During and immediately after the war, the Romanian Surrealist Group engaged in an intense and often extraordinary collective activity, exemplified by this key surrealist text signed by Trost and Gherasim Luca that suggests a critical reappraisal of the surrealist project and sets out proposals for future developments. Poignantly signalling their complete isolation from other contemporary surrealist comrades, it appears not to have made a great impact at the time within the international movement, even though its authors both subsequently came to live in Paris after the group’s collapse in 1947 as Romania became a Stalinist regime; several of its themes, however, were to exert a considerable influence on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.

DIALECTICS OF THE DIALECTIC: A MESSAGE ADDRESSED TO THE INTERNATIONAL SURREALIST MOVEMENT

Gherasim Luca and Trost. Bucharest, 1945

This appeal is made to our surrealist friends, dispersed throughout the world, and as with major shipwrecks we signal our precise position: 44°5′ latitude north and 26° longitude east.

The inexhaustible diversity of cretinising means at the disposal of the enemies of the dialectical development of thought and of action, and the oceans of blood bearing witness to the current cessation of objective evolution, will never, even for a moment, be enough to distract us from the red thread of reality.

Despite the snares surrounding us, we refuse to slip into the errors – as theoretical as they are material – that each time assume a new appearance whose aim, through their immediate, moral or quantitative aspects, is to distract us from our fundamental desire whose first known stage is to transform desire into the reality of desire.

Separated from our friends since the imperialist world war started, we still have no news about them. But we have always cherished the secret hope that on this planet where our existence seems daily to become more untenable, the real functioning of thought has never ceased to motivate the group which holds in its hands the highest ideological liberty ever to exist: the international surrealist movement.

We appeal especially to André Breton, sending him our most fervent message, as at the same time we address the international surrealist movement, giving details of some of our theoretical conclusions from these past years of solitude, in the indefatigable pursuit of new dialectical solutions which will allow us to surpass the excruciating conflict existing between us and the world.

As surrealists, we have continued to envisage the possibility of these permanent confrontations between interior reality and exterior reality in our adherence to dialectical materialism, in the historical destiny of the inter- national proletariat and in the sublime theoretical conquests of surrealism.

If the Surrealist Movement was able to react swiftly to the right-wing deviations which surrounded or threatened it, deviations of political or artistic opportunism, prior to 1939, when we last received information, we believe that it is also time to address certain errors which have crept into surrealism itself. Although less visible, these errors seem to us just as dangerous for the dialectical development of thought. Therefore, before moving on to present our detailed discussion, we feel we should indicate certain existing tendencies within surrealism in recent years, tendencies which little by little risk compromising communal effort.

We can group these artistic deviations, ideologically linked to the surrealist movement, under the following general headings: the gradual transformation of objective discoveries into means of artistic production, and the attempt to propagate in a cultural way a given state of the development of surrealist thought.

We do not believe we are alone in raising fears about the existence over the last few years of what might be called a ‘surrealist landscape’.

We have in mind not the improper use of surrealism, which started long ago, nor those who have taken up the word for one reason or another; such errors were challenged at the time. It is a matter of the mimetic use of techniques invented by the first surrealists, techniques which are reappearing in all sorts of productions within the movement itself but which on close analysis lack revolutionary objectivity.

Only a complete objective necessity can justify the use of a surrealist technique after its discovery, such as a mania or a hysterical state of suggestion. But we believe it is time to react against the tendency to consider certain objectively surrealist techniques as mechanically transmissible and capable of being used indefinitely.

Surrealist discoveries exist, but surrealist manners, applicable as they stand, which would merely replace the old and odious methods used by poets, painters or writers, do not.

