Obscure Objects of Desire - Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics by Johanna Malt, Hardcover, 9780199253425 | Buy online at The Nile
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Obscure Objects of Desire - Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics

Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics

Author: Johanna Malt  

This book offers a critical approach to the political claims of the surrealist movement, asking whether it is possible to theorize a connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism, and the form that surrealist art and writing took.

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Summary

This book offers a critical approach to the political claims of the surrealist movement, asking whether it is possible to theorize a connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism, and the form that surrealist art and writing took.

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Description

In a speech given in Prague in 1935, André Breton asked, 'Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?'. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such an art, Breton always struggled to make a theoretical connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism and the form that surrealist art and literature took. Obscure Objects of Desire explores ways in which such aconnection might be drawn, addressing the possibility of surrealist works as political in themselves and drawing on ways in which they have been considered as such by Marxists such as Benjamin and Adorno and by recentcultural critics. Encompassing Breton's and Aragon's textual accounts of the object, as well as paintings and the various kinds of objet surréaliste produced from the end of the 1920s, Malt mobilises the concept of the fetish in order to consider such works as meeting points of surrealism's psychoanalytic and revolutionary preoccupations.Reading surrealist works of art and literature as political is by no means the same thing as knowing the surrealistmovement to have been a politically motivated one. The revolutionary character of the surrealist work itself, in isolation from the polemical positions taken up by Breton and others on its behalf, is not always evident;indeed, the works themselves often seem to express a rather different set of concerns. As well as offering a new perspective on familiar works such as the paintings of Salvador Dalí, and relatively neglected ones like Breton's poèmes-objets, this book recuperates the gap between theory and practice as a productive space in which it is possible to recontextualize surrealist practice as an engagement with political questions on its own terms.

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Critic Reviews

“'Malt's Obscure Objects of Desire offers a valuable synthesis of literaryand art-historical analytical approaches to the study of surrealism, as well asa complex picture of the idealogical structures the surrealists both confrontedand fetishized.'Modernism/Modernity”

`Malt's Obscure Objects of Desire offers a valuable synthesis of literary and art-historical analytical approaches to the study of surrealism, as well as a complex picture of the idealogical structures the surrealists both confronted and fetishized.'Modernism/Modernity

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About the Author

Johanna Malt is at Lecturer in the Department of French, Kings College, University of London.

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More on this Book

In a speech given in Prague in 1935, André Breton asked, 'Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?'. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such an art, Breton always struggled to make a theoretical connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism and the form that surrealist art and literature took. Obscure Objects of Desire explores ways in which such a connection might be drawn, addressing the possibility of surrealist works as political in themselves and drawing on ways in which they have been considered as such by Marxists such as Benjamin and Adorno and by recent cultural critics. Encompassing Breton's and Aragon's textual accounts of the object, as well as paintings and the various kinds of objet surréaliste produced from the end of the 1920s, Malt mobilises the concept of the fetish in order to consider such works as meeting points of surrealism's psychoanalytic and revolutionary preoccupations. Reading surrealist works of art and literature as political is by no means the same thing as knowing the surrealist movement to have been a politically motivated one. The revolutionary character of the surrealist work itself, in isolation from the polemical positions taken up by Breton and others on its behalf, is not always evident; indeed, the works themselves often seem to express a rather different set of concerns. As well as offering a new perspective on familiar works such as the paintings of Salvador Dalí, and relatively neglected ones like Breton's poèmes-objets, this book recuperates the gap between theory and practice as a productive space in which it is possible to recontextualize surrealist practice as an engagement with political questions on its own terms.

Read more

Product Details

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Published
22nd January 2004
Pages
248
ISBN
9780199253425

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