Roger Caillois

Roger Caillois (Reims, 1913 – Le Kremlin-Bicêtre, 1978) was a French writer, sociologist and literary critic whose essayistic work joined literature, sociology, poetry and philosophy. He is best remembered for his studies of play, but his thought also ranged over surrealism, the sacred, the fantastic, the mineral world and Latin American literature.

Caillois moved to Paris as a teenager and was drawn first to the Le Grand Jeu group and then to surrealism, which he left in 1934. He studied the sociology of religion with Marcel Mauss and comparative mythology with Georges Dumézil. With Georges Bataille he founded the Collège de Sociologie in 1937, an attempt to bring surrealist concerns into a more scientific register. His work on the sacred, The Man and the Sacred, argued that it holds society together through two poles: respect for the rule, and festive transgression.

In 1939 he went to Buenos Aires at the invitation of Victoria Ocampo and stayed in Argentina through the war, writing against Nazism. Back in France he founded the La Croix du Sud series, devoted to Latin American literature, and helped introduce Borges, Carpentier and Neruda to French readers. He worked for UNESCO from 1948 to 1971 and entered the Académie française in 1971.

His best-known book, Man, Play and Games (1958), sorts games into four categories: agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation) and ilinx (vertigo). His anthology of fantastic literature let him separate the marvellous from the fantastic. In his last years he turned to the forms of minerals, which he saw as echoing the figures of the human imagination.

His influence reaches into ludology, studies of the fantastic and the French reception of Latin American writing.