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The Futures of Surrealism: Hegelianism, Romanticism, and the Avant-Garde1

David Cunningham
In the course of urging upon us a "re-reading of the history of the modernism of the 1920s," Colin MacCabe counterposes, in a recent work, the writings of Georges Bataille and those of a man he calls that "loathsome Leninist Breton" (MacCabe, 82). The comment is an aside-it appears in brackets and in a book devoted to the late 1960s cult film Performance-but is perhaps all the more significant for that. For it would seem to reflect, all-too-fashionably, an extreme version of a pervasive contemporary doxa concerning surrealism and the relationship between these two figures. It is not my intention to trace the genealogy of such a it would probably go, in part, via the selective view-though "translations" of French theory (and of the Tel Quel group in particular) into the terms of Anglo-American post-structuralism2 -but, clearly, a pivotal moment in the construction of this opposition is represented by the writings of those associated with the American art journal October.In the 1997 Formless:A User's Guide,for example, co-authored by two of the journal's editors, Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, the former feels able to assert that "there is no connection whatever between Bataille's sense of the Sacred [as what is "wholly other"] and Breton's contemporaneous reappropriation of the marvellous" (53, my emphasis). Now, it would not be hard to show that this hardly corresponds to Bataille's own conception. Indeed, Michael Richardson has demonstrated this very well in the detailed introduction to his superb collection of Bataille's writings on surrealism, and one could easily cite supporting statements, such as that in the 1946 essay "On the Subject of Slumbers": "I would now like to affirm [surrealism] from within as the demand to which I have submitted and as the dissatisfaction I exemplify" (Bataille 1994: 49). My intention in noting this is not, however, to elide the important differences between Breton and Bataille's positions. Rather, the initial aim of this paper is to ask, first, what might be revealed by the recent tendency straightforwardly to opposethe likes of Breton and Bataille, and second, to question some of the "philosophical" conceptions that
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would seem to underlie such an opposition-a questioning that may have certainmore general implicationsfor contemporary"theoretical" accounts of modernism and the avant-garde. A User'sGuide One termmissing fromFormless: (its sole mentionis in rathernegative terms)but far more centralto the earlierwork of Krauss in particular, is that of "postmodernism." Although rarelymade explicit as such, Bataille (like Duchamp and a few others) clearly has a pivotal role within Krauss'swork of the early 1980s, as representinga kind of proto-postmodernismthat points forward to-and in part explainscontemporary practice. In this sense, we are encouraged to read the "philosophical"divide between Bataille and Breton as that which also divides postmodernism from modernism and the avant-garde,despite the historical complication this evidently involves. The nature of this division is made very clear by Krauss,in her essay "TheOriginalityof the Avant-Garde":
...postmodernism establishes a schism between itself and the conceptualdomain of the avant-garde, looking back at it from across a gulf thatin turnestablishesa historicaldivide. Thehistoricalperiod that the avant-gardeshared with modernismis over. This seems an obvious fact. (170)

