That Obscure Object of Revolt: Heraclitus, Surrealism's Lightning-Conductor

Author(s): Jonathan P. Eburne

Source: symplokē , 2000, Vol. 8, No. 1/2, Anthologies (2000), pp. 180-204
Published by: University of Nebraska Press

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that Obscure Object of Revolt:
Heraclitus, Surrealism's
lightning-conductor

JONATHAN P. EBURNE

We are wrong to consider that we establish th

culture through the analysis and critique of the ma
that culture. Already such a classification presupp
part of the critic the realization of a hypo
exceptional has no documentary value. What pe
form an idea of the intellectual reality of a milieu,
that which is the object of critique, is the current
thinking which is in circulation.

- Louis Aragon, "Philosophie des Paratonnerr

In the October 1927 issue of La Révolution Surré

Surrealism's flagship journal published a pair of ar
Heraclitus of Ephesus into the group's pant
precursors, a genealogy outlined in André B
Surrealism (1924) and elaborated in subsequent i
The first of the two articles is a brief biogra
presocratic philosopher, reprinted from Fénelon's 1
anciens philosophes. The second article, a book revi
more polemical. Entitled "Philosophie des paratonn
lightning-conductors]," Aragon's review addresses
interest in Heraclitus manifested in three contemp
each of which attempts to derive a solid ideologic
few secondhand quotations that constitute th
philosophy (45). However, as Fénelon's biographica
is not an easy task, since Heraclitus has alw
"obscure, because he never spoke except by enigm

® symplokë Vol. 8, No. 1-2 (2000) ISSN 1069-0697, 180-

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 symplokë 181

time, though, Aragon notes that Hegel famously regarded Heraclitus as

his precursor in developing a theory of dialectical change. As
bewildering as they are influential, the cryptic and often dubious
fragments of Heraclitus' lost work On Nature maintain, Aragon writes,
"a prestige which one looks to make serve the most irreconcilable ends"
(47). Aragon might as well have been writing about the Surrealists here,
for in the years immediately following his review, the ancient
philosopher would become a kind of "lightning-conductor" for the
group's own most irreconcilable ends, its fiercest debates, and its efforts
to remain relevant as an avant-garde collective.
Just as a lightning-conductor's usefulness only fully emerges during
a storm, at a time of crisis, allusions to Heraclitus begin to appear in
Surrealist writings at the very moment when the group entered its
tumultuous period of adhesion to the French Communist Party and
revolutionary Marxism. However, rather than grounding such dramatic
changes in the movement's structure and purpose within a solid
philosophical tradition, Heraclitus's fragments offer no easy political
doctrine. Not only do the fragments suggest a cosmology based on
contradiction, fire, and constant transformation, but their fragmentary
form is itself rife with inconsistency and internal conflict. Thus
exacerbating rather than neutralizing the Surrealists' polemical energy,
the instability expressed in and by Heraclitus' lost work almost
uncannily reflects the Surrealist movement's own volatility, even
fragmentation, at this moment of internal conflict. Indeed, in the years
following their initiation into leftist politics in 1926, the Surrealists would
dramatically restructure themselves as a group based on a commitment
to collective political action, either expelling or alienating members who
refused to adhere to such a program.1 I wish to argue, then, that this
Heraclitian instability does in fact "ground" Surrealist discourse in the
sense that it redirects the group's polemical energies toward its own
epistemological foundations, revealing the extent to which its attitudes
toward revolutionary action are completely shot through with questions
about the fundamental constitution of the "reality" against which
Surrealism wished to revolt.
In exploring, as he writes, "what life there is in the philosophy of
Heraclitus," Aragon unwittingly identifies the very question that
Surrealism would be asking of itself in the immediate future: "what life
is there in the philosophy of Surrealism?" In fact, Aragon's article
anticipates how this latter question of the movement's relevance and
solidarity would be haunted by an "object of critique" uncannily similar
to the content of his review: how to engage in leftist politics without

1The archival documents concerning the movement's turn "toward political action"
have recently been published as part of the "Archives du surréalisme" collection: cf. Bonnet
(1988; 1992). For an English-language account of this period, see Lewis (1990).

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182 Jonathan P. Bourne That Obscure Object of Revolt

either sacrificing intellectual precision or succumbing to reductive

"explicative ideologies/' If Aragon is critical of scholarship's reduction of
Heraclitian philosophy to stable political values, by 1929 the Surrealist
group was likewise submitting itself to a profound - if spiteful - critique
of its own interpretations of the nature of historical, political, and
empirical change. The title change in the group's flagship journal reveals
the issues at stake in this upheaval: after André Breton's Second Manifesto
appeared in its final issue at the end of 1929, La Révolution Surréaliste was
reincarnated as Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution. Under
renegotiation was Surrealism's very raison d'être, its value as an act
political and epistemological force rather than as a mere "a
movement."

At the same time, Georges Bataille's more skeptical reaction to

Breton's new positioning of Surrealism - "too many damned
idealists"2- demanded a similar renegotiation of whether an art
movement could in fact position itself not within "the paltry sequence of
literary history, but in history itself, seen in its widest application,
something that correctly considers the development of our sensibility
from the most distant time."3 Although it may be tempting to consider
such disagreements as evidence of the movement's descent into rhetoric,
it is crucial to remember how extensively these disagreements were
structured around the concepts Surrealism embraced. The reverse is also
true: Surrealism was also restructuring itself around the very
disagreements that threatened to tear it apart. Indeed, what is most
remarkable about the group's interrogation of its relationship to revolt is
the extent to which it focused the group's scrutiny upon its own
founding principles . In the following paper, I wish to cite the common
allusions to Heraclitian philosophy by Aragon, Breton, Bataille, and
Salvador Dali as evidence that even in relatively disparate writings, and
over the course of several years, their thoughts about Surrealism
possessed a common object of critique: an interrogation of "revolution"
which examined not only the nature of Marxism and historical
materialism, but their epist-emological bases as well. It is not my
intention here to exhaust the numerous references to the presocratic

2//Beaucoup trop d'emmerdeurs idéalistes" is Georges Bataille's response to Breton's

and Aragon's inquiry, "A suivre: petite contribution au dossier de certains intellectuels à
tendences révolutionnaires (1929)." Rpt. Pierre, 104. The translation of " emmerdeurs
idéalistes" as "damned idealists" is not ideal, since in the original "idealist" is a modifier; a
more accurate English translation of "emmerdeurs" might be the Anglicized "bloody
wankers." Breton's American biographer translates "emmerdeurs idéalistes" instead as
"fucking idealists" (Polizotti 316).
Bataille later revised his position on Surrealism, intending this statement positively,
in an article published in Combat in 1945 ( Bataille 1994, 53).

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 symplokë 183

philosopher in Surrealist works.4 Rather, I wish to examine the extent to

which Heraclitus appears in the service of a "first critique" of reality
which strove to determine the status of revolt within the order of things,
that is, whether revolt was a latent property already existing within
"nature," or whether it only came into being as the result of human
action, analysis, and creation.

