He had always suspected that something might be founded on the basis of contempt, the French novelist Montherlant confessed in 1935, but it was only recently that he had come to realize what: morality itself. In an America intent on determining whether a conservative president's compassion is genuine or bogus, whether "compassionate conservatism" is an oxymoron or a redundancy, Montherlant's encomium of contempt may sound like words from another planet. For which reason few would be surprised to learn that he would shortly thereafter be vilified as a leading collaborationist writer—in Raymond Aron's view, "indisputably the greatest"—of Nazi–occupied France. What is more unexpected is that Montherlant's comments on contempt–based morality should serve as an epigraph in a programmatic essay by Roger Caillois, who would himself soon be one of the principal ideologues of the Gaullist resistance. When that essay, "The Winter Wind," appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1938, the editor soon found himself fielding queries as to whether the journal had in fact gone fascist. When it was reprinted during the war, in Mexico, at a time when Caillois was editing the Resistance periodical Les Lettres françaises in Buenos Aires, the art historian Meyer Schapiro wrote an article in the Kenyon Review on just how scarily "reactionary" postoccupation Gaullist France, if Caillois's essay was any indication, might prove to be.

There was indeed something scary about the young Caillois. Consider Walter Benjamin's interest in his 1938 essay "Aridity." It was written under the same impetus as "The Winter Wind" and appears to conjoin epistemology and politics, an almost structuralist celebration of the price an investigation purely "syntactical" might exact from semantic plenitude, on the one hand, and a "dialectic of involuntary servitude," the almost masochistic pleasures of submission, on the other. Caillois was a man of "very real gifts," Benjamin wrote Horkheimer in 1938, but there was something "repulsive" and ultimately "fascist" about him. His "quite extraordinary gifts," as Adorno called them, made him just the kind of Frenchman the Frankfurt crowd felt impelled to engage "inter pares," but at bottom, as Benjamin put it, he was, in the world of ideas, a Balzacian arriviste, a Rastignac who had decided to make it with the "Goebbels clique" rather than the oligarchy of the Faubourg Saint–Germain. That ambivalence generated the image of a depressingly muddied stream sprung from an extremely elevated source. And lest Benjamin's misgivings, indeed fear, of what Caillois represented be underestimated, note may be taken of the German's "strenuous" request to Horkheimer that his reservations about "Aridity" be published under a pseudonym out of nervousness that the well–connected Caillois might intervene personally to thwart his application, in 1938, for French citizenship.

The fact that the writings of Caillois in his early twenties (he was born in 1913) were attracting the attention of the likes of Schapiro and Benjamin, New York and Frankfurt, is an indication of just how nodal an intellectual figure he was. Indeed, one way of delineating his intellectual itinerary, whose principal stages Claudine Frank's rich and informatively annotated anthology would chart, is in terms of the number of no doubt more significant intellectual figures with whom it intersected. Caillois, who had an eye for the telling coincidence, may well have been the single most nodal figure of the French twentieth century.

There was, for instance, an early engagement with André Breton and the Surrealists, with whom he claimed to have broken over an exemplary conundrum: Given the mystery of Mexican jumping beans, is the more fruitful posture to break them open and dispel the enigma (Caillois's preference) or to respect the enigma and harness whatever imaginative possibilities it appeared to invite (Breton's position)? Then there was Caillois's founding, with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, of the Collège de Sociologie in 1937, a projected "secret society" of sorts intent on inventing an "active" or performative sociology, capable through its analyses of instilling a measure of "the sacred" in a democratic society gone lifelessly flat. Here, in one of Caillois's versions of the episode, his disaffection was dictated by a sense that human sacrifice (the murder of a consenting member of the group) was the fantasy—intent on not remaining a fantasy—that haunted many of Bataille's undertakings. It was Philip Roth who suggested in a recent novel that Bataille was the preferred thesis subject of every other with–it graduate student in French, and the fact that the significantly lesser known Caillois, Bataille's junior by sixteen years, served as his principal interlocutor during a seminal period of his thought offers some indication of his strategic situation in French letters.

