FROM THE COMMUNICATING VASES TO ARCANE 17, WAS BRETON A FREUDIAN-MARXIST?

par Rizk-Urbanik

May 9, 2019

Attributing such a qualification so abruptly to Breton, an essentially anti-dogmatic figure, may seem like a contradiction, a scandal, or even heresy. Moreover, this concept of "Freudian-Marxism" is particularly delicate to define insofar as it covers various ways of relating the two major theorists of the 19th century, Freud for psychoanalysis and Marx for the founding philosophy of proletarian revolution.

The interrogative modality tempers with caution this rapprochement which is not incongruous and where we must hear, not an essentiality, but a sustained interest in doctrines echoing an existential poetic commitment.

The debt of the surrealists, of Breton in particular to the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud is beyond doubt, as attested by an impressive number of references to Freud cataloged by Henri Béhar (they number 109) in his index. Less numerous are the mentions of Marx, Engels or socialist theorists 44, but they are nevertheless real.

One of the fundamental themes of surrealism is undoubtedly the dream, it is even its primary material, at the heart of psychic life. Far from being a simple revealer betraying an unconscious lower layer, it is for these poets the primordial clay that connects the real and thought. In the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, Breton thus defines this aspect of poetic production in an inversion of the superior and inferior:

"Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of associations neglected until then, in the omnipotence of the dream, in the disinterested play of thought."

Freud's work which publishes in 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams shows that the dream is the royal road to access the unconscious. There could only be a meeting between Breton and the great Viennese thinker on this point. However, very quickly an incompatibility of perspective emerges. For the psychoanalyst, the work of interpretation carried out in concert with the dreamer can make manifest the latent content of the dream and ultimately cure it. For the poet, there can be no question of a cure, which would suppose a return to a psychic, moral, social normality, all called into question by surrealism. How then to formalize the meeting points of these two perspectives, one normative, the other disruptive?

Is the answer in the collective dimension, in the hope of changing life, proper to the surrealists, who, like Apollinaire, were "tired of this old world"?

The teleological perspective of a Marx who predicted the end of history with the disappearance of class struggle, revolt before social inequalities, and the phenomenon of exploitation, insurrections were certainly in phase with the surrealists' will to put an end to all forms of oppression, whether it came from the bourgeoisie, the Church or the State.

The crux of the question is undoubtedly to combine these two philosophies of individual liberation (psychoanalysis) and collective liberation (Marxist struggles) with this new poetic point of view that does not separate the work from life and promotes existential emancipation as a poetic fact. Can we say in this sense that Breton was a Freudian-Marxist?

Two texts particularly refer to these data: they are The Communicating Vases, published in 1931 and Arcane 17 written during the Second World War, in 1944, during a trip to Gaspésie. Both of complex composition in that they combine different types of writing, theoretical essay, first-person narrative, oneiric prose, even esoteric, they clearly manifest the concern to liberate material and real life through the intermediary of the dream. Between the two periods, that of the thirties, pre-fascist, which incite to collective commitment and the end of the war in exile, is there an itinerary that distances Breton from the desire for emancipation toward a strictly poetic and individual point of view? How to understand the final formula of Arcane 17 "Freedom, love, poetry" alpha and omega of all existence?

The Communicating Vases, written in 1931, metaphorically takes up a principle of physics that describes the equilibrium relationship between two fluids arranged in different receptacles, communicating with each other. The main purpose of this essay is to question the relationship of the real world to the psychic world and to reconcile the dream, imagined reality and the duty-to-live. "Making the possible come at the expense of the probable" does it pass through a collective adventure in which Freud and Marx can be reconciled with poetry?

A dozen years later, the long poetic narrative Arcane 17 approaches a much more internalized point of view on the question of love in a hymn to the beloved woman and to love. On the collective level, Breton questions less about the becoming of human justice than he is obsessed with the question of peace and anti-nationalist struggle. Little by little the criticisms addressed to Freud and the Marxists are increasingly developed, to the point that poetic emancipation remains the only perspective.

