Annie Le Brun: Darkness and Method
FRANÇOIS-RENÉ SIMON
Surrealism. This word, especially in its adjective form—and this is no accident—has become such a band-aid for peddlers of clichés of all kinds that one would die of exhaustion trying to count them all, to denounce them. It is understandable that some of those who were involved have distanced themselves. And since the silent wave of identity politics has not spared these circles where one is supposed to prefer adventure to convention, it is also understandable that Annie Le Brun has set aside this glass mask — the glass that Breton dreamed of using to build his house.
Distance, is a key word for her, she positions herself at a distance from the world to observe the mechanics of how it works and “the misery of our times” 1. It is also the title of one of her publications and of a column that she wrote in “La Quinzane littéraire”. But distance does not mean remoteness.
Annie Le Brun entered surrealism at the beginning of the 1960s. Yes, at the time, one entered Surrealism because it already existed. It wasn’t a matter of inventing it, but of reinventing it. This “Chore of fewer days”2 was still a burden. Reinventing surrealism, certainly, but how? The case has not been closed, yet not without consequences: you can leave surrealism but it never leaves you. No doubt, because it plunges, eyes wide open, into the heart of humanity to its “unbreakable core of night” while exalting the most luminous forms and forces of life: love, poetry and freedom.
It is the preservation of these poles —their reciprocal animation — that gives surrealism its formidable emotional power, even to the point of anguish, that is so immediately perceptible in visual works. Think of Chirico, Tanguy, and Magritte, but also of Toyen, Camacho, and Jean Benoît to whom Annie Le Brun was so close. One of his very first contributions to surrealism was to explore—with a smile on his crimson lips and a sundew in his buttonhole—that black humour which Breton sensed, on the eve of the mid-twentieth century, required "Increasing the dose of pure black." This is how she described it in July 1966 to the attendees of the Cerisy ten-day conference on Surrealism: “The idea of evil, of all the forces that oppose desire, the sense of limits —like that of death, forever germinating — are bullets that black humour receives full in the heart, and hastens to contemplate as if they were the pit of a red fruit it has just discovered.” 3
Annie Le Brun occupies a unique place in the intellectual landscape of our time: coming from surrealism, she is the only one to know a certain notoriety today, which is corroborated by the impressive number of her publications (with both small and major publishers). And since there is no good reason for her to keep quiet, she does not shy away from this recognition. On the contrary, she takes full advantage of it in order to increase her contributions, always with a relevance and inspiration we thought had disappeared with André Breton. I know someone who The Reality Overload saved from suicide.
Hence, thanks to Annie Le Brun, the surrealist voice continues to be heard above the din. Books, prefaces, articles, interviews, lectures, active participation in major exhibitions: one might think she’s doing too much in a world where speech — multiplied and boundless — flows through minds like sand slipping through ones fingers. But perhaps she is not doing enough: “There are some books one would prefer not to write” 4. And we cannot thank her enough for the scope of her undertaking and her ability to handle it: she often spares us from having to read tedious books and encourages us to discover those that we will only read “by breaking and entering into who we believe ourselves to be” 5.
The paradox of Annie Le Brun is the poetry of her discursive thought, which scrutinizes its subjects with intellectual tools that are in no way inferior to those of the most celebrated academics, yet in the name of a sensibility they so masterfully lack. She herself never ceases to assert this, applying almost to to the letter André Breton’s precept: “Love first, there will always be time afterward to examine what you love and seek to fully understand it” 6. She could also take up this line from a letter by Sade that she often quotes: “You know that no-one analyzes things like I do”.
For whenever Annie Le Brun examines something, it is not to obscure it with her own shadow but to go all the way to the shadow from which that thing emerged, that “shadow we never want to see”.7 From this challenge to mental laziness have emerged three major works, whose successive reissues prove not only their validity but also their “inactualité” *: Les Chateaux de la Subversion (1982), Sudain un bloc d’abime, Sade (1986) ** and Vingt mille lieux sous les mots, Raymond Roussel (1984), which will soon after be joined by the recent and decisive Si rien avait une forme, ce cerait cela (2010). With what relentlessness, and what passion for understanding that which seizes us at the deepest level —rejection of it being just another sign —has she not questioned what usually eludes us! With a method that seems to be the key to all her books: a poet “descending to the bottom of the chasm” and never thinking that the bottom has been reached.
