In honor of André Breton’s birthday, I am supplying a link to a scanned full-text image of his book Arcane 17. This image appears in the Hathi Trust Digital Library, which is a consortium of university libraries serving as an academic supplement to the (controversial) Google Books project. I intend to comment on the Google […]
I first saw reference to the connection between the Surrealists and Lenin’s 1914 Hegel Notebooks in David Roegider’s entry on Surrealism in the first edition of the Encyclopedia of the American Left. Martin Jay notes that it was André Breton who first introduced Henri Lefebrve to Hegel’s Science of Logic in 1924 in his book […]
Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996) was an extremely important historian and theorist of art who specialized in Romanesque architecture. Schapiro was also a highly independent Marxist thinker and frequently wrote on politics throughout his long career. Among his most important contributions in this area were his interventions in defense of the revolutionary internationalist position on World War […]
What follows is André Breton’s account of his visit to Haiti and the impact his activity had there (described by Franklin Rosemont in an earlier post). This exchange is taken from an interview conducted in 1946 with Jean Duché. The full interview appears in the fascinating book Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism. As with all […]
Class Cleansing: The Massacre at Katyn by Victor Zaslavsky Telos Press, 2008. 133 pp. I hesitate to review anything connected to the Telos school. The journal has undergone a precipitous theoretical decline from its origin as a center of phenomenological Marxism, critical theory, and council communism to become a vehicle for the Americanization of French […]
Once upon a country: a Palestinian life by Sari Nusseibeh In paperback (Picador, 2008, 584 pages) Nussibeh belongs to the highest strata of Palestinian society and so his life experience differs greatly from that of the average resident of a West Bank town. He has, however, sacrificed much for his commitment to the Palestinian national […]
This blog is intended to be largely a critical exploration of ideas through the medium of the book review. Sadly, my pile of “books finished” is much larger than my capacity to produce thoughtful reviews. I am introducing the category of “Thumbnail Review” to permit me to share a few lines about books I consider […]
At this moment of physical devastation in Haiti, recalling an event from the country’s rich revolutionary past is a small gesture of solidarity with its people. This passage is from Franklin Rosemont’s long essay André Breton and the First Principles of Surrealism. “Lescot” is Élie Lescot, staunch ally of Franklin Roosevelt and one of Haiti’s […]
“While public funds evaporate in feasts of fraternity, a bell of rosy fire rings in the clouds.” From the Louise Varèse translation of “Phrases”, one of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations.
Jacques Vaché and the Roots of Surrealism by Franklin Rosement (Charles H. Kerr, 2008, 388 pages) Rosa Luxemburg described World War I in these terms: “For the first time the destructive beasts that have been loosed by capitalist Europe over all other parts of the world have sprung with one awful leap, into the midst […]
Criticism &c. 