We will therefore study successively:

I Breton's Freudian-Marxist Quest for Existential Emancipation

II The Failures of Freudian-Marxism; Poetry Alone Transcendence and Existential Commitment

(Poetry alone is capable of resolving the contradictions between action and dream, individual and society, idealism and materialism)

III Poetry, Freedom, Love: The Mysticism of Renewal

* * *

I Breton's Freudian-Marxist Quest for Existential Emancipation

Freudian-Marxism or the Total Liberation of Man:

What exactly do we mean by this formula? To which thinker do we refer who could have determined Breton's thought? Various attempts were already elaborated in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany and Italy especially to reconcile psychoanalytic discoveries and Marxism.

"To psychoanalysis which proposed a theory of the soul, a method and a technique of care with the aim of removing man from his alienation, [...] Marxism brought an analysis of socio-historical alienation processes that claimed to be objective." (Encyclopedia Universalis, Freudian-Marxism article).

In both cases, theoretical analysis was to lead to practical action and a remedy. The solution to the failures of a personal history was the analytical cure, the solution to remedy collective alienation was the proletarian revolution. If the parallel of the two approaches is clear, from the start Freudian psychoanalysts were refractory to any ideology and Marxists were suspicious, even hostile to the liberation (or channeling) of drives which they saw as a diversion from revolutionary struggles.

It was especially some psychoanalysts who thought that one could not liberate psychic symptoms without liberating individuals from economic oppression. Each Freudian-Marxism actually draws differently from the work of Freud or Marx by conjugating at will a theoretical part.

Is this Breton's procedure, of which we can doubt that he read Alfred Adler, Siegfried Bernfeld, Carl Fürmuller, Wilhelm Reich, Otto Fenichel, Paul Federn, Heinrich Meng, Erich Fromm as early as 1931? To cite only him, Wilhelm Reich's Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis only appears in French in 1933 (in German in 1929).

It is indeed only after the struggles of May 68 that the historicity of the subject was fully recognized, that a cultural relativity of the unconscious was envisaged and that symmetrically, a social psychology of the masses could be envisaged.

How did Breton position himself as an iconoclastic intellectual and poet in the face of these theories of emancipation?

Thinking Material Emancipation, Liberating Love:

Part two of The Communicating Vases ends with a vision of progress on a historical scale "whose duration considerably hampers that of my life" p. 137 VC. The end of capitalist exploitation and the liberation of women are associated, and thereby the possibility of loving and being loved without venality coming to obliterate sexuality. Breton quotes Engels:

"A generation of men who never in their lives will have been in the case of buying at the price of money, or with the help of any other social power, the abandonment of a woman; and a generation of women who will never have been in the case of giving themselves to a man by virtue of considerations other than real love, nor of refusing their lover for fear of the economic consequences of this abandonment." (p. 137-138)

"This task [...] must [...], deliver (to this future man) in accomplishing itself the perspective understanding of all others, it is his participation in the sweeping away of the capitalist world."

Fully Freudian-Marxist, in the sense that he draws a picture of human alienation, with at its heart amorous frustration, Breton in 1931 gives as a model the Soviet Union, which at that time still shows in the West the blazing of a redefinition of life — including sexual liberation. More progressive, advanced, and in resonance with contemporary current events, is this critique of prostitution which, according to him, adulterates any amorous relationship, not out of prudishness, but out of amorous absolutism. Having just described his quest for the woman during his wanderings in the streets of Paris, and his refusal to resort to prostitutes, Breton founds in theory this posture, a beautiful way of conjugating the analysis of superstructures and infrastructures.

He thus defines the role of the intellectual: "As long as the decisive step has not been taken in the path of this general liberation, the intellectual should in everything and for everything, strive to act on the proletariat to raise its level of consciousness as a class and develop its combativeness." (p. 142 VC)

Making the revolution is therefore the ethical and political duty of the poet, who from this point of view is in the continuity of Hugolian prophetism and romantic idealism. Simply, the individual and erotic dimension is more clearly present there.