* In this case a seemingly “out of date” quality or timelessness indifferent to what is “current”
(translator’s note)
** Sade: A Sudden Abyss, 1991, City Lights
Some people think themselves clever for reproaching Annie Le Brun for her tendency towards repetition. It is a little like reproaching a face for only having one nose. Since the iron of conviction is all the more effective for being struck while it’s hot, it will mark the skin with a burn that is always recognizable. This is how Annie Le Brun constantly reminds us of her fundamental requirement “No idea without a body nor body without an idea”. While the first part of her argument finds widespread support today, the second part is much harder to buy. Another reiteration, is that of the word “Sensible”* , in both its adjectival and noun forms. It was in fact, because of the absence of this reference that Annie Le Brun very quickly chose to turn away from what was considered ultra-revolutionary at the beginning of the 60s: le sensible was trampled underfoot.
“The eye exists in a savage state”. This celebrated opening line from Surrealism and Painting dates back to 1925. Has it ever found a better reflection than this observation in double negative — and in shared revolt — formulated by Annie Le Brun in 1989: “ That the eye no longer exists in a savage state — as some would try to persuade us — Jean Benoît will never accept. Each of his gestures is in itself an affirmation of the violence of the gaze, which succeeds in wrenching from the transparencies of perspective the luxuriance of meaning that alone can give life to forms.” 8
Annie Le Brun is a truly charming person. She is also one of the most fierce. For her, one does not go without the other, and that is undoubtedly why she won’t be fooled. Rare are those who, having earned it, emerge from her books without the imprint of her feline claws (retractable). Some deserve no more than an (indelible) scratch, such as Yves Bonnefoy, who betrays poetry to glorify “what is elementary in life”. 9 Others have nothing but tattered thoughts to offer, I’ll name a few at random: Bernard-Henri Lévy, Marguerite Duras, or number one in the literary spectacle, Philipe Sollers. More seriously Maurice Blanchot and his hatred of the poetic image, Michel Foucault and the followers of “French Theory”, or some peddler of surrealism labelling a volume of the complete works of Benjamin Péret with the name of Robert Sabatier, a forgettable man of letters. With her knack for pointing out the rip in the seat of one’s pants, Annie Le Brun reminds us that if “words make love”, she will not let them be unmade with impunity.
* In English “le sensible” would most closely refer to that which is perceptible to the senses.
(translators note)
Enough chatter! Annie Le Brun reveres the “way of thinking” dear to the Marquis De Sade
too much not to avoid forging those crutch-concepts of which the “deconstructionists” and “pragmatists” are such adepts, in order to turn “meaning” into a null and void object. 10 But she has too much passion for understanding not to put forward a few guiding principles that illuminate the world in which we are condemned to live : “poetic enormity”, which “excessive rationality” will never overcome, for example, or “the terrorism of femellitude” *, which she counters with “criminal darkness” driven by “the golden wheel of love”.
“Why is Juliette a woman?” To this question posed by psychoanalyst Jean Allouch, Annie Le Brun has replied 11, but we might in turn ask ourselves: why is Annie Le Brun a woman? She too is “of a particular kind”, not a surrealist woman but a surrealist pure and simple, although she
claims to turn away "from anything that lays claim to it, directly or
indirectly, since both sides take an interest in it from an aesthetic or
cultural point of view, forgetting the essential", 12 — in other words, the fundamental revolt against the detestable conditions in which we are forced to live, but also the awareness of how we came to terms with “the unbearable human condition” 13. I will not go so far as to resume the stultifying little game of So-and so is a surrealist in…Annie Le Brun makes us see things we had not yet seen, particularly the way we practice the art of hiding them from ourselves.
As she remarked during a recent Jorge Camacho exhibition, Annie Le Brun, much like the artist himself — has chosen “not to flee the world, but rather to go out and encounter everything that stirs within it.” This leads her to examine, with a lucidity that transcends the political, those ordinary catastrophe’s which, though lacking the irreversible scale of Auschwitz or Hiroshima, nonetheless trace the barbed wire of our times. Here the derisory is as significant as the cataclysmic: the T-shirt bearing Rimbaud’s image, the “Metropolitan” poetry contest, and the omnipotence of “social media" eradicate our neurons just as effectively as pesticides eliminate birds and insects with varying degrees of speed, only to replace them with these “vile substitutes that true, beautiful nature has no use for.” 14
For Annie Le Brun, surrealism is the affirmation “by every possible means, artistic or otherwise, of poetry as the highest degree of consciousness — in other words of making sensory evaluation the sole intellectual and moral criterion 15. We are obliged to note that the cultural sphere remains the most obvious territory where a little of the fire that gave birth to surrealism still manifests. All the more reason for Annie le Brun to hunt elsewhere, ”elsewhere and in another way.” 16
* A neologism used by French feminists to describe the collective experience of women, modelled after the term Négritude.