Krauss's rhetorical assertion of obviousness indicates, as always, the anxious force of a desire for the clarity of a limit that this very rhetoric signals as fragile. Moreover,it is this anxiety that is then transferredto the relationbetween Bretonand Batailleon Krauss'sreading. While this is not the place to re-open the rathermoribund debates surrounding the concept of postmodernism, suffice it to say that if this concept has come to seem increasingly implausible, no doubt (as I am not the first to note) it has to do with the restrictions implicit in its conception of modernism, and its tendency to reduce it to the limited terms of something like a generically-definedperiod style, as a means of As such, establishingits own dubious claims to historical"uniqueness." if there is a need to rethink"thehistory of modernism"and of the "avantgarde," this involves a rathermore radical reassessment than, I think, MacCabehas in mind. Nonetheless, it is worth paying some attentionto his precise descriptionof Bretonas a "loathsomeLeninist,"and takingit more seriously than I suspect MacCabedoes himself. For it raises the he is a question of whether Bretonis "loathsome"for MacCabe,because if and what he means term. I so, "Leninist," by this imagine MacCabeis perhaps thinking primarily of Breton's position within the surrealist group, and of what is often seen as his uniquely "dictatorial" persona. But the term "Leninist" also be to have another might thought important implication if we recall its historical connection to the discourse of an
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avant-garde.Indeed, it is this French term, taken originally from a military vocabulary, that Lenin himself adopts in his 1902 What is to be Done?, as a means of defining the role of the Communist Party as vanguard of the working class (Lenin, 1969). As Susan Buck-Morss has recently noted, the terms "avant-garde" and "vanguard" -undifferentiated in Lenin's own writings -originated in primarily spatial concepts. The condition, however, of their familiar metaphorical functioning in political, cultural and artistic discourse from the mid-nineteenth century, was their transcription "onto the dimension of historical time" (Buck-Morss, 61; Cunningham 2001: 169-182). This is to say that before any apparent locatability of something called the avantgarde within the disputed limits of a socio-historical or art-historical periodization, the concept of an avant-garde inscribes a particular mode of temporalizing history in its own right. Thus, to define Breton as a "Leninist," ("loathsome" or otherwise), could well be read as ascribing to his thought a particular "politics of time" (in Peter Osborne's phrase), and thus a particular way of articulating the general (and essentially abstract) temporal modality of an avant-garde. It is in these terms that I want to explore the relation between the time of the avant-garde and the time of surrealism. However, to reemphasize the above, this is emphatically not referring to "the avantgarde" as a conventionally received art-historical category, but rather as a general concept through which particular movements or works articulate themselves or come to be articulated in a way that is inseparable from more general questions concerning the nature of historical time (including the time of art or literary history). As such, reconsidering the relation of surrealism to modernism or the avant-garde should not involve simply another re-jigging of curatorial categorizations derived (usually with considerable simplification) from the likes of Clement Greenberg or Peter Biirger, but should invite us to reconsider the nature of the very concepts of modernism and the avant-garde. As Blanchot writes, in an essay to which I will return in more detail in a moment: "[T]he history of surrealism is only of scholarly interest, particularly if the conception of history is not modified by its subject" (1993:407). What, then, might such a modification entail, and what might it reveal about the forms and practices of surrealism, and of the avantgarde, in general?3 As famously cited by Walter Benjamin, in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Breton states: "The work of art is valuable only insofar as it is vibrated by the reflexes of the future" (qtd. in Benjamin, 242). This strikes me as exemplary, in its abstract temporal
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form, of what might be reasonably termed an avant-gardeconception of artistic "value," emerging from the mid-nineteenth-century intensification of modernity as a form of historical consciousness, with the "re-orientation to the future" that this entails (Berman, 135). Considering such a conception in its most fundamental and expansive sense then depends upon the way in which one understands the relation of the present-where the art work comes forth for judgement-to the future, whose reflexes must, for Breton, vibrate therein if the work is to be judged valuable. Nonetheless, if the avant-garde is to be thought in these terms, then far from presenting us with a univocal "category" or "project"-amenable to a fixed empirical or typological determinationthis embraces a whole range of equivocal and contested understandings of how such an affirmation of the future is itself to be conceived and manifested in specific cultural forms and practices. Thus it is in terms of the resulting politics of conflicting temporalities that surrealism's (and Breton and Bataille's) particular place in the history of modernism and the avant-garde might be reconsidered, in such a way as to modify and enrich our conception of this history. There are a number of related issues that I cannot consider here, such as the complex details of surrealism's tortured relationship to Marxism and to Leninism itself. Instead, I want to approach this from a slight angle, following up on Jean-Michel Rabate's useful suggestion that "a history of French Hegelianism" (largely lost in contemporary accounts) may shed "more light on the break-ups, splits, dissociations, and tensions between various modernist factions" than any received typological categorizations of modernism or the avant-garde (2002a: 17). What I will seek to add to Rabate's claim-through all-too-brief engagements with Benjamin and Blanchot's readings of surrealism-is the even more submerged role that the legacy of German Romanticism may play in this, since it constitutes the pre-history of the Hegelian dialectic. Hegel: Time Dominated by the Future In many ways, Hegel is an obvious place to begin in considering the kinds of questions I have set out, given that Jean-Michel Besnier (as well as Denis Hollier and others) opposes Bataille and Breton precisely in terms of the former's "refusal of Hegelianism" (Besnier, 170;Hollier, 1990). Of course Bataille's perceived anti-Hegelianism is precisely what is seen to connect him later to the likes of Deleuze and Foucault, and to pit all of them against Breton, who never tires of citing Hegel in his support. Yet, one of the problems with the customary opposition set up between Breton and Bataille, in these terms, is that it tends to rest almost exclusively on
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the spectacularly bad-tempered exchanges that took place in 1929-1930 with the publication of the SecondManifestoof Surrealismand the collective pamphlet, Un Cadavre,which responded to it. As Michael Richardson comments, reading this polemic "one is surprised how seriously it has been treated, as though it has the quality of a debate" (7). More important, doing so ignores Bataille's far more affirmative texts written during the post-war period, at a time when surrealism's star seemed to be on the wane: "Who today," Bataille writes in 1945, "could deny the radiant power of surrealism... [as] what remains vibrant and genuinely compels recognition" (1994, 57). It is clear that Hegel had a role to play both in the early polemics and in the post-war (qualified) rapprochement. Unfortunately, it has only tended to be the first of these that has been noted. Yet, as Hollier concedes, Bataille in fact only began to study Hegel in any detail during the 1930s, after the exchanges around the Second Manifesto. Now, famously, one figure explains Bataille's turn to Hegel's work. As Besnier puts it: "With Kojeve, Hegel arrived in France" (173). And Kojeve's seminars at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes didn't start until 1933. Moreover, while Besnier's statement is largely true, as regards Bataille and many of his generation, it is less accurate in general terms. For the first extensive translation of Hegel into French was carried out in the late nineteenth century by an ex-student of Hegel, Augusto Vera, and, as Rabate notes, it was almost certainly this that Breton worked with.4 Moreover, even after Vera, the likes of Jean Wahl (a friend of Breton's) and Alexander Koyre had already begun to introduce Hegel to a French audience, before Kojeve's seminars (Rabate 2002b: 23-36). This is significant because Breton is already wielding Hegel against Bataille and the so-called "dissident surrealists" in the SecondManifesto- three or with considerable four years before Kojeve's seminars-albeit ambivalence, given his simultaneous judgement on what he calls the "colossal abortion" of the Hegelian system (Breton 1972: 140). And, of course, what is presented as Bataille's anti-Hegelian response to Breton is, given his own ignorance of Hegel at this point, simply a polemical attack on Breton himself. Or, in other words, "Hegelian" here is really just another word for a somewhat vaguely conceived "Idealism," which Bataille's materialism set out to exclude in its entirety- a point that gives some legitimacy to Breton's surprisingly astute observation that it is precisely in his search for such a materialism that "Hegel awaits" Bataille (Breton 1972: 181). If this is a "debate" around Hegel, it is one marked by a good deal of ignorance on both sides. One is tempted to cite Bataille's own later judgement on Nietzsche, that he "knew of Hegel only the usual vulgarization" (qtd. in Derrida 1978: 252).5 SubStance#107,Vol. 34, no.2, 2005

