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Pataphysical Essays
Pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions, of laws governing exceptions and of the laws describing the universe supplementary to this one. Alfred Jarry's posthumous novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, first appeared in 1911, and over the next 100 years, his pataphysical supersession of metaphysics would influence everyone from Marcel Duchamp and Boris Vian to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. In 1948 in Paris, a group of writers and thinkers would found the College of 'Pataphysics, still going strong today. The iconoclastic René Daumal was the first to elaborate upon Jarry's unique and humorous philosophy. Though Daumal is better known for his unfinished novel Mount Analogue and his refusal to be adopted by the Surrealist movement, this newly translated volume of writings offers a glimpse of often overlooked Daumal: Daumal the pataphysician. Pataphysical Essays collects Daumal's overtly pataphysical writings from 1929 to 1941, from his landmark exposition on pataphysics and laughter to his late essay, "The Pataphysics of Ghosts." Daumal's "Treatise on Patagrams" offers the reader everything from a recipe for the disintegration of a photographer to instructions on how to drill a fount of knowledge in a public urinal. This volume also includes Daumal's column for the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, "Pataphysics This Month." Reading like a deranged encyclopedia, "Pataphysics This Month" describes a new mythology for the field of science, and amply demonstrates that the twentieth century had been a distinctly pataphysical era.
Poet, philosopher, and self-taught Sanskrit scholar René Daumal (1908–1944) devoted himself to a lifelong attempt to think through death by means of what he called “experimental metaphysics”: an attempt to address metaphysical questions through scientific methodology. After co-founding the iconoclastic journal Le Grand Jeu and rejecting overtures from the Surrealist movement, he abandoned the literary path to become a disciple of the spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff.
Poet, philosopher, and self-taught Sanskrit scholar René Daumal (1908–1944) devoted himself to a lifelong attempt to think through death by means of what he called “experimental metaphysics”: an attempt to address metaphysical questions through scientific methodology. After co-founding the iconoclastic journal Le Grand Jeu and rejecting overtures from the Surrealist movement, he abandoned the literary path to become a disciple of the spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff.
136 pages, Paperback
First published March 25, 2012
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About the author
René Daumal
83 books188 followersRené Daumal was a French spiritual surrealist writer and poet. He was born in Boulzicourt, Ardennes, France.
In his late teens his avant-garde poetry was published in France's leading journals, and in his early twenties, although courted by André Breton co-founded, as a counter to Surrealism and Dada, a literary journal, Le Grand Jeu with three friends, collectively known as the Simplists, including poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. He is known best in the U.S. for two novels A Night of Serious Drinking and the allegorical novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing both based upon his friendship with Alexander de Salzmann, a pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff.
Daumal was self-taught in the Sanskrit language and translated some of the Tripitaka Buddhist canon into the French language, as well as translating the literature of the Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki into French.
He married Vera Milanova, the former wife of the poet Hendrik Kramer; after Daumal's death, she married the landscape architect Russell Page.
Daumal's sudden and premature death of tuberculosis on 21 May 1944 in Paris may have been hastened by youthful experiments with drugs and psychoactive chemicals, including carbon tetrachloride. He died leaving his novel Mount Analogue unfinished, having worked on it until the day of his death.
The motion picture The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky is based largely on Daumal's Mount Analogue.
William Walsh, an English poet, was a personal friend of Daumal and performed a radio presentation of Mount Analogue later in his life.
In his late teens his avant-garde poetry was published in France's leading journals, and in his early twenties, although courted by André Breton co-founded, as a counter to Surrealism and Dada, a literary journal, Le Grand Jeu with three friends, collectively known as the Simplists, including poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. He is known best in the U.S. for two novels A Night of Serious Drinking and the allegorical novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing both based upon his friendship with Alexander de Salzmann, a pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff.
Daumal was self-taught in the Sanskrit language and translated some of the Tripitaka Buddhist canon into the French language, as well as translating the literature of the Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki into French.
He married Vera Milanova, the former wife of the poet Hendrik Kramer; after Daumal's death, she married the landscape architect Russell Page.
Daumal's sudden and premature death of tuberculosis on 21 May 1944 in Paris may have been hastened by youthful experiments with drugs and psychoactive chemicals, including carbon tetrachloride. He died leaving his novel Mount Analogue unfinished, having worked on it until the day of his death.
