Open letter to the Surrealist Group

The fundamental, permanent aspect of the Surrealist approach has always resided in the passionate exaltation of the ideas of Revolt and Freedom, and in the methodical, conscious search for the means necessary to achieve integral human liberation. In this perspective, revolutionary action was always recognized as essential by all individuals belonging to the Surrealist Movement, whose very nature implied that it could not accommodate itself to immediate reality without losing all subversive value, and that it must, while preserving the most absolute independence, logically fit into the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, for the overthrow of the christian-capitalist order. Hence the Surrealists' unconditional refusal to “make a career” in either “literary” or social life, and their constant concern to situate their own activity in relation to the watchwords of proletarian revolution. Hence this perpetual quest for a terrestrial afterlife, this irresistible push towards the future, which condemns the movement to general incomprehension, sarcasm and insults from imbeciles and scoundrels of all kinds.

Such a determination to break with the past cannot tolerate any form of compromise and requires, on the part of those who assert it, the utmost moral rigor and the greatest intelligence of Surrealism's own purpose. It also presupposes a revolutionary consciousness that can tolerate no dogmatism or fideism, and which, in order not to deny itself, must perpetually question the spiritual legacy of previous generations, either to reject it or to dialectically go beyond it.

It was with such demands in mind that we came to Surrealism, and it is because such demands remain ours that we persist in declaring ourselves Surrealists, despite the withdrawal of a group that retains the “official” label.

Today, certain facts lead us to believe that, beyond formal memberships and the wearing of a label that no longer commits to anything, the “invariable principles” (A. Breton) of Surrealism have ceased to animate most of those who express themselves in its name. A brutal event, without precedent in the history of the Movement, has confirmed what certain lesser clues had long led us to suspect. On the subject of the Algerian War, the Surrealist Group, whose entire past seemed destined to play the role of a “beacon” and, through the reaffirmation of “revolutionary defeatism”, vividly proclaim the right to sedition that is inscribed in the very heart of man, finally found itself, in almost its entirety, in solidarity with the French “Left”, whose activity, for decades, has been limited to consciously sabotaging any liberating action.

On several occasions and through various channels, we have protested against this state of affairs, not as censors or enemies, but as comrades united to your Group by emotional and ideological ties, with precautions that alone testified to our good faith. The result is well known: a few pleasant reflections on our style, a series of invectives and insults in place of political arguments, the most odious maneuvers to avoid any discussion and, when the intervention of André Breton and Jehan Layoux made such a discussion inevitable, unjustifiable hostility rendering such an explanation futile and pointless. It should be remembered that we were supposed to know about the “Sédition et les surréalistes” dossier before it was published: A. Breton had promised us we would. In fact, we were kept in total ignorance of its contents, which led to some regrettable errors in presentation. Jehan Layoux himself, who as a member of the group was directly concerned, was unable to obtain a reading. We do not overestimate our activity. We only know that, on your part, everything was done to make it impossible — if only by forbidding us certain collaborations to which we attached the greatest importance — with the avowed hope that it would remain without a future. We return to this affair only insofar as it revealed a state of mind, new in the Surrealist Movement, which authorizes its members, even the most ignorant of any political reality, and in the name of a revolutionary infallibility which any regular at the “café” would automatically possess, to treat as enemies those who asked for a fraternal discussion, and to cry provocation when the latter were forced to defend themselves, without invective or insults.

Such a reaction shows that today, any critical activity likely to call into question some of your positions is felt by you to be scandalous, that you consider it inconceivable that an individual or a group could be right against you. It is an inherent fate of all revolutionary parties, groups and movements to undergo, at the slightest collective failure and without any apparent transformation, a mutation that leads them to defend, with the same terminology, a different or even opposite cause. Despite its denials and parodic rodomontades — which are revealing, by the way — it seems that the Surrealist Group is today suffering from this “perversion of values” which is the mark of a degeneration that is undoubtedly irreversible. All that remains of the permanent restlessness, the vertigo of freedom and revolt experienced by the first Surrealists, asserted with boundless arrogance, is a miserable concern for expediency and immediate “efficiency”, which introduces the movement into the “literary” and “artistic” circuit, to the delight of a shameful generation of “painters”, “poets” and “journalists” who shamelessly exploit and distort the fundamental principles of Surrealism.

Of the “political (philosophical) line” and the “artistic line” that Surrealism has always claimed to unite, it's clear that only the latter is important to you. You've simply forgotten that the latter has revolutionary value only because of this unification, and that neglecting one for the other is tantamount to embracing that split in man that Surrealism has always held to be heartbreaking. To remain a Surrealist implies rejecting this state of affairs, as well as any dissociation between the will to “transform the world” and that to “change life”.

Apparently, of course, nothing has been called into question, but your present activity is the pure and simple negation of the ideas you still claim to hold, knowing only too well that they remain unassailable. Thus, in the name of revolutionary Internationalism, you were able to lend your support — and in what terms — to Captain Galvao's reactionary movement, or countersign with Thorez and Aragon a declaration on the Spanish strikes, calling for the abandonment of revolutionary struggle in favor of class collaboration. It's no big deal to be extorted into signing by a few Stalinist “intellectuals”, but it's becoming indecent to rank in all conscience among the professional anti-fascists — and in what company — at the same time as you inveigh against those who have the bad taste to claim to uphold the principles of the Permanent Revolution.

