L’un dans l’autre

L’un dans l’autre (“The one in the other”) is the name of a surrealist collective game created in the fifties by André Breton. Less famous than the exquisite cadavers, it is based on a particular use of the threaded metaphor and consists in an enigma that has to be cracked by the players. On the basis of Rastier 1987’s interpretive semantics, this study describes the semantic foundations of the game and the mechanisms that lead to the discovery of the solution. It shows how l’un dans l’autre forms what can be called a semic complex and how a rule of optimality eventually paves the way towards the answer.