Having taken charge of the edition of The Secret Life of Salvador Dali in the collection I directed at L'Age d'Homme editions, and having worked extensively with Frédérique Joseph-Lowery, it seemed quite obvious to me to participate in the colloquium she organized with Isabelle Roussel at Cerisy. The subject imposed itself, from the frequency of shit in Dali's work, both written and pictorial, and the sublimation that followed.

Colloquium Program: Dali. On the Traces of Eros (2007) (ccic-cerisy.asso.fr) DALI ON THE TRACES OF EROS FROM MONDAY AUGUST 13 (7 PM) TO MONDAY AUGUST 20 (2 PM) 2007 DIRECTION: Frédérique JOSEPH-LOWERY, Isabelle ROUSSEL-GILLET

ARGUMENT: Women's mouths that eat themselves, couples that devour each other, mothers who give a breast to suck with the whiteness of the driest skulls: Dali's universe is dark and deliquescent. It is only in the shadows that discreet erections, on the canvases, dare to raise the tone. Unless the tonality becomes grotesque, everything collapses: sex appeal is a monster says a canvas woman to a very little boy. On the side of the representation of women, the wind of fashion seems to bring gaiety and fantasy: drawer breasts, extendable buttocks, body with genital apparatus made of lobsters, other crustaceans hung around the neck, cutlet epaulettes. Venus's body recomposes itself according to necrophilic, fetishistic, autoerotic, scatological fantasies, support of anal, oral practices that go back to the time of earliest childhood. The decor, in turn, becomes corporalized: sex-telephone, lip-sofa, vulva-hat... Sex is this great mobile metamorphic power, whimsical and baroque, elusive, which annihilates the boundaries between the kingdoms of men, women, objects while behind rise ghosts and fantasies, double images of a universe more disembodied than it appears.

This meeting around Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali proposes to collect the textual traces, pictorial relics, cinematographic vestiges, pseudo-scientific remains that litter the work.

Monday August 13 Afternoon: WELCOME OF PARTICIPANTS Evening: Presentation of the Center, colloquiums and participants

Tuesday August 14 Morning: Pilar PARCERISAS: Archaeological eroticism in Salvador Dali. Gradiva or feminine beauty through dream or erotic desire Philippe KAENEL: "In the name of the Father, the Son...": Salvador Dali's polymorphous Christ Afternoon: Opening of Annick ROUBINOWITZ's installation (in the old stables) Dance passage by Virginie SOUQUET Isabelle ROUSSEL-GILLET: Béjart/Dali: Gala on the traces of steps Frédérique JOSEPH-LOWERY: Dance, a medusa's trick?

Wednesday August 15 Morning: Henri BÉHAR: Scatodali Dance passage by Virginie SOUQUET (in the farm courtyard) Haim FINKELSTEIN: Dali, critical sodomy Afternoon: Claire NOUVET: Hand gifts Daniel KAY: Saint Anthony's peep-show Vicent SANTAMARIA DE MINGO: On hysteria and its relations to bisexuality (Reverie) Testimony of Denise SANDELL

Thursday August 16 DAY IN AVRANCHES Morning: Visit to the Avranches Scriptorial Visit to the exhibition "Dali. The Practice of Recycling" (at the Avranches Scriptorial) Aperitif and buffet (Victor Hugo Hall near the Avranches Botanical Garden) Afternoon: Frédérique JOSEPH-LOWERY: "There's a lizard!" (at the Avranches Museum) Visit to the exhibition "In Place of the Dragon" by Annick ROUBINOWITZ (at the Avranches Museum) "Eorasonnée", Contemporary Solo Dance Creation, by Virginie SOUQUET (Ancient Funds in Avranches) Visit to the exhibition "Dali and Béjart: dancing Gala" (Bergevin House in Avranches) Visit to Mont-Saint-Michel

Friday August 17 Morning: William JEFFETT: Dali: a hot erotic, a cold erotic Astrid RUFFA: Magical operations and the omnipotence of Eros Afternoon: Patrice SCHMITT: The double image: on the traces of Eros and Thanatos

Saturday August 18 Morning: Paolo SCOPELLITI: The great edible paranoid Jean-Claude MARCEAU: Dali or the gay knowledge of Modern Style eroticism Afternoon: Claude DEBON: Apollinaire put in the nude by Dali himself John JOHNSTON: Cybernetic Eros Evening music: Dali at the fair (INA archives), introduced by Frédérique JOSEPH-LOWERY, with discussion Recital by Martine TORREGROSSA (Singing with guitar of 5 poems by Garcia Lorca, set to music by Paco Ibanes)