In Arcane 17, Breton describes human misery much more poetically through an evocation of the night, with sordid activities. "a pile of coal, a trap or a speeding car? Some will concert projects without scope while others will assert or conceal sordid interests. [...] these are the gentlemen of the funeral."

He evokes the class interests of counter-revolutionaries by their contempt for utopias: "human demand [...] must sometimes be renewed and refounded in the unfettered desire for collective well-being, very quickly taxed as utopia by those to whom it individually casts a shadow." (A17, 52)

The most surrealist meditation on human revolts is undoubtedly the oneiric drift to which Breton invites us in Gaspésie. Having glimpsed red buoys topped with a black pennant on a coastline, a mnesic drift figures the Parisian windows, "the red canvas flags of certain road works", then the red or black flags of a Parisian demonstration in which he participated in 1913 at the age of 17 against the extension of military service to three years.

"In the deepest galleries of my heart, I will always find the coming and going of these innumerable tongues of fire, some of which attach themselves to licking a superb carbonized flower." (p. 17, A 17)

Personal oneirism borders on libertarian demand:

"NO GOD NO MASTER. Poetry and art will always have a weakness for everything that transfigures man in this desperate, irreducible summons that from time to time he takes the derisory chance of making to life." (p. 19)

The Primacy of the Dream: Fusion of Material Life and Psychic Life

In his Essay The Communicating Vases, Breton never ceases to articulate the two types of psychic and social alienation, and his central question is to establish the relationship of the dream to material life. Retracing the historical difficulties since time immemorial to establish a theory of the dream, he evaluates Freud's decisive contribution without however recognizing all his concepts. He salutes in him the recognition of the dream in the continuity of the psyche.

"I will adopt [...] the judgment according to which psychic activity would be exercised in sleep in a continuous way" (p. 28) The dream must not only be recognized, but judged indispensable to life, of capital utility: "At the very short scale of the twenty-four-hour day, it helps man to accomplish the vital leap."

He salutes in Freud the formulation of the principle of condensation in a dimension that contains neither space, nor time, nor principle of contradiction. (p. 59) Breton gives the account of personal dreams that he interprets himself to prove the reciprocal relationship of real life and the dream. Thus, having dreamed that he was offered in a store a fashionable tie representing Nosferatu, he traces its origin: the meeting, the evening before, of an old reactionary professor, the one whom Lenin attacks in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, combined with the presence of bats under the hotel arcades which have "completed the vampire character." (p. 51)

The dream, however, is not just an escape from the heaviness of material life, whose characteristics can be read in a clinical pathology study, it is the essential root of existence that allows life to unfold. This is why, far from harming action, it allows it and why it is constitutive of surrealist art.

The dream and the construction of the poetic object take up the same principle of arbitrary assembly, of encounter linked to chance, like this exquisite corpse constituted of an empty drawn envelope closed by a red and empty seal, edged with eyelashes and bordered with a handle, in which the poet sees a bad pun "eyelashes/handle — silence".

He takes up Lautréamont's formula, "Beautiful... like the fortuitous encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella" to give it an oneiric interpretation.

"If one wants to refer to the key of the simplest sexual symbols, one will not take long to agree [...] that the umbrella can here represent only the man, the sewing machine the woman".

The poetic act is an emancipating sexual act through its incongruous rapprochements.

The desire for existential plenitude is vectored by the desire for love and whether it is thought individually or collectively, it is indeed the triumph of the dream that the poet theorizes and practices simultaneously. Consequently, dream, material and psychic reality, art merge in Breton and we arrive at the idea that poetry is the only transcendence.

In this, it is important to emit some reservations regarding Breton's Freudian-Marxism.

II The Failures of Freudian-Marxism, Existential Poetic Commitment

Or how poetry is the only transcendence.

