1In one of the most arresting sections of L'Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution), 1907, Henri Bergson proposes a general theory of “instinctual sympathy” through a highly disconcerting example. This example of sympathy appears in the chapter of Creative Evolution titled “Intelligence and Instinct,” in which Bergson draws on the writings of the entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre to describe the predatory habits of certain insects. Bergson focuses on a particular hunter wasp, the Ammophila hirsuta, which, “like a learned entomologist and a skilful surgeon,” stings its prey at exact points in the nervous system so as to paralyse but not kill it, in order to retain it alive for nourishment. Bergson’s close focus on such insects provides the detail of an evolutionary-based philosophy that proceeds from the microcosmic to a macrocosmic in a picture of Life as characterised by inter-species continuities rooted in shared origins. As Bergson explains: “Thus the instinctive knowledge which one species possesses of another on a certain particular point has its roots in the very unity of life, which is, to use the expression of an ancient philosopher, a ‘whole sympathetic to itself’” (Bergson 1998, 167). The significance of the wasp’s behaviour for Bergson is that it offers evidence that such habits have not been formed by the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which would suggest that the insect had knowledge, qua intelligence, of where exactly to strike its prey, but, rather, that the ability of the predator arises through an instinctual sympathy with its prey. Such a sympathy is clearly not understood in moral terms, as compassion, for example, and Bergson qualifies his use of sympathy as intended “in the etymological sense of the word” (Bergson 1998,173). Nevertheless, despite such a qualification, Bergson’s illustration of this instinctual sympathy creates one of the most strikingly affective images in Creative Evolution.
2The unnervingly evocative character of Bergson’s passage on predatory wasps reveals the influence of Fabre’s vivid and intimate descriptions of insect life. While hugely popular through the numerous series of his Souvenirs entomologiques (1879-1909), Fabre was also the favourite natural historian of the surrealists, who were particularly drawn to his lurid descriptions of the mating habits of mantids, in which the female mantis is depicted as a merciless femme fatale who devours the male mantis during coitus. What most especially interested the surrealists was that despite its decapitation, the body of the male insect continued to complete the reproductive act. At the same time that Bergson claims etymological neutrality for his term “sympathy,” he can be seen to have chosen this example from Fabre’s writings precisely for its affective power. Ethologists could doubtless cite other less visceral examples of an instinctual sympathy existing between different species. Bergson thus creates an extraordinary image of instinctual sympathy as a kind of perverse intimacy which arises from “the mere presence together” of predator and prey. This sympathy binds the “victim” and the predatory wasp, and “teaches it from within, so to say, concerning the vulnerability of the caterpillar”; both species “considered no longer as two organisms, but as two activities” (Bergson 1998, 174). Picking up on the curious combination of descriptive and affective here, Adam Lovasz has recently observed that “there pertains a queer type of solidarity between predator and prey” (Lovasz 2021, 160). Queer indeed, in the pre-20th-century etymological sense of the term.
3There is nothing to imply in Creative Evolution that Bergson’s curious choice of image was part of a broader stylistic intention to shock readers or to present nature in a ghoulish hue. Nonetheless, the historian of psychoanalysis and Deleuze scholar, Christian Kerslake identifies Bergson’s startling example of instinct as weirdly conspicuous (Kerslake 2007, 62). Describing what he calls the “gothic beauty of Bergson’s nightmarish and florid vision of universal sympathy”, Kerslake (2007, 51) suggests that “Bergson’s theory of ‘instinctual sympathy’ – whose privileged example is that of the wasp which paralyses the caterpillar in order to provide its larvae with a living larder – is probably the most bizarre element in Bergson’s philosophy”. There is indeed something bizarre within this section on “The Nature of Instinct” in how Bergson undulates between examples of the manifold ways in which instinct is revealed. We are led from the image of the beak of a chick piercing its shell, to the relations of organisation between cells and body, bees and hive, all of which appear like variations on a “musical theme” originally “felt rather than thought” (Bergson 1998, 171-172), culminating finally in the ghastly image to which Kerslake alludes.
4Following these relatively harmonious examples, Bergson takes the reader suddenly from such vital images of feeling, of organised life, to a far more lugubrious example of instinct at work: “We get the same impression before the paralyzing instinct of certain wasps [that] lay their eggs in spiders, beetles or caterpillars, which, having first been subjected by the wasp to a skilful surgical operation, will go on living motionless a certain number of days, and thus provide the larvae with fresh meat” (Bergson 1998, 172). Bergson’s point with this diverse array of examples is to build a general picture of the divergent ways in which instinct goes to work, and his use of a startling juxtaposition serves to emphasise this point. However, despite the scientific levelling of tone through which Bergson conveys this vast continuity of instinct, it is, paradoxically, the juxtaposition of examples from honeybees and music to skilfully paralysing instincts which distinguishes this passage. In light of Kerslake’s observation, while Bergson’s “florid vision” might emerge from this chapter in Creative Evolution as more gothic than scientific, Bergson’s employment of a startling juxtaposition might reveal this section as less gothic and, in fact, more surreal. Arguably, it is precisely the shadow of the uncanny in Bergson’s thinking about instinct, about the ways in which instinct connects the seemingly unconnectable, that captures the imagination of the surrealist writer Roger Caillois (1913-1978).
- 1 In the mid-1980s, a group of art critics connected to the critical review October developed an inte (...)
- 2 Sarah Wilson has argued that Bergson’s ideas never left the creative current of mid-century French (...)
