Knights of Hermopolis

GÉRARD DE NERVAL            THE   ILLUMINATES                                           OR                 THE PRECURSORS OF SOCIALISM                                             CAGLIOSTRO      (18th C.)          I.                                                                REVOLUTIONARY MYSTICISM  When    Catholicism triumphed decisively over paganism throughout Europe, and then built the feudal structure which survived until the fifteenth century—that is to say during the space of a...

Interview with Radovan Ivsic Do you not think that it is the greatest novelty of surrealism to have constantly ensured that the living waters of the imagination do not get lost in the rut of forms? Let us say once and for all: there is no surrealist theatre. At most we can speak of surrealism and theatre. Just as Breton took great care to speak of surrealism and painting, never surrealist painting. Surrealism  deserves credit for having asserted and proven that poetry is primarily a way of life...This is why the current and innumerable attempts to reduce surrealism to a pictorial or literary style seem misleading and dangerous. Too many people today are interested in doing away with meaning and pretending that it is not attached to form. This is the most clever way to work towards erasing the memory of the world. It is the most clever way to prepare minds to become more and more blank until it is easy to print anything upon them. this opens the door to all forms of totalitarianism....

  Notes on Surrealism and ‘Pataphysics  David Nadeau Surrealism is not at all a literary or artistic movement and is still very much alive! Networks have never ceased to form since the Internationalization of the surrealist movement in the late 1920’s. I am tempted to see a parallel with the conscious diffusion of ‘Pataphysics some twenty years ago…The distinction between historical surrealism and “current” surrealism does not seem to be straightforward at all. Where does one begin and where does the other end? From the death of André Breton until today groups have continued to exist, others have been formed and/or dissolved. There is a continuum from the origins until now. Now, we may regret that Parisian surrealism was not more open in the past (elsewhere, it was completely different), especially during the Grand Jeu crisis and the exclusion of the friends of Sarane Alexandrian and Roberto Matta (around 1947). Current surrealism maintains benevolent relations with Pataphysic...

  Objective Chance or the Gold of Time Marie-Dominique Massoni               Mayakovsky dreamed that the revolution would break down the barrier of time. Several times demonstrators have attacked public clocks, emblems of their salaried exploitation, certainly, but not only of that. One morning in the spring of 1980, the man who designed and produced the poster « What kind of hope do you put in life? » and that I met two days earlier read some poems that I wrote in the time preceding our meeting. We are in Avignon seated at a cafe terrace. In the evening, as we are about to separate, him going south, me going north, we suddenly find that all the station clocks seemed to have stopped at 8 pm. A stopwatch, stored in my travel bag, gives us the time, we have to run to my train which is the first to leave. When the train starts moving, the clock hands go back into motion. Not very sensitive to poetic writing, he had however noted, in the morning, ...