Man’s Dark Interior: Surrealism, Viscera and The Anatomical Imaginary

Abstract

Born of the sociocultural effervescence that swept through Europe in the years following the First World War, Surrealism represented a profound disillusionment towards the established intellectual order that it held responsible for the dehumanising and violent depths to which civilisation had so recently sunk. Decrying the inadequacy of postwar philosophies and politics to deal with the new, brutalised world of the interwar period, the Surrealists loudly championed a revolution of perception by replacing the certainties of prewar thought with the unpredictable discontinuities of non-Euclidean geometry, the base materialism of Georges Bataille and, most especially, the dark visions of the human psyche that emerged through Freudian psychoanalysis.

Afterword: Mind, Imagination, Affect

“…8 One important analytic and aesthetic problematic that emerges in the course of reading the essays in this section -and one that deserves signifi cant future consideration by medical humanities scholars -is how to understand the relationship between Salisbury's call to stay with the matter of language, and Juler's claim for the 'non-or pre-verbal language of graphic alterity', which he fi nds in Artaud, and which, on Juler's account, represents 'that which is linguistically inexpressible: the haptic, the material, the optical and, above all, the visceral'. 9 The matter of language -and that which lies inside, beyond and before it -has been an enduring concern in the humanities, not least since structuralism and its many theoretical aftermaths. It has been, though, in many respects under-investigated in much medical humanities scholarship.…”