![]() ![]() André Breton himself wrote that surrealism is the tail of the romantic comet, emphasizing however, with typical romantic irony, that it is a ‘strongly prehensile tail’.Īssociated with communism, Trotskyism and anarchism during its history, surrealism never ceased to search for the subversive treasures-‘the gold of time’ (Breton)-hidden in dream, play, magic, poetry, love. It shared with the first romantics the repulsion for the prosaic, ‘philistine’, reified capitalist ethos-the ethos of Rechenhaftigkeit (Max Weber), the mercantile spirit of rational calculation-as well as the desperate desire to re-enchant the world. ![]() ![]() One can also argue that surrealism is the most radical expression of revolutionary romanticism in the twentieth century. International in its scope, historically open-ended, its aim was nothing less than to combine two of the highest utopian dreams: to transform the world (Marx) and to change life (Rimbaud). What is surrealism? As this anthology superbly documents, footnote * it is not a ‘French literary school from the 1920s’, but a vast and ambitious poetic, cultural and political revolutionary movement, a subversive protest, in the name of desire and imagination, against bourgeois civilization. ![]()
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