Then there were those more indebted to Caillois than he to them. Caillois's essay on animal mimicry and the "derealizing" experience of space in the variant of depression that Pierre Janet called "legendary psychasthenia" became an important reference—in 1936—for Jacques Lacan's signature concept, the mirror stage. Benjamin's interest in (and fear of) Caillois has already been mentioned, but of the Frankfurt group, it was the influence of Caillois's essay "The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis" (1937)— an effort to link the "castratory" behavior of the female of the species with a key vector of human mythology—on Adorno that is most worthy of remark. Finally, there is Caillois the discoverer of Latin American letters. Invited to Buenos Aires just before the outbreak of World War II by Victoria Ocampo, grand protectress of the arts, he ended up spending the war there, founding Les Lettres françaises, and coming to know Borges, whom he translated and introduced to Paris. Indeed it was arguably Caillois's intervention on that front that achieved international prominence for the Argentine master.

What is odd about Caillois's nodal situation at the vanguard of intellectual life—between, say, Borges and Benjamin, Lacan and Adorno—is the extent to which it seems to coincide with the politically blemished early years of his career. For Caillois, in Frank's evocation, underwent a political sea change of sorts during his stay in Argentina. The vast wastelands of Patagonia, as "derealized" a relation to space as any the young polymath had written about, issued in a "humanist awakening." World War II had been a lesson in the downside of a contempt–based morality, and the fragility of civilization, rather than a "Luciferian" secession from it, became Caillois's guiding principle. Thereafter the essayist would become a prominent editor at Gallimard, a leading cultural bureaucrat at UNESCO, and the founder of the UNESCO–based journal Diogène.

The problem with Frank's vision of a humanist awakening is that Caillois himself may have become a significantly less interesting figure once he had left his politically questionable baggage behind. A member of the Acadèmie française and pillar of the establishment up to his death in 1978, he would become a virtuoso of the suggestive essay, a propagandist for what he called "diagonal sciences," epistemological zigzags, all that might be gleaned from observing "hidden recurrences" in an interdisciplinary expanse: "nothing in the part that is not present as well in the whole, and several times over rather than once, under concealed, disturbing, and almost inaccessible appearances, to be sure, occasionally situated at the extremities of the vast network, but in a state of perpetual correspondence and echo." Here was certainly a suggestive epistemology, grounded in a principle of analogy rather than causality. Indeed, Caillois's apologists, not without reason, have given an ironic deconstructive spin to the shape of Caillois's career. He whose glacial contempt–based morality disdained nothing so much as what he called the "impostures of poetry" ended up writing manifestos for a poetics of science. For the exacerbated analogism his later writings called for was nothing so much as a series of sketches toward just such a poetics.

There is, however, a less glorious take on the shape of Caillois's career, which has been captured in a chapter title of Michel Panoff's provocative study of Caillois's vexed relations with Lèvi–Strauss: "Entre Frèdèric Nietzsche et Monsieur Homais." For it is as though once Caillois gave up the Nietzschean posture of his contempt–based morality, with its will to band together in a Baudelairean posture of dandified disdain, he lapsed into a kind of superior philistinism. The principal documents here are his postwar excoriations of Kafka and Rimbaud and a general intolerance, which had been his from the time of his Surrealist engagement, for avant–garde writing. The will to offend the vanguard was, in fact, so plain that Lèvi–Strauss ended up coining the nickname McCaillois (on the model of Senator Joseph McCarthy).

Curiously, the decline into conformist homogeneity had been a motif that had been theorized by Caillois in his early period. If the joint secession of virile souls had been the program sketched out in "The Winter Wind," mimicry, which finds its ideal case in an animal's imitation of its environment, a propensity to conform to or fuse with decaying elements of its surroundings, marked the opposite pole. In "The Winter Wind" the tendency toward uniformity is thematized by Caillois alternately in terms of the pleasure principle, a crass will to enjoyment, and Carnot's second principle of thermodynamics—or entropy. So that the Nietzschean resistance to both was at once a move beyond the pleasure principle and an exercise in negative entropy. It was also an affirmation of virility in the face of an increasingly soft or feminized society. (Mimesis, as Denis Hollier has put it, was for Caillois already a form of castration.) Consider now that Caillois dates his liquidation of his earlier self to the wartime stay in Argentina, that his hostess, patroness, and sometime lover in Buenos Aires was the formidable Victoria Ocampo, and one has the wherewithal for casting her, within the strict logic of Caillois's personal myth or affective "ideogram," in the role of his own praying mantis.