Although procedures discovered by the surrealists such as automatic writing, collage or delirious interpretation have an objective value which, so strong is our consent to and admiration of them, cannot be overestimated. It is evident that the idealistic repetition of their use removes all primary theoretical value from them and is entirely unjustifiable from the surrealist point of view, that is to say in what is inherently most dialectical about this revolutionary movement. For, through this artistic repetition, surrealist techniques, in the hands of those who let themselves be fooled by such a doubtful interpretation of objectivity, become aesthetic and abstract techniques.

Around and even within surrealism, and above all in painting and poetry, one finds certain surrealist principles taken up again, modified and remade, and the existence of the ‘landscape’ we refer to constitutes in our eyes an artistic deviation that is dangerous from any perspective. This, frequently involuntary, ‘surrealist’ mannerism threatens to turn surrealism into an artistic current, making it acceptable to our class enemies, assigning it an inoffensive historical past that would, in a word, cause it to lose the edge which, through all of the contradictions of the outside world, has driven those who have made revolution their raison d’être.

We therefore see in the non-objective and routine use of major surrealist techniques an error leading to the depreciation of these discoveries and allowing artistic tendencies disgracefully to appropriate these revolutionary values, something which constitutes a mortal threat to the development of thought and action.

The transformation of objective surrealist discoveries into artistic techniques can be related to a second error we must identify, which we label the persuasive tendency to propagate a given state of the surrealist movement.

This tendency only serves to amplify the first, given that it introduces surrealism into a sort of cultural politics. ‘Surrealist’ anthologies visibly express this second deviation, and the endeavour to propagate existing discoveries in a mechanical fashion, so that the resulting ideas radiate out, in a way that can only be said to represent a woeful attempt to make surrealism acceptable by fixing it at a particular moment of its perpetual movement.

In pointing out these two fundamental errors of recent years to our surrealist friends, we believe it is unnecessary to emphasise further the dangers lying in wait for revolutionary thought, which take refuge in a deadly confidence in the ability to fix what was violently torn from the outside world and from ourselves in cultural terms.

The transformation of surrealism into a current of artistic revolt would put an end to its theoretical development, and following its transition through the inevitable stages of refusal and scandal, it would risk sharing the fate of every movement of revolt which the class enemy has always finally managed, in one way or another, to use for its own purposes.

In the following pages we intend to present the theoretical conclusions we have reached, but whose terms we can really only express partially.

At the same time we feel we should clarify certain fundamental viewpoints, which we believe may be attributed to the surrealist movement in general, positions whose role is to highlight the concrete discoveries we wish to present and which are taken up more fully in specialist works devoted to them.

It is difficult to find graphic equivalents to our most inexpressible desires, but we shall attempt to indicate a few essential points. The first concerns the need to maintain surrealism in a continually revolutionary state, a state which might offer us synthetic (Hegelian, materialist, unprecedented) solutions, which moreover have until now been awaited in vain.

This continually revolutionary state can only be maintained and developed by a dialectical position of permanent negation and of the negation of negation, a position which might be capable of the greatest imaginable extension towards everything and everyone.

We reject any tendency, no matter how seductive, to make surrealism either the inheritor of revolutionary thought, the most advanced movement of our time, or any other synthetic state which could naturally recur in it. The current position of surrealism incontestably implies these synthetic states, but we believe we should reject any attempt to limit it statistically or to allow it to be swallowed up by problems of legacies.

The mad hopes we placed in the apparition of surrealism and in our own apparition demand the expression of all our desires, all at once, and this desire to desire would clash with any attempt to transform surrealism into a movement simply belonging to the present.

The dialectical and materialist power of surrealism towards all the other existing movements could exert precisely the same attraction on its members and sooner or later we would find ourselves plunged into the stupefied melancholy implied by any spiritual heritage.

In our opinion surrealism cannot be simply the most historically advanced movement. Without wishing in the slightest to founder in the philosophical idealism of all romanticism, we feel that surrealism can only exist in continual opposition to the whole world and to itself, in that negation of negation guided by the most inexpressible delirium, and without of course losing one or other aspect of its immediate revolutionary power.