5Caillois is perhaps more generally known for his sociological works Le Mythe et l’homme (Myth and Man), 1938, L’homme et le sacré, (Man and the Sacred), 1939, and Les Jeux et les hommes (Man, Play and Games), 1958, and, later in his career, for a number of publications on the phenomenology of the imagination in relation to stones, such as Pierres (Stones), 1966, and L’Écriture des pierres (The Writing of Stones) 1970. In the context of studies of surrealism, Caillois’ most well-known texts present a comparison between the instincts of insects and human behaviour, myth, and pathology, which were published in Minotaure, a surrealist-dominated periodical which ran from 1933 to 1939. What is not so well-known is that both these texts, “La mante religieuse: de la biologie à la psychanalyse” (The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis), and “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire” (Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia) reveal a strong influence of Bergson’s ideas. Firstly, this can be identified in Caillois’ use of the model of the divergent evolutionary tendencies of instinct and intelligence represented respectively by insects and humans, which Bergson developed in Creative Evolution. Secondly, it can be recognised in Caillois’ adoption of the theory of the myth-making function as a virtual instinct which Bergson proposed in his 1932 book, Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion (The Two Sources of Morality and Religion). In Anglo-American scholarship, Caillois texts on insects have tended to be seen in the light of their relation to psychoanalysis. For example, Caillois’ text on mimicry has been seen to have influenced Jacques Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage, while both texts have been read in relation to the Freudian death drive, owing to Caillois’ insinuation of the biological grounds of compulsively self-destructive behaviour.1 In his text on mimicry, for example, Caillois defined glitches in the mimetic behaviour of insects as equivalents to a human tendency to self-dissolution, as defined by Pierre Janet’s term psychasthenia, and the depiction of this tendency in art, literature, and myth. Other than in the writings of Claudine Frank (Caillois, 2003) and Rosa Eidelpes (2014), the influence of Bergson on Caillois’ most well-known surrealist writings about insects has been overlooked. Reasons for this are mixed. On the one hand, it may be due to a historical assumption that Bergson’s influence had waned by the time surrealism developed, and, on the other hand, owing to a lack of interest in the more general status of Bergson’s thought and influence in the inter-war period. In the field of art history and literature, knowledge of Bergson’s influence has been a given in relation to, for example, Cubism or the literary modernist stream-of-consciousness and experimentation with temporality. However, outside strictly modernist fields of study – within which surrealism has never been contained – the relative absence of reference to Bergson may in part be due to a lack of familiarity with the philosopher’s work and influence.2
- 3 See the tract “Read and Don’t Read” published by José Corti in a catalogue of surrealist publicatio (...)
- 4 In histories of surrealism, Julien Gracq and Georges Sebagg have noted connections between Bergson’ (...)
6Bergson is barely mentioned in the history of surrealism. The most explicit references to Bergson appear in a 1931 polemic as a philosopher not to read and one condemned by the leader of the surrealist movement, André Breton, for his participation in French nationalistic propaganda during the war of 1914-18.3 However, given Bergson’s immense contribution to discourses on the experience of time, perception, the unconscious, memory, and dreams, non-ordinary states of consciousness and the critique of the limits of instrumental rationalism, there seems much connective tissue with surrealism.4 So many surrealist artists explored the complexities of time and memory, the fluidity of material morphologies, and the power of art and poetry to tap into a vital vein of creative energy freed from the confines of intellect and attention to utilitarian life, that – outside of the political context – connections to Bergson’s thinking might seem self-evident. For Breton at least, the political issue seems to have overshadowed any other possible points of convergence. As François Azouvi (2007) has argued, Bergson’s influence on younger thinkers had greatly waned by the time Breton established the surrealist group in 1924. I would argue, however, that this rejection of Bergson’s ideas can be seen as more of a disavowal, given, as Azouvi has suggested, that the surrealists had so much in common with Bergson’s historical concerns. According to Azouvi, if Bergson had not become such a figure of contempt for Breton’s generation, his ideas would have fed very clearly into the new critique: “The disavowal of logic, the appeal to unconscious forces, the omnipotence of dreams – all these watchwords of the new avant-garde would have come quite naturally under the invocation of Bergson” (Azouvi 2007, 304). It is, I propose, in the writings of Roger Caillois that this otherwise suppressed influence of Bergson comes to the fore. This is not strictly conveyed in terms of an irrationalism with which both Bergson and the surrealists have been associated. It more concerns the appeal of Bergson for developing an embodied sense of the human as necessarily constitutive of both intelligence and something else, be this understood as intuition or instinct, at work not only in the job of survival but also throughout human creativity.
7By highlighting such influences on a writer who was at the heart of an avant-garde movement that claimed to be hostile to Bergson, I aim in this text to offer a further example of the historical vicissitudes of Bergson’s ideas; influence being at the same time both disavowed by the surrealists and acknowledged in Caillois’ work. My intention in opening with Bergson’s example of the Ammophilia hirsuta is to show that the parallel between the writings of Bergson and Caillois concerns not merely Bergson’s vivid descriptions of disquieting insect behaviour but also the strategies of his writing, his way of relaying in a few paragraphs from one dimension of life, particular and close-up, to another more generalised or universal dimension, as well as Bergson’s skill (philosophical and poetic) in conveying the connections between one seemingly unconnected element of nature to another. As a surrealist keenly receptive to unusual or striking juxtapositions of seemingly distinct entities, Caillois was undoubtedly drawn to Bergson’s writings on insect behaviour as a most curious paradigm of not only instinct, but moreover a general instinctual sympathy running throughout the natural world: what Lovasz has called “the web connecting, in a solidary way, seemingly discrete animals” (Lovasz 2021, 161). It is thus Bergson’s curious combination of the lyrical and affective with the scientific, and his illustrative use of insects as avatars of general instinctual characteristics pertaining throughout organic life, which I believe comes to influence Caillois’ surrealist writings and thereby to embed Bergson’s work in an arena of avant-garde thought largely understood to have rejected Bergson. In what follows I will set out through close textual reading the grounds for Bergson’s direct influence on Caillois’ writings. I will look firstly at Bergson’s evolutionary model of instinct and intelligence and how Caillois adapts this for surrealist purposes – that is, to present human-insect relations in terms of an evolutionary uncanny. Secondly, I will show how Bergson’s theory of the fonction fabulatrice, the myth-making function, is axiomatic for Caillois’ thinking about myth and instinct, as well as his sociobiological conjectures about the role of myth in social cohesion and activism.
8In the basic sense of his interest in generalising relations between humans and other species, Caillois’ use of insects to explain fundamental organic processes and patterns of behaviour within nature at large has an established precedent in Bergson’s work. In turn, Bergson’s thinking in Creative Evolution and Two Sources is rooted in 19th-century studies on instincts, such as those of William Benjamin Carpenter, who, in his 1874 publication Mental Physiology, wrote about the two divergent tendencies of instinct and intelligence principally exemplified by insects and humans: “In fact, it would appear that Instinct culminates in the articulated series, and especially in the class of Insects; just as Intelligence does in the vertebrated series, of which Man is the highest representative” (Carpenter 1874, 57). Like the French entomologist Fabre to whom both Bergson and Caillois refer, Carpenter cites the praying mantis as an observable example of automatic behaviour in the insect world (Carpenter 1874, 55). Although instinctual, Carpenter nonetheless identifies this automatic category of behaviour as also underlying human experience. According to Carpenter, basic mental functioning in humans can also be defined in terms of automatism: “Our mental activity is, in the first instance, entirely spontaneous and automatic; being determined by our congenital nervous organization and by the conditions of its early development” (Carpenter 1874, 25). This correlation of instinct and automatism would be creatively explored in surrealism, notably along a Freudian register of the compulsions of Eros and Thanatos.