Viewed in a positive light, Caillois's development would have been from a kind of Nietzschean stoicism to a form of epicureanism. On the one hand, it was a disdainful will to pull back from entropic nature with all its attendant vulgarities; on the other, the repeated affirmation that "man is not isolated from nature," that there is, for instance, a fundamental continuity between the gratuitous splendor of a butterfly's wing and the delights of abstract art. Man would be fundamentally embedded in the maze of "connivances," "echoes," "reflections," and "recurrences" it would be Caillois's "transversal" mission to construct. Whence the palpable delight of the author, late in his career, on the subject of the "natural fantastic": "My thought tries to seize [stones] at the ardent moment of their birth. I then experience a very special kind of excitement. I feel myself becoming a bit like stones. I liken them to myself by means of the unsuspected properties I sometimes attribute to them in the course of my speculations, which are alternately precise and lax, and which combine the web of dreams with the chain of knowledge."

Yet can the notion that "man is not isolated from nature," for all the excitement it elicits in Caillois, ultimately be separated from the thesis of his early essay on mimicry and "legendary psychasthenia"—that far from being vivifying, the merger of organism and milieu (through mimicry) is a principal manifestation of entropy itself? In Caillois's beloved Baudelaire, after all, petrification was an expression not of a dandy's liberating jolt (or Benjaminian shock) but of growing acedia or spleen. And that spleen, whereby the writer merges with his environment, is not a bad characterization of the mildly depressing philistinism (dismissing Kafka and Rimbaud) that had one of Caillois's postwar commentators, as we saw, cast him in the role of Flaubert's incorrigibly conformist Monsieur Homais. Thus man–inseparable–from–nature is marked both positively (epicurean dissolution into the maze of reality) and negatively (the very plight of the mimicking organism in the throes of entropy). To read Caillois is ultimately to gauge what is at stake in those twin valences. Which means, no doubt, figuring out all that Caillois has riding on the "objective ideogram" of the praying mantis and the voracious patroness who may have been its real–life avatar, Victoria Ocampo.

Claudine Frank, to whose informative commentary readers of Caillois stand deeply indebted, is less than successful in teasing out such issues. Early on in her introduction, she throws her hands up in apparent frustration: Caillois's oeuvre, she suggests, "stands as a beckoning enigma, a riddle. Is there an overarching unity? A key? Moreover, as readers [of her anthology] may find, each text, when read in isolation, seems lucid but almost meaningless. What's the point?" Frank never quite gets around to answering that question, ending her long introduction with the suggestion, de rigueur in some circles, that later Caillois should perhaps be read "as a counterpart to the 'dehumanized' free play of the poststructuralist signifier," or, more lamely, as a lesson concerning the "emotion of analogy."

The choice of texts is quite admirable. Many of the familiar essays are included, but there are fascinating and unexpected entries. Thus a summary of a lecture delivered in Buenos Aires in 1940 on the "Mechanization of Nihilism" evokes the very kind of (contemptuous and sadistic) secret society Caillois had been advocating in "The Winter Wind," and does so in the course of delineating the principal phases of a totalitarian regime. And there is a tantalizing fragment from a wartime piece published in Argentina in which the author seems virtually undecided as to which way to lean in the wake of France's disastrous defeat: "Let others say the yes we never pronounced. If their will desires to achieve the goal it pursues and grows through the obstacles it meets; if it grows through its victories, then, equally fed by triumph and defeat, these unified and pure beings will be graced and will suddenly gird the sword of the elect. We do not ask that they honor us; but we ask that, before condemning us as they should, if we were unable to precede or to follow them, they acknowledge that we recognized and dreamed them, that we defined their virtues, and that none of us mistook himself for one of them." For anyone interested in the enigma of Caillois's career the inclusion of such passages is a boon. There are, on the other hand, pieces evoked by Frank that one would have liked to see included—neither "The Winter Wind" nor the archly brilliant "Aridity" are in the table of contents, nor is the vitriolic address Caillois delivered to "welcome" Lèvi–Strauss to the Acadèmie française—but she has assembled enough little–known material by one of the more intriguing figures of twentieth–century French thought for this volume to deserve warm welcome from anyone interested in the byways of European intellectual history.

Jeffrey Mehlman is University Professor at Boston University and author, most recently, of Emigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940–1944 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).