Unveiling the most revolutionary positions, surrealism is equally its own participant, and cannot be lost in itself for any length of time. It is here that the key to all revolutionary power is hidden, which must not elude us, even for the most tempting quantitative results.

We recognise in this dialectical attitude the most concrete possibility of keeping intact within ourselves the revolutionary mechanism and the means to trample underfoot any discovery which does not immediately oblige us to find another. Each state of negation, linked one to another in a concrete, absurd and dialectical way, causes us to reject the past in its entirety, for no historical moment has been able to fulfil the relative–absolute of our desires. We reject humanity’s past in its entirety, as well as its mnemonic support in memory, recognising our desires not simply as the projection of fundamental needs (such as some of the desires hidden within the unconscious) but also those we must labour to invent. Any limitation of the possibility of inventing new desires, from no matter what source and for whatever reason, will always awaken in us the demoniac taste for negation and for the negation of negation.

In this effort to reconcile interior reality with exterior reality, we tirelessly return to certain sublime discoveries which exalt our positions. We are thinking above all of the materialist (Leninist) position of the relative–absolute and of objective chance, meaning the meeting of human finality with universal causality.

Objective chance constitutes for us the most awesome means to locate the relative–absolute aspects of reality, in its favourable forms, and it alone ceaselessly offers us the possibility of discovering the contradictions of a society divided along class lines.

Objective chance leads us to see in love the general revolutionary method appropriate to surrealism.

After so many fruitless attempts to find a concretely revolutionary method that is unsullied by idealistic remnants, we have come to consider erotic magnetism as our most valid insurrectional means of support.

It is clear that in order to have reached this general conclusion our attitude towards love developed in an unprecedented fashion. This attitude implies every state of love known up to the present day, but at the same time it demands the dialectical negation of these states.

Whilst accepting every known state of love – libertinism, fidelity, polygamy and the psychopathology of love – we also go beyond them, at least theoretically. In trying to tap love in its most violent and decisive, most attractive and impossible forms, we are not content to see it as the great disrupter that occasionally, in one place or another, breaks through the divisions of class society. The destructive power of love against all established order both contains and goes beyond the revolutionary needs of our age.

We proclaim that love, freed of its social and individual, psychological and theoretical, religious or sentimental constraints, is our principal means of knowledge and of action. Its methodical aggravation, its limitless development, its overwhelming fascination – the first stages of which we have already passed through with Sade, Engels, Freud and Breton – offer the dreadful changes of direction and the scandalous exertions that bring the most effective means of action within not only our grasp, but also that of all revolutionaries.

This dialecticised and materialised love constitutes the relative–absolute revolutionary method revealed to us by surrealism, and in the discovery of new erotic possibilities that go beyond social, medical or psychological love, we can grasp the first forms of objective love. We believe that, even in these most immediate forms, the unlimited eroticisation of the proletariat constitutes the most precious promise to be found to assure the latter, in the wretched age we are living through, a real revolutionary development.

In attempting to discover and invent the most staggering aspects of love, we stand opposed as much to the limitations with which nature confronts us from without as to the limitations of Oedipus complexes within.

We stand opposed to the passivity shown up to the present towards nature, to the secret admiration it has inspired amongst revolutionary movements, since we are impatient with the sluggishness of natural laws.

Neither can we accept a human biology which reflects the most advanced aspects of nature, nor the cellular axioms which surround us and lead fatally to death, contradicting our revolutionary desires and keeping us in a state of ambivalent tension between life and its contradiction.

We dream of reconciling our class situation with our attitude towards the regressive aspects of nature, given the danger that a blind and implicit confidence in the latter’s possibilities, as has almost always been current, might harbour a dreadful oppression.

A total revolution, as first formulated by the surrealist movement, cannot accept the Darwinian leaps of nature, the contradictory influences of human biology or the abstract indifference of cosmology.

