By MICHAEL LÖWY
Considerations on the occasion of the centenary of his “First Manifesto”
Surrealism is not, and never was, a literary school or an “avant-garde” artistic movement (like Cubism or Fauvism), but a worldview, a way of life and an eminently subversive attempt to re-enchant the world. It is also a utopian and revolutionary aspiration to “change life” (Rimbaud) – an adventure at once poetic and political, magical and rebellious, which began in Paris in 1924, and continues to this day.
Since its origins, Surrealism has been an international movement. However, in the following pages we will focus on the Paris Surrealist group, which initially revolved around André Breton but continued its activity after the death of the author of the Manifestos of surrealism.
The revolutionary aspiration is at the very origin of surrealism. The First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) by André Breton is a radically libertarian document. And one of the group's first collective texts is entitled “The revolution now and always” (1925). In that same year, the desire to break with Western bourgeois civilization led Breton to approach the ideas of the October Revolution, as shown in his review of Lenin, by Leon Trotsky. Although he joined the French Communist Party in 1927, he maintained, as he explained in the pamphlet “In the Great Day”, your “right to criticize”.
Was Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930) who drew all the consequences of this act, affirming “our total and unreserved adherence to the principle of historical materialism”. At the same time as he asserted the distinction, the very opposition, between “primary materialism” and “modern materialism” advocated by Friedrich Engels, André Breton insisted that “surrealism considers itself indissolubly linked, by reason of the affinities I have mentioned, to the approach of Marxist thought and only to this approach”. At the same time, the surrealists showed great interest in the work of Sigmund Freud, in the interpretation of dreams and in the unconscious as a source of “automatic” poetic expression. The exchanges of letters between André Breton and Freud bear witness to this interest.
It is clear that his Marxism does not coincide with the official vulgate of Comintern. It could perhaps be defined as a “gothic Marxism”, that is, a historical materialism sensitive to the marvelous, to the dark moment of revolt, to the illumination that tears, like lightning, the sky of revolutionary action. In other words: a reading of Marxist theory inspired by Rimbaud, Lautréamont and the novel Black English (Lewis, Maturin) – without losing sight, for a single moment, of the imperative need to fight against the bourgeois order. It may seem paradoxical to unite, as communicating vessels, O Capital and the castle of Otranto, The origin of the family e A Season in Hell, The State and the Revolution e Melmoth. But it is thanks to this singular approach that André Breton's Marxism is constituted, in its disturbing originality.
In any case, it belongs, like that of José Carlos Mariátegui, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse, to the subterranean current that runs through the twentieth century beneath the immense dams built by orthodoxy: romantic Marxism. I refer here to a form of thought fascinated by certain cultural forms of the pre-capitalist past and that rejects the cold and abstract rationality of modern industrial civilization, although it transforms this nostalgia into force in the struggle for the revolutionary transformation of the present.
If all romantic Marxists rise up against the capitalist disenchantment of the world – a logical and necessary result of the quantification, commodification and reification of social relations –, it is in André Breton and in surrealism that the romantic/revolutionary attempt to re-enchant the world through imagination reaches its most radiant expression.
