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AUTOMATIC THEOLOGIES

Etc.

No, indeed, sir.It means nothing of the kind. Put your butterfly back in its carafe.

You may be sure that Saint-Pol-Roux said exactly what he meant.^42



‘‘The surrealist intervention on the poetic plane,’’ Franklin Rosemont wrote in 1973:

consists of short-circuiting the whole gamut of rationalizations (aesthetic, moral, etc.)

to express the real functioning of thought, thereby liberating images of concrete irra-

tionality in poetry that escapes the clutches of realistic appearances, breaks through

the meshes of everyday action, and, breathing the flames of inspiration and revolt in

all directions at once, calls for and prepares the dictatorship of the imagination.^43

In claiming, not just to bring together figures of the actual and the possible on a rhetorical
level, but actually to bring the imaginary to bear on everyday reality in a way that is both
spontaneous and redemptive, surrealism makes a move that is not without glimmers of a
covertly theological project intimately tied up with its overtly political project of establish-
ing at least some small part of heaven on earth. The ‘‘state of grace’’ that Breton saw as
the goal of all surrealistic endeavor is, in fact, a point at which the equality between
dialectical oppositions reigns supreme: ‘‘Here at last... the world of nature and things
makes direct contact with the human being who is again in the fullest sense spontaneous
and natural. Here at last is the true communion and the true knowledge, chance mastered
and recognized, the mystery now a friend, and helpful.’’^44
The surrealist politics of equality, then, is dependent upon a notion of communica-
bility that transcends all human boundaries while allowing the distinctions between con-
cepts to continue to exist (albeit in a more lackadaisical fashion). It was exactly this
fluidity between concepts, between the opposing forces of the real/imaginary, profane/
sacred, disenchanted/reenchanted dialectics that made the surrealist project so attractive
to thinkers, like Benjamin, with some stake in the development of a radical political
epistemology. In many respects, the artistic success of the by-products of surrealist au-
tomatism is unfortunate, because it has obscured the political project that is fundamen-
tally at stake in surrealist methodology, leading to the movement’s canonization within
the halls of great writers, poets, and painters and to the belief that automatism is nothing
more than a method for the creation of sublime objects. Surrealism’s aim was, however,
and still is something more egalitarian. In 1933, Breton writes:

Surrealism’s achievement is to have proclaimed that all... humans are completely

equal in relation to the subliminal message [for lack of a better term, the secular

numinous element] and to have maintained constantly that this message is a com-

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