Heraclitus in the Service of Surrealism

And [the] thunderbolt steers the totality of things.

- Heraclitus5

If Surrealism, beginning in 1927, developed a critical interest in the

philosophy of Heraclitus as a common or "conductive" object, this
commonality is subverted by the intransigent nature of the philosophy
itself. On the one hand, Heraclitus' own statements seem to resist
generating any doctrinary "system" of thought. As Fénelon notes, even
at its inception, Heraclitus7 book On Nature "had an extraordinary
reputation, because, Lucretius said, nobody understood what it meant"
(Fénelon 44). On the other hand, this near-mythological obscurity is
compounded by the precarious textuality of the fragments themselves.
Available only through the quotations and accounts of the classical
authors who cite it, Heraclitus' On Nature always possesses, Aragon
observes, an "origine suspecte." The instability of their authorial status
yields a dismembered, and often contradictory, assortment of textual
fragments whose cohesiveness is more the product of centuries of
interpretation than it is of Hera-clitus' own writing.
However, to the extent that modern classical scholars have shown
them to converge upon a related body of concerns, the fragments

References to Heraclitus can be found in works by André Masson, who not only cites
him in several early letters, but also publishes an illustration to Michel Leiris's entry on the
philosopher in the 1937 edition of Leiris' Glossaire: j'y serre mes glosses. The Belgian
Surrealist Louis Scutenaire prints a "portrait" of Heraclitus in his "Pêle-mêle" (1934). Both
René Crevel and, more extensively, René Char discuss his philosophy in their later writing.
Finally, Breton, in his later writing, from the Dictionnaire Abregé du surréalisme (1938) to his
interviews after WWII, repeatedly adopts Heraclitus as a figure of unpopular but objective
speculation.
Robinson 42-3. This fragment, collected by Hyppolytus, has been grouped by
numerous scholars - from Martin Heidegger and Eugene Fink to Charles Kahn - alongside
another which discusses the notion of "steering" [oiakizei, from oiax, the tiller of a ship]:
"The wise is one, knowing the plan by which it steers all things through all." (Cf. Kahn, 54-
5) As Robinson writes, "the thunderbolt seems most likely [. . .] to be a symbol for that
divine and immortal aetlier which Heraclitus sees as rationally directing the cosmos and its
processes, and which in turn he appears to equate with that 'one wise thing which is not
and is willing to be called by the name Zeus .... That the thunderbolt was known as Zeus'
weapon is of course a commonplace" (Robinson 126).

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184 Jonathan P. Eburne That Obscure Object of Revolt

advance a similarly "volatile" theory about the difficulty of knowledge

and the ubiquity of flux and revolution in the empirical world, a theory
whose very language insists upon confusion, contradiction, and
wordplay. For the sake of this essay I will focus upon the interplay of
two key Heraclitian notions: physis -"nature," "real constitution," or
"Being," whose tendency it is to "hide itself" [kruptesthaif; and
logos- the "account," "statement," or that which one hears (or fails to
hear).7 Amidst more cosmological-sounding fragments, these two terms
demarcate a complex Heraclitian epistemology in which the "real" of the
natural world is as difficult to grasp as the articulation by means of
which we attempt to grasp it. As one fragment claims, "many people do
not 'understand the sorts of things they encounter'! Nor do they
recognize them [even] after they have had experience [of them] - though
they themselves think [they recognize them]" (Robinson 18-19). This
acknowledgment of a "missed encounter" inherent within
understanding suggests, as Andrew Benjamin has written, that

it is possible to draw an analogy between interpreting the

fragments and the problems involved in understanding the
empirical. Neither a particular fragment nor the empirical can
be understood literally, that is as an end-in-itself, rather both
demand the recognition that understanding is never im-
mediate but is the result of the process of interpretation. (124)

Aragon makes a similar observation in " Philosophie des paratonnerres,"

acknowledging how this "missed encounter" does not merely inhibit
understanding, but instead incites the appropriation of Heraclitian
thought toward all sorts of incomparable ends. Beset by their
indeterminacy, interpreters of the fragments are driven toward "fixing"
them to definitive orders and explications, thereby developing
ideologically-determined meanings that are not Heraclitian at all
(Aragon 48).
Aragon' s article thus prefigures the tacit but critical role Heraclitus
plays in Surrealist discourse by showing how his presence in academic
writing on political philosophy thus represents more than a coincident
influence. Less a founding father of philosophy than a kind of repressed
mystery, Heraclitus's "return" to academic prominence discloses a
significant ideological disruption, what Aragon calls a "flotation line"

hrhis fragment, collected by Themistius, is translated by Robinson as "[A thing's? (the

world's?)] real constitution has a tendency to conceal itself" (Robinson 71). This same
fragment is cited by Dalí in "Sant Sebastià," translated more succinctly as "nature likes to
hide itself." Robinson, however, argues that "nature" is a later term, while the broader
category of "the nature of things," or even "Being" may be closer to the original sense of
vhysis (Robinson 161-2).
7Cf. Robinson's comments, 74-5.

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 symplokë 185

marking the level of foolishness of current thinking. Aragon's review

criticizes the authors who attempt, through "cheating" them of their
complexity, to mobilize Heraclitus' s fragments in the service of definite
political platforms: specifically, platforms which favor the bourgeoisie
and which naturalize the historical development of the established order.
"The truth is," Aragon writes, "to speak of a politics of Heraclitus, in light
of the known fragments, has no meaning. This politics . . . cannot be
other than a purely imaginary construction" (46). Understanding the
fragments as advocating an infinitely more volatile - yet still
materialist - principle of change based on lightning and fire, Aragon
argues that the intellectual reality of the 1920' s can be characterized by
its repression, not only of t;he subversiveness of the fragments
themselves, but also of the revolutionary political implications ascribed
to them historically through a leftist tradition beginning with Hegel and
the left Hegelians (48).
When, five years later, André Breton cites Heraclitus in The
Communicating Vessels (1932), he does so as part of his revisionary efforts
to stabilize, rather than unsettle, Surrealism's already tumultuous
theoretical grounds. In this work, Breton attempts to co-opt the "missed
encounter" of understanding as precisely the revolutionary breach in
"reality" that Surrealism has always striven to create. Here, as in his
other theoretical writings on Surrealism, Breton attempts to forge an
accord between the group's "poetic" interest in psychoanalysis and its
more recently defined "political" interest in revolutionary Marxism.
However, in defiance of the French Communist Party's rigidly Stalinist
definitions of political efficacy, Breton adamantly defends the
revolutionary potential of Surrealism's "belief in the superior reality of
certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of
dreams, in the disinterested play of thought" (Manifesto 26).8 Wishing
neither to suppress political activity nor to stray from the more poetic
"revolution" called for in the First Manifesto, Breton cites Heraclitus in
order to "pick up on the thought of the old Ephesian, that 'men in their
sleep are working with and participating in the events of the universe"
(Communicating Vessels 135). By "sleeping," that is, by continuing to
plumb the volatility of unconscious processes through "oneiric"
practices like automatic writing, psychoanalysis, and the exquisite
corpse, Breton argues that Surrealism can provide an expanded set of
imaginative possibilities for a leftist project that might otherwise
succumb to "the search for concrete, continuous, immediate effectivity"

On Surrealism's tumultous relations with the French Communist Party, see Lewis,
The Politics of Surrealism; see also Thirion, Révolutionnaires sans revolution and Paligot,
Parcours politique du surréalisme.