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Nonetheless, in some sense, it is the "vulgarization"that should of the concernus here;or at least what is at stakein this is not the accuracy various readings of Hegel circulatingwithin Frenchintellectual circles The question to be asked is: at this time, but their own self-understanding. WhyHegel?There are numerous possible answers to such a questionthe relationto Marxism,the importanceof negativity orof reconciliation, the myth of the end of history-but I would like to draw attentionto one suggested by Rabate, who notes that Koyre (and indeed Kojeve after him) stressed, above all, "the originalityof Hegel's conceptionof time, a time dominated by the future"(Rabate2002b:24).6Forit is in this sense that the interestin Hegel sharedby many Frenchintellectualsand artists of the period clearly intersectswith the problematicof the avant-garde. Indeed, the particularmoments in which Breton tends to employ (or believes he is employing) Hegelian formulationsmakes this clear.Thisis most evident in that aspect of Bretoniansurrealismthat presents itself as a "machinefor integration"(Chenieux-Gendron, 4); a definition that a could also serve as descriptionof the Hegelian dialecticitself (at least in its "official"version [Bennington,218]). Thus Breton obviously sees a Hegelian resonancein the firstmanifesto'sfamous assertion:"Ibelieve in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality,which are into a kind of absolute reality,a surreality" seemingly so contradictory, 1972: For Hal Foster, this "insistence on resolution, the (Breton 14). of such dualisms as waking and dreaming, life reconciliation Hegelian and death...is the raison d'etre of Bretonian surrealism" (16)7 - an argument given further legitimacy by a 1934 lecture, "What is which proclaims the "finalresolution"of "interiorreality Surrealism?," and exterior reality" as "the supreme aim of surrealism"(Breton1978: 116). Thismay well, forBreton,have had Hegelianconnotations. Yet,contra the customary assumptions of certain art historians and cultural is farfromexclusively theorists,such "insistenceon resolution" "Hegelian" and himself credits Schiller with -Hegel "demanding enunciating the of and reconciliation" (1993: 67)--and in fact opens principle totality itself up to some fairly damning objectionsprecisely from a Hegelian perspective.For surrealism,as Bretondefines it in the manifesto,clearly invites the same kind of critique that Hegel himself directs at his immediate predecessors and contemporariesin post-KantianGerman philosophy (including Schiller),who, as he puts it in ThePhilosophy of Right,relapse,in theirinvocationsof futurity,into a "never-ending oughtto-be... [that] wanders to and fro without being able to get beyond" (Hegel 1967:90). It is the supposed inadequaciesof such a "never-ending
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ought-to-be," and of its inability to resolve the Kantian antinomy of "ought" and "is" characteristic of moralitiit,that constituted for Hegel the basis for a critique of all forms of utopianism, and of what he termed the merely "abstract and formal" character of its conception of freedom, whereby we are "forever in the domain of the unrealised ought, of Sollen" in which "all is looked upon as ambition" (Taylor, 530). Such a critique turns up again in Marx and Engels's arguments against both the Young Hegelians and nineteenth-century utopianism socialism (where the concept of an avant-garde first came to be deployed among followers of Saint-Simon and Fourier). As Lukacs, for example, summarizes, explicitly distancing himself from his own earlier "utopianism": The HegelianMarxist "category of mediation.. .is not something foisted on to the objects from outside, it is no value-judgement or 'ought' opposed to their 'is.' It is ratherthemanifestation structure"(Lukacs, 162). of theirauthenticobjective The Legacy of German Romanticism In this light, it seems clear that while a futurally-projected unification-of subjective and objective, abstract and concrete-is often explicitly presented by Breton in Hegelian terms, from an actual Hegelian perspective it would more obviously belong to that "Romantic" (or earlier German Idealist) pre-history of Hegelian thought-the Romantic vision of "wholeness" which, in Friedrich Schlegel's words, may be glimpsed in "the fragments of the future" (21).8 It is such a "vision" that is preempted in a long-forgotten 1796 text, the so-called "Oldest System Programme of Idealism," discovered among Hegel's notes, but which may have been written by Schelling or Holderlin--a text that Jacques Ranciere asserts "laid the basis for a new idea of revolution" (138). The role of aesthetics in this revolutionary "programme" -quite alien to Hegel himself-would tend to confirm the link here, recalling someone like Schelling's slightly later conception of the art work as "a sensuous image of freedom" (Critchley, 90). As Andrew Bowie has put it: "The aesthetic product becomes a utopian symbol of the realisation of freedom: in it we can see or hear an image of what the world would be like if freedom were realised" (57).9 Hence, also, Schlegel's speculative orientation of the Romantic project as regulated by the Idea of a future fusing of "the poetry of art and the poetry of nature" that would "make poetry lively and sociable, and life and society poetical" (31). It is this that connects a Romantic desire for the 'self-suppression of art in life" (already articulated in Schiller's Letterson the Aesthetic Educationof Mankind) to "avant-garde radicalism" (Ranciere, 134). As such, if Bataille's early critique of Breton does hit the mark, at this stage it would not be so much as a critique of his
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Hegelianism but as a critique of the prehistory of Romantic(and more still visiblebehind it and pervading utopianism, properlyIdealist)aesthetic the surrealistarticulationof the avant-gardeand its moment of futurity: "Allof existence[is]conceivedas purely is Bataille's literaryby M. Breton," most damning criticismin the late 1920s(qtd.in Cohen,9).10Yet,despite Rabate'sclaim that Breton's avant-gardiste "utopia of a life identical with art and thought is a condensed version of Hegel's synthesis of the concept with the Absolute and with its historical and empirical manifestations,"such a view would, in fact, be anythingbut Hegelian formulated (Rabate2002a:26). Indeed,for Hegel, such an "aesthetically" be a "the could mere retreat into zone of intuition only twilight "utopia" and fantasy"(Taylor,48). There is little doubt that the "reflexesof the future,"which should vibrate the present work of art, are often thought by Breton in this straightforwardlyutopianist manner. Yet the tendency to read Hegel (knowingly or otherwise)back into Romanticism-by no means unique