(IN)ACTUALITY OF SURREALISM (1940-2020), EDITED BY OLIVIER PENOT-LACASSAGNE

Compte-rendu par Catherine Dufour

19 mars 2023

Maurice Nadeau in his History of Surrealism published in 1945 decreed that surrealism, now outdated, was coming to an end. This point of view long held authority, despite the uninterrupted activity of the movement from the 1940s until its official dissolution in 1969 by Jean Schuster, and even well beyond. The unprecedented sum gathered by Olivier Penot-Lacassagne has chosen to focus on this post-war surrealism, long neglected, which however experienced a renewed critical interest in the 2000s. The twenty-four contributors to the work do justice to more than seven decades of history of a movement considered internationally and put in relation with the great upheavals of History.

The articles are organized chronologically, punctuated by various documents (tracts or letters of the time, testimonies or contemporary judgments) that bring to life a surrealism re-evaluated in light of its (in)actuality. The reader is gradually led to wonder whether, beyond a mercantile globalization that sometimes credits it with a deceptive actuality, surrealism does not embody another timeless, authentic and subversive actuality. The absence of chapters is an editorial choice that undoubtedly tends to account for an approach without rigidity or dogmatism, open to the eclecticism of views on a protean surrealism. For the sake of synthesis, my review nevertheless re-establishes temporal landmarks and thematic titles, at the risk of betraying somewhat the spirit of a flourishing work.

1940s: activity of surrealism under the Occupation / exile and return of Breton

Olivier PENOT-LACASSAGNE ("Paris-New York, New York-Paris. Surrealist comings and goings") studies how, during the war, Breton and the many European artists who emigrated to New York attempted to keep the spirit of surrealism alive, despite various obstacles, of which the art critic Clement Greenberg was not the least, due to his severity towards a devalued surrealist painting compared to avant-garde abstraction.

Meanwhile, in France, the "La Main à plume" group was acting against the Occupier. Léa NICOLAS-TEBOUL ("La Main à plume, 1940-1944: renewal of surrealism in occupied France?") comments on the activities and publications of the group, of which Dotremont was an essential figure. In July 1943, La Main à plume addressed a Letter to Breton1, which would never reach its recipient. This letter reported a desire to maintain the surrealist requirement, far from the "unravelings of Messieurs Aragon, Éluard and Co." and the "bleating of mystical lambs".

A second article by Olivier PENOT-LACASSAGNE ("The spirit of surrealism") presents Breton's New York point of view in his Prolegomena to a third manifesto of surrealism or not (1942), according to which surrealism would still be the highest emancipatory ambition for the future. A message difficult to hear in occupied France... Upon Breton's return in 1946, the crucial question of surrealism's new place arises. The 1947 tract "Rupture inaugurale", written by José Pierre and approved by 52 signatories, attempts to take stock of relations between surrealism and politics since 1935. But a new intellectual landscape is emerging, embodied by journals from the underground like L'Heure Nouvelle (1945-1946) by Adamov, who no longer adheres to Breton's idealist myth, or Troisième Convoi (1945-1951), in which Artaud and Bataille participated, and which claimed to completely overhaul surrealism. With Bataille, enemy from within, negativity imposed itself as the primary value of a surrealism that now had to take into account a mutilated consciousness in a world in ruins. Artaud, who embodied "the ultimate burst and shipwreck", addressed a Letter to André Breton in March 1947, violently hostile to "emasculated" surrealism. Blanchot for his part, from 1945 to 1947, did not recognize himself either in the movement's publications (Ode to Charles Fourier, Liberty is a Vietnamese word) or in the exhibition Surrealism in 1947.

Anne FOUCAULT ("The experimental against the esoteric. Dissidence of revolutionary surrealism, 1947-1948") is devoted to the dissidence of the ephemeral Revolutionary Surrealism which, in the wake of La Main à plume, contested the idealist line of Breton and his friends to reconnect with the dialectical Marxism of the 1930s. From this movement, represented notably by Dotremont, Magritte, Nougé, or Noël Arnaud, CoBrA was born, which, interested in the sensory experiences of everyday life, prepared the Internationale situationniste of Asger Jorn, bearer of a surrealist heritage from which it would gradually emancipate itself.