André Breton's Marxism also distinguished itself from the rationalist/scientific, Cartesian/positivist tendency, strongly marked by eighteenth-century French materialism – which dominated the official doctrine of French communism – by its insistence on the Hegelian dialectical heritage of Marxism. In his lecture in Prague (March 1935) on “the surrealist situation of the object”, he insisted on the decisive importance of the German philosopher for surrealism: “In his Esthetic, Hegel addressed all the problems that can be considered the most difficult in poetry and art today, and he resolved most of them with unparalleled lucidity. (…). I say that, even today, it is Hegel who must be questioned about the successes or failures of surrealist activity in the arts.”[I]
A few months later, in his famous speech at the Writers' Congress for the Defense of Culture (June 1935), he returned to the attack and was not afraid to proclaim, in opposition to a certain anti-German chauvinism: “It is above all in German-language philosophy that we have discovered the only effective antidote to the positivist rationalism that continues to wreak havoc here. This antidote is none other than dialectical materialism as a general theory of knowledge.”[ii]
This adherence to communism and Marxism did not prevent, at the core of the surrealists' approach, an irreducibly libertarian position. It is enough to recall the profession of faith of First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924): “The word freedom is the only one that still exalts me.” Walter Benjamin, in his 1929 article on Surrealism, invited the Surrealists to articulate “the anarchist component” of revolutionary action with the “methodical and disciplined preparation” of the latter – that is, communism…[iii]
The rest of the story is well known: increasingly close to the positions of Trotsky and the Left Opposition, most of the Surrealists (with the exception of Louis Aragon!) definitively broke with Stalinism in 1935. This was not a break with Marxism, which continued to inspire their analyses, but with the opportunism of Stalin and his acolytes, which “unfortunately tends to annihilate the two essential components of the revolutionary spirit”: the spontaneous rejection of the living conditions offered to human beings and the imperative need to change them.[iv]
In 1938, André Breton visited Trotsky in Mexico. Together they wrote one of the most important documents of XNUMXth century revolutionary culture: the appeal “For an independent revolutionary art”, which contains the following famous passage: “tocultural creation, the revolution must, from the beginning, establish and ensure an anarchist regime of individual freedom. No authority, no constraint“There is no movement, not the slightest trace of command! … Marxists can walk hand in hand with anarchists here…”. As we know, this passage was written by Trotsky himself, but we can also assume that it was the product of his long conversations on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro.[v].
In the post-war years, André Breton's sympathy for anarchism would become more clearly manifest. In Arcanum 17 (1947), he recalls the emotion he felt when, as a child, he discovered a tomb in a cemetery with this simple inscription: “Neither God nor Master”. In this regard, he expressed a general reflection: “above art, above poetry, whether we like it or not, there also flies a flag that is alternately red and black” – two colors between which he refuses to choose.
From October 1951 to January 1953, the Surrealists would regularly collaborate on the newspaper The Libertarian, organ of the French Anarchist Federation, with articles and notes. At that time, its main correspondent in the Federation was the libertarian communist Georges Fontenis. On this occasion, André Breton would write the inflammatory text entitled “The Clear Tower” (1952), which recalls the libertarian origins of surrealism: “Where surrealism first recognized itself, long before it defined itself, and when it was still no more than a free association of individuals who spontaneously and en bloc rejected the social and moral constraints of their time, was in the black mirror of anarchism.”
Thirty years and many disappointments later, he once again declared himself a supporter of anarchism – not the kind he wanted to turn into a caricature, but “the kind our comrade Fontenis describes as ‘socialism itself, that is, this modern vindication of the dignity of man (his freedom as well as his well-being)’…”. Despite the split of 1953, André Breton did not cut ties with the libertarians, continuing to collaborate on some of their initiatives.[vi]
However, this interest in libertarian socialism did not lead the Surrealists to deny their sympathy for the October Revolution and the ideas of Leon Trotsky. In a speech on November 19, 1957, André Breton insisted and signed: “Against all odds, I am one of those who still find, in the memory of the October Revolution, a good part of that unconditional impulse that led me to it when I was young and that implied the total surrender of oneself.”
Saluting Trotsky’s gaze, as it appears in Red Army uniform in an old photograph from 1917, he proclaimed: “Nothing can erase a gaze like that and the light that emanates from it, just as Thermidor could not alter the features of Saint-Just.” Finally, in 1962, in a tribute to Natalia Sedova, who had just died, he called for a day when “not only would justice be done to Trotsky, but the ideas for which he gave his life would be given full force and scope.”[vii]
Surrealism is perhaps this ideal vanishing point, this supreme place of thought where the libertarian trajectory and that of revolutionary Marxism meet. But we must not forget that surrealism contains what Ernst Bloch called “a utopian surplus,” a surplus of dark light that escapes the limits of any social or political movement, no matter how revolutionary it may be. This light emanates from the irreducible core of the night of the surrealist spirit, from its obstinate search for the gold of time, from its desperate plunge into the abysses of dreams and wonder.
In 1969, leading figures of Parisian surrealism, such as Jean Schuster, Gérard Legrand and José Pierre, decided that, due to the death of André Breton in 1966, it would be best to dissolve the Surrealist Group. On October 4, 1969, Schuster published in the daily newspaper Le Monde a text entitled The Fourth Song, which solemnly announced the end of the surrealist movement as an organized collective activity: “we renounce the word to save the idea”.