to Breton-might also be read in anotherway, and it is this, in the light of recent work on Romanticism,that I want to pursue below. At stake herewould be the extentto which one readsRomanticism itself(asopposed to Idealism)as actuallyregardingit as "possibleto restoreunity to what the modern world increasinglyseparates"(Bowie, 63). Now, a counterreading of Schlegel that stresses the self-consciousness of an essential or "failure" is one that figured by ironyand thefragment "incompletion" runs throughthe readingsof Benjamin and Blanchot-readings thathave in recenttimes produced a largebody of secondarycommentary. It is not my intentionto add to this here.Nonetheless, I do want to draw attention to the fact that both Benjaminand Blanchot also wrote (affirmatively) the Romantic inheritance of this movement (as well as of the avantgarde in general),which I want to explore in the latterpart of this essay. Of primaryimportancehere will be the possible forms of non-utopianist futuritythat,againstthe grainof its conventionalreception,both thinkers seek to uncover in Breton'ssurrealism. Benjamin and Blanchot 1929essay is farbetterknown than Blanchot's two pieces Benjamin's on surrealism,so I will only very briefly draw attention to some of its interestingfeatures.The first point is the centralitythat questions of time have in the essay. Although this relates to what are described as "the revolutionaryenergies that appearin the outmoded,"this reworkingof the past (as revolutionary)is itself directed toward the opening up of
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another mode of futurity in the present, which is precisely irreducible to the projective futures of utopianism (Benjamin 1985: 129). For what gives the outmoded its "energy" is its embodiment of "latent, unrealized futures" that suggest a "different structure for modern experience" (Caygill, 133, 70). Moreover, it is this conception, and its accompanying critique of the modes of historical temporalization associated with both historicism and progress--as instituting a conception of "homogenous, empty time"-that is taken forward to the later Benjamin's work-to the Arcades Project and to the notion of "now-time [Jetztzeit]"(Benjamin 1992: 252-3). Indeed, the "experience" of the "now"-a kind of "avantgarde experience," as Osborne suggests (1995: 150)-is explicitly presented as being prefigured by "the 'Now' of recognizability in which things put on their true-surrealist-face" (Benjamin 1999: 464). Of key importance for my concerns is that such experience is also explicitly presented by Benjamin as non-utopianist, since in principle the connection to "the Absolute" that it insists upon "does not project fulfilment into another place or a later historical time," leaving open its "horizon of anticipation" (Osborne, 2000: 15). Following from this, the second point is that although Benjamin directly criticizes what he calls surrealism's "pernicious romantic prejudices"-seeing this as leading toward a potential aestheticization of the political and a dangerous fascination with myth-this should not, I think, be read as a dismissal of Romanticism, or of its relation to surrealism, per se (Benjamin 1985: 237).11 To do so would be to ignore the complexities of Benjamin's own reading of Romanticism; a reading which-as early as his 1919 doctoral dissertation "The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism" played a central role in his attempt to develop what Caygill describes as a principled non-Hegelianist conception of "speculative experience" (8). It is precisely this that motivates Benjamin's search, in Schlegel's writings, for a conception of a "fulfilled" infinitude of "connectedness" [Zusammenhang]as opposed to the "empty" Fichtean "bad infinity" of "continuous advance" [Fortgang],which is liable to the kind of Hegelian critique outlined above (see Phelan, 69-82). This is what Adorno has in mind when he writes of Benjamin's proximity to "the Romantic conception of the fragment as a construction that is not complete but rather progresses onward into the infinite... [and thus] champions [an] anti-idealist motive in the midst of idealism" (16). In other words, Benjamin sought in Romanticism some model for nothing less than a disruption of "the possibility of Hegelianism avant la lettre" (Critchley, 115); a model still implicitly at stake in the 1929 essay on surrealism, as it is in the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940).12 I will return to
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this reading of Schlegel below, but suffice it to say that at issue for Benjaminhere is the precise nature of surrealism'sconnection to what, in 1919,he cites as Schlegel's"Romantic messianism": "Therevolutionary desire to realize the kingdom of God on earth"(qtd. in Benjamin,1996: 185).In adopting surrealismas a basis for articulatingthe conceptionof now-time, Benjaminmight be said to seek to read it againstthe utopianist side of Breton'sthought and to link it instead to an "otherRomanticism" of the fragment;a link that may go a good way toward displacing the of Bretonand that of Bataille,with oppositionbetween the "modernism" which I began, as well as complicating our conceptions of an "avantgarde" temporalitymore generally. As with Benjamin, the legacies of German Romanticism, and of Schlegel in particular,also assume a very centralrole within Blanchot's theoretical project.13And, once again, a certain understanding of the fragment is key here. The temporal implications of the fragmentaryare made very clear in the elaborationof the idea of the "project" in one of for themostfamousof Schlegel's Athenaeum "The Fragments: feeling projects -which one might call fragmentsof the future-- is distinguishablefrom the feeling for fragmentsof the past only by its direction:progressive in the former,regressive in the latter" (1991:21). Now, this can obviously be extended into a utopianist position in which the future is positioned as the site of a projectedwholeness beyond present fragmentation;"an implied designation of something that has previously been or will subsequently be whole - the severed finger refers back to the hand" (Blanchot1993:307).Thiswould then be, to borrowa phrasefromRenato Poggioli, one "Romantic precedent" for Breton's surrealism (10).14 However, as with Benjamin,what Blanchot's writing on surrealismalso is the of in it relation to another rather suggests reading possibility differentRomanticprecedent;one constituted around what he refers to as a "non-romanticessence of romanticism"(Blanchot1993:356). This, then, would be Blanchot'sversion of Adorno's "anti-idealistmotive":
Thedemand,the extremedemandof the fragmentary.. .ruins the work because the work...is the unity which is satisfied with itself-this is what Schlegel sensed, but it is also what finally escaped him. (1986: 160)