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186 Jonathan P. Ebnrne That Obscure Object of Revolt

(Communicating Vessels 135). 9 It is this accord which articulates Breton's

evolving dialectical model for establishing a "communication" between
the disinterest play of thought and the work of political change. As
Margaret Cohen argues in her recent study of Breton's "modern
materialism," even from the first moment of his "Paris Trilogy" of Nadja
(1928), Communicating Vessels (1932), and Mad Love (1937), Breton
attempts to show "not only how the Marxist and Freudian forces of
determination are susceptible to apprehension by each other's
methodologies but also the possibility that they communicate closely"
(Cohen 60). Breton, Cohen writes, repositions the orthodox Marxist
opposition of material and ideal worlds "according to the
psychoanalytical opposition waking/ dreaming," and in doing so
transforms this distinction into a "purely formal division." Instead of
granting a privileged status to the waking and material, Breton
understands both the material and the ideal, as well as waking and
sleeping, as different yet complementary expressions of the forces
structuring experience (Cohen 126-7).
Breton cites Heraclitus a second time in Communicating Vessels as a
way of conceptualizing this "harmony" between seemingly opposed
ideological systems, not only between Marxist and Freudian
methodology, but between the two "realms" of experience they each
describe as well. Breton writes that the challenge for most modern
ideologies (but especially for Surrealism) is "to maintain that what
opposes them is in accord with them." Heraclitus, he continues,
"expressed it precisely: 'Harmony of opposed tensions, like [that] of the
bow and [that] of the lyre" (Communicating Vessels 134). Although Breton
cites this fragment to suggest how Surrealism's political "bow" and
poetic "lyre" resolve dialectically to obtain "great animation . . . though
this alteration of attraction and repulsion" (Communicating Vessels 135),
the Heraclitian sense of harmony is qualified, in a separate fragment,
with a much greater sense of conflict: "the finest attunement stems from
things bearing in opposite directions, and that all things come about by
strife" (Robinson 15). 10 What Breton's suppression of the strife
constitutive of harmony suggests, then, is that he is guilty of the same

As Elisabeth Roudineso has written, the Soviet Union reproached psychoanalysis for
its pessimistic insistence upon the instinctive nature of man, of which Freud's theory of the
libido was the reflection. In the face of Communist ideals of improvement and
reconditioning, psychoanalysis, particularly its notion of sexuality, "seemed dangerous
because it was considered "asocial," that is, taking part in an anarchistic order which risked
pulling the masses toward debauchery and preventing them from turning towards future
happiness" (Roudinesco56).
As Robinson argues, this quotation seems to be a condensation of a number of
Heraclitian ideas, and particularly of the fragment that claims, "One must realize that war
is common, and justice strife, and that all things come to be through strife and are so
ordained." The "resolution" of strife within a dialectic is therefore somewhat less stable. Cf.
Robinson (49; 80-81).

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 symplokë 187

tendency to "fix" Heraclitus's formulas of which Aragon is so critical.

And yet, Breton's misreading seems deliberate, its suppression directed
toward the Surrealist group's own conflicts as well, perhaps, as the
idealism of the accord he attempts to forge. Indeed, Breton appropriates
his reading of the fragments in order to produce an extremely difficult
synthesis. Not only does Heraclitus appear here "in the service of
Surrealism" as a way of forging an accord between the Marxist,
Freudian, and artistic imperatives of the movement, but also as an
attempt to sublimate the group's internal conflicts. Rather than diffusing
its strife, in fact, Breton's use of Heraclitus serves as a rally cry to the
group's immediate members, arguing that the strings of Surrealist
affiliation are most powerful when the very body of the group threatens
to break apart, and that the group can perform its best work at the very
moment when its relations are the most strained.
Though ingenious, Breton's application of Surrealist principles to the
group's own relations is nevertheless as reactionary as it is conceptual, a
response to the attacks leveled against the movement by the Communist
party, as well as by Georges Bataille and, more subtly, by Salvador Dalí.
Criticizing less the discrepancy between Surrealism's political and poetic
efforts, than Breton's strategy for surmounting it, Bataille and Dalí each
criticize the assumptions that govern Breton's Heraclitian accord.
Whereas Breton cites Heraclitus to synthesize the productive dialectical
tension within and between "instruments" - the bow and the lyre, the
political and the poetic, as well as the real and the surreal - Bataille and
Dalí each develop a " Heraclitian" system for discovering a similar set of
oppositions in nature. That is, rather than juggling conceptual systems
for explaining the "forces structuring experience," Bataille and Dalí each
attempt to isolate those forces within the minute particulars of material
things themselves.

The Name of the Rose

"Heraclitus is surrealist in dialectic/'
-André Breton (1932b, 17)

Ostensibly a review of Salvador Dali's first Parisian exhibition of

paintings at the Galerie Goemans in November 1929, Georges Bataille's
article on Dali's Lugubrious Game serves as a platform for his major
critique of Surrealism. Keenly aware of Dali's role as an infusion of new
life into the movement's recently diminished ranks, Bataille discusses the
painting in a way which evokes Surrealist rhetoric, while replacing its
"productive" language of action, poetry, and Revolution with a
vocabulary of despair, rage, and violence. Bataille writes,

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188 Jonathan P. Eburne That Obscure Object of Revolt

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams,

but in violence. Thus abandoning certain investigations is out
of the question. It is only a matter of knowing how to vent
one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen
around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
(Visions 24)

Portraying Breton's rhetoric of active political participation as mental

(and political) weakness, Bataille argues that Surrealism is trapped
within the very prison of idealism from which revolutions strive to
extricate themselves in the first place.
Bataille' s critique of Surrealism is particularly interesting because it
does not question the "accord" between politics and poetics which
Breton uses Heraclitus to illustrate, but instead questions the Surrealists'
understanding of revolution itself. Revolutions, Bataille argues, are the
inevitable backlash of human life against the idea, the "idea that
brutalizes all men and causes them to be docile - the idea in the form of,
among other things, a piece of paper adorned with the arms of the
State" (Visions 27). In other words, even in its syntax, Surrealism's
"service to the Revolution" subordinates the specificity of its political
aims to the authority of an idea: Revolution with a capital R. This is
why, in a footnote satirizing Breton's opinion that Dali's painting "marks
perhaps the first time that the mind's windows have been thrown wide
open," n Bataille questions "the orientation of those who see here for the
first time the mental windows opening wide, who place an emasculated
poetic complacency where there appears only the screaming necessity of
a recourse to ignominy" (Visions 30). What is most impressive about
Dali's Lugubrious Game, Bataille insists, is its abject ugliness, so powerful
in its ignominy that it aborts the very intellectual movement it induces.
That is, its ugliness prevents the painting's affect from ever coalescing
into an idea (such as Revolution with a capital R). Therefore, to speak
about such a painting in the language of poetic transcendence, as Breton
does, is to indulge in a "servile nobility, this idiotic idealism that leaves
us under the spell of a few comical prison bosses" (Visions 28). Breton's
"weak" reading of Dali's painting thus corroborates Bataille's distaste for
Surrealism's "idiotic idealism." Indeed, beginning with its vague and
poetic commitment to the "liberation" of Dali's open windows,
Surrealism's conformity to the stylistic "nobility of the idea" permeates
the very core of its ideology.12 Such is the idealism Bataille finds so

1 'Breton, "The First Dalí Exhibition," ctd. Polizzotti, 332-3.