Sunday August 19 Morning: Iveta SLAVKOVA-MONTEXIER: The loss of integrity and eroticism: an antihumanist vision of desire in Dali's work Myriam WATTHEE-DELMOTTE: "Hidden faces" of Dali's eros: the thought of the novel (communication at Les Granges in the old stable with Annick ROUBINOWITZ's installation) Afternoon: Intervention by Annick ROUBINOWITZ Reading of a text by José FERREIRA with Michel MEGAS Jean-Louis GAILLEMIN: Erotic critique of the object Evening: The New Angelus by Millet, installation by Annick ROUBINOWITZ

Monday August 20 Morning: Presentation of doctoral students: Caroline BARBIER DE REULLE, Elliott KING and Maayan RAZON Synthesis and discussion.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ades, Dawn, Dali (Thames and Hudson, 1982 and 1995) and Dali and surrealism, Harper & Row, c1982; With Vincent Gille, Jennifer Mundy: Surrealism: Desire Unbound (2005); With Jean-Hubert Martin: The Endless Enigma: Dali and the Magicians of Multiple Meaning (2003); Editor of Dali's optical illusions, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2000. Béhar Henri, André Breton: The Great Undesirable, Fayard 2005; Creator of the journal Mélusine, Cahiers du Centre de Recherche sur le Surréalisme; With Michel Carassou: Dada, History of a Subversion, Fayard 2005. Finkelstein Haim, Salvador Dali, Art and writings, 1927-1942. The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Cambridge University Press, 1996; Surrealism and the crisis of the object, UMI Research Press, 1979. Gaillemin Jean-Louis, Dali, Unfulfilled Desires, from purism to surrealism. Joseph-Lowery Frédérique, ed. issue Reading Dali, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 2001, and critical edition of the original manuscripts of The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, ed. L'Age d'homme, 2006. Jeffet William, ed. with Hank Hine and Kelly Reynolds of Persistence and Memory, New critical perspectives on Dali at the centennial, the Salvador Dali Museum, St Petersburg, Florida, 2004. Kachur Lewis, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations, Displaying the marvelous (MIT Press), 2001. Ottinger Didier, Surrealism and Modern Mythology: The Ways of the Labyrinth from Ariadne to Fantômas, Gallimard, 2002 and Duchamp without end (2000). Millet Catherine, Creator and director of the journal Art Press; Books: Dali and me, ed. Gallimard, 2005; Contemporary Art: History and Geography (Flammarion 2006); Contemporary Art in France (Flammarion, 1987, 1994 and 2005); The Sexual Life of Catherine Millet, Seuil, 2002. Parcerisas Pilar, catalogue of the exhibition Dali's Affinities (2004). Scopelliti Paolo, The facsimile of "The Immaculate Conception" by Eluard and Breton, preface by Henri Béhar, L'Age d'Homme, 2002. Spector Jack, Surrealist art and writing, 1919-1939: The gold of time, Cambridge University Press, 1996; The Aesthetics of Freud: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Art, ed. Mc Graw Hill, 1974. Taylor Michael and Dawn Ades, Dali, exhibition catalogue at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (September 2004-January 2005) and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (February-May 2005), ed. Rizzoli International Publication. Watthee-Delmotte Myriam and Olivier Clynckemaillie, Dali (2000).

Cf.: Salvador Dalí: on the traces of eros | International Cultural Center of Cerisy (cerisy-colloques.fr)

Publication of proceedings: Frédérique JOSEPH-LOWERY, Isabelle ROUSSEL-GILLET (ed.): SALVADOR DALÍ: ON THE TRACES OF EROS, Notari Editions; Bibliotheca Daliniana, 2010, 352 p. ill.

In Dali, sex is a force that acts permanently in the laboratory of the work and which determines in the artist, from the most troubled zones of turbulence of his imagination, an exploratory impulse turned towards ecstasy and sublimation. This colloquium around the Catalan artist proposed to collect the textual traces, pictorial relics, cinematographic vestiges and pseudo-scientific remains littering the work of this French surrealist that the country where he was born imaginarily rejects more than ever. The resulting proceedings are presented in the order of the unfolding of the days and interventions, so much did it matter to account not only for the intellectual dimension of the different approaches, but also for the inscription in time and space (a week at the Château de Cerisy) of the very presence of the participants, their speech, their body: how, indeed, to meditate on the traces of eros in Dali while ignoring this requirement of the artist who expected from the "looker" (and therefore from criticism), in the contemplation of his works, the same engagement of the sexual body as himself in his creative act. The central question posed by Dali, and which the reflections have therefore made it possible to reactivate under various angles, is indeed that of the degree of mobilization in (and by) the work of art: what resonances of his body, what echoes of his psychic life is one ready to deliver through gesture, gaze and speech? Read my contribution: Scatodali (melusine-surrealisme.fr)