Ren� Daumal and the pataphysics of liberation

Abstract

Daumal's use of pataphysics is not, I would contend, quite as cosmetic as Torma suggests. Certainly it fulfils the same function as negation, and therefore might appear to be redundant. But the following passage stresses just how important the concept of humour is in Daumal's soteriology: En usant toujours de tels mots que negation, plus exacts peut-etre en leurs sens originels, je craindrais de laisser entendre cette operation comme un vain simulacre abstrait du discours, un vain scheme vocal. Et, pour tâcher que tu ne retombes dans le sommeil de ton ‘savoir’ philosophique, je dirai donc plutot, quand je parle bien du doute methodique, sarcasme ou derision methodique (T 41; Daumal's emphasis). Despite its heavily idealist overtones, therefore, Daumal's method relies far more on the provocation of the rational mind, than it does on the Hegelian Geist, the hypothesis of absolute consciousness. Humour is not just a Bergsonian social corrective for Daumal, a convenient critical tool with which to excoriate the absurdities of science, as it had been for Jarry in Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien.27 Nor is it just a protection against a hostile world, as Breton claims, following Freud.28 For Daumal, it is certainly the former, and could well be the latter; but it is more. It is a soteriological tool of self-criticism and humility, which, like acid, gnaws away at self-importance and self-satisfaction in the search for an authentic self untrammelled by the absurdity of bourgeois individualism. I shall leave the final word to Daumal, whose apparently gnomic Clavicule 3 from Le Contre-Ciel aptly summarizes in its playfulness the joyous rejection of the absurdity of the individual self: Recule encore derriere toi-meme ris: Le Non est prononce sur ton rire. Le Rire est prononce sur ton NON. Renie ton Nom, ris de ton NON (CC 26).