2019年8月11日 星期日

尤瑟納爾Marguerite Yourcenar 論卡伊瓦 Caillois, Roger 1913-1978.:Man, play, and games. The necessity of the mind :The edge of surrealism : a Roger Caillois reader




在圖拉真統治下版圖擴展到極限,占有帕提亞,亞美利亞,亞述和美索不達米亞,但他的繼承者哈德里安就顯得穩健謹慎,不再東征西討,他像我們古代也有築城禦蠻的想法,他不是建萬里長城,他構築哈德里安城牆,在萊茵河和多瑙河豎立屏障,抵抗條頓民族和斯拉夫民族入侵。法國現代聞名及作家尤瑟娜(Marguerite Yourcenar)就曾以哈德里安為主題寫成小說Memoirs of Hadrian 

Quotations

"Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle our soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the body's ecstasy. …Nailed to the beloved body like a slave to a cross, I have learned some secrets of life which are now dimmed in my memory by the operation of that same law which ordained that the convalescent, once cured, ceases to understand the mysterious truths laid bare by illness, and that the prisoner, set free, forgets his torture, or the conqueror, his triumph passed, forgets his glory".
"Like everyone else I have at my disposal only three means of evaluating human existence: the study of self, which is the most difficult and most dangerous method, but also the most fruitful; the observation of our fellowmen, who usually arrange to hide secrets where none exist; and books, with the particular errors of perspective to which they inevitably give rise."

Memoirs of Hadrian (Paperback)by Marguerite YourcenarGrace Frick (Translator) 
Mémoires d'Hadrien is a novel by French writer Marguerite Yourcenar describing the life and death of the Romanemperor Hadrian, who meditates on his military triumphs, love of poetry and music and his philosophy and his passion for his lover Antinous, capturing what Gustave Flaubert calls "the melancholy of the antique world." The book was published in France in French in 1951 and was an immediate success, meeting with enormous critical acclaim.



In 1950, Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick bought a house, "Petite Plaisance", in Northeast Harbor on the island. Yourcenar wrote a large part of her novel Memoires d'Hadrien on the island, and she died there in 1987



 
J. D. Spence (1974 )《中國皇帝:康熙自畫像》(The Emperor of China : Self-Portrait of K'ang-Hsi)吳根友譯,上海遠東, 2005














每篇法蘭西院士的就職演說,可能都是寶藏,深度比美諾貝爾文學獎演說的廣度。這樣說,有點misleading....




2019.8.11 瑪格裏特·尤瑟納爾 Marguerite Yourcenar的法蘭西院士就職演說,主要談Roger Caillois卡依瓦的作品。

  1. Roger Caillois, 1971–1978, essayist and sociologist
  2. Marguerite Yourcenar, 1980–1987, novelist and essayist
ロジェ・カイヨワRoger Caillois、羅歇 卡依瓦  1913年3月3日 - 1978年12月21日)は、フランス文芸批評家社会学者哲学者神話戦争遊びなど、多岐にわたる研究・著作をした。
In 1980, Yourcenar was the first female member elected to the Académie française. An anecdote tells of how the bathroom labels were then changed in this male-dominated institution: "Messieurs|Marguerite Yourcenar" (Gents/Marguerite Yourcenar). She published many novels, essays, and poems, as well as three volumes of memoirs.

『斜線』中原好文訳,思索社,1978
Roger Caillois (ロジェ・カイヨワ) : Obliques 1975
我們可以知道日本至少翻譯他的半打著作。

這位法國『不朽的』院士,wiki 的介紹竟說他最為人記得的是主編的UNESCO
雜誌和引進中南美文學到法文圈
Today Caillois is remembered for founding and editing Diogenes, an interdisciplinary journal funded by UNESCO, and Southern Cross , a translation of contemporary Latin American authors published by Gallimard that is responsible for introducing these authors to the French-speaking public.

以下是英文簡介,日本岩波有兩譯本:

1958年 『遊びと人間』(Les jeux et les hommes

Caillois' key ideas on play[edit]

