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KATE KHATIB

equation of a particular moment in the history of artistic practice with a particular set of
messianic categories. If lines of resonance appear between elements of the surrealist proj-
ect and certain theological constructs—revelation, the miracle, and the sacred are all pres-
ent in various forms in surrealist thought—one must tread lightly in this dangerous
territory of making theological claims on behalf of a group of thinkers whose collective
intent was the total destruction of all repressive systems, including church and state, and
who, in 1925, composed an open letter declaring war on the pope; indeed, in more than
seventy years of theoretical development, surrealism’s adherents have never failed to con-
tinue the project of scathing theological critique because, following Marx, ‘‘the criticism
of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.’’^1 Exclusionism, authoritarianism, the hierar-
chically dominant position of the Church—the surrealists have cited all of these as justifi-
cation for their belief that the greatest enemy of human imagination is organized religion,
which centers on a purely phantasmagoric and fundamentally mythical andunreachable
central body. ‘‘God is a hallucinatory projection of humankind’s own misery, fear, and
loathing,’’ Don LaCoss wrote in 2001, ‘‘refracted back onto ourselves, and incorporated
into our individual psyches as well as the larger society.’’^2
Yet the surrealists’ position as critics of organized religion should not prevent their
inclusion within the field of ‘‘post-secular’’ studies. The surrealists may have set their
cause in opposition to the traditional theological arsenal, but they also mined the rhetoric
of religious criticism for useful tools, taking bits and pieces and investing them with new
significance outside the archaic language of heaven and hell, forging direct links between
such lofty concepts as ‘‘revelation’’ or ‘‘the sacred’’ and the concrete understanding of
objects in the everyday world. The surrealists reoriented these concepts and their ultimate
aims toward something that might best be described aspractical truth. In fact, surrealism’s
interventions in the theological-political field throughout the first half of the twentieth
century foreshadow the rethinking of religion that Hent de Vries seems to have in mind
when he writes, in the introduction toPhilosophy and the Turn to Religion:

as a sociopolitical force and as a theoretical problem... the ‘‘return of religion’’

remains inexplicable as long as one continues naı ̈vely to oppose religion, not only

to critique, autonomy, and self-determination, to the profane and the finite, to the

technological and the mechanical, to the modern and the postmodern, but also to

their concrete manifestations in the secular nation-state and republicanism, the na-

ture of international law, and the future of transnational forms of identity (individual

and collective).^3

Seeking, in the movement’s earliest incarnations, to break out of the Enlightenment con-
text of life lived by virtue of reason alone and to shed the theological baggage that weighed
down all post-Enlightenment European critical and artistic practice, surrealism’s adher-
ents envisioned a world in which binary oppositions were brought to the breaking point,

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