect. In fact, I believe Leiris convinc-
ingly shows that we can know the author's intentions by reading or
looking at his or her work.
In the present essay, I shall consider works from very early in
Leiris's career. I shall pay particularly close attention to a chapter
from his novel Aurora. Aurora has received scant attention in the fast-
growing body of secondary literature on Leiris.5 Aurora was not
'Michel Leiris, entry for April 23, 1982, Journal: 1922-1989, edition etablie,
presentee et annotee par JeanJamin (Paris: NRF/(allimard, 1992) 751; hereafter cited
in the text and abbreviated as Journal.
5 Joelle de Sermet
explains some difficulties in ascribing Aurorasecurely to a genre.
For the present purposes, that attribution needn't be secure-in fact, it is part of my
aim to show that, at this point in his career, certain distinctions among his various
M LN 829
published until 1946-and then, perhaps, only as a show of solidarity

with Leiris's old friend Georges Bataille against Jean-Paul Sartre
(Sermet, 169)-but it was delivered to the publisher Kra in 1928 or
1929. Leiris wrote to Kra to withdraw the manuscript in 1932, while
he was participating in the Dakar-Djibouti expedition.6 The first germ
of Aurora is a journal entry from 1923 or early 1924 entitled "Le
Lycanthrope"-the fictional autobiography of a character who al-
ready bears a striking similarity to Damocl&s Siriel, who was in turn
the fictional author of a fictional autobiography that takes its place in
the middle of Aurora (Journal, 36-40). Leiris published the story of
Siriel in finished form as a fragment entitled "Aurora" and dated
"Athenes-Nauplie, aofit 1927" in Cahiers du Sud.7 As I shall explain, the
narration of Siriel's last days is an experiment in autobiography,
matching the time of its writing to the time of the narrated life as
both approach the non-narratable limit of autobiography, the writer's
death. The fictional autobiography was, of course, also in a way
Leiris's first work in autobiography. (Not only is "Siriel" "Leiris"
backwards, but Leiris considered publishing L'Age d'homme [his first
autobiography in the conventional sense] under the title Jeunesse de
Damocles Siriel [Journal, 231-32].) The experiment has a purpose (if
an unsuspected one): to dramatize Leiris's desire to make writing
coincide with the experience it narrates. As such, it is an early
working-out of the desire he later articulated for presence in writing.
In order to understand how this experiment works, I shall first turn
elsewhere to establish the concerns that inform that first experiment
in autobiography.
enterprises (as poet, as autobiographer, as art critic) were not yet in full force. See
Joelle de Sermet, Michel Leiris, poete surrealiste, s6rie "Ecrivains,"dirig6e par Beatrice
Didier (Paris: PUF, 1997) 186-200. For essays or chapters devoted specifically (or
largely) to Aurora,see Sermet, 186-200;Jacqueline Ch6nieux-Gendron, Le Surrealismeet
le roman:1922-1950 (Lausanne: Editions l'Age d'homme, 1983) 279-92;J.H. Matthews,
Surrealismand theNovel (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1966) 107-23, 183; Eric Van der
Schueren, "Aurora, Les palingen6sies de l'aura," Revue de l'Universite de Bruxelles 1-2
(1990): 143-67; Salim Jay, "Aurora Lecture," Sud 28/29 (1979): 27-30 and Jacques
Lovichi, "Damocles Siriel et la salamandre blanche, ou l'ere du scrupule," Sud 28/29
(1979): 37-42.
6JeanJamin, note 8 for the year 1926 in Leiris,Journal, 850; cited in Sermet (168 and
note 1).
7 Michel Leiris, "Aurora (Fragment)," Cahiers du Sud 114 (juillet 1929): 444-59.
830 CHARLES PALERMO
In an essay published in 1930 in the important dissident Surrealist

journal Documents, Leiris uses a borrowed anecdote to illustrate a
painful epiphany-the revelation of a secret hidden in ordinary life,
one that lies waiting for anyone to recognize. The little story, "An
Excess of Cleanliness," comes from a nineteenth-century collection of
tales about death. It tells of a woman who saw a side of beef in a
butcher's stall and swooned at the sight of it. Recovering, she asked
"'Do we have so many nasty things inside our bodies too?"' There the
tales closes: "The answer she was given convinced her to let herself
starve to death."8
The story is a little mysterious. Surely the woman knew that she
carried within her own body blood and the vessels that carry blood,
muscles, organs and a digestive system. (If we are meant to imagine a
woman oblivious to such facts, the author would have done well to say
so.) We can be equally sure that she knew what meat looked like
before she encountered the carcass. What can have surprised her?
The answer (which I believe Leiris's use of the anecdote will corrobo-
rate) is that the woman posed to herself for the first time the
hypothesis that she was like the cattle-enough like it even to die.
Leiris goes on to explain the complementary impulse, the need to
take up one's place among the mortal creatures of the world:
If we had to stand alone, confined to the use only of our own bodies in the
face of external nature, this position would perhaps be grand-that of a
god or a hero-but more dreadful than any other, for we would never
understand what was that other thing, so distinct from our being, so
indifferent to us, strange with a strangeness so very distant and glacial.
What gives us the possibility of connecting ourselves with it is the existence
of human creatures other than ourselves, when they act as mediators,
because on the one hand they participate in nature (since, like it, they are
exterior to us), while on the other hand they participate in us (since their
own constitution is more or less similar to our own constitution). Thus,
society becomes the link between us and nature, and our human relations
immediately become the most important of the many relations existing
between us and the world, so that the sight of human bodies, whether we
consider them friend or foe, is what touches us the most by far, since they
are in any case the living signs of the alliance that nature has consented to
sign with us, the magical seals that consecrate this imaginary pact. ("Man
and His Insides," 42)
Michel Leiris, "Man and His Insides," Brisees: Broken Branches, trans. Lydia Davis
(San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989; originally published in Documents2.5 [1930])
41; hereafter cited in the text and abbreviated as "Man and His Insides."
M LN 831
Leiris describes a doubt about the world and about his fellow
creatures-about whether they are (or whether he can know that they
are) real in the same way he is. I shall call this doubt skepticism, since
it seems to grow out of questioning the justification for thinking that
there is a "real" world outside oneself and that the creatures in it have
minds and souls as one does oneself (as opposed to being automata
or apparitions). I take it that Leiris means the story of the swooning
woman to dramatize the dawn of skeptical doubt on her previously
unsuspecting mind, followed in a single stroke by the grim realization
that accepting the analogy condemned her to death.
If Leiris's account of the mediator's role shows Leiris reconciling
himself to the deal he feels compelled to cut with the world, it does
not exactly represent his recovery from skepticism altogether. Why,
for instance, need he call the pact the mediator permits him to seal
with the world merely "imaginary" [suppose]? The problem is that
mediators allow one to construct an analogy between oneself and
other beings, but they don't guarantee that other beings are fully real
(or human), with minds and inner lives like one's own. Leiris implies
that the kinship of the self with the other is (at best) a speculative
matter (and at worst, presumably, a delusion)-so, even as he
proposes the mediator as a means of reassuring oneself, he recog-
nizes that it only provides comfort. Mediators notwithstanding (as
Leiris appears to conclude), one's kinship with other creatures is only
speculative and, if one insists on certainty, one is left to "stand alone"
after all.
Leiris goes on to widen the scope of his essay to include images
both of fine art and advertising, as well as practices (such as the use of
make-up) that affect one's perception of one's fellow beings. He
notes that many of our representations seem to suppress, as if to deny,
the human qualities in virtue of which we enter into our pact with the
mediator. In these pictures, he finds nothing moving. He is not
touched, for example, by the "conventional nude of official painting,"
which he calls "dehumanized" because it is "scrubbed clean" and
cleansed of whatever might disturb the beholder. He wants from
representations some indication of the function other bodies serve
when they stand for him as "palpable links between us and the outside
world" ("Man and His Insides," 41-42). To "dehumanized" denials of
our likeness with other creatures, Leiris opposes the tributes we pay
to our sense of our fragile, physical being and the place it gives us in
our world: "A primitive man who has his body tattooed with signs that
give him a magical relation to various different parts of the Universe,"
832 CHARLES PALERMO
for example, or "a civilized person" in the throes of a particular vice-