The tract Haute Fréquence (1951) marks an important stage. The new team, embodied in particular by Jean-Louis Bédouin and Jean Schuster, works for a humanity "cured of all idea of transcendence, freed from all exploitation". This is the time when new avant-gardes express themselves who, although still referring to the surrealist heritage, seek to break free from it, like Lettrism. Frédéric ALIX ("For a new conquest of the concrete. Isou's Lettrism against surrealism") relates the noisy birth of this movement in 1946, under the leadership of Isidore Isou who wanted to put an end to surrealist reveries. His Homme Nouveau brandished a conquering rationality destined to frame the new forms of art and poetry, under the governance of the letter, the body and the cries.

Anne FOUCAULT describes to us the effort of small journals ("Some journals in the close margins of surrealism, 1944-1948") which, between the end of the war and the immediate post-war period, in their own way, attempted to keep alive a surrealism in search of redefinition. These minor publications are called Fontaine, Les Quatre Vents, Le Clair de terre, La Révolution dans la nuit or Qui vive. But Bataille has higher ambitions for his own journal, Critique (1946), which aspires to a surrealism animated by a freedom superior to that of Sartre, a surrealism of "being" not assigned to works, a surrealism that would be "pure practice of existence" as Blanchot said.

It falls to Fabrice FLAHUTEZ ("Some battles of surrealism, 1945-1959") to take stock of the divided post-war surrealism. In 1945 Benjamin Péret published Le Déshonneur des poètes, a pamphlet directed against Éluard's L'Honneur des poètes, a collection of patriotic, communist and well-thinking poetry. Sartre announced the end of surrealism in Situation of the Writer in 1947. Yet, that same year, the great exhibition conceived by Breton and his friends, Surrealism in 1947, met with great success, despite the rise of abstract painting. The voice of Isou, who tried until 1949 to make himself sympathetic to Breton, was soon covered by the dissidents of the Internationale lettriste (1952) who wanted to "surpass" a surrealism compromised with consumer society and the University.

1950s: surrealism confronted with communism, Sartre, Camus, Blanchot, and situationism

The tract "Haute Fréquence", in May 1951, marks the taking over of surrealism by a new team composed of Jean-Louis Bédouin, Gérard Legrand, Jean Schuster, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, etc., who militated for a surrealism engaged in its time and a humanity "cured of all transcendence, freed from all exploitation". Other tracts with evocative titles followed: "Déclaration préalable" in 1951, "Au tour des livrées sanglantes!" and "Hongrie, Soleil levant" in 1956. Blanchot, Breton, Dionys Mascolo and Schuster signed in 1959 an "Enquête auprès d'intellectuels français" against the Algiers putsch of May 13, 1958. But Sartre, Camus, Blanchot and the situationists make voices heard that gradually impose themselves.

Jeanyves GUÉRIN, ("A literary chapel of the post-war period. Surrealism seen by Sartre") tracks the satirical references to surrealism in Sartre and Beauvoir's novels and essays. Sartre blames surrealism as a narcissistic, mystical and little-engaged petty bourgeois ideology. In What is Literature? (1948) he defends prose, which signifies the world, against poetry, which surrealists claim. Jeanyves Guérin reproaches the philosopher for minimizing the importance of the movement. Sartre should certainly have nuanced his judgment, but for now he wanted to secure his place in institutions (Gallimard, NRF, CNE, PC) while the network system, which had once benefited Breton, was working less well. The question of communism and the Algerian war would widen the gap between surrealism and existentialism...

The anti-colonial sensibility of the 1950s underlies Anaïs MAUUARIN's article ("L'invention du monde, 1952. The 'primitive arts' under the eye of surrealist filmmakers") which compares two films: Les Statues meurent aussi (1953) by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker and L'Invention du monde (1952) by Michel Zimbacca and Jean-Louis Bédouin. In the latter, a dreamlike medium-length film at the service of a universal conception of myth and a fascination for the primitive, anti-colonialism is far from obvious, which makes it weak compared to Resnais' film which questioned the filmmakers' gaze, the status of the museum object, and read myth as a colonialist construction.

