Roger Caillois and Claude Lévi-Strauss both spent the war in exile from France. Lévi-Strauss had done fieldwork in Brazil in the 1930s, but when he left France he went through Martinique and was detained in Puerto Rico before going to New York City. Caillois spent most of the war in Argentina – he was there when the war broke out, and was unable to return. They were in contact in at least 1942 and 1943 (letters in Odile Felgine, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roger Caillois…, pp. 109-17). Lévi-Strauss taught at the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York, alongside Alexandre Koyré, Henri Grégoire and Roman Jakobson, among many others. Caillois and Lévi-Strauss both contributed to the École Libre’s short-lived journal Renaissance – it published issue I in 1943 and the double issue II-III in 1944-45.
Caillois was a student and friend of Georges Dumézil, who would provide a lot of support to Lévi-Strauss after the war. But despite their linked lives and intellectual lineages they were to clash violently about Lévi-Strauss’s “Race and History” lecture for UNESCO. Lévi-Strauss’s text was first published in both French and English as short books in 1952, before later being included in his second Structural Anthropology collection. Lévi-Strauss’s piece is very dated today, but the general sentiment seems appropriate – different races cannot be simply compared, much less ranked, and ideas of progress need to be questioned rather than uncritically adopted. Rather than humanity climbing stairs, one step after another, it was more like rolling dice, sometimes getting a good score and sometimes not, new failures and past successes in an unsystematic pattern. Or, to take the example of the roulette wheel, two consecutive numbers might be quite common, but three consecutive ones is rarer, and more than that is very uncommon. Humanity is not advancing on a single path. Claims of superiority of one culture, or the ability to judge another from a privileged viewpoint need to be rejected. Most developments happen through contact between cultures, not internally to a single one.
Caillois’s critique “Illusions à rebours [Reverse illusions]” was published in La Nouvelle Revue française – a journal which was relaunched after the war and, to distance itself from its collaborationist past, was now La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française. Although Caillois principally wants to challenge the idea that development is random, there was a colonial viewpoint in his comments. He believed the West was more advanced, and could use that position to appreciate other cultures. Lévi-Strauss replied in 1955 in Les Temps Modernes, with “Diogène Couché [Diogenes asleep]”, a title mocking Caillois’s multi-lingual journal Diogène/Diogenes, also published by UNESCO. A briefer letter from Caillois and a response from Lévi-Strauss, “À propos de ‘Diogène couché’”, appeared in Les Temps modernes later that year.
Although the debate is mentioned in biographies of Lévi-Strauss and Caillois (i.e. Wilcken, Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 191; Loyer, Lévi-Strauss, pp. 404-45/316-17; Felgine, Roger Caillois, pp. 321-23, 377, 380), and in Pajon’s history of the Diogenes journal (pp. 134-35), the fullest accounts of the rivalry are Michel Panoff’s Les Frères ennemis and Thierry Wendling, “Une joute intellectuelle au détriment du jeu?” There is a discussion by Hugo Lopes Williams of the wider implications for Lévi-Strauss’s work on the Journal of the History of Ideas blog. Bernard Dionysus Geoghegan summarises the stakes well:
In an acid critique, French sociologist Roger Caillois suggested ethnography was not about playing games, like roulette, but about putting together pieces of a puzzle that was the total expanse of humankind. Lévi-Strauss’s 1955 retort to Caillois captured his discontent with traditional ethnographic museums. ‘There exists a major difference between roulette and puzzles [le puzzle]: In the former, play is never complete, while… in the latter every piece of the puzzle has its final place’. The human sciences could never produce a total archive of cultures, for they were defined by virtual relations—structures—rather than physical artifacts (Geoghegan, Code, p. 128; quoting Lévi-Strauss, “Diogène Couché”, 138).