a person "who loves 'unusual sensations,' as they say," and who, on
account of that love, makes his skin "an arsenal of cicatrices,
swellings, scarifications, burns, etc." In these practices, Leiris sees
such persons "yielding half-consciously to a need to increase what is
already most human" in themselves ("Man and His Insides," 44). That
is, such persons appear to want or need to reaffirm, to heighten their
awareness of, their humanness by damaging their bodies in small
ways.
Leiris extends the analysis even to "modern cosmetics, whose
object is to preserve or repair what is for us the bodily norm," which
lends them ("rouges, powders, dyes, perfumes"), in Leiris's view,
a terribly erotic, human character, fascinating symbols that they are of the
fight against aging either through a pure and simple obliteration of the
signs of decrepitude or through an attempt, even in youth, to replace the
face, victim of withering, by a kind of mask that is fixed and separate from
time, as attractive as the most gracious of all statues but as sacrosanct as an
idol. ("Man and His Insides," 44)
Cosmetics ostensibly help the user forget the disturbing fact that
upsets the woman in "An Excess of Cleanliness": that recognizing
one's humanity amounts to accepting a death sentence. Cosmetics
help one live in the face of mortality by holding it out of sight (if only
just below the visible surface). Moreover, this denial appeals even to
the young, whom time has yet to mark. Even in youth, when flesh
simply is what cosmetics are meant to make it seem, cosmetics have a
place-they are youth's response to the awareness that its fresh face
cannot be fixed forever. What touches Leiris is that cosmetics'
charming, ineffectual evasion of the inevitability that weighs on the
human condition reveals humanness, too: acknowledging mortality
indirectly by denying it blithely.
In fact, Leiris confessed to being himself subject to the impulse that
cosmetics gratify. His first major, strictly autobiographical work, L'Age
d'homme (known in English as Manhood), explains that he used a
powder after shaving. In a paragraph almost directly preceding the
one in which Leiris discusses his use of powder, he discusses the
character of his investment in poetry. The close juxtaposition of the
two deserves attention. Leiris explains that poetry answered to his
taste for the Absolute and the Eternal, permitting him to take refuge
from "the real" in favor of an imaginary world ruled by the poet's
mind. This turn from the ordinary world into the world of poetic
fantasy brought along with it solitude, chastity, asceticism (except for
M LN 833
indulgence in alcohol, which only helped the young poet to hold the
world at arm's length), a sense of desperate rebellion, and an affected
correctness in dress.9 Reflecting on his impulse toward rebellion,
Leiris sees at the bottom of it a fear of death, and admits that his turn
to poetry was a mutation of his rebellion against death: "I vaguely
hoped that the poetic miracle would intervene to change everything,
and that I would enter into 'eternity' alive, having conquered my
destiny as a man with the help of words" (Manhood, 126-27). When
Leiris passes from his rebellion (abruptly) to his taste for dress in the
sober, English style, and (briskly again) to his use of powder, he
reveals the convergence of his use of powder with his rebellion
against death:
Because my skin was frequently irritated by the razor, I had got into the
habit of powdering my face (and this since I was fifteen), as if I were trying
to conceal it under a mask and afford my person an impassivity like that of
plaster. This corresponded to a symbolic attempt at mineralization, a
defense-reaction against my inner weakness and the collapse by which I felt
myself threatened; I longed for some kind of armor, seeking to achieve in
my eternal personathe same idea of stiffness and rigidity which I pursued
poetically.'
When Leiris writes, then, in "Man and His Insides" of the use of
cosmetics as a gesture of defense against death, he speaks from
personal experience. He turns to cosmetics to deny his mortal body,
his eventual death. Poetry-like powder, asceticism and correct
dress-also serves Leiris's aim to deny his human frailty, to transform
his body into armor or stone.
In Aurora, Leiris dramatizes an impulse toward mineralization like
the one that motivates the use of cosmetics. Unlike his explanation of
cosmetics, though, Leiris's autobiography of Damocles Siriel does not
turn around a cheerful ruse for averting one's eyes from mortality,
but around a grim, inhuman approach to denying the inevitability of
death:
9 Michel Leiris, Manhood:A Journey