Caillois built critically on an earlier theory of play developed by the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens(1938). Huizinga had discussed the importance of play as an element of culture and society. He used the term "Play Theory" to define the conceptual space in which play occurs, and argued that play is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for the generation of culture.
Caillois began his own book Man, Play and Games (1961)[4] with Huizinga's definition of play:
Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.[5]
Caillois disputed Huizinga's emphasis on competition in play. He also noted the considerable difficulty in arriving at a comprehensive definition of play, concluding that play is best described by six core characteristics:
  • 1. it is free, or not obligatory
  • 2. it is separate from the routine of life, occupying its own time and space
  • 3. it is uncertain, so that the results of play cannot be pre-determined and the player's initiative is involved
  • 4. it is unproductive in that it creates no wealth, and ends as it begins economically speaking
  • 5. it is governed by rules that suspend ordinary laws and behaviours and that must be followed by players
  • 6. it involves imagined realities that may be set against 'real life'.
Caillois' definition has itself been criticized by subsequent thinkers;[6] and ultimately, in spite Caillois' attempt at a definitive treatment, definitions of play remain open to negotiation.
Caillois distinguished four categories of games:
  • Agon, or competition. It's the form of play in which a specific set of skills is put to the test among players (strength, intelligence, memory). The winner is who proves to have mastery of said skill through the game, for example a quiz game is a competition of intelligence, the winner proves that it's more intelligent than the other players. E.g. chess.
  • Alea, or chance, the opposite of Agon, Caillois describes Alea as "the resignation of will, an abandonment to destiny." If Agon used the skills of players to determinate a victor Alea leaves that to luck, an external agent decides who the victor is. E.g. playing a slot machine.
  • Mimicry, or mimesis, or role playing Caillois defines it as "When the individual plays to believe, to make himself or others believe that he is different from himself." E.g. playing an online role-playing game.
  • Ilinx (Greek for "whirlpool"), or vertigo, in the sense of altering perception by experiencing a strong emotion (panic, fear, ecstasy) the stronger the emotion is, the stronger the sense of excitement and fun becomes. E.g. taking hallucinogens, riding roller coasters, children spinning until they fall down.
It's worth noting that these categories can be combined to create a more diverse experience and enhance the players interaction, for example poker is a form of Agon-Alea, Alea is present in the form of the cards and their combinations, but it's not the only winning factor; since Agon is present in the form of bluffing, making your opponent think you have better cards by rising the bet, therefore putting pressure on the other players and thus making it possible to win by having a card combination but winning by implementing the bluff skill.
Caillois also described a dualistic polarity within which the four categories of games can be variously located:
  • Paidia or uncontrolled fantasy, it's spontaneous play through improvisation, the rules are created during playing time. E.g. concertsand festivals.
  • Ludus which requires effort, patience, skill, or ingenuity, the rules are set from the beginning and the game was designed before playing time. E.g. the Chinese game of Go.
Caillois disagreed particularly with Huizinga's treatment of gambling. Huizinga had argued in Homo Ludens that the risk of death or of losing money corrupts the freedom of "pure play". Thus to Huizinga card-games are not play but "deadly earnest business". Moreover, Huizinga considered gambling to be a "futile activity" which inflicts damage on society. Thus Huizinga argued that gambling is a corruption of a more original form of play.
Against this, Caillois argued that gambling is a true game, a mode of play that falls somewhere between games of skill or competition and games of chance (i.e. between the Agon and Alea categories). Whether or not a game involves money or a risk of death, it can be considered a form of Agon or Alea as long as it provides social activity and triumph for the winner. Gambling is "like a combat in which equality of chances is artificially created, in order that adversaries should confront each other under ideal conditions, susceptible of giving precise and incontestable value to the winner’s triumph."[7]

Caillois' interest in mimicry[edit]


When Caillois worked with Bataille at the College of Sociology, they worked on two essays on insects in the 1930s: ‘La mante religieuse. De la biologie à la psychanalyse’[8] (1934) and ‘Mimétisme et la psychasthénie légendaire’[9] (1935) Caillois identifies "the praying mantis and mimicking animals as nature’s automatons and masquerades." He formulates "in his peculiarly naturalist fashion what it would mean to act and create without the intervention of the sovereign ego, that magnificent artifact of the modern West that surrealism and the avant-garde have taken such drastic measures to counteract." These articles "might read like two obscurantist entomological studies that, in a way some would describe as bizarre, try to contradict all evolutionary explications for animal cannibalism and mimicry. Their publication in the context of [the surrealist journal] Minotaure makes it possible to see them as the search for figures that evidence the possibility of intelligence without thought, creativity without art, and agency in the absence of the (human) agent."[10]



2017.10.15 讀



法蘭西院士就職演說  上海社會科學院,2006




圖書
Man, play, and games
Caillois, Roger, 1913-1978.
2001.












The edge of surrealism : a Roger Caillois reader
Caillois, Roger, 1913-1978.
2003.















圖書
The necessity of the mind : an analytic study of the mechanism of overdetermination in automatic and lyrical thinking and of the development of affective themes in the individual consciousness
Caillois, Roger, 1913-1978.
1990.

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