Ambivalence toward Freud:

in the 1931 treatise, Breton from the start castigates the excesses of materialism and idealism which he sends back to back. He claims a possible conciliation between two points of view that he judges dogmatic, excessive and without nuance. Materialists content themselves with anchoring psychic life in conditions of existence or in biological drives, and idealists speak of soul in disdain of the body, and forget infrastructures. The synthesis that the poet wishes to operate is not exactly that of a Reichian Freudian-Marxism, first because it is existential poetic commitment, then because a certain number of concepts and drifts of the two bodies of doctrines are contested by the poet. The ambivalence is perfect in the way Breton considers Freud. He is cited among the great men that humanity counts:

"These adventurers of the spirit, [...] those who have taken man by the body, have summoned him to know himself in depth or have put him in a position to justify his supposed ideals – they are called Paracelsus, Rousseau, Sade, Lautréamont, Freud, they are called Marat, Saint Just..." (p. 43, A 17)

As early as 1922, mistrust is the rule when he meets Freud in Vienna. He thus relates his interview in The Lost Steps:

"To imagine one of the most prosperous agencies of modern rastaquouérism, Professor Freud's office with apparatus to transform rabbits into hats and blue determinism for all blotting paper, I am not sorry to learn that the greatest psychologist lives in a house of mediocre appearance in a lost quarter of Vienna." (OC Pléiade, vol. 1, p. 255)

The first reservation sketched in the 1931 essay made to Freudism concerns its absence of dialectical sense — which is to say that it is not Marxist enough — Breton reproaches a new dualism no longer that of soul and body, but that of drives and their expressions. He denounces theorists who have made of the dream only a degradation of waking activity and mystics who have completely separated real life from psychic life, which according to him the "monist Freud" does. The supernatural character of the dream is not sufficiently established by Freud according to Breton, who deplores that Freud said nothing about the prophetic dream.

"Freud is still very certainly mistaken in concluding to the non-existence of the prophetic dream — I want to speak of the dream engaging the immediate future — to hold exclusively the dream as revealer of the past being to deny the value of movement." (p. 23 VC)

For the surrealist, it is the dream that determines so-called real existence. Science of interpretation, psychoanalysis has contented itself with relating oneiric activity to all strata of the past and memory while forgetting the other half of temporality: the future. For the poet, the dream — and not only the will —, and desires determine the material life of the subject. The whole sequel of the narrative illustrates how dreams of an essential feminine allow waiting, encounter and receptivity in the face of objective chance. Breton rewrites Nadja in this text, where he demonstrates by experience the fundamental flaw of Freudism. Existence is a waking dream in which poetry/amorous desire transcends all things.

This is why the praise of Freud is almost perfidious, consciously or not, which consists in saluting the method of interpretation of symbolism. However, this doctrine was prior to him. The epistolary exchanges between Breton and Freud published at the end of the collection indicate a great susceptibility of Freud, accused of not having cited his sources.

"Freud himself [...] seems, in matters of symbolic interpretation of the dream, to have only taken up Vorkelt's ideas."

Beyond these questions of divergences on the understanding of the dream, it is above all the place accorded to it that differs from one thinker to another. For Freud, the dream must serve the interpretation of symptoms intended to cure a patient, while for the surrealist it is the matter and root of being, vector of life. Instead of repressing or sublimating drives, it is a matter for the poet of fighting against oppressions, sexual or political.

This is why, feminist before her time, for Breton, psychoanalysis seems to be thought only in the masculine and seems so little adapted to exploring the feminine mystery. (A 17, 74)

"It will have been necessary to reject all modes of reasoning of which men are so poorly proud, so miserably duped, to make a clean slate of the principles on which the psychology of man has been built up entirely selfishly, which is in no way valid for woman, in order to instruct the psychology of woman in process against the first, with a view to subsequently reconciling them."

An Anti-Dogmatic Militancy:

When he evokes his first battles, it is not class struggle that he denounces first. Breton militates against religion, advocates the struggle against oppressors, those of religious good-thinking, its ideology and its masters.