from Childhoodinto theFierceOrderof Virility,trans.
Richard Howard (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984; published in French as L'Age
d'homme,precedede "De la litteratureconsidereecomme une tauromachie"[Paris: NRF/
Gallimard, 1946]) 125-27; hereafter cited in the text and abbreviated as Manhood.Page
numbers refer to the English edition. The corresponding passage in the Gallimard
edition appears on pages 198-201.
'o Manhood,127. Simon places this interesting passage in relation to the larger theme
of mineralization in Leiris's autobiographies (Simon 56).
834 CHARLES PALERMO
I was always cruel, even as a child. I hated all men (pathetic creatures
barely fit for mating) as well as all beasts and plants, my only feelings of
affection being reserved for inanimate objects. The sight of a bearded face
sent me into a fit of rage. The only thing I liked about women was their
crystaljewellery. When I saw them naked, in order to arouse my desire I
had to imagine that they were statues-cold hard beings without viscera or
skin-and not the female variety of those sinuous little goatskin bottles,
full of sobs and ill-defined sensations, called men. Even my own body I
regarded with pure disgust and made use of any substance capable of
giving it the appearance of granite, often remaining motionless for hours
on end in the belief that this would to some extent enable me to become
more like a statue."l
Siriel continues explaining his passion for turning flesh to stone:
Day and night death hung over me like a mournful threat. Perhaps I strove
to convince myself that this minerality would enable me to elude it,
forming some sort of armour, and also a hiding-place away from death's
shifting but infallible attacks (rather like the one insects make out of their
own bodies when they feign death in order to ward off danger). Fearing
death, I loathed life (since its crowning achievement is inevitably death)-
hence my horror of all those monstrous human beings from whom I was
descended and who, being monsters themselves, never ceased giving birth
to yet more monsters, because any being, starting with myself, whose life
consists in waiting for death can be nothing other than a monster. (Aurora,
90)
Whereas, in "Man and His Insides," Leiris uses the mediator against
isolation (albeit only with provisional success), young Sirieljoined the
young Leiris in accepting the skeptic's isolation and thereby denying
death instead, by refusing his own place in the human order.
Understanding the place of human reproduction in Leiris's skepti-
cism is vitally important. As the passage of Siriel's autobiography that
I have just cited makes clear, there is something especially disturbing
to him in the continuous chain of human life (and death) that
reproduction forges. It's as if ordinary reproduction were a form of
death, in which offspring supplanted their progenitors at birth.
The complicated relationship of reproduction and death in Aurora
becomes clearer in light of one of Leiris's textual sources. Leiris
began Siriel's fictional autobiography under the influence of a story,
" Michel Leiris, Aurora, trans. Anna Warby (London: Atlas, 1990; originally pub-
lished Paris: Gallimard, 1946), 88-89; hereafter cited in the text and abbreviated as
Aurora.
M LN 835
"Cyril Tourneur," by the fin de siecle writer Marcel Schwob. ("Cyril

Tourneur" is one of the fictional biographies collected in Schwob's
Vies imaginaires.)'2 Tourneur has a lot in common with Leiris's Siriel,
including the desire to cheat death. Tourneur's plan is to fill the
world with his own children, ones he would father by his own
daughter, thereby "defy[ing] death" and "propagat[ing] himself like
a god on earth."'3 Leiris transposes the tactic in his journal, devising
his own imaginary evasion of death:
Our death is linked to the duality of the sexes. A man who was male and
female at the same time, and capable of reproducing alone, would not die,
his soul transmitting itself to his posterity without mixture. (Entry for
Monday, October 13, 1924, Journal, 69)
Leiris improves on Tourneur's scheme, at least insofar as he contrives
a means of reproduction that produces purer results-his method is
entirely "without mixture," whereas Tourneur's begins with mixture
in the conception of his daughter.
Siriel has his own version of the scheme. He writes his autobiogra-
phy and hides it in the "womb" of the temple he rules (every part of
which corresponds to a part of a woman). In doing so, he secures it in
a safe place to which (he assures his reader) he alone has access:
Twenty-eighth and last of the dynasty of Hierarchs, before abandoning this

sanctuary soon to be engulfed by the sea (leaving upon the frail barque to
whose nautical capacities I have confided [confie] my bones and my fate),
I leave this sheet of corrugated iron between two stones of the subterra-
nean womb, the key to which I alone possessed, and on this metal plaque
I have personally inscribed the story of my life up to the final catastrophe
which marks its close. (Aurora,88; translation slightly modified)
I take Siriel's action to be a sort of allegory of the plans Tourneur and
Leiris hatched for immortality. In this allegorical version of immortal-
ity via reproduction, the "seed" is Siriel's autobiography and the
mother will not dilute the father's self in transmission, since the
womb is stone and will deliver his soul unadulterated into a new
generation. Further, Siriel seems to hint at his determination to foil
death when he points out that he alone had a key to the hiding
place-as if he meant to come back to read his own life. In fact, the
12A fact Leiris revealed in a letter to Adrienne Monnier-see "A

propos d'Aurora:
une lettre de Michel Leiris," in Monnier's Souvenirsde Londres:petitesuite anglaise avec
une lettrede MichelLeiris (Paris: Mercure de France, 1957) 103.
13 Marcel Schwob, Vies
imaginaires,coll. "L'Imaginaire" (Paris: Gallimard, 1957) 144.
836 CHARLES PALERMO
passage I've just cited pairs Siriel's survival with his story's: in French,
confier has the same double meaning that "confide" has in English (to
entrust with knowledge or a secret or to entrust with an object or
task), so that when Siriel tells his reader that he has "confided" his
bones and his fate, he can be understood to construct an analogy
between taking flight (confiding his bones) and composing his story
for a future reader (confiding his account of his fate). That is to say,
Siriel implicitly equates his prospects for successful flight with his
story's chances of finding an audience.
Siriel asserts the identity of his survival with his finding a reader for
his story even more plainly toward the close of his autobiography:
I have written my story on this sheet of metal which in a few moments I will
conceal in the deep vault of the sacred womb, knowing full well that there
is only a very slim chance of its ever being discovered, but because I
nevertheless want to arrange for myself the possibility of a posthumous and
reputedly unhealthy pleasure (by thus delivering me in my very reality [en
me livrant [.. .] dans ma realitememe],perhaps, to a future reader) similar to
the pleasure I felt when on ritual feast days I would expose myself in that
outfit comprising a scarlet toque and a white silk corset with two stiffened
pouches which made me look exactly like the male sexual organ. (Aurora,
99; translation slightly modified)
Finding a reader would amount to being "deliver[ed] [.. .] in [his]

