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ECOS DA BATALLA COTIÁ.(DECLARACIÓNS POLÍTICAS SURREALISTAS)

By XESÚS GONZÁLEZ GÓMEZ

About this book

Hundreds, or rather thousands if we take into account where there was a surrealistic movement, were the collective declarations of Surrealism. These declarations involved all realms of daily, political and cultural life, fashion and habits.

Ecos da batalla cotiá. Declaracións políticas surrealistas focuses only on the Paris Group of the Surrealist movement in the years 1924 to 1968. The book brings together thirty-five specifically political interventions of Surrealism, and at the same time there is a historical and even literary contextualisation of each declaration.

This volume is both the history of the day-to-day avatars of political life within the Paris group as well as the political history of the Surrealist Revolution. This was a poetic, imaginative and effective revolution against bourgeois and capitalist society that ends up facing another revolution of the prosaic, political and the incontrollable.

Book fragment

The great blackmail of the 20th century against free intellectuals by parties and the Communist movements – maybe we should speak about proletarian movements as the blackmail -- did not only affect the Communists, but also the Anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyists, and other yet other groups. The message was clear: either commitment or inefficacy. Commitment was theorised after 1945 with far more intellectual weight by Jean-Paul Sartre than by the conferences of Soviet writers. We know what conclusion Sartre reached with this commitment: total political inefficacy and oblivion and abandonment of his literary work, which is what actually made him famous. This is an instance of blackmail the Surrealists, in the collective declaration called Inaugural Rupture, reject as openly as André Breton had already stated in 1925 in Legitimate Defence. Breton responded to the work of Pierre Naville, first editor of the La Révolution surréaliste, founder of the first Trostkyist party in France and author of a large number of books on different topics and problems related to Marxism (…), whose surreal work is gathered in a highly recommended book Le temps du surrél. L´esperance mathématique. Surrealism rebelled against any kind of political blackmail.