Christophe BIDENT ("Maurice Blanchot's surrealist experience") analyzes the complexity of Blanchot's relations with the surrealists, from which he retains two essential points. The first is the paradox that made Blanchot say that surrealism, by its very failure, had highlighted the real questions posed to the writer, including that of language which eluded the Subject, in a quasi-Lacanian perspective. The second point concerns the political question, which Blanchot, while referring to Marxism, posed in Kojevian terms close to Bataille's "unemployed negativity". Christophe Brident comments on Blanchot's writings on Breton, Leiris, Bataille and on the trio Char, Michaux, Artaud. In the 1950s Blanchot engaged alongside Breton, Mascolo, Schuster. In the 1960s, theorizing "the absence of book", he praised the theoretical contribution of surrealism. The surreal, which provoked a magnetic field, was close to the neutral, to Bataille's "homogeneous", or to Barthes' "readable". Commenting on novels by Blanchot (Thomas l'obscur), Brident shows that the aesthetic and existential quest towards "pure presence" and "infinite movement" that animated his writing was similar to the surrealist experience according to Breton.

JeanYves GUÉRIN ("Camus and surrealism: misunderstandings and incomprehension") makes a survey of the exchanges, common points and incomprehensions that have punctuated the relationship between Breton and Camus. The article multiplies references taken from journal articles, conferences, correspondences, works. It shows how these two men, who both had libertarian affinities, were never truly friends, and often misunderstood each other, particularly on the notion of revolt, which occasioned a controversy with twists and turns. Camus's L'homme révolté (1951) was certainly not Breton's... And Breton did not like Camus, who only partially knew his work, judging the surrealists or their ancestor Lautréamont. He felt very distant from the philosopher's measured thought. The two men nevertheless shared certain causes.

Remains situationism (1957) whose itinerary Anna TRESPEUCH-BERTHELOT traces ("The surrealists facing noisy heirs. In the lettrist antechamber of the Internationale situationniste"). Debord and his friends, influenced by surrealism then lettrism, crossed paths with the CoBrA collective (1948-1951) of Asger Jorn and Constant. Advocating psycho-geographical drift (a variant of surrealist urban wandering), automatism, controversy, scandal, they nevertheless renounced the surrealists for their disengagement from the revolutionary cause, their esotericism and their sentimentalism. The situationists wanted to deal with capitalism, technicism and consumerism of the Trente Glorieuses.

1960s: revolt rumbles, Front noir / La Brèche / La NRF and Breton / May 68 / Tel Quel, Change, Opus international

The 1960s are those of a growing sensitivity of surrealists to political questions. The tracts rise up against consumer society, against Stalinism, and support world revolutions. The titles, once again, speak for themselves: "Declaration on the Right to insubordination in the Algerian war" (1960), "Tranchons-en" (1965), tract that accompanied the exhibition L'Écart absolu, "Le Paysan du Tout-Paris" (1967) against Aragon, "Pour Cuba" (1967), "La plate-forme de Prague (Paris-Prague April 1968). Surrealism feels reborn in supporting Vietnam, Che Guevara, Black Power. Its official end is however near, enacted by "Le Quatrième Chant" (Le Monde, October 4, 1969) in which Schuster, self-proclaimed leader of the surrealist group after Breton's death in 1966, pronounces its dissolution, while sketching a possible succession to "historical surrealism", which "could not be identified with eternal Surrealism".

In a 2019 communication, Louis JANOVER (Front Noir, 1963-1967) explains the stakes of his journal (animated by Le Maréchal, Gaëtan Langlais, Georges Rubel, etc.) favorable to insurrectional workers' councils against "party communism" and faithful to the surrealism of Breton, Artaud or the Grand Jeu. A long "Open letter to the surrealist group" published in issue 1 of Front Noir in 1963 attacked Schuster for having betrayed the movement and compromised himself with a French left that forgot Trotsky.

Marie-Paule BERRANGER ("La Brèche, 1961-1965. 'We haven't finished being right'") tells us about La Brèche which, succeeding Bief (1958-1960), was born under Breton's direction and essentially relied on Robert Benayoun, Gérard Legrand, José Pierre, Jean Schuster. Carried both by analogical thought and Fourierism, this journal gave a large place to images. Marie-Paule Berranger describes in detail each of its issues and presents its collaborators, including a significant number of women. She identifies the centers of interest that refer to original surrealism. Politically the journal was reactive to the great debates of the time (the Algerian war).