The pieces by Caillois and Lévi-Strauss are the main sources for the positions in the debate, analysed by those secondary accounts. I’ve not been able to find many other primary sources. For example, there is a gap between March 1954 and February 1958 in the published Jakobson-Lévi-Strauss correspondence which therefore does not provide an insight into Lévi-Strauss’s personal reaction. (Pierre-Yves Testenoire adds one 1955 letter to the record, but it is not about this debate.)
A decade later Lévi-Strauss made a few generous remarks about Caillois’s book Pierres in a letter of 12 December 1966 (in Felgine, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roger Caillois…, pp. 115-17). When he was asked to give another lecture by UNESCO in 1971, entitled “Race and Culture”, he did not mention Caillois. This was a debate he was seemingly happy to let lie. This second UNESCO lecture was included in his The View from Afar collection, effectively the third volume of Structural Anthropology.
The final resolution was intended to be with Lévi-Strauss’s May 1973 election to the Académie Française. The ceremony was held in June 1974 and, as usual, was marked by two speeches. First, the newly elected academician would eulogise their predecessor in the specific chair, or fauteuil, to which they had been elected; and then an existing member would speak about the new one. Caillois had supported Lévi-Strauss’s election, which had not been straight-forward, and as a token of appreciation, Lévi-Strauss asked him to give the induction speech. He hoped that this would provide closure to the exchange. Lévi-Strauss told Didier Eribon in their dialogues that “the only way I could thank him was to give him the last word. He equivocated a bit, and then accepted” (Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, De près et de loin, p. 124; Conversations, p. 85).
But Caillois did not do what Lévi-Strauss expected. As his biographer Emmanuelle Loyer indicates: “The staid academic ritual was slightly unsettled by the striking speech, of high literary quality… that nonetheless included a scathing critique… of the man whose praises he was supposed to sing” (p. 636/497). As was the custom, the speech had been shared with Lévi-Strauss beforehand, and he wrote to Caillois in reply: “The style is superb, and I find it full of poetry, charm, and even joy, which is no small feat on such a tedious subject” (undated, early 1974, cited in Loyer, Lévi-Strauss, p. 636/497). However, he also indicated several points which he thought were misjudged.
Caillois died in 1978, and as far as I know was never questioned about the Académie française speech. Over a decade later, Eribon asked Lévi-Strauss about the “barbed comments” from Caillois. Lévi-Strauss said that his attempt at resolving the past had not worked: “Caillois took up his old grudge and gave a speech with an ending that had the grating effect you mentioned (the first draft was even more acrimonious)” (Lévi-Strauss and Eribon, De près et de loin, 123-24; Conversations, 84-85). The formal speeches were, as was usual, published together and are available online. Once in place, Lévi-Strauss used his position in the Académie to support the election of, among others, Dumézil, Fernand Braudel, Georges Duby and Pierre Nora. He and Dumézil also led the Académie’s resistance to feminine nouns for professions, which I write about here.
A copy of Caillois’s final speech is in Lévi-Strauss’s archives, along with the design of the ceremonial sword, the épée, the commission to fund it, details of investiture, lists of previous occupants of fauteuil 29 and other material (BNF 28150 box 218, folder 4). Press clippings relating to his election and investiture are in folder 3. Another archival find shed a little light on the process. Gordon Wasson – whom I write about here – and Roman Jakobson were both asked to subscribe to the fund for his épée. These individually designed swords, and the ornate green outfit, l’habit vert, are extremely expensive, tens of thousands of euros at today’s prices. It was usual that friends and colleagues would contribute to the cost. Wasson, who had made a fortune as a banker and funded a lot of Slavic studies research in the United States, asked Jakobson on 9 March 1974 how much would be an appropriate amount: “I wish to give enough but I do not wish to be conspicuous by the amount of my gift”. Jakobson replied four days later to say “it was a very luxurious and thus expensive sword”. He had given “$20 but have no idea whether it is too little or too much”. He added: “the whole business with the French Academy and its epee seems ridiculous to me, but c’est la France”.