Bataille cites the term 'Surrealism' as itself indicative of this subservience to the
"great constructions of the intellect." As he writes in "The 'Old Mole' and the Prefix Sur in
the Words Surhomme and Surrealist," written around 1929-30 but not published until 1968,
"contemporary surrealism . . . maintains, of course, the predominance of higher ethereal

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 symplokê 189

execrable in Bretonian Surrealism, the idéalisme emmerdant with which it

willfully ignores the ignoble, the merdeux: unlike Breton, who ignores it
in favor of the "wonderland" of poetry, Bataille cannot fail to see that the
shorts worn by the figure in the lower right corner of Dali' s painting are
stained with excrement (Visions 29).
Bataille had already begun to develop this critique of the "elevated,
noble, and sacred" within Surrealism in an article published earlier that
year in Documents. Inhabiting the same epistemological terrain as the
Surrealists' turn toward Heraclitus, Bataille' s article similarly seeks to
uncover a principle of revolt within "reality" that would, however, not
only divest itself from "the nobility of the idea," but would also
understand reality itself as the fall of the idea. Entitled "The Language of
Flowers," the article invokes flowers stripped of their petals as the
empirical basis of what Bataille calls "base materialism," a theory - or
rather an anti-theory - which breaks with dialectical materialism in its
"substitution of natural forms for the abstractions currently used by
philosophers" (Visions 14).
Base materialism, Bataille explains, discloses what he calls the "base
matter" whose real presence is otherwise hidden from superficial
observation. That is, it strives to reveal, within the existing "language of
flowers," the very "revolutionary" intellectual forces that Surrealism is
looking for. The revolutionary principle Surrealism seeks though
"mental windows opening wide" can only exist, Bataille insists, within
the potential for raw phenomena to resist, spoil, and offend the fixity of
the idea.

This quasi- Heraclitian insight about the tendency of physis to remain

hidden yields, for Bataille, a praxis of knowledge based on a kind of
creative insight. In terms of the language of flowers he uses to describe
this method of critical exegesis, not only are the most beautiful flowers
"spoiled in their centers by hairy sexual organs," but any idealized
understanding of their outward form is violently subverted by the
"ignominy" of its real constitution. Bataille writes,

even more than by the filth of its origins, the flower is betrayed
by the fragility of its corolla: thus, far from answering the
demands of human ideas, it is the sign of their failure. In fact,
after a very short period of glory the marvelous corolla rots
indecently in the sun, thus becoming, for the plant, a garish
withering. Risen from the stench of the manure pile - even
though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of

values (clearly expressed by the addition of the prefix sur, the trap into which Nietzsche
had already fallen with superman). More precisely, since surrealism is immediately
distinguishable by the addition of low values (the unconscious, sexuality, filthy language,
etc.), it invests these values with an elevated character by associating them with the most
immaterial values" (Visions 39).

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190 Jonathan P. Eburne That Obscure Object of Revolt

angelic and lyrical purity - the flower seems to relapse

abruptly into its original squalor: the most ideal is rapidly
reduced to a wisp of aerial manure. (Visions 12)

Not only does this flower's sensationalistic rise and decay reproduce
Bataille's critique of "idealism" as an allegory, but the drama itself- the
withering of the ideal and its return to manure - similarly allegorizes his
own (anti-) epistemology. Bataille's observation that the corolla is not a
symbol of transcendence, but a fleeting transformation of shit and rot,
reverses our superficial tendency to read them as signs of desire, love,
and lasting beauty. The "idiotic idealism" which characterizes any such a
misrecognition of the flower's "real constitution" is thus exposed as a
sham, a disavowal of the ignominy of raw phenomena - manure, rot,
sexual organs, procreation - whose persistent yet hidden presence
remains a latent threat to human ideals.
When Breton, in the Second Manifesto, accuses Bataille of an
obnoxious return to "old anti-dialectical materialism," it is to this
perverse empiricism, this elemental fascination with the sordid "life" of
matter, that he refers. Breton depicts Bataille as a "staid Librarian"
whose "paradoxical and embarrassing. . . phobia about the idea" not
only produces ideological positions in spite of itself, but also produces a
passionate misuse of adjectives: "befouled, senile, rank, sordid, lewd,
doddering" ( Second Manifesto , 184). Tiredly "wallowing in impurities"
late at night, Bataille's sensationalism invests hidden details with an
exaggerated revolutionary significance whose value, for Breton, is both
banal and pathological. To illustrate the con-sequences of this
sensationalism, Breton examines the image Bataille invokes at the end of
"The Language of Flowers," in which the Marquis de Sade desecrates a
bouquet of roses inside the walls of the Bastille, tearing off the petals and
dropping them into liquid manure. Whereas Bataille uses the image to
dramatize his own subversive "exegesis" of flowers, musing how
overwhelming an impact this "disconcerting gesture" must surely have
had, Breton is less smitten with the comparison. Noting that the image is
in fact apocryphal, he distinguishes between the symbolic act of Sade, "a
man who has spent twenty-seven years of his life in prison for his beliefs/'
from the insignificant gesture of a mere "staid librarian" (Second
Manifesto 186). In place of Bataille's failed comparison, Breton substitutes
his own: Bataille's idle fascination with removing corollas from flowers
recalls the decadent sultan of Alphonse Allais' "Un radjah qui s'embête,"
who orders for his dancer to be flayed alive in order to artificially extend
the erotic "revelations" of her dance of the seven veils. However, like
Bataille's exegesis, for all its transgressive cruelty this extra step
produces no real transformation, no new interest: as the story goes, the
flayed dancer keeps on dancing, just as Bataille's desecrated rose
remains a rose (Second Manifesto 185). Breton's precise goal in satirizing