Émilie FRÉMOND ("Ce concert est trop beau", NRF n°172, April 1967) analyzes the NRF issue devoted to André Breton and the surrealist movement, shortly after the writer's death. Tributes and testimonies are mixed there, in a somewhat confusing way. Certainly Breton and surrealism are criticized there, but the whole is nevertheless hagiographic. For Breton, contributor to the Nouvelle NRF, had become a monument of literary history, which fitted well with the classicism of a journal little sensitive to the current...

Jérôme DUWA ("'No shepherds for this rage!': the surrealists and the 68 event") questions the uncomfortable position of surrealists in May 68. The tract of May 5, whose title by Jérôme Duwa repeats the formulation, expressed their eternal aspiration towards "definitive convulsions". But youth was rising up against a system of which they had been the objective allies because, from the First World War to the Castro revolution, they had contented themselves with verbal positions. To analyze their hesitations between critical withdrawal and effective engagement alongside youth, Jérôme Duwa calls on Brecht, W. Benjamin, Blanchot, Leiris, etc. and puts into perspective the role of the intellectual in the face of History. He concludes with Mascolo that critical distance could very well contribute to dismantling the ideological decor in which the "old world" was thought.

In the post-68 period, surrealism is confronted with two dominant journals, Tel Quel and Change, while Alain Jouffroy in Opus international in 1967 wants to remain surrealist.

Olivier PENOT-LACASSAGNE ("Surrealism put to the test of Tel Quel") follows step by step the relations between surrealists and the journal Tel Quel (1960-1982). Under the influence of Blanchot, Foucault and Derrida, Artaud and Bataille, then Barthes, Genette and Todorov, the telquelians declare death to traditional literature, to the idealism of analogical thought, to Freudian-Jungian psychologism. Language now does not signify but signifies itself, the human is caught in a network of signs that signify it. Surpassed, surrealism turns to philosophers likely to regenerate it, Fourier and Marcuse, who inspire the exhibition L'Écart absolu in 1965. Jean Schuster's L'Archibras, which succeeds La Brèche in 1967, wants to remain faithful to historical surrealism and calls for engagement for Third World revolutions. That same year Tel Quel published the "Programme" manifesto which inaugurates a "textual rupture" (Sollers) at the antipodes of Schuster's ideals. Tel Quel accuses surrealism of obscurantism and surrealists accuse Tel Quel of formalism. In May 68 the telquelians keep their distance from the Marx-Mao-Marcuse trio. The Artaud/Bataille couple becomes their weapon. When, after the dissolution of surrealism, Alain Jouffroy attempts a relaunch, his "neo-surrealist sauce" is fought by Tel Quel, which generates endless polemics, while telquelism orients itself towards unconditional Maoism.

Born from a split in Tel Quel, the journal Change (1968-1983) is founded by Jean-Pierre Faye, Jacques Roubaud and Maurice Roche. Juliette DRIGNY ("Change and surrealism") analyzes this journal devoted to "the movement of change of forms" or "transformationism". Proposing another reading of Artaud and Bataille, it claims this fundamental surrealism of which May 68 was imbued. The diversity of its participants breaks with the scheme of the group united around a leader. Surrealism fascinates Jean-Pierre Faye as a secret society. "Ruptures" and "aleatory" are the key words of his journal, as are "objective chance", automatism, unconscious, madness, revolution of language. But the rigor of Change, which has met Jakobson's formalism and the Prague Circle, is not in phase with surrealist romanticism. Madness is envisaged there under the double authority of linguistics and anti-psychiatry. The unconscious is no longer that of Charcot or Freud, but that of Foucault and Lacan. Noam Chomsky's generative grammar plays a central role there. However, links are forged between Change and surrealism to support Prague surrealism against the repression of 1968. Change, due to its excessive formalism, will have little posterity.

