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Automatic Theologies

Surrealism and the Politics of Equality

Kate Khatib

To write about surrealism and theology seems an almost heretical act,
on both sides of the equation. Like other Romantic and post-Romantic
artistic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
surrealism owes a debt to mysticism and the occult that is already widely
acknowledged, as is the occurrence of religious symbolism throughout
its corpus. Were these works of art equal to the sum total of the surreal-
ist interventions in the theological realm, there would be little more to
discuss. A less cursory inspection reveals, however, that the presentation
of surrealism as a fleeting moment in the artistic history of the twentieth
century fails to capture the full breadth of the critical project that is at
stake. Indeed, one would do better to define surrealism as a unique
epistemological tradition, one that touches not only the artistic and lit-
erary world of 1920s Paris but also the revolutionary political world of
1960s Chicago, insurgent movements in Latin America, and the net-
worked communities of thealtermondialisationmovement. If we are
able to make such a claim, we can do so only on the basis of the shared
project at the center of all surrealist praxis: nothing less than the total
reenchantment of the world.
In fact, surrealism’s central aims and activities have never been en-
tirely devoid of spiritual tendencies; while calling for a total rebellion
against the authoritarian structures of church and state, and ultimately
against the concept ofanysingularity—godorsovereign—incarnated as
a higher power, surrealist discoveries such as automatism, chance, and
the Marvelous share striking aspects with the messianic notion of a re-
turn to an all but forgotten unity of the profane and the divine, the
actual and the possible, and the real and the imaginary. Thus, the explo-
ration of the relationship between the surrealist tradition and the theo-
logical one must deal with a situation far more complex than the

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