Surrealism: The unfinished revolution

Max Ernst, Sans titre, 1921

Surrealism is not, has never been, and will never be a literary or artistic school but is a movement of the human spirit in revolt and an eminently subversive attempt to reenchant the world: an attempt to reestablish the “enchanted” dimensions at the core of human existence—poetry, passion, mad love, imagination, magic, myth, the marvelous, dreams, revolt, utopian ideals—which have been eradicated by this civilization and its values. In other words, Surrealism is a protest against narrow-minded rationality, the commercialization of life, petty thinking, and the boring realism of our money-dominated, industrial society. It is also the utopian and revolutionary aspiration to “transform life”—an adventure that is at once intellectual and passionate, political and magical, poetic and dreamlike. It began in 1924; it continues today.

Michael Löwy, Morning Star


If, through Surrealism, we reject unhesitatingly the notion of the sole possibility of the things which “are,” and if we ourselves declare that by a path which “is,” a path which we can show and help people to follow, one can arrive at what people claimed “was not,” if we cannot find words enough to stigmatize the baseness of Western thought, if we are not afraid to take up arms against logic, if we refuse to swear that something we do in dreams is less meaningful than something we do in a state of waking, if we are not even sure that we will not do away with time, that sinister old farce, that train constantly jumping off the track, mad pulsation, inextricable conglomeration of breaking and broken beasts, how do you expect us to show any tenderness, even to be tolerant, toward an apparatus of social conservation, of whatever sort it may be? That would be the only madness truly unacceptable on our part. Everything remains to be done, every means must be worth trying, in order to lay waste to the ideas of family, country, religion. No matter how well known the Surrealist position may be with respect to this matter, still it must be stressed that on this point there is no room for compromise. Those who make it their duty to maintain this position persist in advancing this negation, in belittling any other criterion of value. They intend to savor fully the profound grief, so well played, with which the bourgeois public-inevitably prepared in their base way to forgive them a few “youthful” errors-greets the steadfast and unyielding need they display to laugh like savages in the presence of the French flag, to vomit their disgust in the face of every priest, and to level at the breed of “basic duties” the long-range weapon of sexual cynicism. We combat, in whatever form they may appear, poetic indifference, the distraction of art, scholarly research, pure speculation; we want nothing whatever to do with those, either large or small, who use their minds as they would a savings bank. … [The] unflagging fidelity to the commitments of Surrealism presupposes a disinterestedness, a contempt for risk, a refusal to compromise, of which very few men prove, in the long run, to be capable. Were there to remain not a single one, from among all those who were the first to measure by its standards their chance for significance and their desire for truth, yet would Surrealism continue to live. In any event, it is too late for the seed not to sprout and grow in infinite abundance in the human field, with fear and the other varieties of weeds that must prevail over all.

the idea of Surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory, and that there is no real danger of its activities coming to an end so long as man still manages to distinguish an animal from a flame or a stone-heaven help, I say, the Surrealist idea from beginning to progress without its ups and downs. It is absolutely essential for us to act as though we were really “part of the world,” in order thereafter to dare formulate certain reservations.

André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930)

“Transform the world,” Marx said; “change life,” Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us.

André Breton, Speech to the Congress of Writers (1935)

Man must flee this ridiculous web that has been spun around him: so-called present reality with the prospect of a future reality that is hardly better. Each full minute bears within itself the negation of centuries of limping, broken history.

André Breton, Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto (1942)


This month of October marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). And we celebrate it in the full awareness of Breton’s own admonition against the “sterility” of the “perpetual interrogation of the dead”.

