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Breton Notes

Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism

• Doesn�t begin like a manifesto
• typographically (unusually lucid and scientific)
• emotionally (it�s hindsight, reflective, sad)

• �Case against the realistic attitude�
• �hostile to any moral or intellectual advancement�
• �mediocrity, hate, dull conceit�
• Clarity doesn�t give you anything (against Zola, Flaubert, Balzac): only facts
• Not necessarily against �materialism�

• Against rationalism: it only lets you use �facts directly relating to our experience�
• Experience is too limited
• Thank you Freud: you have re-opened the imagination through dreams
• Dreams: they let go, let loose for anything, allow anything
• �the marvelous is beautiful�

• Loves Matthew Lewis� �The Monk�
• Loves Freud (in fact, he psychoanalyzed soldiers during the war!)
• Picasso, Duchamp, Picabia, Paret
• Transhistorical: Swift, Sade, Hugo, Poe, Baudelaire, etc

• Surrealism: �Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express � verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner �� the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, except from any aesthetic or moral concern�
• Against logic and conventional notions of morals or beauty
• As a philosophy: more about dreams and play than about other forms of thought.

Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism

• Attitude of resignation, limitation, exploration
• His followers and his opponents equally misrepresent him
• death of Freud puts psychoanalysis into question
• need to know the “ephemeral and the eternal, the unreasonable and the reasonable” (283)
• Air of disappointment pervades
• Need to reevaluate human relations
• “I have constructed a system of coordinates for my own use” (285): the good system is not a complete, generalized, abstract system; but instead a pell-mell personal system made
• Anti-sectarian, pro-multiplicity (metaphor of carpenter’s tool box, 287: you would use all of your tools, not just one, right? then don’t stick to just one of the “optional modes of knowledge”)
• Wants to impose a new social myth to “foster” a better society (287)
  • Turns out to be aliens! See the last 2 pages, about the being to whom we resemble what animals are to us
  • As soon as you admit we can’t know everything, you postulate the being of some kind of creature that does (reinstating God)
• Faith in Marx slipping b/c capitalism hasn’t been overturned
• Above all, don’t just copy the old Surrealists; you have to make your own path, “at the risk of one’s life” (288)
• “truth shows itself only so as to laugh up its sleeve and never be grasped” (289): new knowledge is yet just an admission that you’ll never know all
• Mentions wartime rationing and hunger
• All knowledge is necessarily specialized today (only talk about your own domain of expertise, pal)