References
Roger Caillois, “Illusions à rebours”, La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue française 24, 1954, 1010-24; and 25, 1955, 58-70.
Roger Caillois and Claude Lévi-Strauss, “À propos de ‘Diogène couché’” Les Temps modernes 111, 1955, 1533-36.
Roger Caillois, Pierres (1966) reprinted in Œuvres, ed. Dominique Rabourdin, Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2008, 1037-86.
Roger Caillois, “Réponse de M. Roger Caillois au discours de M. Claude Lévi-Strauss: Discourse prononcé dans la séance publique, le jeudi 27 juin 1974”, in Discours prononcés dans la séance publique tenue par l’Académie française pour la réception de M. Claude Lévi-Strauss le… 27 juin 1974, Paris: Institut de France, 1974, 19-38, https://www.academie-francaise.fr/reponse-au-discours-de-reception-de-claude-levi-strauss
Odile Felgine, Roger Caillois: biographie, Paris: Éditions Stock, 1994.
Odile Felgine, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roger Caillois, Jorge Luis Borges, Victoria Ocampo, Jules Superville, Georges Bernados, Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry et L’Ecriture en Exil, Chennevières-sur-Marne: Dianoïa, 2014.
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory, Durham: Duke University Press, 2023.
Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Correspondance 1942-1982, eds. Emmanuelle Loyer and Patrice Maniglier, Paris: Seuil, 2018.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et histoire, Paris: UNESCO, 1952, reprinted in Anthropologie structurale II, 377-422; Race and History, Paris: UNESCO, 1952; reprinted as “Race and History”, Structural Anthropology Volume 2, 323-62.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Diogène Couché”, Les Temps Modernes 110, 1955, 1187-1220; reprinted in Cités 81 (1), 2020, 137-68.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Race et culture”, reprinted in Le Regard éloigné, Paris: Plon, 1983, 21-48; “Race and Culture”, The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss, New York: Basic Books, 1985, 3-24.
Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, De près et de loin suivi de «Deux ans après», Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990; Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, trans. Paula Wissing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Hugo Lopes Williams, “Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Political Paradoxes of Structural Anthropology”, Journal of the History of Ideas blog, 17 April 2023, https://www.jhiblog.org/2023/04/17/claude-levi-strauss-and-the-political-paradoxes-of-structural-anthropology/
Emmanuelle Loyer, Lévi-Strauss, Paris: Flammarion, 2015; Lévi-Strauss: A Biography, trans. Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff, Cambridge: Polity, 2018.
Alexandre Pajon, “In Search of a Journal: Caillois and Diogenes”, Diogenes 40 (160), 1992, 113-43.
Michel Panoff, Les Frères ennemis: Roger Caillois et Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paris: Payot, 1993.
Pierre-Yves Testenoire, “Compléments à la correspondance Jakobson – Lévi-Strauss”, Acta Structuralica – International Journal for Structuralist Research 4, 2019, https://hal.science/hal-02455825
Thierry Wendling, “Une joute intellectuelle au détriment du jeu? Claude Lévi-Strauss vs Roger Caillois (1954-1974)”, Ethnologies 32 (1), 2010, 29-49.
Patrick Wilcken, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, London: Bloomsbury, 2010.
Archives
Papers of Roman Jakobson, MIT MC 0072, MIT Distinctive Collections, box 4, folder 31
Fonds Claude Lévi-Strauss, BNF 28150, Bibliothèque nationale de France, box 218, folders 3 and 4
Related posts
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Fondation Loubat lectures at the Collège de France: A Structural Analysis of the Wolverine in North American Mythology – 10 August 2025
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Dumézil and Benoîte Groult: the Académie française and the debate about feminine nouns for professions – 19 October 2025
Gordon and Tina Wasson, Slavic Studies in the Cold War, and the Hallucinogenic Mushroom – 23 November 2025
This is the 52nd post of a weekly series, which has been posted throughout 2025. Every Sunday I’ve posted short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm in 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.
