AUTOMATIC THEOLOGIESa world in which language was flexible enough to allow any and all concepts—theological
and otherwise—to be violently ripped from their places within a traditional historical
trajectory. Old notions were invested with an entirely new significance as they were recast
amongst the myriad surrealist theories of knowledge and experience; chance replaced
reason as the guiding logic of interpretation; and the old binaries of ‘‘sacred’’ and ‘‘pro-
fane’’ became stand-ins for largely the same categories of experience.
Surrealism’s contribution to the growing discourse on political theologies and the
‘‘return of religion’’ is something of a post-secularvia negativa: in seeking to represent
‘‘whole races deprived of life and liberty for the ‘crime’ of not believing man unfit for
heaven on earth,’’ Surrealism’s critical theory unwittingly provides exactly the negation
of religious tropes that is necessary if we are to begin the process of reaffirming post-
secular theology.^4
Surrealism has only recently resurfaced as an object of theoretical interest in both the
academic world and the public sphere. Major exhibitions in the last ten years—at the Tate
Modern Gallery in London, the Guggenheim and Metropolitan museums in New York,
and the Pompidou Center in Paris, among others—coupled with the hotly debated sale
of Andre ́Breton’s famous personal collection in 2003,^5 have brought surrealism and its
adherents back into the public eye. While the movement’s investment in questions of
visual and aesthetic practice cannot be ignored, the surging popularity of surrealist ‘‘art’’
(a somewhat dubious term, depending on whom you ask) precipitated by these recent
exhibitions has little to do with the explicitly critical and epistemological methodology
upon which these paintings, drawings, and objects are based. While lauding the surreal-
ists’ innovations, these exhibitions have done little more than prematurely historicize a
method of political and social praxis that is still in andofgreat use today.
‘‘Generalizations about surrealism based entirely on painters are bound to be mis-
leading,’’ wrote Penelope Rosemont, co-founder of the Chicago Surrealist Group, in her
introduction to the 1997 collectionSurrealist Women, ‘‘because surrealism never has been
primarily a movement of painters.’’^6 Viewed primarily as an aesthetic movement, surreal-
ism’s innovations as a school of political thought are often overlooked or dismissed as
artistic enterprise. Conspicuously absent from the walls of museums and galleries are
the political declarations, the tracts, the manifestos—the voluminous programmatic and
methodological writings—that charted surrealism’s course at every step. It is, of course,
undeniable that surrealism’s adherents have invested a great deal of energy and critical
praxis in questions of aesthetics, as well as in questions of the visual, the literary, specta-
torship, and the revolutionary potential of a variety of artistic media; in fact, much of the
movement’s critical power—and its legitimacy as a form of mysticism in its own right—is
derived from its close relationship with the realm of art. Yet surrealism’s actual involve-
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