Now we can understand Andre Breton’s remark about Sade: «Certainly man no longer consents to unite with nature except in crime; it remains to be seen if this is not one of the wildest, the most incontestable, ways of loving.» It is easy to see that he is talking of love without an object, which is love as experienced by people who are torn asunder.
But this empty, avid love, this insane desire for possession, is precisely the love that society inevitably thwarts. That is why Breton, who still bears the stigma of his declarations, was able to sing the praises of treason and declare (as the surrealists have tried to prove) that violence is the only adequate mode of expression.
But society is not only composed of individuals. It is also an institution. Too well-mannered to kill everybody, the surrealists, by the very logic of their attitude, came to consider that, in order to liberate desire, society must first be overthrown. They chose to serve the revolutionary movement of their times.
From Walpole and Sade—with an inevitability that comprises the subject of this book— surrealists passed on to Helvetius and Marx. But it is obvious that it is not the study of Marxism that led them to revolution.4 Quite the contrary: surrealism is involved in an incessant effort to reconcile, with Marxism, the inevitable conclusions that led it to revolution. We can say, without being paradoxical, that the surrealists arrived at Marxism on account of what, today, they most detest in Marx.
4 The Communists who joined the party as a result of having studied Marx can be counted on the fingers of one hand. They are first converted and then they read the Scriptures.
Knowing the basis and the nobility of the motives that compelled him, particularly when one has shared the same lacerating experiences, one hesitates to remind Andre» Breton that his movement implied the establishment of «ruthless authority» and of dictatorship, of political fanaticism, the refusal of free discussion, and the necessity of the death penalty.
The peculiar vocabulary of that period is also astonishing («sabotage,» «informer,» etc.) in that it is the vocabulary of a police-dominated revolution. But these frenetics wanted «any sort of revolution,» no matter what as long as it rescued them from the world of shopkeepers and compromise in which they were forced to live.
In that they could not have the best, they still preferred the worst. In that respect they were nihilists. They were not aware of the fact that those among them who were, in the future, to remain faithful to Marxism were faithful at the same time to their initial nihilism. The real destruction of language, which the surrealists so obstinately wanted, does not lie in incoherence or automatism. It lies in the word order. It was pointless for Aragon to begin with a denunciation of the «shameful pragmatic attitude,» for in that attitude he finally found total liberation from morality, even if that liberation coincided with another form of servitude.
The surrealist who meditated most profoundly about this problem, Pierre Naville, in trying to find the denominator common to revolutionary action and surrealist action, localized it, with considerable penetration, in pessimism, meaning in «the intention of accompanying man to his downfall and of overlooking nothing that could ensure that his perdition might be useful.» This mixture of Machiavellianism and Augustinism in fact explains twentieth-century rebellion; no more audacious expression can be given to the nihilism of the times.
The renegades of surrealism were faithful to most of the principles of nihilism. In a certain way, they wanted to die. If AndreBreton and a few others finally broke with Marxism, it was because there was something in them beyond nihilism, a second loyalty to what is purest in the origins of rebellion: they did not want to die.
Certainly, the surrealists wanted to profess materialism. «We are pleased to recognize as one of the prime causes of the mutiny on board the battleship Potemkin that terrible piece of meat.» But there is not with them, as with the Marxists, a feeling of friendship, even intellectual, for that piece of meat. Putrid meat typifies only the real world, which in fact gives birth to revolt, but against itself. It explains nothing, even though it justifies everything.
Revolution, for the surrealists, was not an end to be realized day by day, in action, but an absolute and consolatory myth. It was «the real life, like love,» of which Eluard spoke, who at that time had no idea that his friend Kalandra would die of that sort of life. They wanted the «communism of genius,» not the other form of Communism. These peculiar Marxists declared themselves in rebellion against history and extolled the heroic individual. «History is governed by laws, which are conditioned by the cowardice of individuals.» Andr6 Breton wanted revolution and love together and they are incompatible.
Revolution consists in loving a man who does not yet exist. But he who loves a living being, if he really loves, can only consent to die for the sake of the being he loves. In reality, revolution for Andre Breton was only a particular aspect of rebellion, while for Marxists and, in general, for all political persuasions, only the contrary is true. Breton was not trying to create, by action, the promised land that was supposed to crown history. One of the fundamental theses of surrealism is, in fact, that there is no salvation.
The advantage of revolution was not that it gives mankind happiness, «abominable material comfort.» On the contrary, according to Breton, it should purify and illuminate man’s tragic condition. World revolution and the terrible sacrifices it implies would only bring one advantage: «preventing the completely artificial precariousness of the social condition from screening the real precariousness of the human condition.» Quite simply, for Breton, this form of progress was excessive. One might as well say that revolution should be enrolled in the service of the inner asceticism by which individual men can transfigure reality into the supernatural, «the brilliant revenge of man’s imagination.»
With Andre Breton, the supernatural holds the same place as the rational does with Hegel. Thus it would be impossible to imagine a more complete antithesis to the political philosophy of Marxism. The lengthy hesitations of those whom Artaud called the Amiels of revolution are easily explained. The surrealists were more different from Marx than were reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre, for example.
The reactionaries made use of the tragedy of existence to reject revolution—in other words, to preserve a historical situation. The Marxists made use of it to justify revolution—in other words, to create another historical situation. Both make use of the human tragedy to further their pragmatic ends. But Breton made use of revolution to consummate the tragedy and, in spite of the title of his magazine, made use of revolution to further the surrealist adventure.
Finally, the definitive rupture is explained if one considers that Marxism insisted on the submission of the irrational, while the surrealists rose to defend irrationality to the death. Marxism tended toward the conquest of totality, and surrealism, like all spiritual experiences, tended toward unity. Totality can demand the submission of the irrational, if rationalism suffices to conquer the world. But the desire for unity is more demanding. It does not suffice that everything should be rational. It wants, above all, the rational and the irrational to be reconciled on the same level. There is no unity that supposes any form of mutilation.
For Andre Breton, totality could be only a stage, a necessary stage perhaps, but certainly inadequate, on the way that leads to unity. Here we find once again the theme of All or Nothing. Surrealism tends toward universality, and the curious but profound reproach that Breton makes to Marx consists in saying quite justifiably that the latter is not universal.
The surrealists wanted to reconcile Marx’s «let us transform the world» with Rimbaud’s «let us change life.» But the first leads to the conquest of the totality of the world and the second to the conquest of the unity of life. Paradoxically, every form of totality is restrictive. In the end, the two formulas succeeded in splitting the surrealist group.
By choosing Rimbaud, Breton demonstrated that surrealism was not concerned with action, but with asceticism and spiritual experience. He again gave first place to what composed the profound originality of his movement: the restoration of the sacred and the conquest of unity, which make surrealism so invaluable for a consideration of the problem of rebellion. The more he elaborated on this original concept, the more irreparably he separated himself from his political companions, and at the same time from some of his first manifestoes.
Andre Breton never, actually, wavered in his support of surrealism the fusion of a dream and of reality, the sublimation of the old contradiction between the ideal and the real. We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the «supreme position.» «A certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future . . . cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.» What is this supreme position that should mark the «colossal abortion of the Hegelian system»? It is the search for the summit-abyss, familiar to the mystics.
Actually, it is the mysticism without God which demonstrates and quenches the rebel’s thirst for the absolute. The essential enemy of surrealism is rationalism. Breton’s method, moreover, presents the peculiar spectacle of a form of Occidental thought in which the principle of