“When it comes to revolt, none of us must have any need of ancestors. I would like to make it very clear that in my opinion it is necessary to hold the cult of men in deep distrust, however great they may seemingly be.” (André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930)

If we keep before us the significance – theoretical and practical – of Surrealism as an ethical-political-aesthetic (the three are inseparable, we learn) movement irreducible to any particular “artistic” form or expression, then our celebration is not of dead ancestors, but of living, rebellious forms of being in the world that resist petrification and museumification; it is the celebration of a movement whose resonances still carry within it unfulfilled potentialities in the present. As Breton celebrated the yet living desires of romanticism – against the state inspired domestication of its “evil”, on the occasion of an earlier centenary (Second Manifesto) -, so we revel in Surrealism, 100 years after André Breton’s first Manifesto, for its passions still burn. “I say that Surrealism is still in its period of preparation”. (Second Manifesto)

“It will fall to the innocence and to the anger of some future men to extract from Surrealism what cannot fail to be still alive, to restore, at the cost of considerable confusion, Surrealism to its proper goal.” (Second Manifesto)

The word “surreal” today for many evokes little more than something strange. And the fact that it does so reveals a great deal about how much has been forgotten or erased in the Surrealist’s revolt – for a revolt it was and remains.

“Surrealism”, Breton proclaims, “asserts our complete nonconformism”. (First Manifesto) More than anything else, it “attempted to provoke, from the intellectual and moral point of view, an attack of conscience [crise de conscience], of the most general and serious kind, and that the extent to which this was or was not accomplished alone can determine its historical success or failure.” (Second Manifesto)

The crisis of consciousness was understood by Breton and the Surrealists as the desired for result of the loss of the everyday, normative parameters that serve to distinguish between the real and unreal, reality and fantasy, wakefulness and dreaming, true and false, good and evil, beauty and ugliness: in sum, all of the “old antinomies hypocritically intended to prevent any unusual ferment on the part of man” (Second Manifesto); the collection of hierarchical distinctions necessary to engender reasonable and (self)-manageable men and women.

The “crisis of consciousness” is then but another expression for freedom, but freedom as the overcoming of the crisis as crisis, the acceptance of contingency in all that we do and make. “Nothing that has been established or decreed by man can be considered to be definite and intangible, and still less become the object of a cult if that cult requires that one yield to some antecedent divinized will.” (Prolegomena Third Manifesto)

Breton’s definition of Surrealism, as a “philosophy”, is well known: “Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought.” (First Manifesto) In other words, the surreal is the elevation to the level of an “absolute reality” the seemingly contradictory opposition between dream and reality.

The “realistic attitude” is one characterised by the “reign of logic”, of “hypocritical antinomies”, confining and repressing desires that kind find expression only in dreams or, in the extreme, in madness. Surrealism then, as a movement, was the effort to give expression to the imagination, as it is lived in dreams, in thought, in life. It was the effort to rediscover the marvellous amidst the banal, to have us engage with the world as children do, for example, through fairy tales. And there “are fairy tales to be written for adults”. (First Manifesto)

“SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express-verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner-the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” (First Manifesto)

The surreal world opened up by surrealism – as thought-practice, as form of life – was one in which the “mind becomes aware of the limitless expanses wherein its desires are made manifest” (First Manifesto); it is a world in which the imagination, the mind, reaffirms its sovereignty, while simultaneously recognising that its thought emerges from and rests upon something deeper, unknown and unknowable, a “surrealist voice” (the affirmation of radical autonomy leads to – without any full, “rational” knowledge of how -, and rests upon, the recognition of radical dependency, of what Breton will go so far as to call “grace”). (First/Second Manifesto)

Or, as Breton also succinctly states: “We really live by our fantasies when we give free reign to them”, fantasies comprised of images “that man does not evoke …; rather they ‘come to him spontaneously, despotically. He cannot chase them away; for the will is powerless now and no longer controls the faculties.’” (First Manifesto and a Baudelaire quotation)

There are those who may be tempted to interpret the Surrealist gesture as idealistic, or worse, irrational – a criticism levelled at Breton by French communist party intellectuals, and others. The irrationalism presumably has to do with the – on one reading – the Surrealists’ supposed celebration of dreams and desires, as expressed in “automatic writing” for example, or in their defence of revolt for the apparent sake of revolt, and nothing more, ending in a nihilistic exaltation of miscreant or violent acts.

