15 Facts About Roger Caillois

Roger Caillois was instrumental in introducing Latin American authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Miguel Angel Asturias to the French public.

Roger Caillois' efforts paid off: he graduated as a normalien in 1933 before entering the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, where he came into contact with such eminent linguists as Georges Dumezil and Alexandre Kojeve.

In June 1939, at the invitation of Victoria Ocampo whom he had met in Paris a few months earlier and with whom he engaged a close, life-long amorous friendship, Roger Caillois left France for Argentina, where the start of World War II forced him to stay.

Roger Caillois finds the time to conduct serious, personal research on a broad range of subjects and publishes widely, receiving increasing praise and recognition in literary circles: among his most notable books Les jeux et les hommes translated to English by Meyer Barash in 1961 as Man, Play and Games, Puissances du reve, Pierres, Cases d'un echiquier.

Roger Caillois died in Paris on 21 December 1978, aged 65, following a brain hemorrhage.

Today Roger Caillois is remembered for founding in 1952 Diogenes, an interdisciplinary quarterly journal edited in French, Spanish and English with initial funding by UNESCO and still published to this day.

Roger Caillois is widely cited in the nascent field of ludology, primarily from passages in his book Les Jeux et les hommes.

Roger Caillois built critically on an earlier theory of play developed by the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga in his book Homo Ludens.

Roger Caillois used the term "Play Theory" to define the conceptual space in which play occurs, and argued that play is a necessary condition for the generation of culture.

Roger Caillois began his own book Man, Play and Games with Huizinga's definition of play:.

Roger Caillois noted the considerable difficulty in arriving at a comprehensive definition of play, concluding that play is best described by six core characteristics:.

Roger Caillois focuses on the last two characteristics, rules and make-believe.

Roger Caillois' definition has itself been criticized by subsequent thinkers; and ultimately, despite Roger Caillois' attempt at a definitive treatment, definitions of play remain open to negotiation.

Roger Caillois described a dualistic polarity within which the four categories of games can be variously located:.

When Roger Caillois worked with Bataille at the College of Sociology, they worked on two essays on insects in the 1930s: 'La mante religieuse.