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The Man Who Saw Through Himself
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The Man Who Saw Through Himself

How Michel Leiris changed autobiography.

Opinion

When Michel Leiris died, in 1990, at the age of eighty-nine, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote, in Libération, that Leiris was “indisputably one of the great writers of the century.” That would seem to be a big claim, especially if the name Leiris meant nothing to you. What was so great about him? The anthropologist Aleksandar Bošković wrote, in 2003, that “there is perhaps no single figure that influenced so strongly French ethnology and anthropology.” This is one Leiris. But, Bošković wrote, Leiris was also an “artist, poet, writer, critic, traveller, surrealist . . . a true ‘Renaissance Man’ whose friends included Breton, Bataille, Giacometti, Picasso, Césaire, and Métraux.” This gets us closer. ...