In response, Breton says of Surrealism that “it plunges its roots into life” and thus it cares little for the distinctions and orders that seek to domesticate the surreal plane upon which human life can exist. In this sense, surrealism, as a form of life, cannot but be characterised as revolt; a revolt that requires no historical, normative or utilitarian justification. To place revolt under the later is to submit it to reason and logic – another, and ultimately more violent, form of “reality”. Life springs forth unannounced, without former sanction, engendering, creating and sweeping away. And as we too are life, living, capable of temporarily and violently denying it or being within it, then our “every act is its own justification, at least for the person who has been capable of committing it, that it is endowed with a radiant power which the slightest gloss is certain to diminish.” (First Manifesto) Our existence can only be one of interdependent and overlapping creation and destruction. What distinguishes the first posture from the second, the surrealist posture, is that the latter assumes, embraces, a “permanent revolution” of ways and forms of living, in which “construction and destruction can no longer be brandished one against the other.” (Second Manifesto)

“I believe in the absolute virtue of anything that takes place, spontaneously or not, in the sense of non-acceptance, and no reasons of general efficacity, from which long, pre-revolutionary patience draws its inspiration – reasons to which I defer – will make me deaf to the cry which can be wrenched from us at every moment by the frightful disproportion between what is gained and what is lost, between what is granted and what is suffered.” (Second Manifesto)

Surrealism is not a blind and wild orgy of mad forms of self-expression, the heedless unleashing of passions and desires, against the tyranny of reason and history. It does not hurl madness at the face of reason. It rather, and fundamentally, pursues and attends to that which lies between dream and reality, at the point-moment of contact between them, where-when they give way to a surreality; it is here-then that the sources of “poetic imagination” – poiesis – are to be found. (First Manifesto) Yet it is no simple matter to apprehend this point-moment, however clear the path to it may appear to be, “for one is never sure of really being there”. (First Manifesto)

“I believe in the pure Surrealist joy of the man who, forewarned that all others before him have failed, refuses to admit defeat, sets off from whatever point he chooses, along any other path save a reasonable one, and arrives wherever he can.” (First Manifesto)

“Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now, search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point. From this it becomes obvious how absurd it would be to define Surrealism solely as constructive or destructive: the point to which we are referring is a fortiori that point where construction and destruction can no longer be brandished one against the other.” (Second Manifesto)

“All ideas that win out hasten to their downfall. Man must be absolutely convinced that once there has been general consent on a given subject, individual resistance is the only key to the prison. But this resistance must be informed and subtle. By instinct I will contradict a unanimous vote by any assembly that will not take it upon itself to contradict the vote of a larger assembly, but by the same instinct I will give my vote to those who are climbing higher, what with every new program tending to the greater emancipation of man and not yet having been tested by the facts. Considering the historical process, where it is fully understood that truth shows itself only so as to laugh up its sleeve and never be grasped, I am on the side of this minority that is endlessly renewable and acts like a lever: my greatest ambition would be to allow its theoretical import to be indefinitely transmissible after I am gone. (Prolegomena Third Manifesto)

The surreal is anarchic: it possesses no beginning, no principle governs it and it cannot be commanded. Surrealism was and remains the effort to give form – necessary, but temporary, form – to our lives, and perhaps to all life (Prolegomena Third Manifesto), while keeping and attending to its sources.

Anarchy is neither the end nor means of politics; it is the animating source of political life which anarchism carries as “a spark in the wind, but a spark in search of a powder keg.” (André Breton, Arcanum 17, 1944)


(Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are from: André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor Paperbacks (1972)/The University of Michigan Press (1969))


In a series of posts, we will share articles and essays that critically capture the “surrealist revolution”. We do so not as historians, nor as academics, eager to explore and exhaust the vast body of literature on Surrealism. Our ambition is more modest: to catch the resonances of unfinished rebellion, without forgetting its anarchic precursor, dada.



Man Ray, Waking Dream Seance: Surrealist Group, 1924
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