If, then, as Blanchot concedes, Schlegel's dominant philosophical conception of the fragment entails a model of "history,which, become revolutionary, places at the forefrontof its actionwork thatis undertaken in view of the whole," there is also, in tension with this, a more counterintuitive sense of "fragmentary writing" as an infinitely disruptive movement of unworking[desoeuvrement] that exposes and traces the of any final unification and that produces "new relations impossibility
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that except themselves from unity, just as they exceed the whole" (Blanchot 1993: 359). In a recent introduction to Schlegel's work, J. M. Bernstein summarizes this argument (most familiar from the work of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy) well:
For a work to fully exemplify and reflectivelyarticulatethe Idea of poetry as infinite becoming, it would have to cancel itself as work, bracketitself as work for the sake of the indeterminate Idea, unwork its being as work, forfeit its status as materialpresence in favour of art's "not yet," be itself and always beyond itself. It would be a fragment without being part of a whole, and rehearse an ironic displacementof whatever immanentclaim it would make. (xxxiii)

At the very least, Blanchot himself notes, with this opening of another Romanticism,
will fromnow on bearin itself [the]questionof discontinuity Literature or differenceas a question of form-a question and a task German Romanticismnot only sensed but already clearly proposed-before consigning them to Nietzsche and, beyond Nietzsche, to the future. (1993: 359)

Surrealism Part of this future is surrealism, and perhaps particularly a certain notion of the surrealist image, as that which bears "in itself the question of discontinuity or difference as a question of form." Breton's famous definition in the first manifesto is exemplary: "The value of the image depends on the beauty of the spark obtained; it is, consequently, a function of the differenceof potential between the two conductors" (1972: 37, my emphasis). As Blanchot observes, a range of terms are used to denote the experience thus "produced" -shock, the spark, the explosive, the convulsive; experiences of the extraordinary, the marvellous, the unexpected, the surreal- concepts that, as he puts it, "would like to escape all conceptualization" (1993: 406). The question that then emerges is: What kind of futurity does the "spark" of the surrealist image evoke? Now, one of the crucial elements of Blanchot's most extensive reading of surrealism, in his essay from the late 1960s entitled "Tomorrow at Stake," is its emphasis upon the time of surrealist experience, as what he terms "a pure practice of existence.. .in a determinate temporal modality" (ibid.,407). And as Blanchot's title makes clear, essential to this is precisely the question of surrealism's futurity, of its "tomorrow." This is crucial because, just as Blanchot seeks to read Schlegel against that which in him leads into Hegel-the "rhythm of the Romantic fragment" that works, "anachronistically, against its 'dialectical Aufhebung'"(Critchley, 115) -so too he seeks to read Breton against his own Hegelian orutopianist conceptions of the "reflexes of the future." Indeed, this is the very basis
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set forth for Blanchot's own attempt to "interrogate"surrealism "no longer in relationto what comes to an end, but with the question of the future that designates itself in this end that is infinite" (Blanchot,1993: 406). It is this, in turn, that lies behind Blanchot's insistence on a (rigorously non-Hegelian) reading of the surrealist image as "the surprisingmanifestation(a manifestationby surprise)of the un-unifiable" (ibid.,415). For despite Blanchot'sown clearly-expresseddoubts about the surrealists' conceptions of chance--doubts that center on what it would mean to "will" or "desire"the chance formationor encounterwhat is important, above all, in surrealism's aleatory practices is, he argues, "the provocation"it produces, by which the future "can come into relation" with the present as "interruption, interval, arrest, or opening" (ibid.,412-3).It is precisely "whatis at stake"in this "opening" that the Hegelian determinationof chanceis "insufficient to accountfor" in its most radical manifestation as a As such, surrealism, (ibid.,414). calls an immanent nor of forth neither end temporalmodality experience, a utopianist projection, but an "exigency" that comes from the "everexteriorto the horizon itself;the futureas "unknown," "unexpected" which it seems to stand out" (ibid.,412): against
From the unknown-what is neither the pure unknowable nor the not yet known-comes a relationthatis indirect,a networkof relations thatnever allows itself to be expressedunitarily...a non-simultaneous set of forces, a space of difference...[T]he future of surrealism is bound to this exigency of a plurality escaping unification and extending beyond the whole (while at the same time presupposing it, demanding its realisation).(ibid.,409)