9Although Caillois showed an interest in the 1930s in the Freudian understanding of the unconscious, he was also drawn to this discourse on mental automatism, developed, for example, in the research of Georges Cuvier, Eduard von Hartmann and Conwy Lloyd Morgan, which can also be traced back to Arthur Schopenhauer, who, on reading Cuvier, observed in The World as Will and Representation that “insects are to a certain extent natural somnambulists” (Schopenhauer 1966, 344). Callois’ was clearly fascinated with this historical discourse – in which Bergson had engaged – on the relations between instincts in insect species and automatic or reflex behaviours in humans, described thus by the cultural historian of insects, Hugh Raffles: “In this late-19th-early 20th-century post-Darwinian moment of intense debate about the nature and origins of human and animal behaviour, instinct was a central, much-contested philosophical and empirical concept” (Raffles 2010, 60). In Creative Evolution Bergson develops his own highly evocative model of divergent tendencies in his depiction of evolution as the creative surging of life into and through different material formations. Nonetheless, his distinction between instinct and intelligence is thus not original but is embedded in psycho-philosophical studies of the 19th century. Moreover, his theory of the myth-making function in Two Sources can also be seen to have precedent in Carpenter’s work. In his Mental Physiology, for example, Carpenter (1874, 585) refers to two publications by Frances Power Cobbe from the early 1870s on the topic of “unconscious cerebration” in his description of a “myth-making tendency” within dreams which, according to Cobbe is continually “transmuting sentiments into ideas”. Carpenter asserts that this myth-making tendency “seems inherent in Human nature and […] ever and anon breaks out in some new form” (Carpenter 1874, 634). Bergson’s convergence of theories on instinct and myth-making can thus be traced back to broader debates within the late 19th-century concerning body-mind dynamics which, like Carpenter’s, brought together research on the instincts, automatic behaviour, dreams, and the imagination.
10In his two articles on insects and humans published in Minotaure, shortly after the publication of Bergson’s Two Sources, Caillois presented an analysis of how the instinctual behaviour of insects finds its evolutionary counterpart in affective psychological states and imaginative representations rooted deeply in the human psyche. Rather than merely an analogical leap, Caillois’ connection was based on the premises of evolutionary biology upon which Bergson had constructed his arguments in both Creative Evolution and Two Sources, principally concerning this distinction in the evolutionary tendencies of instinct and intelligence. In the second chapter of Creative Evolution, Bergson articulated this distinction thus:
[O]ne of the clearest results of biology has been to show that evolution has taken place along divergent lines. It is at the extremity of two of these lines – the two principal – that we find intelligence and instinct in forms most pure (Bergson 1998, 174-5).
11On the one hand, the line of intelligence is represented by the vertebrates, culminating in humans, and on the other hand, the line of instinct is represented by the arthropods, culminating in insects, in particular the Hymenoptera. In Creative Evolution and further developed in Two Sources, Bergson bases this model on an original, primal, organic state in which tendencies were nascent before they diverged:
[I]ntelligence and instinct are forms of consciousness which must have interpenetrated each other in their rudimentary state and become dissociated as they grew. This development occurred on the two main lines of evolution of animal life, with the Arthropodes and the Vertebrates. At the end of the former we have the instinct of insects, more especially the Hymenopterae; at the end of the second, human intelligence (Bergson 1935, 17)
12We know, however, that for Bergson these tendencies are never entirely independent of one another, with instinct and intelligence comingling to some extent even at the highest points of distinction (Bergson 1998, 97). Moreover, when establishing the different tendencies of human and insect in Creative Evolution, Bergson emphasises that, behind the evolutionary processes of divergence, lay an original state of unity. Evolutionary distinctions are thus haunted by a primeval image of undifferentiated life, and Bergson’s vivid image of an archaic evolutionary state of ontological indistinction conveys the interconnection of the human with other species within deep time: “Being, to a certain extent, one with this primitive ancestor, he is also solidary with all that descends from the ancestor in divergent directions” (Bergson 1998, 43). It is this ambivalent relation between humans and insects which Caillois exploits in his comparative writings on humans and insects, emphasising the uncanny sense that humans and insects somehow share instincts in spite of their evolutionary divergences. While the morphology of the mantis, for example, fascinated the surrealists for its android-like appearance, Caillois was more interested in searching for equivalences between function and behaviour in humans and the instincts of insects. In a 1960 publication Méduse et cie (The Mask of Medusa, 1964) Caillois set out his theory of “diagonal sciences” by which he proposed a trans-disciplinary approach to the study of humans in the context of the natural world at large to explore the “transverse factors in nature” (Caillois 1964, 15). These diagonal connections, Caillois wrote, “link together phenomena which at first sight seem to have no common basis”, and, Caillois proposed, construct the foundations of a new epistemological model:
They unite unexpected features in groups of things with apparently little in common but which obey the same laws, are subject to the consequences of the same principle and respond to the same challenge. The complex relationships of the process of an entire economy of life (in short, its ecology) will not be uncovered by naïve separate investigations, though a unifying principle will always be there, the same throughout. It is this principle which must be found (Caillois 1964, 15).
13Bergson’s theory of instinct in insects finding an equivalent in the virtual instincts of humans is key to Caillois’ thinking here. Looking at insects not from an entomological perspective but from an idiosyncratic combination of sociobiology, natural aesthetics, and anthropology, Caillois would explore how virtual instincts in humans can be seen to emerge through the imagination into phenomena such as myth, folklore, masks, disguise, ornamentation and the aesthetic tendency in general – an offshoot, he suggested, of “an autonomous aesthetic force in the world of biology in general” (Caillois 1964, 41). Bergson’s evolutionary metaphysics thus set the stage for Caillois’ epistemological ambitions in “diagonal science”, a guiding theme of the journal Diogenes which Caillois launched with the assistance of UNESCO in 1953.