However, this conclusion was rejected by many other surrealists. Vincent Bounoure took the initiative to respond to Schuster and his friends in October 1969, in a text entitled “Nothing or what”, which proposed the continuation of the surrealist adventure. Several surrealists in Paris and Prague joined him and, from 1970 onwards, collective activities were resumed.[viii]
Unfortunately, most mainstream academic accounts of Surrealism assume that the group “dissolved” in 1969. It is very odd that this attitude persisted despite the very visible presence of the Surrealist movement in Paris after 1970. For most art historians, Surrealism was just one of a number of “artistic avant-gardes,” like Cubism or Futurism, that were very short-lived.
Vincent Bounoure (1928-1996) was the driving force behind the new period of surrealist activity, and remained an inspiring figure until his last day. A gifted poet and brilliant essayist, he was, like his companion Micheline, fascinated by the oceanic art of New Guinea, about which he wrote several essays.
Another prominent figure of the group after 1969 was Michel Zimbacca (1924-2021), a poet, painter, filmmaker and captivating character. His documentary on the “wild arts”, The invention of the world (1952), is considered one of the few truly surrealist films; Benjamin Péret wrote the mythopoetic text that comments on the images. The surrealist group met frequently in the apartment he shared with his partner Anny Bonnin. Bounoure and Zimbacca were the living link between the post-1969 surrealist movement and the group founded by André Breton in 1924.
In the years 1970-1976, the Parisian surrealists who refused to give up gathered – in close contact with their friends in Prague – around a modest magazine, the Liaison Surréaliste Bulletin (BLS). O French Newsletter contains a debate on “surrealism and revolution” with Herbert Marcuse. Among many other treasures, an article by the anthropologist Renaud in support of the American Indians gathered at Standing Rock in July 1974.
In the last issue of BLS, in April 1976, a collective statement was published in support of a young Brazilian surrealist filmmaker, Paulo Paranaguá, and his companion, Maria Regina Pilla, who had been arrested in Argentina and accused of “subversive propaganda”. Initiated by the surrealists, the appeal was published by Maurice Nadeau in La Quinzaine Litteraire and also signed by renowned French intellectuals, such as Deleuze, Mandiargues, Foucault and Leiris.[ix]
The Parisian Surrealists maintained close relations with the Prague group, which lived semi-underground under the Stalinist regime imposed on Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion of 1968. They could meet informally in private homes, but their magazine analog was banned and they were not allowed to exhibit their works or films. In 1976, on the initiative of Vincent Bounoure, the surrealists of Paris and Prague published in France (Editions Payot) a collection of essays, The Surrealist Civilization.[X]
In 1987, the Surrealists published a response to the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. The eminent rationalist philosopher had criticized an alleged attempt by the Surrealists to “force a reconciliation between art and life.” In their response, the Surrealists stressed that their goal was not to “reconcile” anything, but to change life by dialectically overcoming the traditional opposition between dream and reality. Habermas considered that the Surrealist revolt against the institutionalization of art had failed; in their response, the Surrealists asserted that the Surrealist rebellion is not only against the institutional status of art, but against all the dominant institutions of our civilization. Furthermore, “as long as a few stubborn thinkers refuse to submit to the full power of instrumental reason, it will be too early to speak of the failure of the Surrealist revolt.”[xi]
The Surrealist group has always been very political, since 1924. After 1969, this continued to be true, but it does not mean that it was a question of joining existing political organizations. Some members participated in Trotskyist organizations (the Revolutionary Communist League, the French section of the Fourth International), others in the Anarchist Federation or the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. But the majority of the Parisian Surrealists did not belong to any organization; their common spirit was anti-authoritarian and revolutionary, with a dominant libertarian tendency. It was this spirit that inspired their activities and the common statements published in these years.
Many of these statements concern indigenous struggle movements, whether in Mexico, the United States or elsewhere. This is certainly linked to the movement’s anti-authoritarian and anti-colonialist tradition and its rejection of modern Western civilization.
