ON A POLEMIC: JEAN CLAIR; RÉGIS DEBRAY

Review par Pascale Roux-Cassuto

The thesis of the work—the title indicates it very clearly—is the following: surrealist ideology is founded on a sectarianism that relates it both to occultism and to totalitarianism.

Jean Clair performs a work of undermining the foundations that surrealism claimed and that, even today, are generally attributed to it. Thus, according to him, surrealism is not avant-garde, it is on the contrary nostalgic and regressive, it is a neo-romantic "revival" (p. 29). Its filiation with Freudianism and Marxism would be "ideological bricolage" (p. 47): indeed, the taste for occultism would be incompatible with scientific or materialist thought. And Jean Clair affirms: "Breton is neither a revolutionary communist, nor a disciple of Freud. He is an authoritarian and confused spirit, [...] the prototype of these gang leaders in whom the taste for domination prevails over knowledge and rigor" (p. 45).

Having shown that surrealism is not what it wanted people to believe and what was believed to be an avant-garde claiming "Freud + revolution" (1), Jean Clair then reveals what he considers to be its true nature: surrealism is a totalitarianism. The rapprochements between surrealism and Nazism punctuate the text, without always being explicitly its main object. Thus, for example, Jean Clair establishes the rapprochement between expressionism and Nazism—both born in Munich—then, in the following chapter, the rapprochement between expressionism and surrealism (2). The argumentation, as we can see, progresses toward the explicitation of the surrealism/Nazism analogy. Jean Clair then shows the importance of violence in the ideology of the avant-gardes in general, and of surrealism in particular; various episodes of its history testify to this, he affirms, such as the Anatole France trial (which allows the author to make the rapprochement surrealists/Stalinist communists) or the Contre-attaque adventure (which allows him to make the rapprochement surrealists/fascists). Artaud's theater of cruelty, whose anti-Semitism Jean Clair does not forget to underline, is brought closer to the National Socialist Thing Theater (3).

From chapter VII, Jean Clair moves to a second moment of his "genealogy of violence": he no longer questions the links that surrealism maintains with a history that was contemporary to it but on its posterity, whose destructive apotheosis would be September 11th. The author enumerates the representatives of these "three generations that were nourished on surrealist milk" (p. 180): Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, situationism and the May 1968 rioters, American Happening and the European Fluxus movement, Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard. And finally, he concludes, September 11th would be only the delayed realization in time of a surrealist dream. The author does not explicitly affirm the responsibility of the surrealists in these attacks, but the entire work is constructed so that the reader makes the hypothesis himself: from the second chapter, the author underlined the futurist predilection for the motifs of the airplane and the skyscraper; chapter V reproduced the surrealist world map published in 1929 in Variétés, on which the United States are nonexistent and Afghanistan disproportionately large. Commenting on Aragon's remarks (4), Jean Clair writes: "On September 11, 2001, Aragon's reverie left surrealism to take form in reality. The 'white buildings' of the Twin Towers collapsed in flames, while the incredulous West discovered on the world map a somewhat forgotten country, Afghanistan." (p. 119)

The last pages of the work pose the question of the artist's responsibility, of the autonomy of the literary sphere in relation to the political sphere. The author's position is unequivocal: "From the moment when fiction—the poem, the narrative—presents itself as an action in the real world—manu festus—it loses the privilege of being an activity escaping sanction, therefore unpunishable, to become an act justiciable in the eyes of authority, and liable to be repressed." (p. 196) Totalitarianism is not always on the side one believes...

Du surréalisme considéré dans ses rapports au totalitarisme et aux tables tournantes is not a work of literary history, it is a pamphlet. The author himself designates it as such, belatedly, certainly, a few pages before the end (p. 192). The remarks held in the "warning" are quite different. Jean Clair's project presents itself from the outset as a polemical enterprise—he will shock, he will be criticized, he knows it—but the author nevertheless defends himself against putting surrealism on trial: "Once an object of passion, it should henceforth be an object of study" (p. 9). Purely rhetorical negation, this declaration of principle, since in this book, surrealism is not an object of study but indeed an object of passion—perhaps even of rage. Like any self-respecting pamphleteer, Jean Clair stands as the sole defender (or almost) of a truth confiscated by the representatives of institutional knowledge, the "academics" and the "devout" who have made the historiography of surrealism "virtually unassailable" (p. 17). As in any pamphlet, the representation of the real proposed is a fundamentally binary representation, opposing a positive and a negative: the Freudian unconscious vs the romantic unconscious, romanticism vs the Enlightenment, passion vs reason, the "admirable" vs the "detestable" (p. 47), etc. Jean Clair develops a binary, evaluative and Manichean thought, in terms finally very little distanced, very little devoid of the passion that the author nevertheless claims to have abandoned.