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 symplokê 191

Bataille in the Second Manifesto is to reverse the latter' s judgment that

Surrealism meanders in a " wonderland of poetry": it is Bataille who
amuses himself with inflated imagery and language, while Surrealism
works instead to provide " practical possibilities in no way competitive in
the most immediate realm of consciousness" (Second Manifesto 140).
At the same time, though, like Bataille, Breton begins to express such
practical possibilities by means of a language of flowers - that is, in
terms of the "real constitution" of the natural world, which for Breton is
nevertheless characterized by processes as opposed to mere things. Breton
begins the Second Manifesto with a long discussion of Friedrich Engels,
claiming Surrealism's analogy to historical materialism. If Surrealist
artistic practices (automatic writing, dream-work, and exquisite corpse)
represent a negation of lived "reality," then the goal of a politicized
Surrealism would be to negate this negation, mobilizing these practices
toward a "higher incarnation" - an alternate, revised, or revolutionary
version of this prior reality. The question, in other words, would be one
of how Surrealism could actually influence the world and help "the
Revolution." If, for Breton, more "passive" practices like automatism and
dreams can liberate the imagination, then something active must be done
with them. Just as he will later turn to Heraclitus in order to articulate
such a difficult project, in the Second Manifesto he cites Friedrich Engels'
Anti-Dühring. In his chapter on "the negation of the negation," Engels
defends dialectics against Diihring's charges of its theological artificiality
by resorting to a rhetoric of nature, and, more specifically, to a language
of flowers. Instead of requiring a mystical external principal of causation
to "move" dialectical change, the negation of the negation occurs
naturally on a tangible and pragmatic scale. When a seed of barley
germinates, the seed is negated. The barley flower, which is the negation
of the seed, produces its own seeds in turn, which, when the stalk dies,
yield the same grain of barley, only multiplied twenty or thirty fold.
Moreover, Engels continues, with a flower (an orchid, a dahlia), this
dialectical cultivation not only increases the number of seeds but,
through breeding, also augments the quality of the flowers themselves.
Here, then, the sublated "negation of the negation" strives toward an
ideal form, a more perfect state (Engels 126).
Finally, turning from orchids and dahlias to roses, Engels
differentiates this dialectical negation from simple destruction and
naysaying: the point is neither to crush the grain of barley, nor to negate
the sentence "this rose is a rose" by simply saying it isn't. "Negation,"
Engels writes, "in dialectics does not mean simply saying no, or
declaring that something does not exist, or destroying it in any way one
likes" (Engels 131). For Breton, though, such destructiveness is precisely
Bataille' s recommendation: a kind of negation which produces no
pragmatic result, no Auflwbung; Bataille just wants to get his fingers
dirty. Breton, on the other hand, wishes not only to translate Surrealist

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192 Jonathan P. Eburne That Obscure Object of Revolt

practice into Engels' terms, but also to perform an analogous "negation

of the negation" upon Surrealism itself, thus re-establishing it as a more
rigorous, "purer," and more productive machine. If, as Breton writes,
Surrealism's "rose" is negated through an entire series of
transformations - becoming "the one that has an unusual place in a
dream, the one impossible to remove from the 'optical bouquet,' the one
that can completely change its properties by passing into automatic
writing, the one that retains only those qualities that the painter has
deigned to keep in a Surrealist painting" - then its subsequent Aufliebung
returns the rose, "completely different from itself ... to the garden. That
is a far cry from an idealistic view of any kind . . ." (Second Manifesto 141).
The Surrealist who acts in the service of the Revolution upholds a reality
infused with the transformational knowledge of Surrealist methods, and
is therefore never a "mere poet"
Bataille, writing with Raymond Queneau in La Critique Sociale in
1932, remains seriously unconvinced by such an argument. Critiquing
both Engels and, in fact, Heraclitus as well,13 he differ- entiates between
"nature" itself and the tendency, of both Engels and Breton, to naturalize
dialectical change as an element of "natural" existence:

the difficulty offered by nature to the dialectic is not only

indicated by the history of all scientific research: Hegel himself
was the first to indicate cautiously that it was precisely nature
which by its 'impotence [. . .to adhere strictly to the Notion]
sets limits to philosophy/ To philosophy: in other words, to
the dialectical construction of the becoming of things. For him,
nature is the fall of the idea; it is a negation, at the same time a
revolt and an absurdity. (Visions 106-7)

The Liberation of the Fingers

Nature likes to hide itself.
- Heraclitus, ctd. Salvador Dalí

At the moment of his inclusion as a Surrealist in 1929, Salvador Dalí

inhabited an artistic and ideological position that differentiated itself
from both Bataille and Breton, while remaining faithful to the name and

1 Of Engels, Bataille writes, "if a part of Anti-Duhring is criticizable, it is that part in

which figure the examples of 'the negation of the negation.'" Of Heraclitus, he writes, "it
must be admitted that the dialectic has other antecedents than Heraclitus, Plato, or Fichte,"
choosing to emphasize instead the gnostics and neoplatonist mystics, by means of whom
Bataille can slough off Hegelian dialecticism's "diversity in identity, or identity in
diversity," for a form of revolutionary historical change based on negation itself. (Bataille
and Queneau, 281 & 283).

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 symplokê 193

spirit of Surrealism. As Dalí writes in his 1930 article "Rotten Ass" [L'âne
pourri], Surrealism's revolutionary potential lies in its power to train
artists to become

Idealists without participating in any ideal. The ideal images of

Surrealism in the service of the immanent crisis in
consciousness, in the service of the Revolution. (" L'âne pourri"
12) 14

Alhough it pays tribute to the "revolutionary" impulse of Surréalisme au

Service de la Révolution, in whose inaugural issue it appears, Dali' s article
nevertheless tampers with the journal's ideological position. In what
may be a reference to the group's current crisis of 1929-30, Dalí subjects
the immanence of their Revolution to the "immanent crisis of
consciousness" which, it seems, Surrealism must undergo in order to be
"of service." Dali, in effect, adds yet another negation to Breton's
dialectic - a turn back towards crisis which stands to subvert, or at least
to suspend, the ideals toward which Surrealism was striving. Dali's
"immanent crisis" thus exaggerates, or "sublates," Breton's own
distancing of the group from Stalinism's "search for concrete,
continuous, immediate effectivity"; it mobilizes the group's imaginative
machinery toward nonproductive ends, serving a Bataillian destruction
of the idea rather than producing a more utilitarian form of revolt. What
makes Dali's modification possible is its consideration of the role played
not merely by "exegesis" or "imagination," but by images and
representation as well, when it comes to thinking about nature and the
"real constitution" of the world. As a visual artist keenly aware of the
significant role played by representation not only in visual and poetic art
but in political philosophy and psychoanalysis as well, Dali's thinking in
this period exploits the extent to which any "revolutionary"
communication, or antagonism, between the material and ideal (or
between waking and sleeping) is completely subject to logos, the
"account," "statement," or in Dali's case, the image, that one hears (or
fails to hear). What Dali will later call his "paranoid-critical method"
strives to reproduce - and simulate - the "missed encounter" with reality
suggested in Heraclitus's fragments, while still achieving the traumatic
effects of Bataille' s raw phenomena.
Dalí begins to develop his theory of images in the service of an
"immanent crisis in consciousness" as early as 1927, when, in his article
"Saint Sebastian," he finds in representation itself the properties of irony,
shame, and agony. Citing the Heraclitian fragment about physis,

14My translation. Cf. "The Stinking Ass/' translated by J. Bronowski (1932) for This
Quarter, and "The Stinking Ass, " in The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí (1999), edited by
Haim Finkelstein.

