Fassio, Juan Esteban, 1924-

Juan Esteban Fassio, born in Buenos Aires in 1924, was close to the most active avant-garde circles in his home town from a young age, particularly thanks to his friendship with poet, art critic and painter Aldo Pellegrini, a key figure in the development of surrealism in Latin America. Fassio enrolled in the Collège of Pataphysique in 1952, and on April 6, 1957, on the 50th anniversary of the death of Alfred Jarry, founded together with Albano Rodríguez the Instituto de Altos Estudios Patafísicos de Buenos Aires (IAEPBA, now Longevo Instituto de Altos Estudios Patafísicos de Buenos Aires), the first ever pataphysical institution after the Collège. An enthusiastic researcher and collector, Fassio, who worked at the Centro Editor de América Latina (CEAL), translated for the first time into Spanish some works by Alfred Jarry, among them Ubu roi ( Ubu rey, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Minotauro, 1957, together with Enrique Alonso), and invented peculiar machines for reading specific novels. His Machine à lire Roussel was meant to help the reader to navigate the complex structure of Roussel's Nouvelles impressions d'Afrique (1932), characterized by continuous divagations and stories within stories. Julio Cortázar in his La Vuelta al día in ochenta mundos (1967) writes about Fassio sending him sketches for another machine, the Rayuel-o-matic, designed to mechanically assist in the reading of Cortázar's Rayuela (1963). Made up of a bed and a mechanical system of drawers offering the reader the different chapters of the book according to three different orders (among which, one completely random). The machine, most likely never realized, would have featured amenities such as a cabinet with groceries and a toaster, and a self-destruction button. With the advent of military dictatorship in Argentina in 1976, Fassio started feeling that he was in danger, due both to his activities within CEAL, and to his associates. He managed to leave the country for Switzerland in 1978, and settled in Barcelona, where he died in 1980. "Pataphysique" (or, in English, "pataphysics") is a term coined around 1889 by a group of high school students in Rennes, and later appropriated by one of them, writer Alfred Jarry (1873-1907). Although deliberately obscure and absurd, the term was supposed to designate a science beyond, and on top of, metaphysics. Pataphysics has been variously described as the science of the detail and of the individual, as well as of imaginary solutions. It is devoted to the total acceptance and celebration of paradoxes and nonsense in every aspect of human life, and is based on the principles of universal equivalence (according to which, everything is the same) and of inversion of the contraries. Ultimately, pataphysique is not describable, as it constitutes a strenuous form of resistance towards any kind of systematization, and any attempt to make sense of the universe. One of the main objectives of this science without objectives seems to be to ridicule and laugh at every form of power and authority. The Parisian Collège de Pataphysique, founded in 1948, came to play a fundamental role in the understanding of pataphysics itself, as a delirious structure in which the cult of hierarchy and titles is manifested in an organizational chart with no end and no meaning, in which the administration of the institution is everything. Among the satraps, or personalities of the Collège, some of the most relevant figures of twentieth century culture are to be found, including Marcel Duchamp ("el más brillante patafísico contemporáneo," according to Fassio in 1954), Jean Dubuffet, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Raymond Queneau, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Baudrillard, and Umberto Eco.