We wish to dialecticise and make concrete the utopian attempts at human resistance against nature, and we wish to topple the terrifying barriers which nature ceaselessly erects against us and under whose cover class society can be upheld.

We have long known that any sense of measure, for opportunistic reasons, in our opposition to the outside world will only backfire on us. This is why we want to link our historical revolutionary position to our revolutionary position against nature, thus favourably re-establishing the necessary relationship between desire and the universe, considered from a cosmological point of view.

Now more than ever we realise that any class revolution must be concretely mirrored by a revolution against nature.

The necessity to discover the love which, unhindered, might overthrow social and natural obstacles leads us to a non-Oedipal position. The existence of birth traumas and Oedipal complexes, revealed by Freudian theory, constitutes the natural and mnemonic limits, the unfavourable unconscious wrinkles, which, unbeknownst to us, control our attitude towards the outside world. We have formulated the problem of the complete release of man (Gherasim Luca, L’Inventeur de l’amour), adding as its condition the destruction of our initial Oedipal position.

Thanks to the revolutionary movements the situation of the father has been soundly shaken, as much in its direct as in its symbolic forms. But the castrating vestiges of birth traumas nonetheless still persist within them, supported moreover by the favourable position of brotherhood maintained by political movements; this too is simply one of the forms covered by the initial complexes.

The painful defeats of love, all tainted by romantic idealism and humanity’s incapacity to objectivise itself, find their first form in the mnemonic fixity of the mother and in the primitive other we carry within us.

The qualitative transformation of love into a general revolutionary method, and the possibility of going beyond the unconscious image of love in one giant leap, are prevented by this primordial theoretical defeat maintained within us by the Oedipal position. Freed of the mortal anguish acquired at birth, freed of the limitations of complexes deriving from our unconscious Oedipal attitude, we are finally trying to find the specific paths of our liberation and to go beyond the ‘endless cycle’ implied by our erotic attitudes in their biological or psychic forms.

Considered in the light of a non-Oedipal position, the existing states of love are merely stages we must cross, and the concrete absurdity of objective love can only be unleashed by this imperious Hegelian negation, turned aphrodisiac to the point of paroxysm.

The necessities of revolution require the non-Oedipal attitude to be extended on a general level relating to the infra-psychic situation of revolutionaries in their immediate struggle (Gherasim Luca, Premier manifeste non-Oedipien).

So long as the proletariat retains within itself the fundamental primary complexes against which we are fighting, its struggle and even its victory will be illusory, since the class enemy will remain hidden, unperceived, in its blood. Oedipal limitations fasten the proletariat to a position that symmetrically negates the bourgeoisie, and so becomes inculcated with its odious fundamental values, in a way that is all the more dangerous for being unacknowledged.

For so long as the proletariat’s unconscious maintains the father–brother relation, it is held in a state of slavery towards itself, and so retains the deformations stemming from nature and the capitalist economy. Marx had already drawn attention not only to the need to think of the proletariat as an antagonistic class arisen from the development of the means of production, but also of the need to deny this imposed state. To deny this state, the teeth of revolution must bite deep into mankind’s unconscious, natural passivity. This is a matter of going beyond the abstract and artificial admiration for the proletariat, and finding the lines of force able to imply its own negation. This negation must, moreover, relinquish humanitarian and outdated inter- nationalism, which continues to permit national interests to affirm themselves under cloak of reformist egalitarianism, in favour of an extreme anti-national position, concretely class-based and outrageously cosmopolitan, taking up its most violent aspects, to the point of bringing mankind itself into question.

Our position on the relations between the conscious and the unconscious, as revealed by dream and psychoanalysis, is undergoing a dialectical change that emerges from our general attitude towards reality.

