| I read Bretonian Surrealism in terms of its resistance to psychoanalysis as well as of its acceptance of it. I address its ambivalent relation to the notion of the uncanny, embraced by the Surrealists for its disruptive potential regarding identity and aesthetics but also resisted because of its connection to such psychic mechanisms as the compulsion to repeat and the death drive. In this ambivalence I locate the productive problem of Surrealism as a movement which comes to see in these same things the potential for regression, defusion and death.;This argument is sketched in Chapter One, as is the relationship between Surrealism and psychoanalysis. Chapter Two considers the Surrealist notions of the marvelous, convulsive beauty and objective chance as so many uncanny confusions between opposed states. The two primary forms of objective chance, the unique encounter and the found object, are precisely uncanny to the degree that they recall or repeat past traumas. Chapter Three suggests a reading of the Surrealist image as a juxtaposition of different psychic signifiers.;Chapter Four develops in a social register the uncanny confusion between animate and inanimate states discussed in a psychic register in Chapter Two. Chapter Five develops in collective terms the uncanny return of past states discussed in subjective terms in Chapter Three. Here I argue that Surrealism works through historical as well as psychic repression, and that it does so through a recovery of outmoded objects and images.;In Chapter Six I propose that Surrealism be understood in terms of an uncanny return of two psychic states above all: a fantasy of maternal plenitude, of an auratic, pre-Oedipal space-time before any loss or division; a fantasy of paternal punishment, of an anxious, Oedipal space-time where "man, ill-prepared, is taken by a sudden fear in the forest of symbols" not only are the Surrealists subject to the uncanny return of such repressed material, but they also seek to exploit it for transformative purposes and to recoup it for therapeutic ends--and in so doing that they develop innovative notions of aesthetic practice, cultural politics and critical history. |