14In Caillois’ mantis text, the parallel made between humans and insects pertains to the overcoming of the instinct of self-preservation by the sexual instinct in the male of the species. Caillois here finds a resemblance in both human behaviours relating to castration anxiety and an array of mythical and folkloric representations that would seem to crystallise this anxiety through the virtual instinct of the imagination. To illustrate this, Caillois gives different examples of imaginary representations he links to castration anxiety, such as the figure of the Giftmädchen or the vagina dentata, even connecting this dangerous alluring archetype to historical figures like Catherine the Great and to representations from contemporary popular culture of the femme fatale. One such is the female automaton played by Brigitte Helm in Fritz Lang’s 1928 film, Metropolis, who indeed enacts a very mantis-like pose in her famous dance-scene. Her doppelgänger character would dramatize the kind of collective representation that Caillois associated with mythical structures: on the one hand, Good Maria, the spiritual catalyst of social revolt and solidarity, and on the other Robot Maria, a seductive, chaotic and socially destructive archetype. Again, Bergson’s logic of myth as virtual instinct structures Caillois’ thinking about correlations between the insect and the human being. In this instance, concerning castration anxiety and the phantasms this produces found in myth and folklore, Bergson’s influence on Caillois is clear:
Castration anxiety would be a specification of the fear of being devoured. And because this fear may be considered the vestigial residue, in one species, of behavioural patterns observed in many others, it then has all the greater right to present itself as the original phenomena. In other words, I think that these questions should ultimately be resolved by biology (Caillois 2003, 81).
15With the method of “comparative biology” developed in his insect texts of the 1930s, Caillois takes his cue from Bergson, who, in Two Sources (1935, 43) claimed “we have the right to proceed like a biologist”, and whose evolutionary axis of instinct and intelligence enabled the kinds of comparative explanation of human behaviour and representations that Caillois pursued. Thus, although Caillois adopts the position vis-à-vis insects and humans that Bergson establishes in Creative Evolution concerning instinct and intelligence, the crux of Bergson’s influence comes from Two Sources, where he develops his theory of the myth-making function as a virtual instinct in humans.
16As a member of the surrealist group, Caillois was not unique in his fascination with insects and the automatic, instinctual behaviour associated with them, most notably the praying mantis. With its startling combination of theatrical gestures and rapacious mating habits, the insect came to fascinate the surrealists as one of nature’s affective counterparts to the compulsive and seemingly automatic character of human sexual instinct. The creature figures many times in surrealist visual art and writing, with examples being the poem, Ralentir travaux, written by André Breton, René Char and Paul Eluard in 1930, Salvador Dalí’s book The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus (c. 1934), Max Ernst’s painting La Joie de vivre (1936), and notable works by André Masson and Alberto Giacometti. For his part, Caillois was primarily interested in insects as exemplars of automatic behaviour that found a counterpart in folkloric and mythical representations. Not only did Caillois explore this parallel between nature and the imagination in relation to the mantis – as an avatar of the femme fatale – but throughout his career he also analysed mimicry and insect morphology as an instinctual counterpart to the recurrent fixation with disguise and invisibility, masks and intimidation in the myth-making imagination of humans. For Caillois, the instinctual, automatic behaviour of the mantis and mimetic insects “corresponds to something similar in man – to some obsession, some myth, some irrational but compelling belief or course of action” (Caillois 1964, 125).
17What Caillois essentially adopts from Bergson is a paradoxical image of insects which Bergson builds between Creative Evolution and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. This image depicts insects as a class of creatures which are, on the one hand, far removed from humans on the evolutionary trajectory of instinct and yet as startling and unexpected examples of evolutionary traits in which humans also share. Bergson’s theory in Two Sources of the myth-making function acting in humans as a virtual instinct, as an evolutionary equivalent of instinctual behaviour in insects, offered Caillois not only a striking leap of logic ripe for surrealistic appropriation but also the basis for a radical critique of human exceptionalism. Bypassing the biocentric human-animal image evoked by the evolutionary imaginary of other surrealists and contemporaries, Caillois seized upon the insect because it represented one of the most apparently distant natural classes to the human, thereby enabling him to exploit more exaggeratedly the uncanny force of resemblances. Caillois’ surrealist intent is quite far from Bergson’s in this respect. However, Caillois would share with the Bergson of Two Sources a sociobiological collapsing of the distinctions between nature and culture which would root a generalised sense of human creativity within the dynamics of instinct, rather than a realm of human intelligence beyond and above nature.
18Caillois’ writings in the 1930s arose from his dual position both within André Breton’s surrealist group and as a student, of grammar and philology at the École normale supérieur between 1933 and 1935 and, beginning in 1933, attending the lectures in comparative mythology and religious science of Georges Dumézil and Marcel Mauss at the École pratique des hautes études. His work at that time is notable for the intersection of scholarship and cultural critique with a strong sense of collective, socio-political imperative. This was manifest in his involvement in collective attempts to think through how to converge the study of myths and the sacred with their affective social reactivation in the face of fascism in the late 1930s. This approach, which Caillois scholar Claudine Frank has defined as “intellectual activism” (Caillois 2003, 17), was most apparent in Caillois’ role in initiating the idea of the anti-fascist intellectual collective, Contre-Attaque in 1935. It is also reflected in his establishing two years later the Collège de sociologie (College of Sociology, 1937-1939) alongside Georges Bataille and fellow former surrealist turned ethnographer Michel Leiris. Caillois’ use of Bergson’s theory of myth as a virtual instinct should be placed in the context of such sociological and anthropological interests. In doing so, however, it draws Bergson’s Two Sources into the orbit of a radical group of thinkers not typically associated with the philosopher who were, nonetheless, fundamentally concerned with an issue at the heart of Two Sources, namely the relations between society, myth, instincts, and emotions.
- 5 Throughout this text, the publication will be referred to in the French to emphasise that the book (...)
