Autonomies

… make no mistake about it, those responsible for putting this philtre of the absolute into circulation are the enemies of order. They pass it round secretly, under the eyes of the police, in the guise of books and poems. The anodyne pretext of literature allows them to offer you at a rock-bottom bargain price this deadly ferment which it is high time to make generally available for consumption. It is the genie in the bottle; it is the gold of poetry in a solid bar. Buy, buy the damnation of your soul, at last you are going to lose your way, here is the machine guaranteed to capsize the mind. I announce to the world this momentous news item: a new vice has just been born, man has acquired one more source of vertigo — Surrealism, offspring of frenzy and darkness. Walk up, walk up, this is the entrance to the realms of the instantaneous …

Louis Aragon, The Paris Peasant (1924)

Preface for a Reprint of the Manifesto (1929)

It was to be expected that this book would change, and to the extent that it questioned our terrestrial existence by charging it nonetheless with everything that it comprises on this or that side of the limits we are in the habit of assigning to it, that its fate would be closely bound up with my own, which is, for example, to have written and not to have written books. Those attributed to me do not seem to me to exercise any greater influence on me than many others, and no doubt I am no longer as fully familiar with them as it is possible to be. Regardless of whatever controversy that may have arisen concerning the “Manifesto of Surrealism” between 1924 and 1929 – without arguing the pros and cons of its validity – it is obvious that, independent of this controversy, the human adventure continued to take place with the minimum of risks, on almost all sides at once, according to the whims of the imagination which alone causes real things. To allow a work one has written to be republished, a work not all that different from one you might more or less have read by someone else, is tantamount to “recognizing” I would not even go so far as to say a child whose features one had already ascertained were reasonably friendly, whose constitution is healthy enough, but rather something which, no matter how bravely it may have been, can no longer be. There is nothing I can do about it, except to blame myself for not always and in every respect having been a prophet. Still very much apropos is the famous question Arthur Craven, “in a very tired, very weary tone,” asked Andre Gide: “Monsieur Gide, where are we with respect to time?” To which Gide, with no malice intended, replied: “Fifteen minutes before six.” Ah!, it must indeed be admitted, we’re in bad, we’re in terrible shape when it comes to time.

Here as elsewhere admission and denial are tightly interwoven. I do not understand why, or how, how I am still living, or, for all the more reason, what I am living. If, from a system in which I believe, to which I slowly adapt myself, like Surrealism, there remains, if there will always remain, enough for me to immerse myself in, there will nonetheless never be enough to make me what I would like to be, no matter how indulgent I am about myself. A relative indulgence compared to that others have shown me (or non-me, I don’t know). And yet I am living, I have even discovered that I care about life. The more I have sometimes found reasons for putting an end to it the more I have caught myself admiring some random square of parquet floor: it was really like silk, like the silk that would have been as beautiful as water. I liked this lucid pain, as though the entire universal drama of it had then passed through me and I was suddenly worth the trouble. But I liked it in the light of, how shall I say, of new things that I had never seen glow before. It was from this that I understood that, in spite of everything, life was given, that a force independent of that of expressing and making oneself heard spiritually presided – insofar as a living man is concerned – over reactions of invaluable interest, the secret of which will disappear with him. This secret has not been revealed to me, and as far as I am concerned its recognition in no way invalidates my confessed inaptitude for religious meditation. I simply believe that between my thought, such as it appears in what material people have been able to read that has my signature affixed to it, and me, which the true nature of my thought involves in something but precisely what I do not yet know, there is a world, an imperceptible world of phantasms, of hypothetical realizations, of wagers lost, and of lies, a cursory examination of which convinces me not to correct this work in the slightest. This book demands all the vanity of the scientific mind, all the puerility of this need for perspective which the bitter vicissitudes of history provide. This time again, faithful to the tendency that I have always had to ignore any kind of sentimental obstacle, I shall waste no time passing judgment on those among my initial companions who have become frightened and turned back, I shall not yield to the temptation to substitute names by means of which this book might be able to lay claim to being up-to-date. Fully mindful, however, that the most precious gifts of the mind cannot survive the smallest particle of honor, I shall simply reaffirm my unshakable confidence in the principle of an activity which has never deceived me, which seems to me more deserving than ever of our unstinting, absolute, insane devotion, for the simple reason that it alone is the dispenser, albeit at intervals well spaced out one from the other, of transfiguring rays of a grace I persist in comparing in all respects to divine grace.

André Breton, 1929.

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”.