But this empathy and great interest in the “savage arts” are also the expression of a romantic/revolutionary/anti-capitalist state of mind: the Surrealists believed – like the first Romantic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who praised the freedom of the Caribbean – that in these “savage” cultures – the Surrealists did not like the word “primitive” – we could find human values and ways of life that were, in many ways, superior to Western imperialist civilization. The legends, myths and ritual artifacts of these “savages” were greatly appreciated, not only by Vincent Bounoure and Michel Zimbacca, but by the entire Surrealist group.
In 1991 the Bulletin surréaliste international no. 1 was published in Stockholm, with the responses of the groups from Paris, Prague, Stockholm, Chicago, Madrid and Buenos Aires to a survey on the current task of surrealism. The Paris group insisted in its text that “surrealism is not a set of aesthetic or playful recipes, but a permanent principle of refusal and negativity, nourished by the magical sources of desire, revolt and poetry (…). Neither God nor master: more than ever this old revolutionary motto seems pertinent to us. It is inscribed in letters of fire on the gates that lead, beyond industrial civilization, to surrealist action, whose objective is the re-enchantment (and re-eroticization) of the world.”
To protest against the pompous celebrations of the Fifth Centenary of the so-called “discovery of the Americas” (1992), the surrealists published the Bulletin Surréaliste International no. 2 in 1992, with a joint declaration signed by surrealist groups from Australia, Buenos Aires, Denmark, Great Britain, Madrid, Paris, the Netherlands, Prague, São Paulo, Stockholm and the United States. Inspired by an essay written by our Argentine friend Silvia Grenier, this document celebrates surrealism’s elective affinity with indigenous peoples, against the Western civilization that oppressed them and tried to destroy their cultures: “in the struggle against this suffocating totalitarianism, surrealism is – and has always been – the companion and accomplice of the indigenous peoples.”
O French Newsletter was published in three languages – English, French and Spanish – by the Chicago Surrealists, who provided the cover with a collage of Franklin and Penelope Rosemont depicting Columbus as Alfred Jarry's Père Ubu.[xii]
The Museum of Modern Art in Paris (Centre Georges Pompidou) opened a major exhibition of surrealist art in the spring of 2002, entitled “The Surrealist Revolution.” The exhibition did not, in fact, have any “revolutionary” significance and attempted to present surrealism as a purely “artistic” experience using “new techniques.” At the entrance to the museum, visitors could pick up a free four-page brochure explaining that “the surrealist movement wanted to participate actively in the organization of society” and that it had had a great influence on it, especially through its impact on “advertising and music videos”…
Disturbed by this conformist amalgam, Guy Girard suggested that the Surrealist group prepare an alternative pamphlet, in the same four-page format, with similar typeface but with entirely different content: Surrealism is described as a revolutionary movement whose aspiration for freedom and subversive imagination aims to “eliminate capitalist domination”; the pamphlet is illustrated with images of women artists – such as Toyen or Leonora Carrington – who are practically absent from the exhibition, and with a historical photograph from 1927: “our collaborator Benjamin Péret insulting a priest”…
The group members then carefully placed a stack of the surrealist pamphlet on top of the “official” pamphlet for visitors to pick up. Interestingly, the curators of the exhibition, challenged by the surrealist pamphlet, removed their own futile piece and replaced it with a new one that attempted to take into account the fact that surrealism was a subversive anti-authoritarian movement that denounced “the Family, the Church, the Fatherland, the Army and Colonialism”…[xiii].
The group's various pamphlets and statements were published in the book Poetic Insoumission. Tracts, Affiches and declarations of the Paris group of the surréaliste movement 1970 – 2010 (Paris, The cherry season, 2010). Guy Girard edited the book, compiled the material and illustrations, and wrote a brief introduction to each text; M.D. Massoni wrote a brief historical introduction. The book has been partially translated into Russian and Portuguese [For a poetic insubordination: pamphlets and declarations of the surrealist movement 1970 – 2022. São Paulo, underinfluence editions, 2022].