The distortion of historical reality, which has been repeatedly underlined (5), is ultimately only an argumentative strategy among others. Jean Clair mixes epochs, taking no account of chronology; he multiplies striking shortcuts, inaccuracies, omissions and makes questionable use of quotations. In order to operate the rapprochement between totalitarian ideologies and surrealism, he puts end to end, without analyzing or putting them in perspective, quotations and episodes that have the sole function of serving the argumentation, setting aside everything that could contradict his thesis. Thus, he devotes long pages to Bataille and his sur-fascism to which, for a few months, Breton adhered. Contre-attaque is, it is true, an episode that embarrasses many historians and critics and Jean Clair is right to say that it is necessary to question this moment in the history of surrealism. But how not to be struck by the bad faith there is in highlighting this brief episode without even mentioning all the surrealist initiatives, anterior and posterior, that aimed to fight against terror, whether fascist or Stalinist? Jean Clair boasts of "taking surrealism at its word" (p. 21), of not neutralizing the violence of its political positions by presenting them from an aesthetic angle. Surrealism could not, it is true, be considered as an "intellectual pastime like any other" (6). But taking surrealism at its word does not mean manipulating a few quotations so short (they rarely exceed the sentence) that one can make them say what one wants, nor making a vague paraphrase, without precise references, that authorizes all adaptations of the cited discourse to the needs of the argumentation. Taking surrealism at its word, taking it seriously, studying its foundations and, why not, its place in a genealogy of violence, would have required a minimum of intellectual honesty.

Among the argumentative strategies used, one of the most effective in our eyes is the parti pris of considering surrealism only from the point of view of the "ideological foundations of an intellectual current that also presented itself as a political movement" (p. 7), leaving aside aesthetic questioning. We will not discuss here the viability of such a project, the possibility of treating separately these two facets of a movement that never ceased to claim the link between aesthetics and politics and whose works, Jean Clair himself underlines, were "tools," "instruments" (p. 66) aimed at transforming the real. The aesthetic question is evacuated with the greatest naturalness by the author: there is no surrealist art. In the first chapter, he thus shows that neither De Chirico, nor Marcel Duchamp, nor Picasso, nor Miró, nor Delvaux, nor Alberto Savinio were surrealists and he denies the existence of any common denominator between artists such as Magritte, Dalí, Picabia or Masson. The fate reserved for poetry is a bit different. The author feigns to be an admirer of certain surrealist poems and, to prove it, he cites among the "most beautiful poems that surrealism has aroused" texts that are inscribed in the "tradition of a popular song" and are signed by the resistant Aragon ("Un temps de chien" and "Je vous salue ma France") or by the very young Éluard ("Pour vivre ici," 1918). In other words, texts that one can hardly consider as surrealist. In the name of refusing an excessive aestheticization of surrealist political positions, Jean Clair denies the existence of surrealist art—explicitly for painting, by omission for poetry. He goes even further, and this is undoubtedly his most formidable weapon: he cuts a certain number of surrealist centers of interest from their aesthetic extensions. This is notably the case with occultism, astrology, hysteria, automatic writing or even myth. The group's research on dreams, the unconscious, chance were undeniably productive in terms of aesthetic innovation. But by refusing any consideration of surrealist art, Jean Clair makes the group of artists a band of charlatans interested in outdated and discredited theories, spending their time trying to converse with the dead. One understands the full scope of the work's subtitle, "Contribution à une histoire de l'insensé": Jean Clair's enterprise is to cut surrealist positions from their meaning, both political and aesthetic.

But in reality, who is the target of this pamphlet? The surrealists themselves? Their defenders—the "academics" and the "devout"? Their readers? The answer comes from Jean Clair himself: they are "the May 1968 rioters, heirs, for the most cultivated among them, of the surrealist vulgate, and even more the children whose tutors they will have become." The latter, who take Breton at his word, are, according to him, worshippers of violence or, at best, "apostles of free love, faithful to these great orgies à la Fourier that will be Woodstock, Raves and Love Parades" (p. 19). Terrorism, moral decadence, rock'n roll, drugs, sex, techno—society is going badly. We should put a little order in all this.

Régis Debray. L'Honneur des funambules : Réponse à Jean Clair sur le surréalisme. Paris : L'échoppe, 2003. 47 p.

Régis Debray's response to Jean Clair's pamphlet is brief, but it hits the mark. It begins by questioning the effectiveness of a text that would want, in these times of auctions and commemoration, to put surrealism on trial for revision. For attacking Breton thus, it is to take him out of the formaldehyde of official celebration and literary history textbooks, it is ultimately to revive the corpse—it is the "slap to the mummies" (p. 7): it would have been better to attack the organizers of the consecration and deal "with surrealism considered in its relations with success-stories and profit-making..." (p. 9).