very reality" to a reader. A slim chance-just like the chance of his
bodily survival-but one worth taking for the "posthumous" pleasure
it might return. To die and yet be delivered from the womb in one's
"very reality" for a new, posthumous life-clearly, I think, we can
understand Siriel as planning to return both to and as his reader.
Such a plan seems obviously built upon and constructed to the same
ends as the schemes that Leiris hatched for his hermaphrodite and
that Tourneur planned for his progeny. 4 Siriel's reference to the garb
'4 The most provocative point of intersection between Hand's argument and mine
concerns the related themes of sex and communication. Hand notes that the reception
of Leiris's journals has proposed Louise ("Zette") Ieiris as the rhetorical addressee.
Against that tradition, Hand notes that the journal was also home to secrets of Leiris's
homosexual liaison with Marcel Jouhandeau, and further that that encounter (and
Jouhandeau's portrait of Leiris in XimenesMalinjoude) may have provoked Leiris to
begin the development of "Le Lycanthrope" that eventually produced the story of
Damocles Siriel. For Hand, this (and other facts about the importance of Leiris's
relationship with Jouhandeau) justifies claiming that "the homosexual apprenticeship
concealed within the Journal is more profoundly operative than those heterosexual
secrets of Lena or Louise which criticism is happy to endorse" and that it "persistsas a
negative grounding in Leiris's most accomplished work, underlying, for example, the
MLN 837
he wore on feast days, its resemblance to the male sexual organ, and
the kinship linking the act of self-display in which it figured with his
memoir's posthumous reception insist unmistakably that his autobi-
ography is to be taken as a form of reproduction. The major
difference is that Siriel's plan very clearly implicates a reader. It is a
writer's plan for immortality, not a father's.
Further, I want to say that it is (allegorically, at least) also a skeptic's.
That's because a skeptic will not accept what is not certain, and one
can only be certain about one's own experience. (What will count as
being certain and as one's own experience, of course, become
complicated questions for the skeptic.) So a skeptic's plan for
autobiography assumes that confiding one's story to the reader
depends on delivering oneself in one's "very reality"-that is, on
providing the reader access to one's own experiences.15 Siriel's
imaginative answer to this challenge is to make himself the posthu-
mous reader. Death figures the separation between selves that makes
autobiography into "confiding" (that is, communicating) one's story,
but his implicit intention to survive his flight to return to his womb
suggests that only he could accept the confidence without adulterating
the self he had entrusted to the vessel. What Siriel dreams of, then, is
what one might call prolonging oneself beyond death (which is to say,
beyond the limit of oneself, as though into another person or self)
through writing.'6
Death's importance in Aurora appears in other ways, too. Siriel
approaches death as the non-narratable event that it is-as a limit
that narration can only approach asymptotically. For example, Siriel
can say that he expects to die (and where and how he expects to die),
but he cannot (within the limits of autobiography) narrate the dying
resolute heterosexualization of L'Aged'homme's form, content and prefatory programme"

(Hand 147). I am struck by the intriguing possibility that Leiris's relationship with
Jouhandeau (and his appropriation of his portrait from Jouhandeau's work) may
underlie Leiris's recasting of Tourneur's plan for achieving immortality through incest
as a plan for subverting (hetero-)sexual reproduction by removing the woman and
substituting one's life story for one's progeny.
15 Simon puts the problem nicely: "Dans quelle mesure l'ecrivain peut-il s'assurer
que le langage qu'il saisit comme une perche qu'il tend vers un interlocuteur cache au
revers de la page n'est pas, quoi qu'il fasse, inp6entrable, puisque, par definition
meme, "interlocuteur" ne peut etre ici que l'image d'une parole bloquee?" (Simon
135).
16One might compare this dilemma to the story of the Corsican brothers, as told and
discussed by Stanley Cavell, "Knowing and Acknowledging," Must We Mean What We
Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976; originally
published by Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969) 251-53.
838 CHARLES PALERMO
itself.'7 The space of time between the moment he stops writing and
the moment he will die he must narrate in the future tense: "I have
written my story on this sheet of metal which in a few moments I will
conceal. [ . .]" This shift locates the act of writing in relation to the
writer's death as the two grow closer.
The narrator who opens Aurora (not Siriel) comes up against the
limits of narration in a way similar to Siriel's. In so doing, he helps
one see the relationship of the narrator to his skepticism, finally
putting the isolation of the writing self explicitly in terms of death. "I
have always found it more difficult than most to express myself other
than by using the pronoun 'I'-not that this should be seen as any
particular sign of pride on my part, but because for me this word 'I'
epitomizes the structure of the world" (Aurora, 53). The narrator
explains that the world is a screen of phenomena called forth and
sustained by his attention-or created and maintained by Fate for the
narrator alone. Either way, the narrator espouses a version of the
skeptical position-one specially suited to a narrator because in it,
narration internalizes skepticism by breaking the world up into a
voice (the pronoun "I") and, on the other hand, the objects and
events it calls into existence as it narrates. The narrator describes
narration as a set of "circumlocutions" for referring to himself, says
that the narration kills objects as it passes from one to another, and
concludes that that killing reflexively affects its narrator: "The death
of the world equals the death of myself" (Aurora, 53-54).
In its movement, the narrative voice becomes like another person's-
always becoming alien to itself, dead to itself. He calls "Death" a
"grammatical pitchfork which imposes its ineluctable syntax on the
world and on myself," a "rule which makes all discourse nothing but
17A pioneering essay on Leiris addresses the theme of death, which has since
received much attention-see Charles Juliet, "La Litt6rature et le theme de la mort
chez Kafka et Leiris," Critique 126 (novembre 1957); reprinted as CharlesJuliet, Pour
Michel I eiris (Paris: Fourbis, 1988) along with Juliet's "Rencontres avec Michel Leiris,"
originally published in L're des Vents3/4 (mai 1981).Juliet considers Leiris's preoccu-
pation with death as a preoccupation with the impossibility of dying-a view with which
I take my own claim (that death represented a horizon toward which writing, life, and
communication with the reader tend) to agree. Another important essay on Leiris
deserves mention in this context: Denis Hollier's "La po6sie jusqu'a Z" (in his Les
DepossMIe's [Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, Malraux, Sartre],coll. "(ritique" [Paris: Editions de
Minuit, 1993] 23-35; originally published in L'Ire des vents 3-4 [juin 1980]) names a
writing (of which Leiris's own work is exemplary) constructed around a miseen abime-
an emptiness at the limit of an infinite series, like a horizon at the work's center.
Hollier calls this writing cenography [cenographie], after cenotaph (a monument in
honor of a person whose remains are elsewhere) (25).
M LN 839
a miserable mirage masking the nothingness of objects."'8 The end of

