Roger Caillois: Traversing Art and Science
An interdisciplinary conference
Friday 30 March 2007, 09.30 - 16.30, University of Essex
This conference brings together an international panel of speakers to
discuss the writings of the social theorist Roger Caillois (1913-1978).
Caillois’ involvement in the French avant-garde of the 1930s ranged from
his early association with Le Grand Jeu, to André Breton’s surrealist
group, and to the establishing of the College of Sociology with Georges
Bataille and Michel Leiris, and although he became a rigorous critic of
surrealism, Caillois’ approach to the fields of ethnography, sociology,
myth, psychology, biology, and poetry continued to be inflected with the
ideas that had been generated in the surrealist environs of this
turbulent decade. In his search for general laws that could be seen to
unite the seemingly disparate products of the imagination with social
and psychological structures and an apparent natural order – defined in
later years through the image of a chess board – Caillois’ studies
ranged from as diverse phenomena as the sacred, the spirit of play in
man and nature, the study of stones, folklore, and science fiction.
Taking as our starting point Caillois’ notion of a ‘diagonal science,’
we aim to reflect upon the multi-faceted character of his thought within
an inter-disciplinary context.
Speakers:
Ian James, Department of French, University of Cambridge, ‘A Question of
Form? Caillois and Klossowski’
Gary Genosko, Department of Sociology, Lakehead University, Ontario,
'The Obsolescence of the Bureaucratic Beyond: Caillois' Relocation of
Heaven and Hell'
Paul Hegarty, Department of French, University College Cork, 'Evolution,
Violence and Chance in Caillois and Bataille'
Tiina Arppe, Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki, ‘Caillois
and Bataille: The Affective Sacred and the Problem of Power’
Claudine Frank, Independent Scholar, Paris, ‘Secrecy and Exemplarity in
the Writings of Roger Caillois’
Donna Roberts, Department of Art History and Theory, University of
Essex, ‘Caillois, the “Natural Fantastic” and the Allure of Resemblance’
Gavin Parkinson, Department of Art History, University of Oxford,
'Caillois' Method, Dali's Madness, Surrealism's Physics'
Karel Stibral, Department of Philosophy and History of Science, Charles
University, Prague, ‘Darwin, Darwinism and Roger Caillois:
Between Usefulness and Beauty’
This conference is free but places are limited.
For further details and to book a place, please contact Emma Berry
Organised by Donna Roberts in collaboration with the AHRC Research
Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies
ref:
http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/