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194 Jonathan P. Eburne That Obscure Object of Revolt

translated as "nature likes to hide itself/' Dalí explains this concealment

as a phenomenon of modesty or auto-pudeur [self-shame], an explanation
he attributes to the Futurist Alberto Savinio:

It is a question - he [Savinio] tells us - of an ethical reason, for

this shame is born of the relationship of nature with man. And
he discovers in this the prime cause which engenders irony.
("Sant Sebastià" 214)

Attributing to nature both desire - its "liking" to hide itself -and a social
relationship with man, Dalí locates a causality within physis that does not
originate in the Idea but rather in the interaction between nature and
man. For Dalí, "matter" is not dead; yet, unlike the argument Bataille
makes in "The Language of Flowers," the "raw phenomena" of nature
are not so much rebellious and disruptive as they are perversely elusive.
Bataille' s revelation that flowers possess "hairy sexual organs" finds its
metaphysical antecedent in Dali' s claim that nature is ashamed of its own
nakedness, a nakedness which it desires to conceal. Yet unlike the
prurient sexuality of Bataille' s flowers, this desire is reflexive: merely
precipitated by "the relationship of nature with man," the self-shame is
autoerotic in the sense that its real object of desire actually is the deferral
of its exposure. 15 This, for Dalí, is thus the basis of irony, since it means
that only an external act of representation (the Heraclitian logos) can
perform the gesture of exposure which interrupts the auto-erotica and
thus allows nature's nakedness to have any meaning. As Dalí explains,

Enriquet, a fisherman from Cadaqués, told me, in his own

language, the same things one day when, looking at a picture
of mine which represented the sea, he observed: 'It's the same.
But it's better in the picture, because there you can count the
waves.' Irony could also be seen to begin in this preference, if
Enriquet were capable of passing from physics to metaphysics.
Irony - as we have said - is nakedness; it is the gymnast who
hides behind St Sebastian's pain. And it is also this pain,
because it can be counted. ("Sant Sebastià" 214)

Savinio's odd argument about nature's desire to hide itself as a phenomenon of

shame may derive from a reading - or, perhaps, a misreading - of the Greek terms in a
separate Heraclitian fragment. In a fragment collected by Clement, Heraclitus writes, "If it
were not in Dionysus' honour that they make a procession and sing a hymn to the
shameful parts, their deed would be a most shameful one. But Hades and Dionysus, for
whom they rave and celebrate the festival of the Lenaea, are one and the same!" (Robinson
17). As Robinson notes, after C. H. Kahn, "the identification of Dionysus and Hades,
fertility and insanity, is mediated by verbal connections between genitals (aidoia), shame
(aid os) . . . and Hades (Aides).' Whether anything can be also inferred from an etymological
derivation of Hades as meaning 'un-seen' (a-ides) seems however doubtful" (Robinson 86-
7)-

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 symplokë 195

Representation thus fixes or limits nature's elusiveness: it allows us to

"count" it. At the same time, though, any power it possesses as a tool for
exposing hidden meaning within the world of facts relies upon its ability
to be, as Enriquet says, "the same." This constitutes what Dalí means by
irony: the representation has suddenly become the "better" double of the
real. The real, in other words, has been photographed, artificially
confronted with its nakedness like the Emperor made aware of his new
clothes, or like the muscular gymnast who, modeling for a painting of
Saint Sebastian, suddenly comes into view "beneath" the painting's
representation of pain. In this latter case, it is not only the gymnast who
comes suddenly into view but also the pain itself, the exaggerated details
of which can be "counted" in the sense that the painting's efforts to
simulate a sensation are exposed, rendered naked.
Dalí later discusses the evocative power of such exaggerated detail
as a property most fully realized in photography. In an article published
a few months before joining the Surrealists in Paris, Dalí attests to the
"great rigour" of photography's ability to "really establish the most
complete, scrupulous and exciting registry that man could ever imagine"
("Dada fotogràfica" 227). Calling the photographic product a
"donnée" - da da fotogràfica in his original Catalan - Dalí suggests,
however, that the photographic process does not merely yield an
objective record: the "objective crystal" is still a "glass of real poetry"
("Fotografia, pura creació" 216). Rather, like the "donnée" ("given")
quality of Marcel Duchamp's readymades, the photograph produces an
alter-ego of the object suddenly infused with an excess of signification.
The photographic " donnée," like the readymade, frames and presents
fragments of the material world "with all its exaggerated detail, the
awareness of which is made possible only through a skillful photogenic
quality to which the photographer can subject things" ("Dada
fotogràfica" 227). 16 Thus both rigorously "objective" and- just as
rigorously - "imaginative," the

mere donnée of photographic transposition already means a

total invention: the capture of an UNKNOWN REALITY.
Nothing proves the truth of surrealism so much as
photography. The Zeiss lens has unexpected faculties of
surprise! ("Dada fotogràfica" 227)

This access to the "hiddenness" of nature anticipates Bataille's

development of a critical exegesis with similar "faculties of surprise."
Quite literally, the precision optics of Zeiss lenses enabled "raw

16Unlike Duchamp's readymades, which work best as originals in museums, Dali's

photograpliic "givens" can be mechanically reproduced without altering their effects. As
simulacra, they are already copies.

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196 Jonathan P. Eburne That Obscure Object of Revolt

phenomena" to be photographed at close range with remarkable clarity;

the "skillful photogenetic quality to which the photographer can subject
things" produced inventive new images that defamiliar ized "reality,"
while maintaining - or augmenting - their claim to empirical accuracy.
Indeed, unlike Surrealism's more "passive" development of new
faculties of representation through contact with the unconscious, Dali's
photographic donnée stresses the technical superiority of a method
which "will not stop opposing the objective fact against hybrid
approximate poetry, inflected by an aesthetic, insipid subjectivism"
("Realidad y sobrerrealidad" 225). Much as Roland Barthes contends in
Camera Lucida that the photograph's essence is to ratify what it
represents, Dalí suggests indeed that its "surprising" effect of capturing
an unknown reality is a function of its constant challenge to the
understanding: ratify thisl If, as Dalí writes in a 1928 letter, "one has to
allow things to be free of the conventional ideas which the intellect forces
on them," it is the photograph's empiricism that lends it the power to
stimulate enough doubts about our own perceptive abilities to constitute
a "crisis in consciousness" ( Aguer and Fanés 37).
As a tool for grasping "objective facts," the exaggerated clarity
afforded by the Zeiss lens can destroy stereotyped mental images
because it suddenly inflects the depiction of real things with a sense of
irony. The photograph's revision of the natural world is (like the
Heraclitian logos) challenging and often difficult to understand, not
because it yields to the constant flux of physis, but precisely because it
fixes it in a mechanical, rather than poetic or conceptual, fashion, forcing
us to reckon with its sudden unfamiliarity to our habitual
understanding. Dalí, therefore, locates the image, rather than the
immanence of actual "raw phenomena," as the agent of "the osmosis
established between reality and surreality." Dali's point is that it is the
tool or system of observation that is inventive, a "pure creation of the
mind," rather than the phenomena observed.
This crucial distinction between Dali's method and Bataille's
become most explicit in the relationship between Bataille's article,
Toe" (November 1929), and Dali's earlier "Liberation of the Fing
(March 1929). Both articles structure their arguments around the su
"uncanny" confrontation with an organ's crass physicality - the pa
the body whose connection subsumes its identity, whose "nat
inclusion hides its specificity. For Bataille, the big toe is base on a
of the prohibitions and clothing used to conceal it, but it becom
example of "base matter" at the moment when we are made to look
when, as he writes, we are "seduced in a base manner, without
transpositions and to the point of screaming, opening [our] eyes wide:
opening them wide, then, before a big toe" (VE 23). For Dali, the
"liberation" of fingers evokes how material facts can become "more
violently significant each day within consciousness," "liberated" from