Dominique DROUET-BIOT ("Opus international: Alain Jouffroy's sidestep for a surrealist 'recharge'") brings us back to surrealism through Opus international. His thesis is that Alain Jouffroy, member of the founding collective of this journal published from 1967, at the same time as Schuster's L'Archibras, used it to revivify surrealism. Excluded by Breton in 1948, Jouffroy, who kept an unfailing admiration for him, developed an intense editorial activity to make his movement known. Dominique Drouet-Biot guides our steps through several issues of this journal where first-hour surrealists coexist with more contemporary figures. Jouffroy loved eclecticism, novelty, internationalism, pleaded for automatism and dream, was interested in rebels, Godard, Artaud and Bataille... Between the rejection of surrealism and its sacralization, he opted for a conciliatory position and for the recognition of surrealists of the shadow (Rodanski) or contemporary surrealists. But he aroused many polemics: he was an "excluded", a heretic who claimed to reconcile Aragon and Breton, past and present, and who aspired to the leadership of a movement whose official leader was Schuster. He was accused of being recuperative and confusionist and his journal, enriched with numerous reproductions, was perceived as an art journal.

1970s: American surrealism / feminist surrealism / surrealism and Lacan / Coupure / Vaneigem

Effie RENTZOU ("Brief critical history of surrealism in the United States") proposes a panorama of the reception of surrealism in the United States, from the 1930s to the present day, based on the major exhibitions that made history, university studies, journals or trends in the art market. In the 1980s flourished studies inspired by structuralism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, feminism. The transversal approaches of cultural studies and multimedia change the gaze on surrealism, which from the small Parisian and masculine cenacle of the pre-war period had expanded to a globalized surrealism, all media combined, gendered and open to cultural differences. Recent conferences and exhibitions confirm these trends, irrigated by postcolonial, post-humanist, ecological, political readings and archival work that continues to enrich itself.

It is often forgotten that, parallel to the surrealism of exile, there was in the United States an authentic surrealist group, studied in an article by Olivier PENOT-LACASSAGNE whose title ("Poetry Matters! Notes on American surrealism, 1966-2020") is a wink to the current Black Lives Matter. This group was born in the 1960s, under the banner of Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, in Chicago. The article studies in particular the interactions with the Beat Generation of this combat surrealism which, influenced by Marcuse, the Frankfurt School, anti-colonial struggles, counter-culture, supported workers' struggles and engaged very radically for the cause of Blacks.

Devoted to feminist criticism of surrealism, Katharine CONLEY's article ("'The hidden woman': gynocriticism of surrealism") goes back to the founding essay by Xavière Gauthier, Surrealism and Sexuality (1971), to introduce us to the universe of American "gynocriticism" of the 1970s, which was interested in surrealist women as artists and no longer only as muses or objects of desire. This gynocriticism rose up against the Bretonian cult of "the woman child". Katharine Conley comments on several studies by American feminists highlighting the androcentric character of many surrealist works. The publications reviewed resonate with debates on feminine writing led in France by Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray. The article concludes on the place of women in some recent exhibitions and on the state of current publications of Anglo-Saxon feminist criticism.

Audrey Lasserre ("Surrealism as heritage: in head 100 women persist") prolongs this debate. Her title is a reference to Ernst's famous collage novel, La Femme 100 têtes (1929) and to the title of a special issue of Les Temps Modernes, "Les femmes s'entêtent" (1974), to which about forty women from the MLF contributed. The article recalls that feminist currents of the 1970s were divided around the notion of feminine "differentialism", opposed to the Marxist universalist conception of equality between man and woman. Inspired by Marcuse's erotic revolution, Xavière Gauthier went so far as to forge the concept of "femellitude", antinomic to the notion of "femininity" which carried all sorts of stereotypes. She extended sexual freedom to homosexuality, forgotten by the first surrealists, and to perversions. It appears that feminists sometimes went further than surrealists in the fields of art and writing, which have so often excluded them...

