NOTES TO PAGES 619–21the ‘‘Breton committee’’ requesting the state to turn the collection and the apartment that housed
it into a ‘‘Breton Museum,’’ prompted outcries and protests from the surviving members of the
Paris Surrealist Movement and the Surrealist Movement in the United States. See the manifestos
‘‘Surrealism Is Not for Sale!’’ and ‘‘Who Will Embalm the Embalmers?’’ online at http://www.sur
realistmovement-usa.org/ for more information.
- Penelope Rosemont, ‘‘All My Names Know Your Leap: Surrealist Women and Their Chal-
lenge,’’Surrealist Women: An International Anthology(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), xxix. - Quoted in Mike King, ‘‘Art and the Postsecular,’’Journal of Visual Art Practice4, no. 1
(2005): 16. - Throughout this essay, the termsurrealismis used to refer to the political and epistemologi-
cal project that arose in France in the second decade of the twentieth century. Its use is, however,
in no way limited to the praxis of the Parisian surrealists between the wars; later incarnations of
this same project, in particular, the American Surrealist Movement, founded in 1966 with the
explicit support of Breton and the remaining members of the Paris Surrealist Movement, are also
included here not only as examples of surrealist practice but as participants and co-conspirators in
exactly the same movement. I am greatly indebted to Ron Sakolsky for his incomparable discussion
of Surrealism’s heritage—European, American, and otherwise—in the introduction to the 2002
compendiumSurrealist Subversions. - Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’’ [1929],
trans. Edmund Jephcott, inWalter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2,1927–1934, ed. Michael W.
Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 208. - Walter Benjamin, ‘‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’’ [1918], trans. Rodney
Livingstone, inWalter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1,1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Mi-
chael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 101. - Benjamin, ‘‘Surrealism,’’ 215.
- Benjamin had already established his unwillingness to accept any epistemological system
that could not take into account the myriad experiences that the Kantian paradigm refused to
accept. ‘‘A philosophy that does not include the possibility of soothsaying fromcoffee grounds,’’ he
told Gershom Scholem in 1918, ‘‘and cannot explicate it, cannot be a true philosophy’’ (Gershom
Scholem,Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship[1975], trans. H. Zohn [New York: Schocken
Books, 1981], 59). The theory of experience that Benjamin puts forth in his early text ‘‘On the
Program of the Coming Philosophy,’’ a more or less direct response to Kant’sProlegomena to Any
Future Metaphysics, is echoed strikingly in his essay on surrealism’s critical practice, written some
ten years later. - Benjamin, ‘‘Surrealism,’’ 208.
- F. Rosemont, ‘‘Crisis of the Imagination,’’ 14. Although Chicago Surrealism would develop
more than twenty years after Benjamin’s death, it is, without a doubt, one of the surrealist manifes-
tations that remains closest to what Benjamin thought of as the movement’s critical and political
practice. Chicago Surrealism, which grew up around the husband and wife team Franklin and
Penelope Rosemont, both of whom are still vocal activists and surrealists today, is one of the most
militantly political incarnations of surrealism to date. More than the Paris Surrealist Movement,
whose adherents dabbled in Marxism, but could never seem to make prolonged productive use of
its theories, the Chicago Surrealist Group, which was founded primarily by student activists, has a
strong political background, utilizing both Marxist and anarchist theories as a springboard from
which continue the development of Breton’s original—if somewhat abstruse—political project. In-
terestingly, however, the Chicago Surrealist Group is also where surrealism begins to differ from
Benjamin on a number of interesting points, among them the distinction between the unity of
PAGE 785785.................16224$ NOTE 10-13-06 12:34:46 PS