19This contextualisation aims to emphasise that, while certainly rejected by the younger generations, Bergson’s ideas were still being creatively appropriated or at least echoed within an element of the avant-garde. While Caillois’ use of Bergson is conspicuous within the context of surrealism, it was nonetheless fairly well veiled in his surrealist texts, only emerging more explicitly in his 1938 publication Le Mythe et l’homme,5 which was published four years after his resignation from the surrealist group. In an interview shortly before his death in 1978, Caillois stated that his intention in joining the surrealist group “was really to discredit the entirety of literature and to substitute it with a study of drives and instincts” (Caillois 1991: 147). It is in relation to this intention, then, that we should locate Caillois’ interest in Bergson’s thinking on myth. Bergson’ ideas, like those of Sigmund Freud, underpin Caillois’ attempts to re-route what might otherwise be understood as products of the imagination (literature and myth, for example) as arising from instinctual, biological processes. Although this logic follows a sociobiological reductionism, Caillois was adamantly anti-Darwinian in his views on the biological roots of socio-cultural phenomena and the need to “break the framework predicated on the struggle for survival and natural selection,” which he considers to be “too strictly and exclusively utilitarian” if not in fact simply an anthropomorphic projection upon nature at large (Caillois 2003, 346). “This attitude,” Caillois asserted in 1970 in “A New Plea for Diagonal Sciences”, “prompts one to greatly vary the principles of biological explanation and to assert that nature (which is no miser) pursues pleasure, luxury, exuberance, and vertigo just as much as survival” (Caillois 2003, 346). Caillios here proposed other motives just as pressing as survival, such as “profusion, play, ivresse, and even aesthetics,” and of course also placed great emphasis on myth as arising from biological sources.
- 6 The surrealist poetic method, as proposed by André Breton in his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, was (...)
20Caillois’ adaptation of Bergson’s ideas on myth and instinct from Two Sources was central in his development of a biological (but not racial) understanding of myth within the politically radical environment of the College of Sociology. In Le Mythe et l’homme, Caillois combined a Durkheimian perspective on myth as a supersocialising phenomenon with Bergson’s theory of the myth-making function as a virtual instinct. Following Bergson’s instinctual definition of myth, Caillois sought to define the nature and function of myth as biologically determined: “clarifying the different determinations (from the elementary laws of biology to those which, complex to the extreme, determine social phenomena) which contribute to make collective representations of a mythical character a privileged manifestation amongst the entirety of imaginative life” (Caillois 1972, 13). Thus, in Le Mythe et l’homme, Caillois explicitly employed Bergson’s notion of the fonction fabulatrice to argue for what he called a “biological conditioning of the imagination” (Caillois 1972, 83). While his provocative choice of comparative analysis – insects and myth – certainly draws some of its logic from a basic surrealist method (of juxtaposing two apparently distinct phenomenon to obtain a new lyrical perspective on reality),6 arguably, the assuredness of Caillois’ argument in these texts derives from the authority he affords Bergson’s claim in Two Sources that “mythology is a product of nature” (Bergson 1935, 114).
21One of the most conspicuous features of Caillois’ writings on myth is the comparison he makes between, on the one hand, instinctual behaviour in insects and, and the other, mythical representations and psychological complexes in humans. As already proposed above, this curious comparative approach is not merely an example of the surrealist logic of the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated phenomena. Rather, Caillois builds his surrealist texts on insects, and his chapters on insects and the function of myth in Le Mythe et l’homme, upon the Bergsonian theory of the fonction fabulatrice: the myth-making function as an evolutionary development and the origin of human fiction in general. Writing, for example, in “The Function of Myth” (the first chapter of Le Mythe et l’homme), Caillois clearly sets out the Bergsonian frame of his thinking. Arguing that myth must be studied from many different perspectives – i.e., biological, historical, social, psychological – to access its “fine-grained network of determinations” (Caillois 2003, 114), Caillois refers to the second chapter of Two Sources, specifically to the section titled “Myth-Making and Life,” when insisting on the biological grounding of his comparative method:
Comparing the most perfected examples of the two divergent evolutions in the animal kingdom (which respectively lead to man and to insects), it seems acceptable to seek correspondences between the two, and especially between the behaviour of the one and the mythology of the other. Particularly so if, as M. Bergson would have it, mythical representation (a quasi-hallucinatory image) is meant to provoke, in the absence of instinct, the behaviour that instinct itself would have triggered (Caillois 2003, 117).
22Bergson’s theory of the myth-making function derives from his model of the evolutionary divergence of instinct and intelligence: with insects paradigmatic of instinct and humans of intelligence. The myth-making function, however, has a certain ambiguous character, arising in humans from instinct but via intelligence, as Bergson writes: “For the pressure of instinct has given rise, within intelligence, to that form of imagination which is the myth-making function” (Bergson 1935, 138). The myth-making function in humans thus neither arises entirely from instinct nor is it entirely a product of intelligence: “We have said of this myth-making function that it would be wrong to define it as a variant of imagination” (Bergson 1935, 165). Bergson, therefore, distances myth from the imagination and defines it as a “tendency” closer to a form of instinct. In his inquiry into the origin of the myth-making function, Bergson concludes that it arises from a peculiar kind of instinct which he calls a “virtual instinct”:
[T]he tendency under consideration is an instinct, were it not that it is precisely in the place of an instinct that these phantasmic images arise in the mind. They play a part which might have developed on instinct, and which would actually do so in a being devoid of intelligence. Let us say for the time being, that it is a virtual instinct, meaning that at the extremity of another line of evolution, in insect societies, we find instinct automatically inducing a behaviour comparable, in its utility, to the behaviour which is suggested to man, being both intelligent and free, by these well-nigh hallucinatory images (Bergson, 1935, 90-91).
23Caillois employs this theory of the myth-making function as a key example of the biological origins of phenomena which might otherwise, within a humanist purview, be understood as cultural expressions. Caillois defined myth in such terms and was certainly drawn to Bergson’s sociobiological alignment of myth to religion, but he also considered art and the imagination in general as grounded in a biological and structural necessity of the mind rather than cultural contingency. Caillois identified in Bergson’s theory of the myth-making function as a virtual instinct a logic for thinking about the instinctual bases of the creative imagination in general, an approach he referred to as the phenomenology of the imagination. According to John Mullarkey (2007, 55), that Bergson understands the fabulating function in more general terms, and not solely in relation to myth, is in fact clear in the second chapter of Two Sources. Here, Bergson relates this function to “the reactions of man to his perception of things, of events, of the universe in general”: “clearly”, Mullarkey argues, “Bergson’s discussion of fabulation concerns more than just religion, for this faculty lies at the origin of fiction and a good deal of our more creative representations of the world.” This is precisely what Caillois extrapolates from Two Sources to develop his own thinking on the instinctual bases of fabulation, be it mythical, folkloric, or pertaining to psychological fantasies in the Freudian sense of neuroses, all having their roots in a quasi-instinctual faculty.
