War on latency: on some relations between surrealism and terror

More than any other gestures of modernity, surrealism focuses on the explication of culture, making creative processes explicit. Illustrates this by describing Salvador Dali's performance of his "paranoiac critical method" at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London. In...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Radical philosophy 2006-05 (137), p.14-19
Main Author: Sloterdijk, Peter
Format: Article
Language:English
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:More than any other gestures of modernity, surrealism focuses on the explication of culture, making creative processes explicit. Illustrates this by describing Salvador Dali's performance of his "paranoiac critical method" at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London. In the unsuccessful attempt to present the subconscious as a navigable zone, the fear of annihilation came to the fore, and the aesthetic explication process was activated to dispel this. The surrealists' enthusiasm for psychoanalysis made them confuse the Freudian definition of the subconscious, based on the concept of latency, with Romantic metaphysics. Refers to the work of Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti and Herman Broch, as well as Dali's declaration of the right to be mad.
ISSN:0300-211X