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 […]
Tag Archives: Andre Breton
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 […]
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 […]
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. 