The Futures of Surrealism: Hegelianism, Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde

In the course of urging upon us a “re-reading of the history of the modernism of the 1920s,” Colin MacCabe counterposes, in a recent work, the writings of Georges Bataille and those of a man he calls that “loathsome Leninist Breton” (MacCabe, 82). The comment is an aside—it appears in brackets and in a book devoted to the late 1960s cult film Performance—but is perhaps all the more significant for that. For it would seem to reflect, all-too-fashionably, an extreme version of a pervasive contemporary doxa concerning surrealism and the relationship between these two figures. It is not my intention to trace the genealogy of such a view—though it would probably go, in part, via the selective “translations” of French theory (and of the Tel Quel group in particular) into the terms of Anglo-American post-structuralism2 —but, clearly, a pivotal moment in the construction of this opposition is represented by the writings of those associated with the American art journal October. In the 1997 Formless: A User’s Guide, for example, co-authored by two of the journal’s editors, Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, the former feels able to assert that “there is no connection whatever between Bataille’s sense of the Sacred [as what is “wholly other”] and Breton’s contem-poraneous reappropriation of the marvellous” (53, my emphasis).