Adanäč la posseduta, “ultima” performer del teatro della possessione di Michel Leiris. Con una postilla sullo spettatore

This article presents and comments on an unpublished essay by Marcel Leiris, published posthumously by Jean Jamin in 2015: the life of the possessed Adanäč met by Michel Leiris in Gondar in 1932, following the (auto)biography of the cleric Mazmur published by the same Leiris in 1975. It is a source of considerable interest, which the author presents in its complexity by adding to this portrait some elements of Adanäč’s life taken from other works by Leiris. Possessed by a small zar who wants to have fun (for this she is called "the shameless one"), Adanäč, shows a transgressive behaviour in the context of the brotherhood she attends. A key aspect of her character is her dramatis persona: an impertinent and licentious servant, always ready to disobey her “mistress”. The lived theatre of the possession, of which Leiris was a great interpreter, finds here an interesting and unique set-up. The article concludes with a note on Michel Leiris, spectator of the zar rituals in Gondar in 1932, an experience that the author considers founding for the subsequent maturation of the man, the man of letters and the ethnographer. He looks for the signs in the very personal elaboration of the concept of the “sacred”, descending from having lived hand-to-hand with the Gondar possessed. The essay Le sacré dans la vie quotidienne, written by Leiris in 1938, in the context of the Collège de sociologie of which he was the founder in 1937 together with Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois, testifies to the very original research of an ethnography of oneself. The Other has become a child himself