
… the worst thing would be for surrealism, turned on its head, would be to make us forget the extent to which “the flora and fauna of surrealism are unmentionable”, but also that the quality of the air we breathe depends absolutely on their luxuriance coming from our night. In other words, the most important thing when, in order to survive, the world has to be “re-passioned”.
Annie Le Brun, Qui Vive (2024)
We “close” our celebration of Surrealism and the 100th anniversary of the publication of André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism with a recent interview with the remarkable surrealist poet and essayist, Annie Le Brun, for the French Marianne magazine.
Annie Le Brun‘s own recent death (29/07/2024) is sadly another reason for us to share this interview.
Annie Le Brun (1942-2024) : “Surrealism was born of the desire to ‘change life’, as Rimbaud dreamed”
(Interview by Isabelle Vogtensperger and published on the 24th of June, 2024, for Marianne)
Qui vive (Flammarion), an essay by the writer and poet Annie Le Brun, written 33 years ago, revives the dawn, the flowering of the beginnings that surrealism represented. In the new edition of 2024, the author measures the distance that separates us from it. She rebels against cultural recycling and deplores the devastation of forests – both mental and ecological. She protests against the swallowing up of art by capital and its intrusion into our inner lives. It’s like a final appeal from the writer whose death we learned of on the 1st of August at the age of nearly 82. Here are her last words to Marianne.
Marianne: In your view, our society suffers from a lack of freedom. You write: “everything that used to be a sign of freedom is systematically used to cover up its opposite”. What do you mean by this?
Annie Le Brun: The emergence of the Internet has changed our relationship with the outside world. But most of the criticisms levelled at it fail to appreciate the extent to which technology and capital are part of the same exponential dynamic that is reconfiguring our perceptions and sensibilities. For the first time, capital is no longer content with extracting and exploiting the world’s riches, but is reaching into our inner lives.
For the image, which until now has been an open door to otherness, has become the privileged agent of capital. Seeming to increase our possibilities of communication, the Internet in fact locks us in a prison of images, without us even being aware that we are being controlled as much as manipulated.
What distinguishes the poetic image?
The strength of an image has always been its enigmatic element, which distances it from the viewer. It is this in-between space that the poetic image reveals to us, at the same time as a new vanishing point that opens up a whole new horizon between words and things and, in so doing, changes the landscape. This is precisely what the current flood of images is increasingly preventing.
You show that the art world is not emerging unscathed from this transformation…
In Ce qui n’a pas de prix I analysed how, from the 1990s onwards, the intensive financialisation of the economy led to an unprecedented collusion between the worlds of money, fashion and art. So much so that the purpose of so-called contemporary art has been to make us witness to this transmutation of art into money and money into art.
It is the cultural pretext best suited to camouflaging the society of denial in which we live. Similarly, since it has become impossible to ignore the dramatic ecological situation we are facing, capital has embarked on a “green capitalism”, enabling it to pursue its project of commodifying everything. Artistic activity is part of the same process, which also manifests itself in the neutralisation of the past, with Surrealism receiving special treatment.
How does the revival of Surrealism divert it from its original purpose?
Surrealism was born out of a desire to “change life”, as Rimbaud dreamed. It was about affirming a poetic awareness of the world, in other words, about making sensitive evaluation the only intellectual and moral criterion.
That’s why there’s nothing neutral or aesthetic about Surrealism, even though it has manifested itself in works of art, which have changed the course of things. Its origins lie in the fundamental revolt of a few young people against a society that had just produced the butchery of the First World War.
This revolt is directly proportional to the wonder that each of us can expect from life. All of the exhibitions that Surrealism conceived between 1924 and 1966 were a war machine against the state of the world. Right up to the last one in 1966, the year of Breton’s death, an exhibition that referred to the utopian Fourier’s “absolute deviation” from known ways, as a way of opposing the new forms of enslavement being introduced by consumer society.
