by Jon Lackman | 14 July 2006 | Journals, Modern
The latest Yale French Studies considers the affection of the surrealists for the “many ‘others’ outside of the official group with whom they shared their passions: Marxists, visual artists, filmmakers, psychiatrists and ethnographers.” In his essay, Jonathan P. Eburne considers “the ties between surrealism’s politics and the problem of terrorist violence,” jumping off from an amusing anecdote told by the surrealist writer Alain Joubert in 1956 (“A group of five, pure-hearted [American missionaries], in whose midst could be distinguished a rugby player and a former paratrooper, thought they could successfully approach the Aucas by offering them gifts of the ‘little-aluminum-kettle-filled-with-brightly-colored-buttons kind … [The Aucas,] with the help of a few deftly-thrown spears, soon managed to restore the forest to its initial purity”) and a 2001 op-ed by curator Jean Clair blaming Surrealism for helping to pave the way for al-Qaida (“the surrealist ideology never stopped hoping for the death of an America it saw as materialist and sterile, and for the triumph of an Orient that served as the repository for the values of the mind”). Eburne concludes, contra Clair, that surrealism was actually “preparing the mind to defend itself against the forms of ideological closure that guarantee the continuation of such atrocities.”
