MLN

In the retrospective prefaces of L’Afrique fantȏme (1934), Leiris describes the change in “perspective” in his ethnography from the search for “communion” or “un contact vrai” with African society to the active defense of African anti-colonial movements as the most realistic form of intercultural contact.¹ The prefaces unequivocally state the necessity for this shift without explaining in depth the reasons behind it. Celia Britton offers an explanation through the Freudian concept of sublimation. Leiris, she argues, sublimates his earlier desire for fusion with the African other into the study of societies, like those of the French Caribbean, composed of multiple contacts with other cultures.² Her psychoanalytical reading finds support in Leiris’ insistence on the ethnographer’s personal involvement in fieldwork but underplays the conscious philosophical concerns underpinning his refutation of complete identification as a valid anthropological goal. That refutation stems less, I maintain, from frustration at not being able to fuse with [End Page 1009] the cultural other, as Britton proposes, and more from the closure that Leiris explicitly equates with fusion in Miroir de la Tauromachie.³

Reading Leiris’ ethnographic writings through the lens of Miroir, published three years after L’Afrique fantȏme, elucidates, I argue, the ontology and politics of his ethnography. Central to Miroir’s discussion of bullfighting is a relation between opposites that contradict one another while depending on one another. This aporia, I advance, informs Leiris’ ethnography, establishing an ontology of finitude whereby everything confronts otherness as both the condition and limit of its existence; nothing can therefore achieve completion. By connecting Miroir and the ethnographic writings, we understand how fusion is not an unreachable ideal that Leiris compensates with the study of intercultural contacts but is ultimately undesirable. If it were possible, it would destroy rather than consummate the anthropological relation, removing the space between self and others where reciprocity, mutual consideration and transformation occur.⁴ It would erase the social and cultural differences which ground anthropological research and would thereby defeat its purpose of embracing otherness. This suppression or exclusion of difference would recall the racist practices that anthropology seeks to attack. Leiris’ change in ethnographic perspective proves essential for his efforts to disentangle his discipline from colonialism with which it is historically and geographically linked, to make it serve the cause of global emancipation.⁵ The infinitely finite or constitutively unfinished quality of the subject/object relation, the impossibility of total identity, does not produce an imperfect ethnography unable completely to grasp its object of study but a dynamic mode of inquiry which contests the world order by unsettling rather than settling cultural identities and borders.

Leiris foregrounds the significance of Miroir when later interpreting the cultural clash of the French Caribbean through the aesthetic of bullfighting with its interplay between conflicting elements.⁶ Miroir [End Page 1010] posits the impossibility of complete unity as the condition of possibility of that interplay. It reflects on the themes of communion and contact through which Leiris interprets the change in his anthropological goal, emphasising how the pursuit of oneness proves counterproductive or, worse still, destructive.⁷ The death caused by total contact between torero and bull metaphorically shows how oneness would destroy the difference and separation which enables contact in the first place. Being one excludes being with; it blocks relation. Relating, we shall argue, depends on a state of “inachèvement obligatoire” (Miroir 37). The obligatory character of incompleteness means that finitude does not stand in opposition to the perfection of infinity; it does not represent a negative limitation marking an unobtainable wholeness.⁸ Instead, it indicates the fundamentally unfinished or permanently perfectible state of all things, the fact that everything is spatially and temporally situated and thus open to external influence, to alteration over time. It suggests a new understanding of realism not based on narrow empiricism but on the acceptance of the impossibility of fullness as the condition of life and growth.

My aim is not to claim that Leiris conceives anthropology in terms of bullfighting or to map the relation of...