Haunting Transcendence: The Strategy of Ghosts in Bataille and Breton

Johnson, Kendall

doi:10.2307/441924

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In 'Haunting Transcendence: The Strategy of Ghosts in Bataille and Breton', 53 Kendall Johnson has shown how Breton's ghostlike nature is akin to Marx's, not in the Communist Manifesto, but in Capital, where the ghost circulates in a manner akin to money. While, for Marx, the 'ghost functions to recognize the social contextuality of value, Breton rationalizes the economic exchange into a spiritual, noneconomic bondy.'…”

Section: Nadja or The Insanementioning

confidence: 99%

Latent Ghosts and the Manifesto: Baya, Breton and reading for the future

Khanna¹,

Singer²

2003

Art History

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Framing this article is an interest in post-colonial theory's impact on art history, and the ethical demands it has placed on that history. While the ostensible subject discussed here is the Surrealist movement, the article also probes how, in a philosophical sense, the European metropolitan episteme was written out of the relationship to the colonies, particularly how conceptions of alterityin abstract as well as in political categorizations of the foreign and the female (plate 4.1) -were theorized coterminous with, but in silence about, coloniality.In the context of the history of the Surrealist movement, Breton and the Surrealists famously protested the colonial expositions in France, and indeed, continued their protest outside the realm of aesthetics to denounce the war in Morocco, and to demand the right to insubordination by French soldiers in the Algerian war of independence. This famous tract came to be called the 'Manifeste des 121' because of the one hundred and twenty-one French intellectuals who signed it. In spite of this manifest anti-colonial protest, all too often the context of colonialism and decolonization is left out of narratives around the origins of the history of Surrealism, even in accounts that foreground its international impact and appeal, its relation to the poetry of negritude, or its complex association with internationalist Marxism and the French communist party. 1 Colonialism seems to haunt the literature on Surrealism.Such silence around the intellectual pressure imposed by coloniality has more recently affected many theoretical movements associated with Continental philosophy generally, and French theoretical movements particularly. A significant proportion of these theories could be more usefully understood as franco-maghrebi theories, and not just in a biographical, socio-historical, or foundationalist sense, but philosophically to comprehend the notion of alterity and its relationship with the foreign, gender and the historicity of philosophical and historical discourse. 2 This seems all the more important to analyse when so many are facing the horror of neo-colonial politics in the form of violent war: for example, the recent war in Algeria, and particularly how women have been affected by this 'virile war'. 3 The histories and complicities of intellectual movements, often

show abstract

Section: Nadja or The Insanementioning

confidence: 99%