In Arcane 17,

"It is the love of man and woman that lies, hypocrisy and psychological misery still hold back from giving its measure, he who historically to be born had to outwit the vigilance of old furious religions and who begins to stammer so late, in the song of the troubadours." (p. 59, A 17)

In The Communicating Vases, he even wonders if poetic means can be legitimately enslaved to any cause whatsoever, even the most legitimate, the anti-religious cause (p 101). The gratuitousness inherent in art in general and surrealism in particular cannot enslave it to any cause whatsoever. As a result, the best example of proletarian art are the constructions of the Cheval postman, of which we see a photograph.

It is institutions in general, academies and cenacles of all orders that it is important to proscribe and belonging to any school, aesthetic, philosophical or political being in contradiction with poetic commitment. A beautiful polemical formula enunciates this refusal of institutions in Arcane 17 where he opposes the male dogmatism of the end of the 19th century to Rimbaud's poetic spirit: "On the one hand, the great wing stroke, nothing less than 'changing life', on the other the drool of the book-eating rat." (P. 67, about Rémy de Gourmont attacking Rimbaud.)

To simplify, Breton's enlightened anti-Marxism is based on the critique of dogmatism, the threat he senses of institutional sclerosis.

At the end of Arcane 17, he opposes the concept of liberation, a transitional concept of ephemeral revolt against an unjust order to true freedom which is an active, lasting, perpetual revolt.

This is why he could not fall under the definition that Marx makes of the intellectual "after having interpreted the world, it is a matter of transforming it". p. 149 VC

"Thus we come to conceive a synthetic attitude in which are reconciled the need to radically transform the world and that of interpreting it as completely as possible. This attitude, we are a few to hold to it for several years and we persist in believing that it is fully legitimate."

Love/Poetry, Éluard's formula is undoubtedly this active synthesis that transforms life and affirms the transcendence of poetry, but a lived poetry and in some way immanent/transcendent.

A Poetic Vision of Eroticism as Absolute

In The Communicating Vases, interrupting a dense theoretical part, Breton evokes his solitude, the necessity of encounter, refusing to discredit love in the name of the social:

"Love considered from the materialist point of view is in no way an unavowable illness. As Marx and Engels have observed (The Holy Family), it is not because it discourages the critical situation [...] it is not because love for abstraction has no dialectical passport that it can be banished as puerile or dangerous." (p.80)

What more beautiful reconciliation of dialectical materialism and the rehabilitation of eroticism than this reference to a Freudian Marx? In fact, Breton then slides to the account of his wandering in Paris, delivered to objective chance, to the wait for a passerby, little sister of Nadja.

After having confessed that prostitutes hardly tempted him, he quotes Engels theorist of love!

"Always from the same materialist point of view 'it is his own essence that each seeks in others.' 'I found myself haggard before this balance without beam, but always sparkling: to love, to be loved.'" (p. 83)

"Before my eyes, people, books, trees floated a knife in the heart."

Amorous desire transforms reality into dream. (p. 89). Thoughts are wild squirrels, and the woman crossed in the street evokes "the Dalila of the little watercolor by Gustave Moreau that I so often went to see at the Luxembourg." "In the lights, her eyes immediately made me think of the fall, on undisturbed water of a drop of water imperceptibly tinted with sky, but stormy sky." (p. 90)

An eschatological vision substitutes for these simple associations at the end of the 1944 narrative. A Hugolian Breton expresses his prophetic vision of the future in a sort of mouth of shadow. (p. 125, A 17)

Before the Percé Rock, an esoteric vision seizes the poet:

"And the proclamation, trumpeted to the four winds, is indeed of importance since from radiant mouths edged with rainbow silk only the news of always is propagated to all echoes: the great curse is lifted, it is in human love that resides all the power of regeneration of the world." (A 17, 59)

In a decade and a half, after the trials of exile and war, what could still be qualified as Freudian-Marxism in Breton becomes a mystical esotericism, and the will to free oneself from all ideologies.

