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NOTES TO PAGES 621–27

concepts and the equality between concepts, which differentiates a purely messianic project from a
purely political one, and the question of meaning in relation to the surrealist use of language. Both
of these points of distinction are discussed at a later point in the present essay.

15. Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautre ́amont), ‘‘Poe ́sies’’ [1870],Maldoror and the Complete
    Works of the Comte de Lautre ́amont, trans. A. Lykiard (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1994), 244;
    Benjamin, ‘‘Surrealism,’’ 208.


16. See, e.g., ‘‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’’ (inWalter Benjamin:
    Selected Writings, vol. 1), where Benjamin discusses the linguistic relationship between the divine
    realm and the profane world of things, some phrases from which are repeated almost explicitly in
    the ‘‘Surrealism’’ essay. See also ‘‘The Task of the Translator’’ in the same volume, the prefatory
    essay to Benjamin’s translation of Charles Baudelaire’s ‘‘Tableaux parisiens,’’ in which he continues
    the development of the linguistic themes first discussed in ‘‘On Language as Such and On the
    Language of Man.’’


17. Benjamin, ‘‘Surrealism,’’ 214.


18. Ibid., 210–11.


19. Andre ́Breton, ‘‘Surrealism and Painting’’ [1928], trans. S. W. Taylor,Surrealism and Paint-
    ing(Boston: MFA Publications, 2002), 4.


20. P. Rosemont,Surrealist Women, li. Meret Oppenheim was one of the key women involved
    with the Surrealist Movement in France between the two world wars. She is perhaps best known as
    the creator of Surrealism’s well-known objectDejeuner en fourrure, often calledFur-Covered Cup,
    Saucer, and Spoon. (See P. Rosemont,Surrealist Women, 74, for additional background infor-
    mation.)


21. Ibid.


22. Mircea Eliade,The Sacred and the Profane:The Nature of Religion, trans. W. Trask (New
    York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959), 11.


23. Ibid.


24. Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Manifestation and Proclamation,’’Figuring the Sacred, trans. D. Pellauer
    (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 49–50.


25. Breton, ‘‘Surrealism and Painting,’’ 46.


26. Ibid.


27. Mary Ann Caws, ‘‘Reading Andre ́Breton,’’Context11 (2002), http://www.centerforbook
    culture.org/context/no11/Caws.html. ‘‘Communicating vessels’’ is used to describe one of the most
    basic examples of a system in modern physics. The experiment—or demonstration, more accu-
    rately—uses a number of vertical tubes of different heights and shapes that ‘‘communicate’’ by a
    tube that joins them together at the bottom. According to the laws of the physics of fluid, any
    increase or decrease of water in one tube affects the water in all of the other tubes and results in an
    immediate reshifting of matter to achieve an absolute equality in the water level, and thus the
    potential energy of the milligrams of water on the surface of each tube. In essence, the communicat-
    ing vessels effectively represent a single vessel. See Ranier Radok’s online discussion of this system
    for more information: http://kr.cs.ait.ac.th/radok/physics/e2.htm.


28. Benjamin, ‘‘Surrealism,’’ 209.


29. Breton, ‘‘Surrealism and Painting,’’ 9.


30. Quoted in David Gascoyne, ‘‘Introduction toThe Magnetic Fields,’’The Automatic Message
    (London: Atlas Press, 1997), 44.


31. Ibid., 41.


32. Andre ́Breton, ‘‘Manifesto of Surrealism’’ [1924], trans. R. Seaver and H. R. Lane,Manifes-
    toes of Surrealism(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 30.

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