If it is in congruence with the triumphant Lacanism of the 1970s, Jacqueline CHÉNIEUX-GENDRON's article ("Resonances between surrealism and psychoanalysis, in the pre- and post-war periods. Jacques Lacan, Guy Rosolato, André Breton") essentially focuses, in a first part, on the "porosity of thought" between André Breton and Jacques Lacan in the 1930-1932 years. Through texts and works interposed, Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron shows how each served as a "reading grid" to the other, and how this dialogue favored in Breton a new conception of an unconscious psyche, structured like a language, and of a poetic writing that was no longer an "automatic writing" articulated with the thought of the first Freud, but, in agreement with the "second topography", an "automatic work" that Lacan had helped him conceive and formulate. The article also shows how, in several texts by Breton, Freudian influences were mediated by Lacan's thesis on paranoia (1932). A second part is devoted to the psychoanalyst Guy Rosolato who, in the era of dominant structuralism, continued to judge essential the influence of Breton, Picabia or Artaud.

In an interview conducted by Anne Foucault, Alain JOUBERT, shortly before his death in 2017 ("The improbable encounter between political power and surrealism"), relates the reasons for his rupture with Schuster, too close to communism. Deploring, like Breton in 1952, the Stalinist maneuvers prejudicial to surrealism, Joubert nevertheless nuances the point: Aragon's excesses should not make us forget the sacred surrealism of Jules Monnerot, nor the heterodox surrealism of Georges Bataille. He recalls that a third way of surrealism (after Marx and Rimbaud) had been announced by Breton in his Yale Conference (1942): "changing the reform of human understanding". One could therefore reconcile poetry and politics, which was confirmed by reading Marcuse. Thanks to Fourier, Breton had rehabilitated an imperative omitted by Marx: Desire. After disavowing the flashy exhibition organized by Patrick Waldberg in 1964, Joubert expresses his nostalgia for the subversive scenographies of the great exhibitions E.R.O.S (1959) or L'Écart absolu (1965) which, making Fourier and Marcuse dialogue, proposed a "poetic attempt at surpassing" the critique of consumer society.

Jérôme DUWA analyzes the journal Coupure ("Beyond historical surrealism: how to make COUPURE, 1969-1972") animated mainly by José Pierre, Gérard Legrand, Jean Schuster. This journal, directly resulting from the dissolution of the surrealist group, thought to enact a definitive "coupure" with the word "surrealism"... which would be called into question by the publication, in six years, of the Bulletin de liaison surréaliste (1970-1976). The layout of Coupure provoked visual disorientation through montages of press "cuttings", ancient or current quotations, associations of unpublished texts and images, détournements, etc. The "sophistications of the layout" perfectly matched the insertion of revolutionary content. This "convoy of dreams without destination" took up the creative disorder of May 68. The support of Maoist activists sentenced to prison, which earned Schuster a trial, was a sign of this radicality which, finally, referred to the subversive spirit of historical surrealism. But Coupure ceased its activities in 1972, due to an impossible relaunch of this energy proper to surrealism.

Fabien DANESI ("Only silence is effective") comments on Jules-François Dupuis's Désinvolte History of Surrealism (1977), pseudonym of Raoul Vaneigem, ex-member of the Internationale situationniste. Vaneigem deplores that surrealism has been recuperated by capitalist society, which Debord was already saying in The Society of the Spectacle in 1967. Surrealism was reformist, idealist and bourgeois rather than revolutionary. Only the rage of Benjamin Péret (Je ne mange pas de ce pain-là, 1936) and that of Antonin Artaud found favor in Vaneigem's eyes, adept of Lautréamont's definition of poetry: "overturn the world" through a "totality of language". Fabien Danesi reveals Raoul Vaneigem's unconscious affinities with surrealist imagery and highlights some of his doctrinal blind spots. A note on Vaneigem's book, written by the surrealist VINCENT BOUNOURE ("A propos des chiennes cocasses") comes to criticize nastily the situationists who, no more than the surrealists, could escape the grip of consumer society and the spectacle.

From the 1970s to TODAY: very contemporary points of view, for better or for worse: Michel Deguy / BHL / Jean Clair / Régis Debray / Emilie Frémond, Yves Bonnefoy / Julien Blaine.

