ABSTRACT
Jean-Pierre Brisset exploits a totalizing mania, and an omnium-gatherum methodology. Language, he strenuously tries to convince people, is a vast, perpetual-motion pun-machine. In order to construct, protect and justify his world picture, Brisset idiosyncratically pulls together elements from philology, biology, the Bible, mythology, plus personal observation—the whole interconnecting agency being his mind-set. Brisset's variety of punning, generally, is of the paronymie kind, what the French call l'a-peu-pres. Brisset's credo adjoins the presupposition of the most optimistic variants of psychoanalysis: everything, however lunatic it seems, makes sense. Brisset projected a dictionary—in fact the makings of one are scattered throughout his entire writings. The reader of Brisset's texts can hardly keep up with the rhizomic proliferation of the associations of the linguistic sorcerer's apprentice.