The motion picture The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky is based largely on Daumal's Mount Analogue.
William Walsh, an English poet, was a personal friend of Daumal and performed a radio presentation of Mount Analogue later in his life.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
July 6, 2012
"Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments" Daumal quotes Alfred Jarry as saying. This means nothing to me. However, Daumal goes on to quote him saying this:
"It will study the laws governing exceptions," and that made so much more sense to me. Science in general is trying to come up with rules for the generalizing of everything. Pataphysics is the opposite. As a computer scientist (aka programmer), I have come up against this very conflict within myself. The scientist in me wants everything to be the same, homogenous, one big picture that works in every case. This is a dream for a programmer because it makes the job so much easier.
The hardest problems I've ever had to tackle as a programmer have always been those where exceptions creep in. And always there are exceptions! Why? Because computers do not work with computers alone, computers interact with human beings, who are prone to act irrationally and inconsistently.
But the other non-scientist/artist/writer part of me understands this and even celebrates the exceptions! The computer program should not define human behavior, it should yield to human behavior. It should become invisible in the face of the human. And exceptions make the human, because none of us are alike, i.e. each human being is irreducible ("The particular is absurd [...] The particular is revolting"). I think this may be why I'm attracted to writers who struggle with similar issues, writers like Musil and philosophers like Wittgenstein. And now René Daumal.
Speaking of Wittgenstein, Daumal's version of pataphysics reminds me a lot of Wittgenstein's language games (but with a more scientific and literary edge to it, rather than a math and logical edge):
I find this opening essay very intriguing because it wrestles head on with the forward dash of science. And instead of rejecting it outright or adopting it fully, it creates a third reality, one that assimilates science through a field of laughter into a parallel universe that makes us more human instead of less.
Not to give you the wrong impression, the essay on pataphysics is only a small portion of this book. The rest is filled with glorious pun-ridden prose-poem-like pataphysical particulars. It is almost impossible to explain or review this portion, but it is a pleasure to read:
"It will study the laws governing exceptions," and that made so much more sense to me. Science in general is trying to come up with rules for the generalizing of everything. Pataphysics is the opposite. As a computer scientist (aka programmer), I have come up against this very conflict within myself. The scientist in me wants everything to be the same, homogenous, one big picture that works in every case. This is a dream for a programmer because it makes the job so much easier.
The hardest problems I've ever had to tackle as a programmer have always been those where exceptions creep in. And always there are exceptions! Why? Because computers do not work with computers alone, computers interact with human beings, who are prone to act irrationally and inconsistently.
But the other non-scientist/artist/writer part of me understands this and even celebrates the exceptions! The computer program should not define human behavior, it should yield to human behavior. It should become invisible in the face of the human. And exceptions make the human, because none of us are alike, i.e. each human being is irreducible ("The particular is absurd [...] The particular is revolting"). I think this may be why I'm attracted to writers who struggle with similar issues, writers like Musil and philosophers like Wittgenstein. And now René Daumal.
Speaking of Wittgenstein, Daumal's version of pataphysics reminds me a lot of Wittgenstein's language games (but with a more scientific and literary edge to it, rather than a math and logical edge):
"pataphysical sophism is a proposition which brings into play syllogisms in a nonconclusive mode, but which become conclusive as soon as certain terms are changed in a manner that the mind grasps as quite obvious [...] the object of pataphysical knowledge is none other than the very law governing these changes [...] The reality of thought moves along a string of absurdities, which is true to the great principle that evidence cloaks itself in absurdity as its only means of being perceived. [...] Just as pataphysics as knowledge is the reverse and exact mirror opposite of physics, it probably can also have a powerful effect against attempts to streamline work when applied to the flow of production." (italics Daumal's).Ultimately pataphysics comes down to a game of language that twists perception beyond its limits. And when I say game, I mean it in the very consequential Cortázarian sense of play, or the serious almost spiritual element that Wittgenstein brings to his language games. Even the pataphysical laughter that Daumal mentions as a key component is a way of transcending an individual's consciousness: "The revelation of laughter will come to every man, but there will be nothing joyful about it [...] the obvious becomes absurd, light is a black veil and a dazzling sun slumbers, whereas my eyes do not."