the narrator's discourse on the narratological face of skepticism, so to
speak, coincides with his arrival in the land where the novel's
adventures will begin. There, his narration slips into the third
person-because on the island where the narrator lands, "the first
person singular is no longer of prime importance and I must grant a
voice to the dynamite of events" (Aurora, 55). The story continues
with a new chapter and a character who, like the narrator at the close
of the chapter I've been discussing, drinks a bottle of whiskey-the
marked continuity of the action implying a kind of identity between
the two selves. (I would also call attention to the fact that the
narrator's arrival takes the form of a ship landing on an island-two
isolated bodies coming into physical continuity.) But that continuity
opposes a discontinuity-the voyage ends and the narrator disem-
barks, and as he does, the "I" of first-person narration becomes the
"he" of third-person narration (the discontinuity that Leiris had
identified with death).l9
18
Aurora,54-see Barberger, and especially her chapter "Le Deuil de l'object," for
the development of these ideas in Leiris's later, autobiographical writings.
19Simon remarks on the
fluidity of identities in Leiris's autobiographies and
connects them to Georges Bataille's L'Erotisme, which is dedicated to Leiris (as L'Age
d'hommeis to Bataille) (Simon 52). Simon cites a passage from L'Erotismethat
unequivocally implies a deep parallel between the themes that preoccupied the two
friends: "La po6sie m&ne au meme point que chaque forme de l'6rotisme, a
l'indistinction, a la confusion des objets distincts. Elle nous mene a l'6ternit6, elle nous
mene a la mort, et par la mort, a la continuite: la poesie est l'eternite"(Georges Bataille,
L'Erotisme[Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1957] 30; cited in Simon 53).
Eroticism itself, as defined by Bataille, goes directly to the heart of the problem I've
claimed that Leiris addressed. See especially Bataille's remarks on the discontinuity
among persons, its relation to reproduction and communication, and the relationship
of both reproduction and communication to death, in the introduction and conclu-
sion (esp. 12-13, 276). Of course, L'Erotisme was written much later than Aurora,but
Leiris's friendship with Bataille dates to the mid-twenties and it's almost impossible to
think that the two writers were unaware of the thematic convergence my reading of
Leiris proposes. There is little record of sustained collaboration between Bataille and
Leiris before their work on Documentsin 1929, but one might see very close parallels
between Auroraand Bataille's L'Histoirede 'ceilof the same period, in which the fluidity
of identities is a marked feature. (Roland Barthes' classic 1963 essay on L'Histoirede l'ceil
points toward the kind of reading of Bataille's novel that would reveal its closeness to
Leiris's work as I understand it. See Roland Barthes, "The Metaphor of the Eye," in
Roland Barthes, CriticalEssays,trans. Richard Howard [Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP,
1972] 239-47.) Leiris wrote an essay for Documentsthat unites certain themes I'm
discussing with eroticism, and, further, does so in a way that lends itself readily to
comparison with Bataille's later formulation-see Michel Leiris, "Le 'caput mortuum'
ou la femme de l'alchemiste," Pleine marge 1 (May 1985): 117-25, presentee par
Jacqueline Ch6nieux; originally published in Documents 2.8 (1930). My thanks to
Stephen Melville for suggesting that I revisit Bataille.
840 CHARLES PALERMO
* * *
In the last paragraphs of his autobiography, Siriel's writing and his

death begin their final convergence. After constructing the boat that
will provide his escape from the mob that pursues him because he has
desecrated the temple in his charge (among his many other crimes,
all of which seem like consequences of his need to deny humanness
and his share in it), Siriel recovers the knife with which he has
committed his crimes and retires to the boat. He explains that he has
been in that boat seven days. And it is there that his tale passes him by,
leaving him in waiting and entering the prospective world of his plan
and of speculation: "From this moment it [the barque] became my
only-and probably my last-dwelling place: I have now been on
board for seven days and seven nights and am awaiting the imminent
equinox in order to execute my plan." When the next paragraph
begins, Siriel takes up his plan and the future tense. He explains that,
in two days, he will take advantage of the high water to flood the
temple. He will unleash the flood by prying apart the stones of the
seawall with his knife (Aurora,98-99).
Note that it is the point of the knife that will end the suspended
present and unleash the deluge that will flood the sanctuary and
carry Siriel off to presumed death-the denouement of the drama he
has been preparing. And Siriel's knife is worthy of the task-it is not
just a knife. In a passage that closely follows the last, Siriel explains his
plans for his knife:
As for my knife, the depository of the blood of several murders and the
instigator of this final tumult, I will treasure it because it alone will enable
me, when all my supplies are exhausted and my boat lost, doubtless for
ever, in the liquid swamp of the waves (for I am not unaware that it would
need an extraordinary stroke of fortune for this escape to bring me to an
accessible land), to elude death's vile enslavement by putting an end to my
own life, in a manner both geometric and majestic, the hilt of the dagger
sunk deep into my flesh forming an eternal cross on my heart ...
In witness whereof I sign my name as a man now assured, thanks to the
tip of an implement, of his ability to become immortal:
DAM()OCIS SIRIEI, (Aurora, 100)
Thus, by the end of this autobiography, the knife-which figured

centrally in his many crimes, his ultimate sexual experiences, and his
plans to breach the sea wall so as to flood the temple-becomes not
only the instrument of Siriel's suicide plan, but the guarantor of his
M LN 841
immortality. What is not clear, however, is whether the knife is to