III Poetry, Freedom, Love: A Mysticism of Renewal

The Woman Announcing a New World:

During his urban wanderings, Breton observes a woman passing in front of the Lariboisière hospital, near the Gare de l'Est. In a significant slip, Breton reads Maternity instead of the hospital's name.

"This confusion, very similar to those that can occur in dreams, testifies, according to me, to the recognition of the wonderful mother who was in the one, if not of not dying, at least of surviving me." (VC, 92)

From the woman is born a new world, she is, as in Aragon's Unfinished Novel, the future of man.

In Arcane 17, this idea which until then was limited to oneiric autobiography takes a cosmic extension. Imagining the future after the end of the war, where he wishes for radical proposals outside the frameworks, before the deficiency of the language of the spirit, making the language of the heart and senses speak loudly:

"May the idea of earthly salvation through woman dominate, of the transcendent vocation of woman, a vocation that has been systematically obscured, thwarted or perverted until us, but which must nevertheless triumphantly assert itself one day." (p. 53 A 17)

Having passed through a Swedenborgian mysticism, close to a Nerval who convoked the essence of the feminine through Isis, the Virgin Mary, the daughters of fire, the star actress, Breton in turn takes up the long series of women idealized by courtesy. From Medusa to Melusine, the woman-child, esoteric mysticism makes the feminine principle the alpha and omega.

We are far from a Freudian-Marxism, liberator of political and sexual oppressions! Not only has the writing completely changed, the perspective has lost its philosophical abstraction. By having made the choice of amorous mysticism, it becomes simultaneously poetic. Because poetry has become flesh in the world, eroticism has spiritualized by becoming total.

The woman does not simply give life, she is phoenix and promise of resurrection. The meeting with Elisa Binhoff in New York is evoked at the very beginning of the poetic narrative, "this notebook of great truant school". She had just lost her daughter Ximena, tragically drowned off Massachusetts. This trial, this descent into hell is followed by the renewal that the encounter allowed:

"When I saw you, there was still all the fog, of an inexpressible kind in your eyes."

It is through love and through it alone that the fusion of existence and essence is realized to the highest degree [...] while these two notions remain outside it always uneasy and hostile.»

Resolving contradictions, reconciling materialism and idealism, love and collective well-being was already the wish expressed in the 1931 essay. The trials of exile and war, separations have deepened and strengthened the desire for unity, which could only reject as artificial or incomplete ideologies. Poetry in its great freedom accompanies the love poem to Élisa.

Poetry:

The absolute and timeless character of poetry, essential to human existence, does not exclude the rejection of "oldness."

"Poetic thought is the enemy of patina and it is perpetually on guard against everything that can burn to apprehend it: it is in this that it distinguishes itself by essence from ordinary thought. To remain what it must be, conductor of mental electricity, it must above all charge itself in an isolated environment." (A 17, 10)

Breton takes up a metaphor of physics dear to the surrealists in echo to that of The Communicating Vases: electricity can only travel isolated under penalty of loss. But this electricity designates a mystery, that of vital energy, of amorous desire, of poetic thought, all analogical. A paradox is enunciated according to which the universality of poetic thought borders on the necessity of placing oneself outside the common, in isolation and an ethereal space.

This contradiction makes poetry an anarchism, symbolized by the black flag a little further on (at page 19) "Above art, poetry whether we like it or not, also beats a flag alternately red and black."

Better still, it is associated with Science with which it shares the exception of being universal. "There can be no question of a new humanism until the day when history, rewritten after having been concerted between all peoples and limited to a single version, consents to take man as its subject. Art and science [...] know approximately this state of grace. [...]" (A 17, 49-50)

This is why, perhaps, the philosophies that are Marxism and psychoanalysis (to which Breton would refuse the status of science) are discredited in favor of a more hermetic symbolization, that of esotericism.