Jean Schuster, who is no stranger to jokes — about the Spanish Revolution, for example — once told us that the review “Sédition” — in which surrealists, militants from the “La Vérité” group and Comrade G. Munis1 expressed themselves — was “nothing revolutionary” (we quote from memory). We'd like to ask this eminent theorist how many of the articles published in the “surrealist action” magazine “La Brêche” defend a political position that can be described as “revolutionary”? Would it be in issue no. 1 — whose ideological and “cultural” level is otherwise appalling — the article devoted to the patriotic Resistance fighter Hespel, in which we find a vibrant apology for the Christian, Stalinist Jeune Résistance movements, led by the anti-Trotskyist Sartrean Francis Jeanson? Such a declaration, approved by the editorial board which includes Jean Schuster, is so un-revolutionary that some militants of “Socialisme ou Barbarie”, hardly suspected of provoking you, naively thought they should be concerned... In fact, we have no doubt that, for most of you, Moscow's “de-Stalinization” and the Castro-Stalinist counter-revolution have more appeal than the “revolutionary idealism” (as Jean Schuster would no doubt say) of Rosa Luxembourg or Leon Trotsky.

Such is the political balance sheet of the Surrealist Group: the qualitative leap that could not fail to occur, has transformed a series of errors and passing lapses into an activity perfectly alien to revolutionary consciousness, whose objective aim it is to obscure, in the same way as the entire infamous French “left”.

Unsurprisingly, the same debacle can be observed in areas specific to Surrealism — most of the group's initiatives are now reducible to “literary” or “artistic” entertainment of the most common kind. The label doesn't change the value of a commodity unwrapped in galleries, displayed in the “leftist” press or even — with a little more smugness and shamelessness — in “surrealist action” magazines. The Positif issue gives us a rather curious sample of this “perversion of values” common to the majority of the group's members, in an article in praise of Brigitte Bardot, José Pierre goes so far as to declare that “at a time when 40 million French people were trembling with fear, at night, at the thought of a possible visit from the plastic surgeons, a young woman of 27 had, and she alone, had a virile reaction”. Such cretinous remarks would not be worth mentioning were it not for the fact that the author was an art critic known for his membership of the Surrealist Group. In fact, judging by the content and level of some of the articles, it's safe to assume that the mad love and sublime love exalted by the first-generation Surrealists are no more than vague memories and pseudo-lyrical dissertation topics. They have given way to another conception of love, of which Issue 2 of “La Brêche presents a rather significant sampling: “Les doigts de la mémoire”, by Guy Selz, takes the obsessions of an insane woman to the heights of eroticism, whose only interest is that of a pathological document — the distinction is easy enough to make, except in minds warped by a taste for the ‘bizarre’ or, more simply, for sauciness — while ‘La chambre d'Arianrod’, by exhibitionist Jean Markale, offers us a vaguely pornographic ‘reverie’ worthy of the best ‘Paris-Hollywood’. To those who think they've had enough with love and eroticism, we can only recall the words of André Breton: “The admirable, dazzling light of the flame must not hide from us what it is made of, must not hide from us the deep mine galleries, traversed by mephitic breaths, that have nonetheless allowed the extraction of its substance, a substance that must continue to sustain it if it is not to be extinguished.
It was from this point of view that Surrealism did its utmost to lift the taboos that prevented us from dealing freely with the sexual world, and the whole sexual world, perversions included...”. What remains, here again, of these concerns, and of the total lucidity they imply?

We could multiply the examples, and note the same emotional and intellectual deficiency in every field. In the end, when you read each of the group's publications, you're left with only one question: will it be poetry, love or freedom that is most brazenly trampled underfoot? It has to be said that, more often than not, they all end up in the same boat. As for the rare authentically surrealist interventions — and we know who to expect them from — they increasingly take on the appearance of a paving stone at the bottom of the pond.

Faced with such a failure, such a betrayal of what we consider to be the very essence of surrealism — a state of permanent revolt underpinned by conscious revolutionary activity — we feel that it is no longer possible to remain silent, and that we must totally and definitively disassociate ourselves from a group whose surrealists are only in name, and in the prestige they usurp: it is at least fortunate that certain small-minded people — they will easily recognize themselves, if only by the hatred they show us — leave no trace of the ideas they are trying to seize.

For our part, we're sure we'll remain faithful to surrealism, which we'll continue to defend, alone and by all means, just as we've defended it with you.

The future, despite everything, will be surreal.

‎
‎

Paris, September 27, 1962.

Corinne Armel, Louis Janover, Monique Langlais, Roger Langlais, Bernard Pecheur, Serge Ründt,

and the autonomous group Fomento Obrero Revolucionario.

• 1G.Munis, whose “Sédition” published a text which had appeared in Italy in “Bataglia Communista” entitled: “La vieille Chine de Mao-Tsé-Toung”.