become the guarantor of his immortality by serving as the means of
his suicide (inscribing the "eternal cross" [my emphasis] on his heart),
or by serving as the burin with which he engraves his story and his
signature.
Writing the autobiography (which Siriel specifically claims in the
opening I cited earlier to have incised himself on the corrugated
sheet) is the only one of his major undertakings in which he does not
explicitly attribute a decisive role to his knife. In fact, he doesn't say
how he incised the metal sheet, but his closing paragraph unmistak-
ably leads the reader to infer (if inconclusively) that he wrote and
signed it with his knife. It's as if he means to shut the reader out of this
moment or to incite the reader-with tantalizing ambiguity about the
instrument that will grant him immortality-to imagine the inscrib-
ing (or even to think of the inscription of the "eternal cross" on Sirel's
heart as that signature). Siriel draws together into a comparison, if
not into a sort of imagined identity, suicide and signature and places
signature beyond the reach of his autobiographical narration, just as
suicide (and death, generally) is beyond the reach of autobiography.
The signature stands for suicide and for Siriel-the-writer's transi-
tion to Siriel-the-anticipated-(posthumous)-reader, as well as for the
convergence of the writer's story with its writing. Leiris discusses the
impossibility of this latter, wished-for convergence explicitly in his
own, autobiographical writings, decades later:
Between the self that I am and the self that I write a [. . .] divergence opens
up: with these pages that drag and dig in, a reckless lead that the narrating
I [je raconteur]maintains on the eternal laggard that is the narrated I [je
raconte], pulled along by the course of events faster still today than
yesterday ...
If one possessed-like a Tibetan ascetic-the art of seeing oneself from
the outside as if one were not oneself, making one's written self-portrait
would remain illusory, if one understands thereby painting in his interior-
ity him who holds the pen in that moment and not another whom he
already knows only by memory when he outlines him on the paper.2
20 Michel
Leiris, Fibrilles,vol. 3, La Regledujeu, coll. "L'Imaginaire"(Paris: Gallimard,
1992; originally published, Paris: Gallimard, 1966) 220-21. For further elaboration on
this passage from Fibrillesand a discussion of related issues in Leiris's later autobio-
graphical writing, see Catherine Masson, L'Autobiographieet ses aspects thedtrauxchez
MichelLeiris (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1995) 59-60 and passim.
842 CHARLES PALERMO
What Leiris seems to ask for is a special kind of connection to the

consciousness (his own) that he means to portray. Indeed, by
imagining the separation of moments in his conscious life as though
it were the difference between distinct people, he repeats a theme he
has established elsewhere, of a limit like the horizon of a self (death,
sexual reproduction, or simply his separateness from other people),
which he then seeks to exceed.
But not to erase: it is not exactly the merger of the two selves that
Leiris seeks. The problem is not that the self splits in two-I take that
condition to be inherent in Leiris's view of autobiography and part of
its attraction for him. In fact, early in his career (around the time he
wrote Aurora and "Man and His Insides"), Leiris points to the split in
himself as an exalted moment in the enterprise of writing. Referring
specifically to keeping hisjournal (and mentioning again the Tibetan
monks' exercise), he says
it could put one on the path to discovery. What is required is a very
profound technique, analogous to the exercises that Tibetan ascetics
impose upon themselves. To accustom oneself to a certain multiplication
of consciousness, and to face one's heart as one ordinarily faces a tree or a
house. I get the impression, myself, of a kind of revolution that takes place
in me-of a turning movement in which my thought seems to describe a
semi-circle and thus stand face-to-face with itself. It is thus that words,
instead of working mechanically (psittacically), take on weight and color:
they move me and no longer count for me as words.
That is what it is necessary to be able to reproduce at will. (Entry from
early May, 1929, Journal, 138)
The separation between Leiris-the-diarist and his subject (his heart,
his thought faced with itself) permits Leiris to see himself as other,
and thus as available to become the subject of a literary work. These
two reflections on autobiographical writing represent the horns of
Leiris's dilemma: the je raconteur must separate himself from the je
raconte in order to treat the latter as an object of understanding; on
the other hand, that very separation means that the je raconteur can
never narrate his own life-he can only write biographies of past
selves. The problem duplicates the problem facing Damocles Siriel.
In fact, I am claiming that Siriel's suicide is a metaphor for the
horizon separating and joining the je raconteur with the je raconte: it
defines the limits of the two selves as well as their continuity.
But Siriel's suicide supplies the vehicle of more than this one
metaphor. The other gap Siriel's death figures, and which the
autobiography is meant to bridge, is that separating the writer from
M L N 843
the reader, through which, as I've already said, Siriel seems deter-
mined to prolong himself by returning to become his only reader. 21
I will return now to the theme of Leiris's (and Siriel's) skepticism
because I believe it can help us understand his desire to deliver
himself across the multiple horizon of writing.
* * *
I've said that Leiris struggles with skeptical doubts, such as might
be paraphrased by common examples like "How do I know the world
is 'real' and not just a screen of phenomena given me by my sense
perception?" or "How do I know that other people are 'real' like I am,
with minds, souls, etc.?"
The mediator Leiris appeals to in "Man and His Insides" links one
to nature and to other beings, but only by analogy-that is, by
suggesting a comparison between the self and the outer world or
other beings. But analogy (as Leiris implicitly concedes by calling his
pact with the mediator "imaginary") cannot supply the certainty the
skeptic lacks. Perhaps the mediator supplies the skeptic informa-
tion-in the form of points of comparison that might help him
construct an argument for his likeness to other beings-but skepticism
21 One
might also see the problem Leiris describes as a version of problems raised by
theory. For example, the notion that words are ideally transparent and "no longer
count [ . .] as words," but instead communicate experience immediately is a prime
target of Derrida's "Signature Event Context" (trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey
Mehlman, in LimitedInc. [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988; originally
published in Glyph 1 (1977)] 1-23) and its critique of a traditional account of
communication. Derrida's insistence that all utterances can be thought of as iterations
of previous uses of the words generalizes the threat of speaking "psittacically"(i.e., like
a parrot) that troubles Leiris and, presumably, leaves him no refuge from it. On the
other hand, one might call into question the account of meaning implicit in Leiris's
journal entry, according to which the meaning of an utterance is contingent on a
correspondence between what it says and the speaker's or writer's mental state. For the
difficulties attending the latter account of meaning, see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things
with Words(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962), Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels,
"Against Theory" (in Against Theory:LiteraryStudies and the New Pragmatism,W. J. T.
Mitchell, ed. [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985; originally published in CriticalInquiry8.4
[Summer 1982]) and (for an especially accessible version of his account of Austin,
against Derrida's) Cavell, "WhatDid Derrida Want of Austin?" in PhilosophicalPassages:
Wittgenstein,Emerson, Austin, Derrida, The Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory,
Michael Payne and Harold Schweizer, gen. eds. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) 42-65. I
would like to thank both Stephen Melville and Walter Benn Michaels for identifying
this passage in Leiris's writing as deserving of further attention-Michaels' remarks, in
fact, on an earlier, somewhat different version of this reading of Leiris's writings helped
provoke me to write the present essay.
844 CHARLES PALERMO
doesn't seek missing information. Despite conceding a thorough,