Between 2019 and 2022, three issues of a new Parisian magazine were launched: Alcheringa. Surrealism Today. "Alcheringa” is a word from an Australian Aboriginal language, meaning “The time of dreams”, mentioned by André Breton in his essay Main Premiere[xiv]. In the editorial of the first issue, Guy Girard recalls the surrealist opposition to capitalist civilization, to all religions, to the power of the State, to patriarchy and to “a thought that, divided between irrational delirium and superficial instrumental rationality, has always fought against creative imagination”. And in an essay in the third issue, Sylwia Chrostowska defines surrealism as an “art of dreams” against the positivity that suffocates us, an art that includes not only nocturnal dreams but also utopian dreams.[xv]
Regardless of its limitations and difficulties, the surrealist movement in Paris has kept alive, over the last 50 years, the red and black flame of rebellion, the anti-authoritarian dream of radical freedom, the poetic insubordination to the established powers and the obstinate desire to re-enchant the world.
*Michae Lowy is director of research in sociology at Center nationale de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). Author, among other books, of Franz Kafka unsubmissive dreamer (Cem Cabeças Publisher) [https://amzn.to/3VkOlO1]
Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.
Notes
[I] A. Breton, Political position of surrealism, Paris, Denoel, 1972, pp. 128-129.
[ii] See Maurice Nadeau, Surrealist Documents, Paris, Editions du Seuil, p. 298.
[iii] W. Benjamin, “Surréalisme, instantaneous achievement of European intelligence", Myth and Violence, Paris, Maurice Nadeau, 1970, pp. 299-301.
[iv] "Du temps que les surréalistes avaient raison”, in M. Nadeau, Surrealist Documents, p.309.
[v] The documentation about this “encounter between the Lion and the Eagle” was gathered by Arturo Schwarz in his small book Breton/Trotsky, Paris, 10/18, 1977. We can also usefully read the texts by Marguerite Bonnet and Gerard Roche in Cahiers Leon Trotsky, n. 25, March 1986 (issue on “Trotsky and the French Writers”).
[vi] A. Breton, “Claire Tour", The key to the fields, Paris, 10/18, 1967, p. 424. On this episode, see the two notable pamphlets published under the title “Surrealism and Anarchism” by the Libertarian Creation Studio of Lyon, in 1992 and 1994.
[vii] These two texts are found in A. Schwarz, Breton/Trotsky, pp.194, 200.
[viii] Vincent Bounoure, “Nothing or nothing”? (1969) in Moments of Surrealism, Paris, L'Harmattan, 1999.
[ix] BLS, n. 10, April 1976, p. 25. The couple was only released in January 1977. It was in 1975, during the campaign for the liberation of Brazilians, that I met Vincent Bounoure to ask him to help us. We became friends and he invited me to go to the Café dos Surrealistas.
[X] Vincent Bounoure (ed.), The Surrealist Civilization, Paris, Editions Payot, 1976. I published a review of this book in the (Trotskyist) weekly Red in June 1976: “this book manifests all the diversity, richness and libertarian inspiration of the surrealist message. Above all, it is a passionate protest, a declaration of “absolute deviation” (an expression of Fourier’s often cited by Breton) from capitalist-industrial civilization and its mercantile, rationalist-positivist worldview.”
[xi] I was the author of this declaration, signed by the surrealists of Paris, Prague and Buenos Aires, and published in the magazine Praxis International, London, January 1987, under the title “Hermetic Bird".
[xii] "1492-1992. So many voyeurs stop replacing themselves with voyants", in Poetic Insoumission, Tracts, affiches and declarations of the Paris group of the surréaliste movement 1970-2010, presented by Guy Girard, Paris, Le Temps des Cérises, 2011, p. 66. I met Silvia Grénier, the main animator of the Buenos Aires surrealist group, during a visit to Argentina around 1985. We became friends and I enjoyed her very much. Inland, an essay against Western colonialism that she had written. I suggested to the international surrealists that we use it as the basis for our statement and wrote a shorter version, which was adopted.
[xiii] I published an article in the leading French newspaper, “Le Monde”, in April 1999, which retells this story: “The revolutionary revolution is soluble in the heart of museums?”.
[xiv] A. Breton, “Main Premiere" (1962), Cavaliere Perspective, Paris, Gallimard, 1970, p. 225
[xv] Sylwia Chrostowska, “Ni Commencement, ni Commandement, Juste un Rêve", Alcheringa 3, 2022, pp. 2-5.
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