The author denounces Jean Clair's approach, reductive, made of commonplaces, "hasty compressions," inaccuracies and "logical sorceries" (p. 12), and responds to his main arguments. Breton would have "remained apart from the science of his time"? But the poet is an artist and not an agrégé, an enchanter and not a pedant: "Your 'not serious abstain,' or the subjection of gold seekers to Earth sciences would make their lyre certainly didactic but about as creative as University theses" (p. 17). Surrealism would have been a heterogeneous, incoherent, "cacophonous" movement, between progress and regression, reason and unreason? Régis Debray quotes Breton: "Until further notice, everything that can delay the classification of beings, of ideas, in a word maintain ambiguity has my approval" (p. 23). Are we attacking Breton's historical positions? The author underlines "the strange discernment of his historical choices and refusals" (p. 24), his political courage and his clairvoyance and he recalls that "had hardly reason to engage in patriotic and working-class Resistance someone for whom the words party and homeland had only troublesome resonance" (p. 25). The strong point of Régis Debray's argumentation is to show, each time, that Jean Clair judges surrealism with criteria that are not pertinent: one does not measure the value of an artistic movement by the standard of scientific accuracy, ideological coherence or political effectiveness. It is ultimately the gaze that Jean Clair brings to surrealism that is called into question and, beyond that, his conception of the modern world: he is one of those who "set their compass and their watch on Harvard, London and Berlin," live in "a planet shrunk to the dreary face-to-face Europe/United States," "globe shrunk by brainwashing, hemiplegic hemisphere" (p. 32-33).

On the chapter of violence and sectarianism, Régis Debray makes concessions to Jean Clair: "Our jewel also has its shadow, violence. It is your strong point, the only one on which I would willingly surrender arms to you: the style of invective, the punch in the face" (p. 35). The only defense that Régis Debray finds is to affirm that the intellectual terrorism of the surrealists is also a matter of context and epoch. The crux of the problem, he affirms, is "of a mediological nature": one cannot remain impervious to the milieu in which one evolves, "the surrealist chameleon proceeded by contagion and osmosis, and in the moral air of the time figured the immoral techniques of intimidation like all sorts of symptomatic commonplaces" (p. 39). This position is perhaps the weak point of Régis Debray's argumentation: the interest he brings to the modalities of communication is justified, but one cannot, it seems to us, make surrealist violence an epiphenomenon, an accidental attribute. Verbal violence, aggression, is an integral part of surrealism, whether one envisages the latter from a political or aesthetic point of view. The end of the work, which advances the idea of a "surrealist religiosity" to account for a poetry that is "a style of existence, a rule of life, the equivalent of a solemn vow" (p. 42), seems very questionable to us. Surrealist violence demands of the world that it change immediately, the marvelous is not an escape toward the "country where one never arrives" (p. 44) but indeed a rape of the real. And in these times of relativism and compromise, in these times when political and economic realism has dethroned all utopias, this violence, intransigent and integral, gives us air.

These few reservations aside, we remain indebted to Régis Debray for taking, through Breton, the defense of the "step aside" (p. 13): "in a civilization that ultimately recognizes only two values, having fun to death and working oneself to death, those who have given imaginative creation another goal than the boredom of leisure or the quest for profit, [...] have a right to a little more than respect." (p. 46-47).

Some press articles published around Jean Clair's thesis:

Jean CLAIR. "Le surréalisme et la démoralisation de l'Occident." Le Monde, November 22, 2001.

Alain JOUFFROY. "Venimeuse attaque." Le Monde, December 8, 2001.

Annie LE BRUN. "Clarté de Breton, noirceur de Clair." Le Monde, December 8, 2001.

Marc JIMENEZ, "Un néoconservateur 'tendance'." L'Humanité, January 9, 2002.

"Entretien avec Jean Clair : Pour en finir avec la religion surréaliste." Le Point, May 30, 2003.

Roger-Pol DROIT. "Recette pour rater un pamphlet." Le Monde, June 13, 2003.

Régis DEBRAY. "L'honneur des funambules." Le Monde diplomatique, September 2003.

Arnaud LAPORTE. "Tout arrive ! Débat Jean Clair/Régis Debray." France culture, October 8, 2003.

(1) Jean Clair quotes the subtitle chosen by Denoël, in 1972, for a reissue of the Position politique du surréalisme (Paris: Denoël/Gonthier, 1972). He comments on it in these terms: "when, in 1972, a pocket edition republished the Position politique du surréalisme, its publisher could not resist the urge to follow the title with a catchy subtitle: "Freud + revolution." It was the magic formula. But it does not apply to Breton." (p. 45)

(2) These two movements have in common, according to Jean Clair, a certain relationship to time (regressive), a mode of expression (automatic writing, irresponsible) and a way of being in the world (violence).

(3) Both, by abolishing the stage/audience boundary, would correspond to a "totalitarian temptation" (p. 150).

(4) Jean Clair quotes two texts by Aragon: "We will overcome everything. And first, we will ruin this civilization that is dear to you, where you are molded like fossils in shale. Western world, you are condemned to death. We are the defeatists of Europe... May the Orient, your terror, finally respond to our voice. We will awaken everywhere the germs of confusion and unease. All barricades are good, all obstacles to your cursed happiness..." (Louis Aragon, Fragments d'une conférence prononcée à Madrid, à la "Residencia des Estudiantes," April 18, 1925, quoted by Maurice Nadeau, Histoire du surréalisme, Paris, Le Seuil, 1945, p. 115) "And may the drug traffickers throw themselves on our terrified countries. May America in the distance collapse from its white buildings..." (La Révolution surréaliste, n° 4).

(5) Notably by Alain Jouffroy, Annie Le Brun, Marc Jimenez, Roger-Pol Droit and Régis Debray.

(6) Jean Clair quotes this expression used by Breton himself in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (p. 21).