Romantic Formalism in Surrealist Poetics

Reworlding the Subject of Modernity

บทคัดย่อ

The surrealisms of Georges Bataille and André Breton have long been read as contestatory and more recently as exhibiting either a sublimatory or a desublimatory aesthetic respecitvely. In reexamining their relationship to “the prehensile tail of romanticism” I attempt to locate their proximal relationship to the first wave of German Romanticism. In so doing. I delineate the philosophical tensions that are shared by both the projects of the Frühromantiker and the surrealists alike, and in light of this go on to locate Breton’s philosophical relationship to the original romantic movement, illustrating their aesthetic relationship to a Kantian “de-worlded subjectivity” to which both the German Romantics and the Idealists originally responded. I conclude that whereas the paradigmatic nature of Bretonian surrealism retains the original romantic ironist position, Bataille’s eroticism and base materialism phenomenologically reinstalls the putative human subject back into the corporeal world through the play of material restriction and expenditure. In so doing, Bataille instantiates a materialistic response to the original position of romantic irony, postulated by Friedrich Schlegel in his essay “On Incomprehensibility.”