"LAUTRÉAMONT AND THEM", IN MÉLUSINE XXVIII, SURREALISM AS HERITAGE, 2008, PP. 211-234.
Taking over, two of my doctoral students, Emmanuel Rubio and Olivier Penot-Lacassagne, wanted to bring together researchers working on surrealism after 1945. They contacted Édith Heurgon, director of the international cultural center of Cerisy-La-Salle, who, on my recommendation, welcomed them very favorably. As will be seen below, the participants sometimes came from far away, and belonged to all generations. For my part, I tried to examine the relationships of the Tel Quel group with their predecessors, in their way of reading works of the past. My title indirectly referred to a notable article by Aragon in Les Lettres françaises.
"Surrealism, however, has its statue, its gods and its mythology, its cross-of-fire and its legend, its recipes and its dogmas, its patois, and nothing is easier, for collectors, than to measure it to the nearest centimeter: statues are the most docile of corpses." (Dotremont) – "in occultism or alchemy, Breton only proposed insignificant chatter from under-"prompter" or under-"non-initiate"; in political economy, he only produced invertebrate under-Trotskyism." (Isou) – "Breton, today it's bankruptcy. Your company has been in deficit for too long. It's definitely not your associates who will get you out of there. They don't even know how to behave at table." (Internationale Lettriste) – "Themselves, the Unconscious of the Big Thing, survive in the harmless, in the good humor of banalized amusements around 1930." (Guy Debord) – "What a pain their literary salon is!" (Topor) – "For surrealism, Lautréamont remains a pretext for verbal inflation, a reference all the more insistent as it is less questioned, a shadow, an expression, a myth, under the cover of which a lyrical, moral and psychological confusionism is perpetuated." (Philippe Sollers) – "And what about the little tails of the surrealist comet: junk of images, desperately interchangeable dreams, libertarian clichés, painful puns, riquiqui eros sublimities?" (Christian Prigent)
This article forms a chapter of the volume: Lights on Maldoror, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2023, pp. 115-128
