I am in the process of reading Ferdinand Alquié’s The Philosophy of Surrealism (an important book I hope to return to in the near future) and came across the striking passage below from André Breton’s Soluble Fish (1924). Alquié includes this brief excerpt while discussing water imagery in the section titled “Derealization” of Chapter 2, […]
Category Archives: Texts
The Romanian writer Panaït Istrati (1884-1935) seems to be virtually unknown in the U.S., although the recent republication of his first novel, Kyra Kyralina by Talisman House may serve to remedy this situation somewhat. Biographical information about him is not in abundance in English and, sadly, I have had to rely on the Wikipedia entry […]
I just had the opportunity to read André Breton: Magus of Surrealism by Anna Balakian, the first American scholar to seriously investigate Surrealism. Balakian, who passed away in 1997 (see obituary in The New York Times, August 15, 1997), published Literary Origins of Surrealism in 1947, after having interviewed Breton when he lived in New […]
The list of contemporary academics producing scholarship on Marx worth reading is, sadly, a short one. Paresh Chattopadhyay, however, has a secure place on it. Chattopadhyay, a faculty member of the Department of Sociology of the University of Montreal, has made an interesting intellectual journey from close association with the thought of Charles Bettelheim, a […]
Capitalist rule is caught in its own trap, and cannot ban the spirit that it has invoked. —Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet (1915) *** I don’t often express enthusiasm about the appearance of new left groups, but I have come across a case in which I’m at least willing to withhold judgment. The International Luxemburgist […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has just made available a 1953 text by Raya Dunayevskaya, “Malenkov Pledges H-Bomb and Caviar.” This document appeared in Correspondence, the newspaper of the group that had been known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency until 1951, when its members openly broke with Trotskyism and left the Socialist Workers Party to embark upon […]
To mark May Day 2010, which in the U.S. will be a day of mass demonstrations against the ongoing anti-immigrant political offensive, I am providing link to the Hathi Trust scan of The Working-Class Movement in America by Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx (Karl Marx’s youngest daughter). This fascinating account of their 1886 speaking tour […]
Franklin Rosemont’s 1978 collection of writings by André Breton, What is Surrealism? remains a treasure trove of rare and valuable texts. I have just come across a footnote by Rosemont to “On Proletarian Literature,” an interesting 1933 speech by Breton, which draws attention to the fact that the Surrealists were the first to publish in […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has just made available one of Raya Dunayevskaya’s analyses of the political aftermath of Stalin’s death in March of 1953. “Russian Regime Cannot Afford a Beria Show Trial,” which appeared in Correspondence on January 9, 1954, recounts the execution of Lavrenti Beria, chief of the Russian secret police, in the context […]
André Breton broke resolutely with the Communist Party of France and the international apparatus of Communist parties in 1935, leaving behind forever former Surrealists such as Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard. Breton’s criticisms of the counter-revolutionary monstrosity the Stalin version of socialism had become are magnificently expressed in the indispensable essays of Political Position of […]
Criticism &c. 