(Translators note)
The battle is unequal, the outcome predictable, but through her books and public stances, Annie Le Brun refuses to despair. "As one who identifies the least obvious manipulations—often flattering ones—by which man continues to subjugate man with increasingly considerable results, she remains convinced that "if servitude is contagious, freedom is even more so.” 17
While the fighter is only one means among others of coming to terms with the world as it is (or as it is going), Annie Le Brun practices the love of art not for what it reveals, but for what it allows us to glimpse. Art, without limitation of periods or form, since it is the form that allows one to reach the heart of the black, as in the famous painting by Paolo Uccello titled The Hunt.
For Annie Le Brun black is not a colour, still less a concept. Perhaps a notion. Black buries all definition, yet it is palpable: like the poetic image it is apprehended physically. At an equal (and infinite) distance from the positive as well as the negative, it is this energy, producer of myths always waiting to be deciphered, and of forms surging forth unexpectedly: the Gothic novel (and Sade) in the midst of the Age of Enlightenment, for example. It is perhaps this god of atheism auguring the creation of a word so well heard by Alfred Jarry: "Let there be darkness!". And why not "that dark night we call love (Victor Hugo), echoed by the astonishing "deep night of knowledge" (André Breton)?
The books of Annie Le Brun are alive with illustrations, obeying a kind of ritual of presentation: the image and its caption on the recto, its title and origin on the verso, within the white space of the page. It is always a matter of broadening the horizon, as evidenced by her taste for certain photographic works (recently, the dark foldings of Jean-Michel Fauquet) or her encounter with the director and actor Benjamin Lazar, who knows how to restore the fiery power of both Baroque texts and music as well as the theatre of Copi. For it is undoubtedly from having read Sade that Annie Le Brun is convinced —like the man of her life, Radovan Ivsic —that nothing compares to the theatre as the possible site for the alchemical union of body and idea. 18 It is understood that, in a synthesis of the image and the body, Annie Le Brun did not content herself with merely prefacing or presenting exhibitions—as she did most recently with L’Ange du Bizarre at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris—but also chose to stage them herself (Petits et grands théâtres du Marquis de Sade in 1989, Les arcs-en-ciel du noir at the Maison de Victor Hugo, and Cibles at the Musée de la Chasse in 2012)."*
"The question of poetry is crucial for all surrealists. If she were to worry about it, Annie Le Brun would still be astonished to find any trace of it in the avalanche of published poems (which can only lead to the marketplace). Her first participation in surrealism took the form of two poems where she was already cultivating within herself—and long before identifying it—the 'indestructible emergence of a murderous passion:
"It is because I kill
I kill for nothing, I kill for a laugh
When the key turns badly in the loosened lock of my shattered
shoulders"**
Forty years later appeared Ombre pour ombre—a collection of her formally poetic texts that opens with her first book, Sur-le-champ, a lesson in provocation in twelve rings... It closes with a series inspired by the photographs of Štyrský, where “The rainbows of darkness” shine resplendent. As if the shadow of Victor Hugo had not yet finished expanding...
* To which we could add the exhibition Radovan Ivsic et la forêt insoumise which she curated in 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb
(Translators note).
** "C'est qu je tue
Je tue pour rien, je tue pour rire
Quande la clé tourne mal dans la serrure déliée de mes épaules
fracassées"
—English translation, Erik Volet, 2026
(Previously appeared in Ce qui Sera, Almanac of the International Surrealist Movement, Brumes Blondes, 2014)
NOTES
1 The Reality Overload, Inner Traditions, 2008
2 André Breton, “ Le Verbe être”, in Le Revolver à cheveux blancs.
3. “… in the composition of black humour today, compared to ten years ago, it is necessary to increase the dose of pure black”, André Breton, Anthology of Black Humour, City Lights, 1997
4 Ibid., from The Reality Overload : the full quote is “There are books one would prefer not to write. But the misery of these times is such that I feel compelled to break the silence”.
5 “ A ce prix du désastre”, preface for the Slovak translation of Nadja, reprinted in De l’Eperdu.
6 “Firsthand” reprinted in Cavalier Perspective, André Breton, City Lights, 2025
7 “Comme c’est petit un éléphant”, postface to The Supermale, by Alfred Jarry.
8 “Un délicat déchaîne” in Jean Benoît, 1990.
9 In the Sept. 11, 1987 issue of Le Nouvel Observateur, quoted in Appel d’Air.
10 Ibid., The Reality Overload
11 In a speech delivered on the occasion of Jaques Lacan’s centennial and reprinted in On n’enchains pas les volcans.
12 “Surrealismé et subversion poétique”, included in De l’inanité de la littérature.
13 André Breton
14 Antonin Artaud
15 “Surrealismé et subversion poétique”, op.cit.
16 “Ailleurs et autrement”, title of one of her last collections of essays and lectures.
17 “ Du trop de Théorie”, reprinted in Ailleurs et autrement.
18 Quoted in, Les arcs-en-ciel du noir.
19 L’Oeuf dans l’eau” in La Brèche #7, December, 1964
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