The title of the collection Arcane 17 refers to the seventeenth card of the tarot deck and represents a woman pouring water from an amphora from each of her hands. She is surmounted by eight stars of which one is more luminous and central, a bird and a bucolic landscape. It is also the 17th letter of the Hebrew alphabet which evokes as a sign the tongue in the mouth. At the center of all these correspondences, Breton places the woman in his narrative, as she is at the center of the tarot card.

Should we see there a true conversion to mysticism or simply the deepening of an idea already present in 1924 in The Letter to the Seers or in Nadja?

The fact remains that it is the fringes of knowledge that fascinate the poet, distraught with the great mystery of the world. Was the discovery of Eliphas Levi in New York through the work of Auguste Viatte, Victor Hugo and the Illuminati of his time published in 1942 in Montreal decisive? Anti-dogmatism, the will to preserve the freedom of reverie have doubtless been just as much.

The Supreme Freedom of Analogy

The principle of analogy, essential to illuminism, seems a more appropriate response to the writer than Freudian-Marxist dogmas (whether separate or combined) to represent and live existence in the world.

Starting from a biographical experience, an excursion to Gaspésie shortly after meeting Élisa, the narrative transforms into a reflection on humanity, history and nature. Poem of amorous incantation, it is a hymn to freedom.

From one of the windows of the house facing the Percé Rock, Breton makes it the frame of the screen on which he projects his own exegesis of the 17th arcana of the tarot, the star.

Scrutinizing truth through a loophole, such is the great enterprise of the text, at the antipodes of the approaches of psychoanalysts or social theorists seeking to render a harsh and methodical light on the real.

"Esotericism, all reservations made on its very principle, offers at least the immense interest of maintaining in a dynamic state the system of comparison, of unlimited field, of which man disposes, which delivers to him the relationships likely to connect the apparently most distant objects and reveals to him partially the mechanism of universal symbolism."

Beautiful formula for an anti-totalitarian desire for knowledge. Positive interpretation is denounced for its grasping and intolerant character. The spirit of Resistance beyond the historical movement of anti-Nazi struggle is exalted as a principle of daily life. Man must become a lookout, on the lookout for a sign as imperceptible as unexpected.

"It is there, at this poignant minute when the weight of endured sufferings seems about to engulf everything that the very excess of the trial brings about a change of sign which tends to make the unavailable human pass to the side of the available." (p. 115 A 17)

Without prejudice to the measures of moral sanitation that are imperative on this dark eve of twice the year thousand, and which are essentially of a social order, for man taken in isolation there can be no more valid and more extended hope than in the wing stroke.»

Conclusion

To conclude briefly, the question asked: "Was Breton a Freudian-Marxist?" was indeed legitimate. He walked alongside an approach of total emancipation of the human race, while remaining, from the start independent, by placing poetic commitment above everything.

It is certain that one can be sensitive to the evolution of his thought consequent to historical trials and say summarily that he was less and less favorable to Marxism, while granting to psychic life its primacy. It remains no less that faithful to himself, he preserved the essential. The "Duty-to-be" supposes accomplishing life, this adventure in the medieval sense, through love — the future will be feminine.

He preserved, we could say, not some alienating doctrine, but the spirit of what will be called after him "Freudian-Marxism." The spirit of conceptual research of the multiple beginnings of psychoanalysis as much as the libertarian spirit of the first theorists of the social. Metaphor, more than concept, is for the poet the means of saying this bubbling spirit.

Let us thus retain the figure of a Lucifer, angel of revolt, bearer of light, Rimbaldian fire thief who quite naturally closes Arcane 17 to illuminate it.

"The angel Liberty, born of a white feather escaped from Lucifer during his fall, penetrates into the Darkness, the star she carries on her forehead grows becomes 'meteor first, then comet and furnace'. [...] it is revolt itself, it is revolt alone that is creative of light. And this light can only be known by three paths: poetry, freedom, and love which must inspire the same zeal and converge, to make the very cup of eternal youth, on the least discovered and most illuminable point of the human heart."