I find this opening essay very intriguing because it wrestles head on with the forward dash of science. And instead of rejecting it outright or adopting it fully, it creates a third reality, one that assimilates science through a field of laughter into a parallel universe that makes us more human instead of less.
Not to give you the wrong impression, the essay on pataphysics is only a small portion of this book. The rest is filled with glorious pun-ridden prose-poem-like pataphysical particulars. It is almost impossible to explain or review this portion, but it is a pleasure to read:
2. ON INTELLECTUAL GELOIDS, PLUMS EXCEPTED
A projection on a horizontal plane of psychic activity, represented, for example, by A HUMAN FACE PHOTOGRAPHED AT THE PRECISE MOMENT OF PARAMNESIA, furnishes on a protoplasmic mass sensitized by potassium bichromate, after its solution and digestion by the aqueous medium of non-insolubilized salts, a sufficiently approximate image of the static intellect, in the best conditions of visibility. The odor, thanks to the idea of God, is pestilential.
April 22, 2012
Pathaphysics, the science of imaginary solutions, is a science made up by the writer Alfred Jarry. What may be a joke to some has become a life-time obsession for writers & artists such as Boris Vian, Raymond Queneau, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and etc. & etc. In many ways its laughter, but taken on an almost (anti) spiritual level. If its a joke, it's a type of humor to convey the absurdity of 20th Century life.
René Daumal a sort of Surrealist (who refused to join up with Breton & Co) and a man devoted to the spiritual side of life. He wrote two wonderful books - "A Night of Serious Drinking" and "Mount Analogue." And also self-taught himself Sanskrit language. So here's a young man totally obsessed with the thought of death and what happens afterwards. In many ways, Daumal is the perfect card carrying member of Pataphysics - because as a science it is not really there, and what's there is a spiritual essence of what is not explained. Nor can it be explained. So in other words a perfect medium for the Poet!
The publisher Wakefield Press, is one of the great small presses out there right now. Beautifully designed, well thought out, and just brilliant.
René Daumal a sort of Surrealist (who refused to join up with Breton & Co) and a man devoted to the spiritual side of life. He wrote two wonderful books - "A Night of Serious Drinking" and "Mount Analogue." And also self-taught himself Sanskrit language. So here's a young man totally obsessed with the thought of death and what happens afterwards. In many ways, Daumal is the perfect card carrying member of Pataphysics - because as a science it is not really there, and what's there is a spiritual essence of what is not explained. Nor can it be explained. So in other words a perfect medium for the Poet!
The publisher Wakefield Press, is one of the great small presses out there right now. Beautifully designed, well thought out, and just brilliant.
October 7, 2025
A flurry of interwar scientific development transmogrified into intelligent nonsense, informed by wordplay and current events as much as emerging theories of the universe and matter. Locus Solus anticipated it, the surrealists wanted it, for Daumal it seems almost effortless. Like Peret, try reading it aloud.
June 2, 2013
Science is the best straight man in the business, and René Daumal never misses an opportunity to deliver a completely mystifying punch line. The joke here is that all the set-ups are real, as the collection of his pataphysical essays are liberally footnoted (about 20 percent of the text is footnotes). Daumal knew his physics, and he had to, for as the founder of pataphysics, Alfred Jarry, wisely said, "Pataphysics is the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, whether within or beyond the latter’s limitations, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics." Daumal's leaps take us into the study of werewolves and ghosts. More grounded in the accepted science of the day are his "Pataphysics of the Month" columns for a French journal (bring that back and save print journalism!). He also offers an essay on the crucial element of pataphysical laughter to the equation. What's the equation? To know x = to know (Everything – x). It's the negative space. Paraphrasing Daumal, a hole is defined as the absence surrounded by the presence. Sure, I hardly understood a word of what I read, but how else can you know the whole picture?
June 25, 2021
‘The pataphysician’s laughter, whether deep and mute or shallow and piercing, is therefore the sole human expression of despair.’
Inverted thought, lycanthropy, green lungs external to the body, ghosts as an absence surrounded by presence. Daumal’s mysticism and pataphysical elaborations may leave your eyes burning and your brain concave, but a distinct taste will remain on your palette, that of laughter maybe?
Inverted thought, lycanthropy, green lungs external to the body, ghosts as an absence surrounded by presence. Daumal’s mysticism and pataphysical elaborations may leave your eyes burning and your brain concave, but a distinct taste will remain on your palette, that of laughter maybe?