The mechanical opposition which has been demonstrated to exist between the conscious and the unconscious, in the latter’s favour, no longer appears in the same light once we truly situate ourselves in an antagonistic position. Given that the unconscious continues partially to retain regressive memory traces in an obsessive oneiromancy (Trost, Vision dans le cristal), we stand opposed to dreams, when considered as the most revealing unconscious symptoms, when the manifest content of these dreams preserves reactionary diurnal remnants.

It is clearly not at all a question of another secondary elaboration of censorial intent, but solely of attempting to establish a real relationship between waking and nocturnal life. This seems to us to be impossible whilst we continue to accept each dream in its entirety, even in its regressive mnemonic aspects.

The acceptance of any dream, even one with reactionary content, simply because it is a dream and a symptom of the unconscious, and in consequence the acceptance of certain oneiric scenes (such as those of repetition or social castration) which flatly contradict our conscious ideological positions, would lead us to impose taboos that only a mechanistic position can attempt to nurture.

In acknowledging, in an indescribably concrete way, the identity of the real functioning of thought throughout waking life, madness and dreams, and in seeing in these three modes only the artificial distinctions maintained by the unfolding of thought in dissimilar external conditions, we are trying to reject the degrading influence of oppressive social facades, not by mechanically re-establishing waking life in dream and madness, but also by a critical attitude towards contradictory diurnal remnants, preserved in the memory in the latter states. We can not accept regressive dreams, as we can not accept religious insanity, because our confidence in these great revolutionary instruments prevents us from harbouring, free from challenge, reactionary contents whose mechanical diversions would only take us further away from the bringing together of waking and nocturnal life.

By researching at the same time the functioning of dream within waking life, with all of its explosive consequences, we can approach the total disorder of waking and nocturnal existence, through the negation of their artificial separation, a negation whose first stages have so far only been offered to us by somnambulism, automatism and a few other exceptional states.

We have returned to the problem of knowledge through images (Trost, Le Profil navigable) by establishing a clear distinction between images produced by artistic means and images resulting from rigorously applied scientific procedures, such as the operation of chance or of automatism. We stand opposed to the tendency to reproduce, through symbols, certain valid theoretical contents by the use of pictorial techniques, and believe that the unknown that surrounds us can find a staggering materialisation of the highest order in indecipherable images. In generally accepting until now pictorial reproductive means, surrealist painting will find that the way to its blossoming lies in the absurd use of aplastic, objective and entirely non- artistic procedures.

[…] Without yet having the necessary means to enable their presentation in all their theoretical scope, we hereby confirm our desire to rediscover the scientific (cosmological) correspondences of our attitude, and our realisa- tion that the surrealist position is in agreement with many discoveries which appear distant from its concerns. Subjectively–objectively, we agree with the discoveries which hold a fascinating attraction over us, such as non- Euclidean geometry, the fourth dimension, Brownian motion, quantum physics and space–time, just as we are partially in agreement with non- Pasteurian biology as represented by the Heraclitian position of homeopathy.

We hope to see, in a concretely active way, these scientific researches coming together, though their too specific nature undoubtedly prevents them from being completely correct, and we are trying to find the delirious methods required to effect a similar coming together in the crushing and malignant materialism of black magic. In La Loi de gravitation we have attempted, despairingly, to give an objective character to the desire to encounter the image of the universe by breaking through the unfavourable enclosure of nature.

Still separated from one another though they are, we dream of the secret harmony that must exist between dream and the fourth dimension, between luxury and Brownian motion, between the hypnotic look of love and space–time. In agreement with science in its attractive and crypthaesthetic aspects, surrealism overthrows at the same time science’s mathematical rigidity with a confidence reminiscent of sleepwalkers’ journeys into the heart of their own mystery, at one for an instant with the secret destiny of humanity.

Crossed night and day by an infinite series of ever more provocative, ever more precious and devouring negations, the unequalled instrument of conquest that is dialectical materialism insanely exalts our insatiable hunger for reality, ferociously gnawing at the black and captive flesh of man.

Covered in blood, his palpitating bones now seem to be long hanging crystals.