Today, what used to be a sign of freedom is being used to cover up its opposite. We can imagine the confusion the exhibition planned for Beaubourg will cause, a sort of Olympiad of Surrealism, illustrating what Breton denounced in 1935 as the “survival of the sign over the thing signified”, where globalism replaces internationalism, parity replaces singularity…
Clearly, any recognition of Surrealism that fails to address this question of reversal plays into the hands of what Surrealism has always opposed. For today we are talking about a struggle to the death to extract value from that which is priceless. Never before has capital penetrated so deeply into our inner lives, for the sole purpose of realising its hitherto inconceivable dream of an imaginary world where everything can be bought.
Was the aim of Surrealism political and existential, rather than aesthetic?
Surrealism is profoundly political, in the broadest sense of the term. In 1942, at one of the worst moments in history, Breton wrote in Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Not: “It is time for man to pass, with arms and baggage, over to the side of man”. The idea was to take into consideration the whole of man, with his sensibility and his desires.
None of the twentieth-century avant-gardes took this into account. Surrealism is to thank for having allowed both to go as far as possible in their singularity. In this way, the freedom of some guaranteed that of others, hence the diversity of the people who passed through it: apparently nothing in common between Duchamp and Miró. It was in their quest for sovereignty that both succeeded in opening up the horizon.
Thirty-three years and a century later, how does Breton still embody the “genius of the beginning”?
What sets Breton apart is his particular attention to what might happen. There’s something there that’s linked to the very essence of poetry: discerning what emerges, so that the world can change from an almost nothing that suddenly determines almost everything. This continual attention is characteristic of Breton’s approach to writing, for example. It was the outpouring of automatic writing that interested him.
In the same way, he paid particular attention to the expression of the insane and that of primitive peoples… The idea of amour fou similarly focused on the emergence of desire. It was on the basis of this wager on the possible that Breton invented this thought-emotion, which he formulated clearly in the first Manifesto: “I want us to be silent when we stop feeling”.
You challenge the idea that our society is highly emotional. You speak of a “debacle of sensitivity”. What does this mean?
There’s nothing emotional about the way people react on social networks. They are conditioned reflexes that show no sensitivity to what surrounds them but reject what is different. Like algorithms, people flock to those who are like them.
Paradoxically, in this age of communication, the world is getting smaller and smaller, and everyone is becoming more and more self-centred. Look at what is happening in the street: people no longer look around them. There’s something very significant about our relationship with the world. This is the terrible deficit of this zoom culture which, on principle, ignores all otherness.
Are we seeing a return to Puritanism?
Yes, and it goes hand in hand with a deregulation that is not just financial or climatic, but general, and that is spreading with the commodification of everything. Hence the worrying disorderly return of all the forms of conformism to which people seek to cling, through reactions stereotyped by the identity they have chosen for themselves.
In fact, anything that is unpredictable has become toxic, in other words, anything that cannot be reduced to numbers and reveals the night of which we are made. This is precisely what surrealism never ceased to demonstrate.
For you, surrealism reinvents love. How do you see this?
When Breton wrote in 1942: “The poetic embrace is like the embrace of flesh. As long as it lasts. Defend any escape from the misery of the world”; wasn’t he talking about the utopia realised between two beings to which passionate love gives us access? Each of us knows how the world changes and becomes bigger as a result. But it is precisely this “excess of meaning”, experienced in the depths of our being, that is being fought against today.
Because it runs counter to the commodification of the sensible world, and a fortiori, the sexual market established by the Internet. It is a complete parcelling out of the human being. The only thing we get out of it is immediate satisfaction of the impulse that leads to continual dissatisfaction, and nothing could be further from the passion of love.
What can we expect today from the poetic image “when everything is in danger of going under”?
I still think that all is not lost, and that it is often at the darkest moment that something can manifest itself. Because although our sensibility is being increasingly abused, it does not continue to exist like plants. We can see this in the growing unease just about everywhere. In each of us there is a poetic need that is linked to desire and dreams.
Of course, poetry does not provide practical solutions, but its power lies in opening up, at the heart of what is, the infinite prospect of what can be, to the point of reversing the perspective. For that, we remain what they want us to forget and that which words, images, impressions and passions carry with them… and which may yet take us beyond ourselves.
For Annie Le Brun (1942-2024)
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