24Bergson’s theory of myth-making as a virtual instinct thereby enabled Caillois to argue for the need to approach the study of myth from manifold perspectives, including the biological. Given that Bergson considers the myth-making function as having at its base a religious end in promoting social cohesion, Bergson’s theory would also have bolstered Caillois’ sociobiological view of myth. In his writings on instinct, myth and the social, Caillois can thus be seen to respond to Bergson’s following appeal in Two Sources:
[M]ankind always presents two essential characteristics, intelligence and sociability […] They call, first of all, for a biological interpretation. Intelligence and sociability must be given their proper place back in the general evolution of life (Bergson, 1935, 96).
25Caillois’ Le Mythe et l’homme is structured around three chapters, i) the function of myth ii) myth and insects, and iii) myth and society. The influence of Bergson runs throughout, especially in terms of Bergson’s view in Two Sources of myth as a virtual instinct with a socialising function and of insects and humans as connected through their natural expression of sociability. Bergson asserts that “sociability” is found in nature “in its finished form at the two culminating points of evolution, in the hymenopterous insects, such as the ants and bees, and in man” (Bergson 1935, 96). Bergson’s influence on Caillois, then, can be understood in the double terms of the instinctual grounds of both myth-making and social life. Moreover, given Caillois’ sociological perspective, it is no coincidence that he would emphasise the dynamic instinctual relations of myth and the social which Bergson highlights in Two-Sources. It is Caillois’ surrealist perspective, however, which would lead him to emphasise the human-insect comparison in such startling ways, and I contend, to take Bergson’s strange example of sympathy as a model of startling convergences between human and insect life.
26According to the historian of psychoanalysis, Henri Ellenberger, Bergson borrowed the term fonction fabulatrice from Pierre Janet, suggesting that the concept is “perhaps not very different from what Frederick Meyers had called the mythopoetic function of the unconscious” (Ellenberger 1970, 355). For Bergson in Two Sources, myth-making developed in evolutionary terms in response to a very particular human problem: intelligence. Along the line of human evolution, instinct has been surpassed by intelligence as the dominant tendency within the species. Yet it is instinct, or a virtuality of instinct, which determines the social nature of the human species, which, Bergson says, “binds us to the other members of society” by a link which “is of the same nature as that which unites the ants in the ant-hill or the cells of an organism” (Bergson 1935, 67). This development of intelligence over instinct, Bergson supposes, led to a situation in which intelligence “threatens to break up social cohesion at certain points” (Bergson 1935, 98). What was required, Bergson proposes, was a “counterpoise” to intelligence:
If this counterpoise cannot be instinct itself, for the very reason that its place has been taken by intelligence, the same effect must be produced by a virtuality of instinct, or, if you prefer it, by the residue of instinct which survives on the fringe of intelligence: it cannot exercise direct action, but, since intelligence works on representations, it will call up ‘imaginary’ ones […] (Bergson 1935, 98-99).
27This, then, is Bergson’s explanation of the myth-making function: a virtual instinct that, through imaginary representations, counteracts the work of intelligence via intelligence itself, that is, through the imagination. The actual purpose of the myth-making function for Bergson is both to preserve social cohesion and to maintain human engagement in vital reality: “the vital impulse is optimistic” (Bergson 1935, 117) and without such optimism “man would feel himself lost in immensity” (Bergson 1935, 137). Fundamentally, the myth-making function is therefore a religious function, and “the first function of religion […] directly concerns social preservation” (Bergson 1935, 107). The function guards against the socially destructive tendencies of individualism, serving as a mode of progress unrelated to its technological manifestations (the proper realm of intelligence) and more understood as a movement of the élan vital. For Bergson, intelligence is a source of vital discouragement if not checked by (virtual) instinct, and thus the fabulating function is a “reaction [which] arouses within intelligence itself images and ideas which hold in check the depressing representation or prevent it from materializing” (Bergson 1935, 127). John Mullarkey has highlighted how, for Bergson, the disturbance of life caused by intelligence is compensated for by the formation of fictions:
The traumatic representation of death (and its depressive effects on our animal will to live) must be dampened by the formation of quasi-hallucinations, fictions, myths, and ultimately the whole panoply of religious symbolism which, at source, is a supplement from nature to compensate for the effects of this shock to thought. Myth, understood in the broadest terms possible, is a refinement of a proto-religious faculty of the mind to animate nature with intentions and actions (Mullarkey 2007, 56).
28Instinct in humans, then, is employed virtually by intelligence to restore balance through representations “evoked by instinct” (Bergson 1935, 115); the knowledge and fear of death being an exceptional endowment of human life and a clear source of its many myths and fictions. The myth-making function, understood in terms of religion, is triggered by nature in order to bind and enable the continuing route of the élan vital, which in Hymenoptera and humans necessarily takes on a social form. Bergson insists that “the social underlies the vital” (Bergson 1935, 98).
29In his writings on insects, myth, and society, Caillois specifically draws from Bergson an emphasis on the relationship between instinct and representation. In The Mask of Medusa, for example, Caillois echoes Bergson’s (1935, 91) definition in Two Sources of myths as “well-nigh hallucinatory” images, writing:
The life of insects is one actuated by instinct, by mechanical and inevitable responses to circumstances; that of man is one of imagination and, as a result, of freedom: a world where the individual has acquired the power to refuse immediate and blind response to a mechanical stimulus. Instinct does not act except through the interposed image. Certainly an image of this kind, full of potential power, is not without effectiveness: it fascinates, like, it has been said, a “developing hallucination” (Caillois 1964, 23).