Michel DEGUY ("The insignificance that threatens us..."), in a 2019 interview with Olivier Penot-Lacassagne, attacks this devalued surrealism that "ends up in Hermès windows" or "in the farce-and-trap shop of Mardi Gras". The word surrealism, used at every turn, has become insignificant, while surrealism designates the "last age of great European romanticism"... whose project of changing life had alas failed. French surrealism had ended in 1947, unlike Czech surrealism rekindled by the revolutionary flame. The attempts at relief after the war were derisory. Meditating on the great work of poetry to which Breton had participated, Michel Deguy pays particular tribute to Paul Celan who "makes caesura" in the contemporary mediocrity of small feelings expressed "as it comes" to have a surrealist air...

An excerpt from Bernard-Henri LÉVY (Surrealism, "this nightmare of letters") taken from a chapter of his Adventures of Freedom. A subjective history of intellectuals (1991) accounts for his relentlessness against the "terrorism" of avant-gardes and the "fanaticism" of surrealists. But Annie LE BRUN, in Qui vive (1991) mocks his amalgams and shortcuts, his comparisons between Nadja and Pol Pot, between surrealists and Khmer Rouge, his "grand-guignolesque" attitude, his counterfeits sown with "blunders and false interpretations".

Hugo DANIEL ("The Jean Clair symptom. On a problematic reading of surrealism") comments on Jean Clair's no less ridiculous essay: Du surréalisme considéré dans ses rapports au totalitarisme et aux tables tournantes (2003). He thwarts point by point the misunderstandings, false historical facts and bad faith of a bilious critic who associates surrealism with fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, pornography and makes it responsible for the civilizational demoralization that led to the September 11 attacks! Hugo Daniel notes that Jean Clair attacks the surrealists' Marx-Freud heresy and their interest in anti-psychiatry, forgetting that, in their approach to madness, the surrealists, in phase with the greatest philosophers of the century (Foucault), contributed to a decisive epistemological rupture.

Régis DEBRAY in some excerpts from L'Honneur des funambules. Réponse à Jean Clair sur le surréalisme (Paris, L'Échoppe, 2003) makes on the contrary a vibrant praise of surrealism, for its heterogeneity, its capacity for contagion and resurgence, its abolition of dualisms in favor of the imaginary, its positions in favor of the oppressed and against religions. The surrealists wanted to make poetry and art a way of living and rejected the society of performance and enslaving leisure.

Émilie FRÉMOND finally proposes a very erudite article ("Surrealism in a salon. From domestic fantastic to the domestication of dream") on the research of modern and contemporary designers desirous of infusing into urbanism, furniture and everyday objects the subversive value of Dada, surrealism or situationism. The article goes back to functional and utilitarian design that had seized avant-garde utopias as early as the 1930s, to then commercialize and reproduce them on an industrial scale (see Dali's Chaise Léda or Max Ernst's Lit-cage). But the Revolution can hardly inhabit the bourgeois salon... Émilie Frémond regrets that current design supposed to be avant-garde actually participates in the gigantic globalized bazaar of contemporary art. She concludes however with an exception: the radical design of Ugo La Pietra, which would maintain authentic affinities with the utopias of Magritte or Tzara's Grains et issues (1935)...

A text by Yves BONNEFOY ("André Breton at auction: vulgar") published in Le Monde, February 5, 2003, at the announcement of the auction of the Breton collection, expresses his sadness and disgust towards "the vulgarity of this grand store style enterprise", which eradicated "even the memory of what is loving and free".

Julien BLAINE closes the work ("I have never affirmed my position towards surrealism") with a letter-poem to Olivier Penot-Lacassagne, dated December 19, 2018, which evokes the avant-gardes he claims, taxing surrealism of "academic recuperation of Dada", except Artaud or genius precursors like Cravan, and paying homage to Breton's famous definition: "Pure psychic automatism by which...".

One can only congratulate the reviewed work for having brought back to life a surrealism long judged outdated, despised or studied in a disparate way. It appears, through the articles, that this surrealism lived to the rhythm of History, traversed by often conflicting currents, enriched by its confrontation with new writers or artists and emerging avant-gardes. It has influenced sometimes underground our ways of living (design) and dialogued with very current demands of culture or gender. Subjected, still today, to the diatribes of some outdated pamphleteers, it has been legitimately celebrated, since the 2000s, by great exhibitions (London, New York, Paris). Its fundamental requirements never cease to be current for those who still believe they can change life / change the world...