It is in the light of this complex (Romantic)experience of the infinitely of fragmentation- one akin to the "negativity"of configured"plurality" the allegoricalratherthan the symbolic15 -that Blanchotquotes Breton: to be out for itself, "surprise ought sought unconditionally" (qtd. in Blanchot, 1993: 464).16 For it is in this most radical "exigency" that surrealism puts "everything in question (ejecting the whole from the orderof the whole) not by a [...] purely capriciousnegation,but through this concerted,non-concerted seeking that remains without assurance and without guarantee"(ibid.,418-9). Now, no doubt this is to read surrealismagainst the grain, against Breton'sall-too-frequentutopianist projections of future "wholeness" and his questionabledeployments of Hegelian language. Nonetheless, it doesn't come from nowhere, and attests, at the very least, to a differend within surrealism's articulation of the structure of avant-garde experience that complicates the relation between Breton and someone like Bataille.Perhaps most significantly,this seems to have been quite clear to Bataillehimself-at least in his post-war writings-and serves,
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(beyond the accounts offered by Krauss, Hollier, and others), to explain the complexities of his own self-defined position as surrealism's "old enemyfrom within" (Bataille, 1994:49). The engagement with Hegel, and the difficulties of this engagement -traced in Derrida's famous essay on Bataille, with its warning concerning the "self-evidence" of Hegel-do not seem insignificant in this respect, though surrealism, typically, is barely referred to in Derrida's account.17 It is worth attending briefly to Bataille's own elaboration of a certain structure of temporal experience appropriate to surrealism in a 1945 review of Breton's Arcane17. For, contraBesnier's or Hollier's insistence on opposition, Bataille makes quite clear here the proximity between his own conception of the "instant" and Breton's thought. Indeed, what surrealism liberates, Bataille suggests, is "nothing other than the instant," whether it recognizes this fact or not:
...we have never been able to distinguish between value and the end pursued. The dissociation requires the strange, passionate and reflective approach, lucid but evading its own lucidity, which distinguishes Andre Breton, who has always treated the future [or rather the projected future] with surprising contempt. "I never make plans," he writes. (Bataille, 1994: 65)

Bataille is not uncritical here, but, again, the criticism is very much positionedfrom within Breton's own questioning:
The morality to which Andre Breton is drawn is rather poorly defined, but it is-if such a thing is possible-a morality of the instant. What is essential about it is the demand imposed on whosoever expresses a will to choose between the instant...and a concern for results which immediately abolish the value and even, in a sense, the existence of the instant. The accent is placed not on the fact of choosing but on the content of the choice proposed. (ibid., 66)

While it is debatable that "morality" is quite the best term here, (rather than, say, "politics"), what is at stake in this is clearly something like what Kristeva-one of those Tel Quel "post-structuralists" customarily opposed to Breton18 -describes as an "irruption" which, like Blanchot's or Benjamin's romantic fragments, "will never be an Hegelian Aufhebung," evoking, as it does, a kind of "'future anterior' that will never take place, never come about as such, but only as an upheaval of present place and meaning" (Kristeva, 1980: 32). The Politics of Time Kristeva is writing here of another pivotal moment in the history of the avant-garde: Russian Futurism. And it is this that returns us, in a rather oblique way, to the issue of Leninism. The futurists, Kristeva argues, "heard and understood the Revolution only because its present was dependent on a future" (ibid., 32). One might well say the same of
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Breton's surrealists. Yet, at the same time, as Buck-Morss has most recently observed, the tensionapparentfrom the very beginning in the historical conjoining of futurism or surrealismas the "cultural"avantgarde and the Communist Party as the "political" vanguard of revolutionary history, may also be understood, in schematic terms at least, as one concerningprecisely what I have described as a politics of conflictingtemporalities; most specifically, a conflict manifested in a in their respective conceptions of this affirmative relation of differend to present future (Cunningham,2001:174-5). The model of vanguardism, theorized by Lenin, conceptualizes historical time in terms of projectiveteleology, where the otherness of the future is always alreadyforeclosedby the determinationof "a 'plan' that locks in future meaning"(Buck-Morss, 67). As such, art or literature is simply a "cog and a screw" in the forward march of the "politically conscious avant-garde of the entire working class," as representedby the party(Calinescu,114).Yet,for the cultural as Buck-Morss avant-garde, reads it in Benjaminianfashion, "what was to come remained an open category" (48). This future, as a condition of the present, is invokedother to the time of either Leninistvanguardismorutopianist projection -not as the basis for a project that would "definethe reason"for present as an to but practice, attempt interrupt "existing time and space as a non-functionalutopian presencein the present"(ibid.,64-5).Thisis not to deny the utopianist (or indeed Leninist)dimensions of surrealism(or of the early Russian avant-gardes)but we also need to be aware of what unsettles themfromwithin.And, at the very least, this suggests that we need to be wary of any attemptto resolve the differends apparentwithin the history of the avant-garde,and its various "futures,"to reduce it to some univocal project or generic definition (which something like a "postmodernism" might simply overcome or leave behind). Conclusion In his earliest essay on surrealism, from the late 1940s, Blanchot poses the question- still our questiontoday- of in what sense surrealism might be said to have "becomehistorical"(1995:85). This is not simply a question of surrealism's "pastness" -or of the way in which the "real" (Foster, contemporary might itself appearto have "becomesurreal" "dominant but dead," to borrow Habermas'sphrase (6)-but is 209-11); also a question of the relationbetween the time of surrealismand that of artor literaryhistory;a questionthathas wider implicationsfor attempts to historicize the work of the avant-gardein general. For, at the very

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least, a genuine account of surrealism should take into account the challenge that it produces to the temporal modalities and categories of historicism itself. If, as Blanchot notes, surrealist questioning can always (unavoidably) "close itself" in "upon a new order, a tradition," there is always that which also escapes the temporalitiesof tradition, and thus of its closure (1993: 418). In Benjamin's famous terms, today the task, as regards surrealism, is to find that "inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it" (1985: 243). For it is by this means that, in the "Now of recognizability," we might recognize what remains of "tomorrow." And, noting this, I would like to end with Derrida, who scarcely ever mentions surrealism. Writing on recent architecture, he says, "Interruption remains perhaps the opening of the unanticipated and the signature of surprise. There is a future only under this condition" (1992: 30). Thus do echoes of surrealism subsist in some surprising places. London UniversityofWestminster,

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. "The Essay as Form" in Notes to Literature,VolumeOne, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Aragon, Louis. "A Wave of Dreams," trans. Susan de Muth. Papers of Surrealism1, Winter 2003: www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/journall.htm. Bataille, Georges. The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, trans. & intro. Michael Richardson. London & New York: Verso, 1994. --. "The "Old Mole" and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhommeand Surrealist"in Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Benjamin, Walter. TheArcades Project,ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999. --. "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism," trans. David Lachterman, Howard Eiland & Ian Balfour, in SelectedWritings, VolumeOne: 1913-1926, eds. Marcus Bullock & Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 1996. --. Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1992. --. One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott & Kingsley Shorter. London & New York: Verso, 1985. Bennington, Geoffrey. Interrupting Derrida. London & New York: Routledge, 2000. Berman, Art. Preface to Modernism. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Bernstein, J. M., ed. Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Besnier, Jean-Michel. "Georges Bataille in the 1930s: A Politics of the Impossible." Yale French Studies 78: On Bataille, 1990. Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation,trans. Susan Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

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- -. "Reflections on Surrealism" in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. ---. The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 Bois, Yves-Alain & Krauss, Rosalind. Formless: A User's Guide. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Bowie, Andrew. Aesthetics and Subjectivity:From Kant to Nietzsche, 2nd edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Breton, Andre. Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver & Helen Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972. --. What is Surrealism?: Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont. New York: Monad, 1978. Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe:The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity, 2nd edition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987. Caygill, Howard. Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience. London & New York: Routledge, 1998. Chenieux-Gendron, Jacqueline. Surrealism, trans. Vivian Folkenflik. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley & Los Angeles: California University Press, 1993. Critchley, Simon. Very Little...Almost Nothing: Philosophy, Literature, Death. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. Cunningham, David. "Architecture, Utopia and the Futures of the Avant-Garde." The Journal of Architecture 6.2, Summer, 2001. --. "A Question of Tomorrow: Blanchot, Surrealism and the Time of the Fragment." Papers of Surrealism 1, Winter 2003: www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/publications/ journall.htm Derrida, Jacques. "Faxitexture" in Davidson, Cynthia C., ed., Anywhere.New York:Rizzoli, 1992. ---. "From Restricted to General Economy" in Writing and Difference,trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. ffrench, Patrick & Lack, Roland-Francois, eds. The Tel Quel Reader.London & New York: Routledge, 1998. Foster, Hal. Convulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Habermas, Jurgen. "Modernity - an Incomplete Project" in Foster, Hal, ed., The AntiAesthetic. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. Hanssen, Beatrice & Benjamin, Andrew. Walter Benjamin and Romanticism. London & New York: Continuum, 2002. Hegel, G. W. F. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet. London: Penguin, 1993. --. The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Hollier, Denis. Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Krauss, Rosalind. "The Originality of the Avant-Garde" in The Originality of the AvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Kristeva, Julia. "The Ethics of Linguistics" in Desire in Language:A Semiotic Approach to Literature,trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine & Leon S. Roudiez. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.

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--. "The Subject in Process," trans. Patrick ffrench, in ffrench & Lack, eds., 1998. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe & Nancy, Jean-Luc. The LiteraryAbsolute: The Theory of Literature in GermanRomanticism,trans. Philip Barnard & Cheryl Lester. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998. Lenin, V.I. What is to be Done? New York: International Publishers, 1969. Lukacs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin, 1971. MacCabe, Colin. Performance. London: BFI, 1998. Osborne, Peter. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London & New York: Verso, 1995. --. Philosophy in Cultural Theory. London & New York: Routledge, 2000. Phelan, Anthony. "Fortgang and Zusammenhang: Walter Benjamin and the Romantic Novel" in Hanssen & Benjamin, 2002. Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1968. Rabate, Jean-Michel. (2002a) "Breton's Post-Hegelian Modernism" in Swearingen, James & Cutting-Gray, Joanne (eds), Extreme Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Death. London & New York: Continuum, 2002. ----. (2002b), The Future of Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Ranciere, Jacques. "The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy." New Left Review 14, March/April, 2002. Richardson, Michael. "Introduction" in Bataille, G., 1994. Schlegel, Friedrich. Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Notes
1. An early version of this paper was first delivered at "ARTiculations," the 29th Association of Art Historians conference in London, 2003. My thanks to Simon Baker and Neil Cox for the invitation to speak, and to David Lomas, Gavin Parkinson, and Dawn Ades-all far more expert in the history of surrealism than I-for comments on that paper. 2. Tel Quel published an influential (and largely critical) special issue on surrealism in 1971, and the following year organized a conference on Bataille and Artaud, the proceedings of which were published in 1973. Despite Sollers's personal debt to Aragon, the writers associated with Tel Quel probably did more than anyone to establish a certain opposition between Bretonian surrealism and a "dissident" reaction identified with Bataille and Artaud (a pairing re-iterated by MacCabe and others). This conjuncture ignores Bataille's own more skeptical assessment of Artaud's work. See Bataille 1994: 42-6. 3. Such modification would be aimed at the extraordinary ongoing influence (in AngloAmerican art history in particular) of Peter Biirger's seminal work, and of the specific role it accords to (early) surrealism. While such influence is clearly merited, as a theory of the avant-garde there remains something essentially arbitrary about Biirger's restriction of this term's referent to movements of the 1910s and 1920s. Most problematically, Burger almost entirely elides the term's own complex history (from the mid-nineteenth century onwards), and, in line with this, its particular temporal implications. 4. The differences between Vera's Hegel and Kojeve's Hegel are of importance here for a number of reasons, not least because Hegel's text that is almost the sole object of