30As well as the idea of fabulating as an evolutionary faculty, Caillois also adopts from Two Sources Bergson’s notion of the image as having affective, activating powers, which thereby compensate for the evolutionary waning of instinct in humans. For Caillois, the image or faculty of representing in general is rooted in instinct, hence his emphasis on its emotive and destabilising potential and his rejection of art or image-making in terms of disinterested aesthetics – a view common within surrealism. In Bergsonian terms, for Caillois fabulation has its origins in instinct rather than intelligence, and Caillois can thus be seen to exaggerate that element of ambiguity in Bergson’s evolutionary model of instinct and intelligence by which humans and insects are drawn into comparative analysis. Notably for Bergson, however pure the evolutionary lines manifest in insects and humans, neither is entirely separated from the other: “There is no intelligence in which some traces of instinct are not to be discovered, more especially no instinct that is not surrounded with a fringe of intelligence” (Bergson 1998, 136). While for Bergson “instinct and intelligence imply two radically different kinds of knowledge” (Bergson 1998, 150), it is in the blurred terrain between instinct and intelligence that Bergson would locate the fonction fabulatrice. Seizing on the uncanny implications of Bergson’s evolutionary model, Caillois exploits Bergson’s understanding that this evolutionary distinction is not absolute. Caillois thus follows Bergson’s evolutionary view that humans do not, then, act like insects because they share an instinctual trait, but instead of acting (because of the dominance of intelligence in humans) they represent. Caillois articulates this view, for example, in his 1935 text on mimicry:
[A]n instinct is produced by biological necessity. Or, failing that, the same necessity provides a type of imagination capable of filling the same role, that is, of triggering similar behaviour in the subject (Caillois 2003, 102 n. 39).
31In her study on Caillois’ sociological understanding of myths, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi has defined Caillois’ approach in similarly Bergsonian terms:
Relying on comparative biology, [Caillois] argued that humans and insects possess a common nature and that the same biological law governs them and determines their convergence. In the case of humans, however, laws do not condition action but rather representations: whereas the insect acts, Caillois wrote, humans mythologize (Falasca-Zamponi 2011, 149).
32What Caillois extrapolates from Two Sources is the implication that, at its most primal core – i.e., that expressed via myth - human imagination is less an outcome of intelligence and more a vestigial residue of instinct. Such a view would be formative in Caillois’ thinking about myth not as an aesthetic, poetic, or irrational phenomenon but, rather, as arising from the force of an internal necessity. Being both biological and psychological, this force is understood to impact upon individual and social life. “It is in effect”, wrote Caillois, “in myth that we can best gcrasp, most keenly, the collusion of the most secret and virulent individual psychic drives with the most imperative and most troubling pressures of social existence” (Caillois 1972, 13). While Caillois understood myth as a “privileged manifestation” (Caillois 1972, 13.) within imaginative life, it was most critically significant not in terms of the imagination per se but in what it revealed about the relations between biology, psyche, and society.
33In another study on Caillois’ work, Rosa Eidelpes (2014) has also underscored the influence of Bergson’s thinking on Caillois’ biologizing of myth. Eidelpes has proposed that the curious genre Caillois develops in the 1930s, mixing seemingly scientific study with highly affective and evocative analogies, can be read as “a hybrid between fiction and science, and in this sense as epistemologically productive” (Eidelpes 2014, 2). Eidelpes claims that Caillois turns away from the psychoanalytic reading of myths towards a biological one, seeing the myth-making function as a consequence of “basic animal instincts” rather than symbolizing intelligence. Caillois, Eidelpes asserts, “is significantly indebted” to Bergson’s notion of the myth-making function: “In assuming that there is an archaic, biological substructure of human fantasy, Caillois concurs with the theory of evolution outlined by Henri Bergson” (Eidelpes 2014, 4). In terms of Bergson studies, this influence of Bergson’s ideas within a milieu historically considered to have rejected the elder philosopher is worthy of recognition. In terms of studies of surrealism, it offers an insight into influences from contemporary philosophy which have largely been overlooked due to established views of the movement’s entrenched ideological principles.
- 7 See in this issue Tommaso Giordani on Sorel and Bergson. Claudine Frank has drawn attention to the (...)
34More a response to political turmoil in Europe than a strictly sociological endeavour, Caillois’ thinking at the College of Sociology considered how democracy had specifically faltered before the mythological structure of fascism and, therefore, that a greater understanding of myth might contribute to a counter to fascism. Bergson’s theory of the myth-making function as a virtual instinct presented Caillois’ with a biological basis for myth which in turn became the basis for a critique of the repression of instinctual energies within the political domain. In relation to myth and society, Caillois shared with Bataille and others at the College of Sociology a mutual interest in Georges Sorel.7 Caillois’ concerns in the 1930s with the problem of social and political cohesion under the threat of fascism provide the context for the appeal of Bergson’s formulation of myth as a quasi-instinctual buffer against socio-political dissolution.
- 8 With reference to Philip Knee’s analysis of the importance of the imagination in Jean-Jacques Rouss (...)
35In the chapter in Le Mythe et l’homme titled “Paris, a Modern Myth”, Caillois invokes the modern myths of the city provided by the 19th-century heroic literature of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, and Victor Hugo in promoting the possibility for the power of such myths to inspire contemporary society to collective action against fascism. The efforts of these writers, Caillois argues, “was clearly related to myth, which always involves granting the imagination a greater role in real life, in that, by its nature, myth is capable of inciting people to action” (Caillois 2003, 187).8 Caillois pointed to Balzac’s character Vautrin as an example of a hero who is “both a rebel and creator” (Caillois 2003, 185) – two features of what Michael Kelly identifies in Bergson’s model of the moral influencer in Two Sources (Kelly 2013, 78). In his study of Bergson’s text, Kelly discusses the importance for Bergson of the emotions activated within society into a contagious moral impetus. The affective emotions spread by heroic spiritual figures are central to Bergson’s model in Two Sources of creative evolution working beyond biology (i.e., reproduction). Through a rebellious resistance (of intelligence) to the pressure of obligation to social conformity (instinct), these figures push society forward through emotional agitation, as Kelly notes, “the motive to resist always stems from emotion” (Kelly 2013, 74). Representing the élan vital, such figures carry creative evolution forward as spiritually privileged figures imbued with “creative emotion and moral heroism” (Kelly 2013, 81). Bergson thus defined emotion as a vector within creative evolution for pushing societies onward from the static force of localised social obligation in the closed society towards the wider embrace of humanity represented by the open society.
36Behind Caillois’ fantasy of Paris in Le Mythe et l’homme, of an emotionally agitated, and morally directed, social effervescence in the face of fascism, thus lies Bergson’s image of the spiritual hero. This heroic figure is defined in terms of a dynamic between instinct and intellect, society and individual, whose energies arise from the élan vital to encourage an opening outwards of moral progress: “For heroism,” writes Bergson, “itself is a return to movement, and emanated from an emotion – infectious like all emotions – akin to the creative act” (Bergson 1935, 40).