August 9, 2025
Only because I grasped about 10%. But will be revisiting.
November 2, 2019
...the stuff of pataphysics is the "irreducible". Now the irreducible is what it is only through an effort at reduction—that is, an attempt at actual synthesis. The only attempt at actual synthesis I can know immediately is my own consciousness. So pataphysics carries awareness from an abstract and universal insight to an actual individual consciousness, that is, to a given potential for synthesis or to a given level of the mind's absorption of the world. —And so pataphysics will measure, in the various areas of knowledge, action, the arts, and human societies, the extend to which everyone is stuck in the rut of individual existence. And it won't be just for the fun of measuring! For in this light, spines will be shaken, and minds, tossed from laughing to sobbing between those parallel surfaces of sophisms, will mirror each other infinitely And suddenly despair will descend upon them. The way out will have to be found.
...
The revelation will come to everyone: that every form is absurd once taken seriously.
...
I believe that anything one takes seriously can take on the name "god". Everything can be taken seriously. If I adopt the attitude of the gentleman who doesn't laugh and I gaze upon the infinite detail of forms through his eyes, everything is god, every point in space, every instant of duration, every moment of consciousness is god.
Daumal proceeds with an appropriately eccentric hermeneutics of Faustroll and pataphysics. Dense, baffling, and wisely obscure, this booklet of aphoristic essays professes profundity and superficiality at the same time. For those who wish to find what they are looking for and for those who wish to find only contradictions.
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March 22, 2020It is not possible for me to rate this book. It is absurdly clever and wisely absurd. Those with a thing for language and science will enjoy themselves, if they are able to let go of rationalism. Those with a thing for the obvious and concrete will like it, if they can stay with the abstract and complex.
October 24, 2012
Fun collection of Dumal's essays on pataphysics, a sort of surreal mysticism, inspirted by Alfred Jarry. This was my first exploration of pataphysical ideas. This is a must read for anyone interested in dadaism, surrealism, and post-modern aesthetics.
September 25, 2023
i liked the parts about topology
December 29, 2024
Less funny than I'd hoped. The best bits are in the articles "Patapysics This Month" which appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française in the 1930s which commented slyly on contemporary science reports.
August 21, 2025
The science of imaginary solutions. This is crazy stuff but I liked most of it. Some of it left me five miles behind but the humor worked for the most part. The pataphysics of ghosts, the final essay, was terrific and I loved that so much.
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December 29, 2022"Pataphysics this Month, February 1935:
General catastrophic mood. The Universe, according to Jeans and Eddington, continues to explode."
"The angst of paramnesia--the sense of 'deja vu'--is not purely and simply erased in poetic feeling; it is overcome by a contact made by consciousness with the universal, it becomes the feeling of a reminiscence of something that has existed for all eternity, that the poet has not created, but unveiled, and that we recognize immediately."
"The reality of thought moves along a string of absurdities, which is true to the great principle that evidence cloaks itself in absurdity as its only means of being perceived."
"... the luminous woman of Pirano; it is true that Dr. Protti, of Padua, explains the phenomenon by: (1) the religious ideas of that woman; (2) the excessive sulfides produced by fasting; (3) the radioactivity of the blood that makes the sulfides luminescent."
General catastrophic mood. The Universe, according to Jeans and Eddington, continues to explode."
"The angst of paramnesia--the sense of 'deja vu'--is not purely and simply erased in poetic feeling; it is overcome by a contact made by consciousness with the universal, it becomes the feeling of a reminiscence of something that has existed for all eternity, that the poet has not created, but unveiled, and that we recognize immediately."
"The reality of thought moves along a string of absurdities, which is true to the great principle that evidence cloaks itself in absurdity as its only means of being perceived."
"... the luminous woman of Pirano; it is true that Dr. Protti, of Padua, explains the phenomenon by: (1) the religious ideas of that woman; (2) the excessive sulfides produced by fasting; (3) the radioactivity of the blood that makes the sulfides luminescent."
January 19, 2018
By and large, an excellent little book that takes pataphysics further into absurdity. At times Daumal is comedic, serious, (pseudo) scientific, and surreal. In particular, the last essay("The Pataphysics of Ghosts"), was the most lucid text within the book and (personally) the most interesting due to my interest with absences/presences in space.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews