Variations on the real world

William Earle

pp. 410-422

in: David Carr, Edward Casey (eds), Explorations in phenomenology, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1973

Abstract

André Breton and Phillipe Soupault used to spend afternoons popping in and out of movie houses in Paris, seeing a bit of this film, a bit of that, refusing to observe the names of the films, or remember their plots. Max Ernst defined his surrealist art as "the fortuitous encounter upon a non-suitable plane of two distant realities"; and suggests that in this way "we have already broken loose from the law of identity." Breton, again, in the Second Manifesto announces: "Everything tends to make us believe there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low cease to be perceived as contradictions."