Lautréamont

Gaston Bachelard is acclaimed as one of the most significant modern French thinkers. From 1929 to 1962 he authored twenty-three books addressing his dual concerns, the philosophy of science and the analysis of the imagination of matter. In 1939, the famous French scientist-psychologist-literary critic provides a virtual bestiary for depth psychology and literary criticism in his study of Isidore Ducasse, known by the pen-name Lautréamont and admired as a cult phenomenon by the Surrealists. Yet critics are often puzzled as to what to make of this book hardly nourished by contemporary poetry and literature, but also very close─in a critical way─to Bergson’s philosophy of time and action, Sartre’s phenomenology of embodiment and nausea, and Freud’s depth psychology of libido. Today, the influence of this book can be felt in the disciplines as cognitive sciences or neurobiology─namely in their redefinition of empathic and embodied sources of metaphoric creaction─and in the new debate on the gap between human beings and animals. The philological apparatus is by the editor.