The revolutionary politics of surrealism in Paris, 1934--1939.

This work probes the latent and the manifest political content of the surrealist movement in interwar Paris. Existing scholarship tends to limit its analysis to surrealism's brief encounters with the French Communist Party (PCF) between 1925--33; the main argument of my dissertation is that surrealist political activity after 1934 that involved experiments with maverick anti-Stalinist left-communism and anarchism say more about the surrealist politics of individual liberty and social liberation than does their connection to the PCF. In the words of Walter Benjamin: Since Bakunin, Europe has lacked a radical concept of freedom. The surrealists have one. The central focus of this study is the surrealist adoption and adaptation of revolutionary defeatism, a strategy based on Leninist-Trotskyist communism and anarchist/anarchosyndicalist derivations dedicated to transforming imperialist war into civil war. When the Stalinists jettisoned class warfare policies and rallied around the Franco-Soviet national defense pact in 1935, poet-polemicist Andre Breton (citing Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht) called upon surrealists to escalate their guerrilla war on the enemy within our own country and subvert patriotism, patriarchy, militarism, and religion. In this light, I re-read a variety of surrealist texts, images, and direct actions---including the display of a Melanesian mask at the Exposition surrealiste d'objets; Georges Bataille's Acephale group; Dora Maar's photographic portrait of Pere Ubu; Helene Vanel's dance piece at the 1938 Exposition internationale du surrealisme; and the practice of surrealist black humor---as creations to demoralize and unnerve the public culture of the Popular Front and Stalinist party dogma in accordance with revolutionary defeatist principles.PhDEuropean historyModern historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127922/2/3029365.pd