Knowledge and surrealism

When André Breton died in 1966, Michel Foucault remarked of the surrealist group’s late leader that ‘there is an image that needs to be obliterated, I think – that of Breton as a poet of unreason. A different one should be placed, not over against it, but on top of it, that of Breton as a writer of knowledge.’ This project accepts Foucault’s invitation to reinscribe surrealism in the history of knowledge. Just as surrealism, in both its orthodox and dissident manifestations, transgressed distinctions between theory and practice, art and science, so Knowledge and Surrealism tracks texts and images across a diverse epistemic field, from archaeology to geology, historiography to ethnography, sex science to occult science. By articulating these relations, the project repositions surrealism in certain genealogies of radical thought.