37Kelly has highlighted the importance of different emotions within Bergson’s argument, on the one hand emotions prompted by an idea or representation – “it is the stirring of sensibility by a representation” – and on the other hand emotions which are “supra-intellectual”, arising from an “affective stirring of the soul” (Bergson 1935, 31). Arguably, Caillois utilises both of these forms of emotion in his formulation of myth in action, writing in “Paris, a Modern Myth” of a political “dramaturgy” oriented “towards exerting an effect on people through representations engendered by the very morphology of the society in which they live” (Caillois 2003, 188). Caillois thus emphasises the role of myth as a virtual instinct in his appeal to integrating modern myths into social revitalisation. The root of this idea can be traced to Bergson’s notion of the triggering of a counterpart to instinct that works via representation, as Bergson states:
Since instinct no longer exists except as a mere vestige or virtuality, since it is not strong enough to incite to action or to prevent it, it must arouse an illusory perception, or at least a counterfeit of recollection so clear and striking that intelligence will come to a decision accordingly (Bergson 1935, 101).
38It was Caillois’ invocation of a kind of collective political phantasmagoria which prompted a strong reaction from Marcel Mauss which included an attack on Caillois’ Bergsonism. In a letter to Caillois in June 1938, Mauss censured his student for the “complete irrationalism” of his Parisian myth and lamented how the text reflected “the influence of Heidegger, a Bergsonian who is lingering behind the times in Hitlerism, who is legitimizing Hitlerism, who is infatuated with irrationalism” (Caillois 2003, 338). Mauss evidently recognised the undercurrent of Bergson’s ideas running through Caillois’ proposition of deploying myth and emotional agitation within political action.
- 9 From Luis Pinto, Les Nerveux de Zarathoustra: la reception de Nietzsche en France. Paris: Seuil, 19 (...)
39It has been suggested, by Claudine Frank for example, that the political tone of Caillois’ writings from the later 1930s more reflect the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Baudelaire than Bergson. With reference to the writings of Louis Pinto concerning “the general shift from Bergson to Nietzsche as the dominant form of philosophical anti-intellectualism at this time”, Frank quotes Pinto’s view that: “heroic pathos seemed more attuned to the intellectual demands of a sombre period than were those cautiously optimistic lessons of wisdom proposed by [Bergson’s] Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion” (Caillois 2003, 385).9 While it is clear that Caillois, Bataille and others in the surrealist milieu oriented their thinking towards Nietzsche in the late 1930s, it is arguable that Caillois managed to extrapolate from Bergson anything but a cautious lesson, and perceived in Two Sources a rather Nietzschean spirit, in which spiritually privileged individuals propel society upwards and onwards, orchestrated around emotively affective representations, or myths.
40In this article I have detailed how Bergson’s Creative Evolution and Two Sources provide Caillois with a biological rationale for myth and fabulation and with a sociobiological basis for the social imperatives of myth and emotional activism. While Caillois’ views on deploying instinct and its virtualities for socio-political ends are certainly problematic, they also offer an insight into how the structures of combining representation and activism were perceived in the light of fascism in the late 1930s. The fact that Bergson’s ideas on the instinctual grounds of collective representations were formative in Caillois thinking around this dynamic opens up Bergson’s legacy to a historical terrain rarely connected to the philosopher.
41Thus, Bergson’s influence on Caillois’ radical and controversial socio-political views in the 1930s may open a perspective to Two Sources which has hitherto remained overlooked, namely, a connection of interests with Caillois and Bataille at the College of Sociology in the relations between myth, instinct, and society. According to Alexandre Lefebvre and Melanie White, Bergson’s Two Sources was written in direct engagement “with sociology, and, more specifically, with Émile Durkheim”, whose strict distinction between biology and society Bergson rejected (Lefebvre and White 2010, 458). The College of Sociology was Durkheimian at its core in its insistence upon the primacy of sacred dynamics within social life and followed Durkheim’s valorisation of collective life with a rejection of liberal political economics and individualism. Nonetheless, Caillois’ interest in collapsing biological and social distinctions ran against the grain of Durkheimian orthodoxy and much closer to Bergson’s thinking in Two Sources that human and non-human societies differ more in terms of degree and not kind.
42Moreover, with their interests in the figure of the mystic and the spiritual leader whose powers are understood as contagious, influencing via the force of emotion rather than obligation, the sacred-sociological concerns of Bataille and Caillois at the College of Sociology can in part be seen to align with Bergson’s narrative in Two Sources. This would especially concern the creative and liberating power of such figures, who pursue intuition beyond intelligence to transcend social and organic strictures. Curiously perhaps, the Romantic tendencies which run through surrealism to the College of sociology, which insist upon the vital importance of emotional influence upon political action, find an ally in Bergson in Two Sources. This would suggest grounds for further investigation into how Two Sources may have resonated with activist circles in the 1930s, and, indeed, how it may still speak to the question of emotional influence in socio-political concerns. Although Bergson’s intent in Two Sources is to offer a model of creative evolution that surpasses instinctual social constraints to attain ever more solidarity amongst humans, his emphasis on the power of affective and contagious emotion in society might today require a carefully qualified understanding in the light of historical and contemporary political discourse.
43While so much current interest in Bergson’s thinking has been renewed through the attentions of Gilles Deleuze, I would argue that, in the midst of deep anti-Bergsonian feeling amongst his peers in the inter-war period (as established by Azouvi), Caillois identified twenty years before Deleuze the significance of Bergson’s co-evolutionary thinking for overcoming the some of the critical problems of humanism. In the context of recent post-humanist critique, Elizabeth Grosz is one contemporary thinker who has discerned in Caillois’ preoccupation with those aspects of nature most apparently distant from the human (insects and stones) a precursor to contemporary anti-anthropocentric thinking. Caillois’ work, writes Grosz, “signals early anticipations of what might be considered a ‘philosophy’ or perhaps even an ‘anthropology’ of the post-human” (Grosz 1995,189). What I hope to have conveyed here is the axiomatic role that Bergson’s thinking played on Caillois’ thinking, in particular Bergson’s emphasis in Creative Evolution on the surprising character of instinctual continuities throughout nature and his theory in Two Sources of myth as a virtual instinct.