According to Roger Caillois, play is "an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money." In spite of this--or because of it--play constitutes an essential element of human social and spiritual development. In this classic study, Caillois defines play as a free and voluntary activity that occurs in a pure space, isolated and protected from the rest of life. Play is uncertain, since the outcome may not be foreseen, and it is governed by rules that provide a level playing field for all participants. In its most basic form, play consists of finding a response to the opponent's action--or to the play situation--that is free within the limits set by the rules. Caillois qualifies types of games-- according to whether competition, chance, simulation, or vertigo (being physically out of control) is dominant--and ways of playing, ranging from the unrestricted improvisation characteristic of children's play to the disciplined pursuit of solutions to gratuitously difficult puzzles. Caillois also examines the means by which games become part of daily life and ultimately contribute to various cultures their most characteristic customs and institutions. Presented here in Meyer Barash's superb English translation, Man, Play and Games is a companion volume to Caillois's Man and the Sacred.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.

The Edge of Surrealism is an essential introduction to the writing of French social theorist Roger Caillois. Caillois was part of the Surrealist avant-garde and in the 1930s founded the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. He spent his life exploring issues raised by this famous group and by Surrealism itself. Though his subjects were diverse, Caillois focused on concerns crucial to modern intellectual life, and his essays offer a unique perspective on many of twentieth-century France’s most significant intellectual movements and figures. Including a masterful introductory essay by Claudine Frank situating his work in the context of his life and intellectual milieu, this anthology is the first comprehensive introduction to Caillois’s work to appear in any language. These thirty-two essays with commentaries strike a balance between Caillois’s political and theoretical writings and between his better known works, such as the popular essays on the praying mantis, myth, and mimicry, and his lesser-known pieces. Presenting several new pieces and drawing on interviews and unpublished correspondence, this book reveals Caillois’s consistent effort to reconcile intellectual rigor and imaginative adventure. Perhaps most importantly, The Edge of Surrealism provides an overdue look at how Caillois’s intellectual project intersected with the work of Georges Bataille and others including Breton, Bachelard, Benjamin, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss.

If you thought you knew all there is to know about Pontius Pilate and Jesus, this little book has some surprises for you. In this ""greatest story never told,"" Pontius Pilate finally gets a chance to tell his side of the story, filling in what the Bible left out. For someone who made one of the most momentous decisions of all time, we know almost nothing about him. Who was this man who sentenced Jesus to death? What went through his mind as he weighed the alternatives? Was he a villain or a victim of circumstance? If we can imagine Pilate as our contemporary, what would we have done in his place? Written by one of France's great men of letters of the twentieth century, ""Pontius Pilate"" is a highly provocative and psychologically gripping novel that reconstructs Pilate's state of mind in deciding to convict Jesus. Taking his place alongside the authors of other such ""sacred fantasies"" as Nikos Kazantzakis (""The Last Temptation of Christ"") and Dan Brown (""The Da Vinci Code""), the surrealist Roger Caillois conjures countless plausible dramas of the ""what ifs"" that might have played out inside Pilate's mind during the final twenty-four hours before he decided Jesus's fate. Transgressive, disconcerting, and original, ""Pontius Pilate"" provides a fascinating opportunity to contemplate the mind of a man who, with one decision, arguably changed the course of human history. It explores the interplay of politics and conscience, fundamentalism and cosmopolitanism, and fanaticism and pragmatism - themes even more compelling today than they were forty-some years ago when the book was originally published. With an introduction by the religion scholar Ivan Strenski, this new American edition of Charles Lam Markmann's original English translation (published in 1963 and long since out of print) makes available once again for the English-language reading public a remarkable work of intelligence, wit, and imagination. ""Pontius Pilate"" offers an engaging and climactic read for anyone interested in the interplay of religion and culture and in the mysteries of this pinnacle moment in the biblical narrative.