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 symplokê 197

the logic which binds them to a specific conceptual order

("L'alliberament" 228).
More significantly, Dali's " liberation" of actual fingers is depicted in
a series of photographs remarkably similar to the photographs by
Jacques-André Boiffard printed in Bataille's article, which maximize
their strangeness through a dismemberment (from bodily logic) achieved
simply by zooming in on individual toes [see p. 198]. 17 However,
whereas the role of photography in dismembering - or "liberating" - the
big toe is completely unacknowledged in Bataille's text, Dalfs own
photographs exhibit a self-reflextivity which thematizes the role of
representation in their more complex process of estrangement [see p.
199]. While the image on the right-hand page depicts an isolated thumb
cropped in the same manner as Boiffard' s toes, the image on the far left
includes the thumb's joint and part of the hand. Though a less striking
image, this composition emphasizes the role of the photograph's edge in
isolating the thumb from the body. More effectively still, a third
photograph shows a finger poking through a hole in a piece of paper.
Here, the paper itself visibly exaggerates the "cropping" performed less
visibly by the other photographs, just as, in the article itself, Dalí
describes the strangeness of his thumb wiggling through its hole in his
painter's palate: "my thumb had often suddenly surprised me as
something disturbing and unusual, despite the habit of seeing it poking
out the hole in my palette" ("L'alliberament" 228). By taking into account
the fact of their own representation, Dali's written and photographic
images achieve the "violent path on which we can MOREOVER give
things their own liberty" by inventively manipulating the way they are
framed and exhibited (228). 18 In other words, unlike Bataille, Dalí does
not merely locate "the real presence" of hidden signs or meanings within
"nature" as the matter whose exposition unsettles our ideological
framework. Rather, Dalí argues that such an effect can only be produced
through representation - not a simple mimesis of the real, but a
simulacra whose presence vies with, and tangles itself up with, the
world of so-called "originary" social facts, to the degree that our
confidence in such facts begins to self-destruct. It is thus less a practice of
exposure than of exhibition - or exhibitionism.
In the later "Rotten Ass," Dalí more explicitly distinguishes his
method of exhibition - what he calls the "paranoid-critical" method
- from Bataille's "critical exegesis." Though Boiffard's photographs rely

See also the five close-up photographs of flowers and stamens by Karl Blossfeldt
published alongside Bataille's "The Language of Flowers," Documents 3 (1929): 160-68.
Dawn Ades has made a similar observation about Dali's painting, writing that "The
'hidden meaning of dreams, their 'latent' content provoked in Dali a passion for
interpretation, although other Surrealists were happy to let the 'dream' stand in its pure
and manifest fullness. Dalí often included in paintings both symbols and their
interpretations" (Ades 157).

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GROS ORTEIL. SUJET MASCULIN. 30 ANS. - PHOTO. J -A. BOIFFARD.

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200 Jonathan P. Eburne That Obscure Object of Revolt

upon "special effects" in their depiction of "the Big Toe," Bataille

nowhere acknowledges this fact. For Dalí, though, the violence which
such images perform upon the Idea springs precisely from "the violences
of simulacra, which materialist thought cretinously conflates with the
violences of reality" ("L'âne pourri" 11). In a footnote, he cites Bataille' s
"senile pretense" of rejuvenating this materialist thought by applying it
to modern psychology: Dali, in other words, accuses Bataille of merely
updating the technology through which reality exerts its violence on the
concept, without considering his own role - and the role of
representation - in this technology. Dali' s paranoid-critical method
attempts instead to develop a more active apparatus for destroying,
rather than for merely "grasping," stereotyped reality, thus living up to
Surrealism's "revolutionary" aims by attacking the unquestioned role of
images, of logos, within reality. Such a method "negates the negation" of
primary representation in favor of perverse "ideal things" which appear
as simulacra; such signs, at once manifestly material and fantastic,
represent the desire for hidden meanings intensified toward obsession.
For Dalí, paranoia is dangerous on account of its power to form
simulacra whose immanent credibility acts corrosively upon "reality."
Paranoia, Dalí argues, systematizes a mental crisis which is analogous to
hallucination, yet which expresses itself in terms of controllable,
recognizable materials rather than subjective, sensory phenomena.
Paranoia induces a proliferation of simulacra that do not merely emerge
from the unconscious, but which operate in the service of unconscious
desire. As Dalí writes,

These menacing new simulacra act easily and corrosively with

the clarity of physical and everyday appearances, making us
dream, by their special auto-pudeur, of an old metaphysical
mechanism with the help of something which we would not
hesitate to identify with the very essence of nature that,
according to Heraclitus, likes to conceal itself.
(" L'âne pourri" 9)

Using the exterior world to validate its obsessive ideas, paranoia's

troubling power derives from its exacting particularity, which, at its
most powerful, can undermine the social and ideological fabric of reality.
As a solidification of unconscious desire imposed upon the material
world - analogous to the "skillful photogenetic quality to which the
photographer can subject things" - Dali' s paranoiac activity surpasses
Surrealism's use of automatic writing in its understanding that the
unconscious does not merely interact with the world passively through
dreams and slips, but also actively in the symptomology of paranoia.
Dalí claims no particular understanding of how this systematization
works, or, for that matter, of paranoia's actual causality. However, he

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 symplokê 201

suggests a provocative relationship between paranoia's symptoms

which, as Jacques Lacan argues in his Surrealist-influenced dissertation
on paranoia, completed around the same time, stand in opposition to the
two major scholarly theories of the illness: the notion of automatism,
which understands the mind as series of automatic functions, and of
constitutionalism, which understands the mind as organically fixed in its
irregularities.19 By situating paranoia as a development in Surrealist
practice, Dalí not only reaffirms the existing Surrealist belief that
madness represents only a difference in degree, not in kind, from
"sanity/' but also that it is a malady with a systematically structured
nature.