point-by-point correspondence between himself and another being,
the skeptic can still ask: "But what if he's not really human, the way I
am?" (or "What if he doesn't see green the way I do?" or "What if he's
really sad when he laughs and happy when he cries?").
The divergence of the je raconteur and the je raconte opens up the
same gulf that separates the skeptic from other minds, but the gap in
Leiris's case falls between the self who writes and the past self whom
he describes. The je raconteur no longer knows the je raconte in his
interiority, to formulate the problem in Leiris's terms. The past self is
as distant as another being, for the skeptic's purposes.
In Aurora, Leiris adds a future self, in the shape of a reader, to the
problem. By planning to make his pleasure in being read a "posthu-
mous" one and by linking his story's finding a reader (whom, as I've
argued, he meant to become) to his survival, Siriel constructs a plan for
imagining a special kind of reading. The plan responds, implicitly, to
a writer's skeptical worry that the reader (even if the reader is the
writer, returned to his own text) will not "know" him through his text
(that is to say, will not know his mind, his experience, his pain, his
intentions-will not know him in his "interiority"). The plan Siriel
devises aims at producing a kind of reading that will satisfy the skeptic
in Leiris by delivering the author in his "very reality," rather than as
another being, and by delivering the author to himself, rather than to
another person as reader. (This is what's at stake in his interest in
Schwob's Tourneur-Leiris finds there the makings of a plan for
transmitting one's self through writing. It's also what is implied in
Siriel's plan to lock the text in a place to which he alone has the key,
in his comparison of confiding his body and confiding his story, and
in the discovery of his story acting as the condition of a posthumous
pleasure.)
Posing the classic problem of "other minds"-even in the complex
transformations Leiris imagines-begins with positing that one can
only know other people in what we might call, following his model,
their exteriority. That is, we can see outer indications of the mental
states of others, such as a wince that indicates pain, but we can't know
that the presumed corresponding mental states really animate these
external indications (or, which is practically the same thing, we
cannot know what those presumed mental states are like). However,
when one poses the problem of other minds in its classic form, one
also implicitly advances the assumption that one's knowledge of
oneself is different from one's knowledge of others-in the sense that
M LN 845
one knows oneself with certainty, in one's "interiority." And while

there is, of course, a difference between being the person in pain and
being the person who sees the putative sufferer wince, the question
remains whether the privileged position (if one may describe it so) of
the person in pain really grants him the certainty the skeptic
demands (the certainty the skeptic wants to oppose to the knowledge
the rest of us can have of the sufferer's pain).
Siriel's version of Tourneur's plan for immortality leads him to
place the two kinds of understanding in comparison. The point of the
plan is to substitute continuity of self for the condition of communi-
cation between writer and reader. But since Siriel's plan shows that
past selves can be seen as a special case of the general class of other
minds, his scheme for posthumous pleasure has more the force of
questioning the superiority of personal continuity over reading than
of demonstrating it. Leiris's later reflection on the je raconteur and the
je raconte makes explicit the corollary: there is no self recent or
current enough not to fall victim to the problem of other minds.
As it turns out, then, there is nothing one knows in the way the
skeptic wants to know.22 When the skeptic voices a doubt specifically
about knowing other minds, it is only because that doubt has not yet
made its way far enough yet to undermine his certainty about his own
experience. But if skeptical doubt takes away all certainty (and not
just certainty about other minds or the nature of the world "out
there"), perhaps it is better to describe the skeptic's discovery as a
limit in oneself-a limitedness or finitude in being human-than as a
region of uncertainty beyond knowing. Siriel's deal-to renounce
22In this
part of my argument, I am following arguments of Austin and Cavell, as I
understand them. See Cavell, "Knowing,"and Austin, Senseand Sensibilia,reconstructed
from the manuscript notes by G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962) and
"Other Minds" in Austin's PhilosophicalPapers,2nd ed.,J. O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock,
eds. (London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), passim. See
especially "Other Minds," 90-97, where Austin criticizes the idea that one is infallible in
one's "sense-statements" (i.e. claims about immediate sensory experience). Cavell,
discussing more complex experiences, sums up the point I would like to advance in this
connection: "Atleast we can say that in the case of some mental phenomena, when you
have twisted or covered your expressions far or long enough, or haven't yet found the
words which give the phenomenon expression, I may know better than you how it is
with you" ("Knowing," 266; cf., Austin, "Other Minds," 112, n. 1). Also see Derrida,
where he extends the "graphematic" condition of language to "all 'experience"'
(Derrida 10).
I would also note that I am not the first to discuss Leiris's work specifically in
connection with Austin's. See Leah Hewitt, "Getting into the (Speech) Act: Autobiog-
raphy as Theory and Performance," Substance52 (1987): 32-44. My understanding of
Austin's work is very different from Hewitt's.
846 CHARLES PALERMO
one's humanity in the vain hope of gaining an exemption from the

limits of humanness-is Leiris's attempt to imagine the consequences
of his desire to refuse his humanity and escape humanness. But, to
renounce one's knowledge in order to preserve the hope of certainty
is a bargain the terms of which no one can live up to. Recognizing
that certainty is simply (or metaphysically) unavailable, and that
knowledge is available (even if it is always subject to the possibility of
error), is accepting one's humanity. Here is where Leiris's experiment
provides a lesson on what is called the "trap of historical reconstruc-
tion" or the error of seeking to recover authorial intention. The
"trap" lies not in seeking to know past experiences or other minds-
or, for that matter, in seeking to understand an author's experiences
or intentions. The trap is concluding that one cannot.
Thus the figures of continuity and discontinuity around which
Leiris's experiments turn might be expected to serve him ultimately
not as figures for what is known and what is unknowable, but as
metaphors for different stances toward objects of knowledge23-so
that, whereas the story of the je raconteur and the je raconte converts the
challenge facing the autobiographer into a special case of the
problem of other minds, the theme of continuity in Aurora that turns
the reader into a reincarnation of the writer is about extending
beyond its ordinary limits the "in here" that the naive skeptic takes to
be safe from skeptical doubt. The first example figures doubt about
one's knowledge of oneself as a discontinuity in personal identity.
23 One
might usefllly compare the difference between this continuity and disconti-
nuity to Austin's discussion of "being sure" and "being certain," respectively. See
Austin, "Other Minds," 92-93. Although he concedes that they are very often found in
combination, Austin contrasts the task of "being sure" ("Here, what I try to do is to
savourthe current experience, to peerat it, to sense it vividly" ["Other Minds," 92]) with
the task of "being certain" ("I am endeavouring to recognize the current item by
searching in my past experience for something like it, some likeness in virtue of which
it deserves, more or less positively, to be described by the same descriptive word: and I
am meeting with varying degrees of success" ["Other Minds," 92]). These two tasks are
not responses to different kinds of questions (such as, for example, questions about
objective facts, on one hand, and about sense-perceptions, on the other hand)-that's
the point. They are different hesitations one may make in response to questions about
one's experience. Which kind of hesitation one feels depends on where one's
confidence falters-in one's "memories and past discernment" (hesitation about being
certain) or in one's "current perception" (hesitation about being sure) ("Other
Minds," 93). Leiris's use of continuity (either physical continuity or continuity in time)
as a figure for knowing is his way of describing his feeling about or stance toward a
given object of knowledge (looking at a painting by Picasso, for example): his feeling
that understanding it depends on looking harder at it, rather than on turning from it
to seek (according to some code or system) its correlative among what one (already)
knows.
M LN 847
The second is more ambiguous: it can be read along with the first
example-as figuring doubt about one's own knowledge of oneself as
the unlikely prospect of Siriel returning alive to retrieve his story-or
it can be read as figuring a desired communication between the
writer and the reader (even if they're different people) as a continuity
of personal identity.
* * *
When physical continuity reappears as a metaphor in Leiris's essay

