ABSTRACT
The work of the humanist comparatist and Germanist jean-Marie Carre hardly promoted the dictatorship of the proletariat. All opportunism aside, what Michel Leiris's review demonstrates is an immediate assimilation and schematization of standard humanist drama of 'dedoublements', 'contradictions' and 'retours', to which he attempts to add both Clarte's political programming and Breton's contemporary repositioning of poetic struggle. It was inevitable that Leiris's process of mimicry and mutation would in time lead to an objectivation of Bataillean dilapidation, as it had done of humanism and surrealist idealism. Leiris's private admission in the Journal, as early as 28 October 1929, that he is already losing interest in Documents and its 'recherches theoriques', is therefore merely symptomatic of the triangulation inherent in each of his critical progressions. The immediately striking feature of Leiris's work with Documents is the relative paucity of pieces by him specifically based on or devoted to literature or literary criticism.