Applied "critically," this paranoia generates its effects primarily

through the double image, "that is, the representation of an object which
without the slightest figurative or anatomical modification, would be at
the same time the representation of an absolutely different object,
similarly denuded of all modes of deformation or abnormality which
might disclose some arrangement" ("L'âne pourri" 10). This secondary
image, which functions as the symptom of an obsessional idea, thus
marks the desire "hidden" within the first image. Though in "Rotten
Ass" Dalí does not actually elucidate how a rotting donkey might
actually figure as an example of this double imagery, the image recurs in
many of his earlier paintings and writings as the prototype fo
"paranoia-critique."20 Though Dalí cites numerous origins for this motif
Dawn Ades has convincingly suggested how the rotten ass may be a
response to the idealized sentimentality of Juan Ramón Jimenez's
famous story Platero y Yo. In the tale, the poet wanders the country with
his donkey, Platero; when the donkey dies, the poet buries him in a
flowering orchard but continues to address him as a transcendental soul
For Dalí, though, Platero was the 'decorative stylization of donkeys, anti-
realism of donkeys, which, as you'll know, are usually made of cork
swarming with ants like crystal" (Ades 140). Dali's rotting donkeys, in
effect, evoke the horror and disgust disavowed by Jiménez, never failing
to see Platero's corpse rotting beneath the orchard flowers. Th
paranoiac retelling of Jimenez's story thus generalizes the exhumed
corpse as the "hidden detail" hiding within the flowers as the decay
from which flowers grow: "flowers," Dalí writes, "are intensely poetic
because they resemble rotting donkeys" (Ades 140). The paranoiac image
infuses the obsessional image of the rotten ass - symptomatic of Dali's

See Lacan, De la psycliose. For evidence of Lacan's early influence by Surrealist

practices, see Lévy-Valensi, Migault et Lacan, "Ecrits 'inspirées': schizo-eraphie."
See, for instance, the famous scene from Luis Bunuel's and Dali's film "Un chien
andalou" (1929), which shows a rotting donkey draped over a grand piano, as well as
numerous of Dali's paintings from 1927 and 1928: "The Rotting Donkey," "Honey is
Thicker than Blood," and many of the "beach scenes."

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202 Jonathan P. Eburne Timt Obscure Object of Revolt

disgust with the idealized transcendentalism of the fable - within the

image of the flowers concealing it: now its full materiality can be
"counted/' ironically exhibited within the very flowers once used to
conceal it.

If Bataille' s roses are spoiled by the hairy sexual organs concealed

within their petals, Dali's "flowers'7 are haunted - uncannily doubled
- by the paranoid image of the spoiled, rotting donkey projected into
their depiction. Instead of resurrecting Breton's ideological com-mitment
as a natural process of dialectical growth and change, Dalí rewrites "the
service to Revolution" in terms of an active desire, kindled toward an
almost necrophilic obsession. Dali's early paranoia-critique thus
supplants Surrealism's reliance upon ideology, and its corresponding
fantasies of "political" and "poetic" practice, with a method that is at
once strictly representational and virulently anti-realist. Structured
around an interpretive apparatus whose pathological form, even,
produces utterly convincing yet disturbing images from its obsessions,
paranoia's systematic nature allows it to be simulated for its effects.
Neither "automatic" nor "an Idea," Dali's paranoia rethinks Surrealism's
epistemological problems in terms of a formal device that is neither
merely an attempt at simulating "madness," nor a materialist analysis of
"reality" effected as if imagination and representation didn't exist at all.
Rather, like the "photographic donnée" of Dali's photography, it
represents a hyper-development of interpretive faculties, an empiricism
whose scrutiny "liberates" material facts from their logical positions, yet
in a way which reproduces this liberation for others to encounter as well:
again, not through the rhetorical or propagandic methods of ideological
praxis, but through an "objective crystal," a "glass of real poetry."
Dali's method for conducting a revolutionary "crisis in
consciousness" in the form of a systematized confusion suggests that he
has found a way to essentially "reverse the charge" of Louis Aragon's
criticism of how the confusion of contemporary thinkers tended to yield
an anti-revolutionary complacency. Unlike Aragon, Dalí no longer relies
on critique to expose the ideologically-fraught misinterpretations of
Heraclitian philosophy, and thereby liberate its "real" ability to produce
crisis. Instead, Dali's paranoid-critical method willfully - but
critically - misinterprets reality in order to provoke a "crisis in
consciousness" that will liberate contemporary thinking from its own
sense of the real. The fundamental volatility epitomized by Heraclitus is
thus no longer governed by ideological discourse, but governs it
instead - or at least functions as a symptom of its "systematized"
confusion. This is true both of Dali's method as well as of Surrealist
discourse itself. Heraclitus's presence in writings about Surrealism
symptomatic of the movement's own ideological disruption - not only
its own disagreements over ideological commitment and over the natu
of ideology itself, but also its ability to produce and multiply simi

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 symplokë 203

disruptions within a wider social and cultural context. As what I have

called Surrealism's "lightning-conductor," Heraclitus conducts
Surrealism's polemical energies from the political to both the
epistemological and the experiential, displacing the single question of
whether (or not) to instigate violent, proletarian uprising onto a broader
field of inquiry about "the forces structuring experience." Rather than
dissipating this polemical energy or even neutralizing its political
usefulness, the effect of Surrealism's diffusion - or suffusion - into
cultural discourse has been to activate a kind of "magnetic field"
suddenly united, charged with political significance, and systematically
disrupted as well. As Michel Foucault has noted, Surrealism's effect on
culture has been less one of replicating its methods (valuing
"subversion" as a political praxis alongside strikes, bombs, and protest),
than to set off a more subtle, yet more pervasive, chain reaction:

What we really owe to [André Breton] alone is the discovery of

a space that is not that of philosophy, nor of literature, nor of
art, but that of experience. We are now in a time when
experience - and the thought that is inseparable from it - are
developing with an extraordinary richness, in both a unity and
a dispersion that arise at the boundaries of provinces that were
once well established.
There is no doubt that the whole network connecting the
works of Breton, Georges Bataille, Leiris, and Blanchot, and
extending through the domains of ethnology, art history, the
history of religions, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, are
effacing the rubrics in which our culture classified itself, and
revealing unforeseen kinships, proximities, and relations. It is
very probable that we owe this new scattering and this new
unity to the person and the work of André Breton. He was
both the spreader and the gatherer of all this agitation in
modern experience. (Foucault 174)

Foucault, of course, is speaking of Breton alone - he is responding to an

interviewer's question about Breton - but as I've attempted to show, at
the moment of Surrealist dispute in the years 1927-30, the effects
Foucault describes are less the product of one man than of a strained
affiliation of Surrealists operating "under the sign" of Heraclitus.21

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

21 1 wish to thank Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron for inviting me to present a

this essay for her seminar at the C.N.R.S. in Paris; I wish also to thank Jean-Mich
for his consistent support and generosity.

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204 ]onat1ian P. Eburne That Obscure Object of Revolt

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