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A Genealogy: Play, Folklore, and Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Edmond Radar
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Extract

Games, festivals, folklore, a derivation of them, and artistic expression are manifestations of symbolic invention. To compare them is to bring out the differences in the order of the symbolic production and have, as a consequence, a differentiated perception of the way they function. It is also to put them into a perspective of filial relationship. In fact, a genealogy appears with the processes that regulate the passage from one to the other of these means of expression. Through the successive dissipation of structural stabilizations that are in turn play, festival and folklore, a generative order of complexity is established of which art, with its dynamics open to all expressive invention, is the end result. Finally, it is to discover at the end of the process the literary text, conceived as a work of art, surrounded by expression and preceded by it, appearing from then on according to one of the precepts of the theory of the text, as a production “of society and history” and as issuing from the social phenomenon in its entirety. “I am not only undertaking a study of a sociology of games,” wrote Roger Caillois. “My idea is to lay the foundations for a sociology beginning with games.” We would say of a sociology in which we would be permitted to glimpse the achievement of the task of explaining the entire social phenomenon itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 26 , Issue 103 , September 1978 , pp. 78 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes (Le Masque et le vertige), Paris, N.R.F., 1958.

2 Paul Valéry, Cahiers, Vol. I, Bibliothèque de la Pléiaqe, Paris, N.R.F., 1973, p. 915.

3 Mikel Dufrenne, Esthétique et philosophie, Collection d'Esthétique, Paris, Klincksieck, 1976, Vol. I, pp. 133-150.

4 Paul Valéry, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 1156.

5 Mikel Dufrenne, op. cit.

6 Iouri Lotman, Structures du texte artistique, Bibliothèque des Sciences humaines, Paris, N.R.F., 1973, p. 106.

7 Thus the festivals between working periods are carried over to military and religious festivals, as Georges Duby notes (Fêtes en France, Ed. du Chêne, 1977). But there are extensions: the military festival celebrates the return to the fields as well as the happy outcome of battles, and the religious festival elevates the agrarian calendar to the dignity of liturgy.

8 Jean Starobinski, Les Mots sous les mots (Les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure), Paris, Collection "Le Chemin," N.R.F., 1971.

9 Pierre Clastres, La société contre l'Etat, Paris, Collection "Critiques," Ed. de Minuit, 1974.

10 Roman Jakobson, Questions de poétique: "Le folklore, forme spécifique de création," Paris, Collection "Poétique," Seuil, 1973, pp. 59-72.

11 Marcel Jousse, Anthropologie du geste, Paris, Resma, 1969.

12 Louis Gernet, Anthropologie de la Crèce antique, Collection "Textes à l'appui," Paris, Maspero, 1968, p. 39.

13 Iouri Lotman, op. cit., p. 116.

14 Paul Valéry, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 836 and 926.

15 Jean-Pierre Bringuier, Approche de Claude Lévi-Strauss, O.R.T.F., May 20-21, 1977.

16 Iouri Lotman, op. cit., p. 36.

17 André Leroi-Gourhan, Préhistoire de l'art, Paris, Mazenod, 1965.

18 Iouri Lotman, op. cit., p. 29.

19 André Malraux, Le Surnaturel, Paris, Gallimard, 1977.

20 Mikel Dufrenne, op. cit.

21 Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, "Jamais un coup de dés n'abolira le hasard," Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris.