Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: the deaths of Michel Leiris
- PART I TEXTS AND CONTEXTS
- PART II THE QUEST FOR PRESENCE IN LA RÈGLE DU JEU
- 6 Excess of joy: the beginnings of presence in ‘ … Reusement!’
- 7 Organs of learning: sensing presence in Biffures
- 8 The act of union: being-in-the-world in La Règle du jeu
- 9 Thanatography: non-being as the limit of autobiography
- Conclusion: locating Leiris
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Organs of learning: sensing presence in Biffures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: the deaths of Michel Leiris
- PART I TEXTS AND CONTEXTS
- PART II THE QUEST FOR PRESENCE IN LA RÈGLE DU JEU
- 6 Excess of joy: the beginnings of presence in ‘ … Reusement!’
- 7 Organs of learning: sensing presence in Biffures
- 8 The act of union: being-in-the-world in La Règle du jeu
- 9 Thanatography: non-being as the limit of autobiography
- Conclusion: locating Leiris
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Biffures's beginning shows, then, how consciousness begins with the biffure of a pre-original biffure. Representation has to stabilize an absolute vertigo in order to bring into focus a point of origin for its own operations. The emerging into the light of an original, pre-expressive state of Being therefore involves a first, predetermining response to the potentially endless biffure of identity. It is this first response which the phenomenological drama of La Règle du jeu's opening then re-enacts in the child's response. Each of these responses is designed to promote or confirm presence, and turns the dark chaos of vertigo into the sublime ideality of ecstasy. In each of these responsive gestures, the biffure is given and becomes a first and meaningful moment. In order to conceive of autobiography's beginning, the preoriginal materiality of the biffure is therefore silently erased in favour of an original ideality of a visual, oral and aural coming into presence.
But as the original expression, ‘ … Reusement!’, has shown, the figures that are asked to operate from the beginning in a neutral and invisible manner in order to represent an original coming into oneself simultaneously throw up, in La Règle du jeu's configurations, a prefigural alterity within the immediate relation to itself of presence.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Michel LeirisWriting the Self, pp. 158 - 168Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002