The Vice of Surrealism

Louis Aragon:

...then I am no longer the bicycle of my senses.

Louis Aragon, Une Vague de Reves

It was a time when, meeting in the evening like hunters after a day in the field, we made the day's acconunting, the list of beasts we had invented, of fantastic plants, of images bagged.

Louis Aragon

The vice called surrealism is the unsystematic and passionate use of the narcotic image, or rather the uncontrolled provocation of it for its own sake and for whatever unforeseen upheavals and metamorphoses it renders visible; for every image, whenever it strikes, forces you to revise the entire universe.

Louis Aragon, Les Paysan du Paris

We shall prevail! To begin with, we shall destroy the civilization you set such store by, and in which you are petrified like fossils in schist. The western world is condemned to death. We are the defeatists....Laugh if you like, but we are the ones who will always offer our hand to the enemy.

Aragon, as quoted in Russell, Max Ernst: His Life and Work

Have You Ever Slapped a Corpse?

Louis Aragon


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