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Kojeve's attention- The Phenomenology of Spirit-was the one major text that Vera never in fact translated. 5. One might also note that Bataille's early polemical engagements with Breton also involve an attack on Nietzsche that Bataille later disavowed. See Bataille 1985. 6. The nature of "Hegel's conception of time" involves rather more complexity than this may suggest. On another reading, it is quite possible to argue that its distinctiveness comes from its very negation of the future as future, through speculative determination-in-advance or a kind of eternalization of its own "philosophical" present. Indeed, the latter point is one already made by Feuerbach (and thus not without influence on Marx) in his 1839 essay "Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy": "Hegelian philosophy must necessarily result in the immobility of time; for if time still moved sadly along as if nothing had happened, then the Hegelian philosophy would unavoidably forfeit its attribute of absoluteness" (qtd. in Osborne, 1995: 42). 7. As Foster observes, this inflects Breton's readings of surrealism's two modern "masters," Freud and Marx. "Freud is Hegelian in me," writes Breton; although, to preempt certain arguments below, one might wonder to what extent this really has to do with Freud's own (partially) acknowledged debt to the Romantic concern with the imagination and the dreamworld, rather than to Hegel himself. (Freud himself largely dismisses the utopianist dimension of Romantic "exploration," just as he later dismissed surrealism's own "liberatory" impulses with regard to repressed libidinal forces). See Foster, 16. 8. I am aware that here and in what follows I am in danger of running together aspects of German Idealism (Fichte, Schelling) and Romanticism (Schlegel, Novalis), which, in recent times, several scholars have made a concerted effort to differentiate, particularly in relation to their respective conceptions of subjectivity and reflection. See, for example, Bowie, 2003. That said, I'm not so sure that the latter can be so straightforwardly separated from the legacy of utopianism (and the positive desire for unity) bequeathed by the former as Bowie, among others, might seem to claim. Or rather, it seems to me, the question of how far one can project an actual unity beyond the present is the problem continually engaged in Schlegel's fragments, and one that is never resolved. 9. This could be read alongside, for example, Aragon's 1924 assertion: "Freedom, that wonderful word, at last has a meaning: Liberty begins where the marvellous is born" (7). 10. See also Bataille, 1994: 28-9. 11. Benjamin's essay might well be read as a concerted attempt to think surrealism as a "revolutionary" appropriation of "aestheticization" as opposed to that "reactionary" appropriation mobilized by Fascism. As Benjamin continues, in an imaginary dialogue in the 1929 surrealism essay: "'To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution'-in other words, poetic politics? 'We have tried that beverage. Anything, rather than that!"' (1985: 237). 12. As far as I know, Andrew Benjamin and Beatrice Hanssen are almost unique in having recognized the importance of this connection, in terms of a "dialectic between profane modes of reading and the encounter with the Absolute" that is carried over from Benjamin's 1919 dissertation to the "profane illumination" explored in the surrealism essay (Hanssen & Benjamin, 4). 13. For a more detailed reading of Blanchot's writings on surrealism, see Cunningham, 2003. 14. See also Calinescu, for whom the avant-garde originates in "romantic utopianism with its messianic fervors" (96). 15. Following, for example, Bowie's account, this would tend to associate surrealism with a "Romantic position." Of course, the potential distinction between symbol and

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allegory here, as a means to conceptualizing the character of the surrealist image, would also suggest links with Benjamin's work, particularly the later "affirmative" accounts of allegory in the readings of Baudelaire. 16. Blanchot's emphasis on the temporality of the "surprising" is also intended to differentiate-however "infinitesimally"-the conception of the infinite implicit in these formulations from the "bad infinity" of "endless striving" with which Hegel himself associates Romanticism, as following Fichte. As such, the legitimacy of Hegel's reading-too often accepted without a proper attention to those texts under attackdepends on the extent to which one believes the Romanticism of Schlegel or, say, Novalis, to have broken with Fichtean Idealism. For an argument that Hegel misjudges "how far Schlegel had already moved away from his attachment to Fichte by 1796," see Bowie, 246. This would also connect back to Benjamin's elaboration of an infinitude of "connectedness" that he discovers in Schlegel, quite different from Fichte's "empty progress." 17. "Why today-even today-are the best readers of Bataille among those for whom Hegel's self-evidence is so lightly borne? So lightly borne that a murmured allusion to fundamental concepts-the pretext, sometimes, for avoiding the details-or a complacent conventionality, a blindness to the text, an invocation of Bataille's complicity with Nietzsche or Marx, suffice to undo the constraint of Hegel. Perhaps the self-evident would be too heavy to bear, and so a shrug of the shoulders is preferred to discipline. And, contrary to Bataille's experience, this puts one, without seeing it or knowing it, within the very self-evidence of Hegel one often thinks oneself unburdened of. Misconstrued, treated lightly, Hegelianism only extends its historical domination" (Derrida 1978: 251). 18. In a 1973 essay, first published in Tel Quel 52-3, Kristeva writes: "Artaud's violent reaction to surrealism...is a reaction against the mentalism and religiosity [in other words, the supposed "Idealism"] that surrealism draws on" (Kristeva 1998: 168).

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