on Picasso, it should be no surprise that it figures Picasso's triumph
over isolation-that it emerges in praise of Picasso's realism, in which,
instead of "a distant panorama of phenomena," the beholder is given
reality to "touch" and "penetrate" ("Toiles," 26-27). And when Leiris
explains the shortcomings of critical writing on Picasso, he charges
the critics with missing a physical encounter with the painter. Leiris
says they "circle their subject" and that they don't "dare to approach
it except with savages' ruses" to foil the traps laid around the canvases
("Toiles," 24). Their reluctance to "[stand] toe-to-toe" with Picasso, as
Picasso does with the world, is their failure; they cannot share his
realism, but bring instead a sort of skepticism to their reading by
supposing that the paintings are ciphers to be decoded, rather than
manifestations of the world (and of Picasso) that call for a "direct,
free, spontaneous, naive" critical attitude ("Toiles," 24). This mistake
is especially typical of the Surrealists, who read Picasso's works as
symbols (rather than as the world itself, presented in a new evidence)
and therefore render him as a man in flight from reality.
In a passage near the close of his remarks on Picasso, Leiris brings
to a head his use of physical continuity as a figure for reclaiming the
objects of knowledge from skepticism:
Human limbs, human heads, human landscapes, human animals, human
objects in a human setting, that is what one finally, and despite certain
appearances, finds in Picasso. No one before him had so forcefully
affirmed, in the artistic domain, that which comprised his nature and his
humanity. Each new object, each new combination of forms that he
presents us is a new organ that we attach to ourselves, a new instrument
that permits us to insert ourselves more humanly into nature, to become
more concrete, denser, more alive. ("Toiles," 29-30)
Leiris describes Picasso's success as a metaphorical physical continu-
ity-a continuity that surpasses all limits to transform the world, and
in so doing seems to insist that it isjust a metaphor (if an apt one). By
848 CHARLES PALERMO
the same token, the breadth with which Leiris applies the metaphor
of bodily communication with the world suggests that he has taken up
a new attitude-more generous than Siriel's-toward the notion that
the limits of the physical self define the boundary between what is
knowable and what is mere appearance. In "Toiles r6centes de
Picasso," Leiris represents the self's boundaries as fluid, open to
extension by an art that "forcefully affirm[s]" the artist's "nature and
humanity."
The new attitude is also visible in the quotation-also from the end
of Leiris's essay on Picasso-that I used as an epigraph: Leiris says
that, at any given moment, his favorite painting by Picasso is the
latest. It is as if Leiris wants the reader to picture Picasso as a painting-
machine, continuously turning out new works. Leiris then positions
himself before that machine as he does before his own je raconteur-
seeking from it a representation that conveys the artist's experience
without loss of immediacy (one that conveys the artist in his interior-
ity). And here, that immediacy is figured not by continuity in space,
but by continuity in time.
Now, one might imagine that if Picasso's painting were to catch up
with Leiris's beholding, Leiris would share Picasso's relationship to
"ce qu'il avait sous les yeux ou en tete," and the dream of presence
would be realized. But it would not. Further, it is important to
remember that Leiris does not imagine the coincidence taking
place-to do so would mean forgetting the limits of humanness he'd
learned. And learning the finitude of humanness is what I've been
claiming for Leiris all along.
College of William and Mary

MLN Volume 120 Issue 4 2005 (Doi 10.2307 - 3840660) Charles Palermo - French Issue - Michel Leiris On Knowing

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MLN Volume 120 Issue 4 2005 (Doi 10.2307 - 3840660) Charles Palermo - French Issue - Michel Leiris On Knowing

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Michel Leiris on Knowing

Author(s): Charles Palermo

To one who asked me right now which one

Michel Leiris's 1930 essay "Toiles recentes de Picasso" opens by

treats things as familiarlyas it is possible to" ("Toiles,"25), and can do

Much recent work on Leiris engages, directly or indirectly, the issue

April 23rd [1982]

Clearly, Leiris credits Picasso with achieving-or, at least, with offer-

published until 1946-and then, perhaps, only as a show of solidarity

In an essay published in 1930 in the important dissident Surrealist

for example, or "a civilized person" in the throes of a particular vice-

9 Michel Leiris, Manhood:A Journey

"Cyril Tourneur," by the fin de siecle writer Marcel Schwob. ("Cyril

Twenty-eighth and last of the dynasty of Hierarchs, before abandoning this

12A fact Leiris revealed in a letter to Adrienne Monnier-see "A

Finding a reader would amount to being "deliver[ed] [.. .] in [his]

resolute heterosexualization of L'Aged'homme's form, content and prefatory programme"

a miserable mirage masking the nothingness of objects."'8 The end of

In the last paragraphs of his autobiography, Siriel's writing and his

Thus, by the end of this autobiography, the knife-which figured

immortality. What is not clear, however, is whether the knife is to

What Leiris seems to ask for is a special kind of connection to the

doesn't seek missing information. Despite conceding a thorough,

one knows oneself with certainty, in one's "interiority." And while

one's humanity in the vain hope of gaining an exemption from the

When physical continuity reappears as a metaphor in Leiris's essay

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