2 - Recasting the self: from surrealism to ethnography

Summary

The beginning of the thirties saw the dispersal of surrealist aesthetics. Some former members of the movement (Aragon) became committed communists, while others (Crevel) chose suicide. Historically, surrealism's metaphysical convulsions became translated into the emergence of more directly socio-political concepts of the self. This period, beginning perhaps with the momentary crisis of 1929, continued through the subsequent years of growing political instability and extremism, to the moment of mobilization which for many marks the end of surrealism and its related aesthetic practices. Intellectually, it is equally turbulent, fluctuating wildly between leftist and rightist positions, and dominated, even captivated, by Kojève's presentation of History as fundamentally tragic and fundamentally over. It is a dynamic summed up in Bataille's phrase: ‘politics of the impossible’. Ideologically, Leiris registers this turbulence, passing from the rigorously controlled group-effect of surrealism through, successively, such transliterary journals and societies as Documents (1929–30), La Critique sociale (1931–4), Minotaure (1933), Contreattaque (1935–6), Acéphale (1936–9), and the Collège de sociologie (1937–9). This intense intellectual and political ferment, as we shall see, was to throw up a host of confused yet daring identificational practices, not least on the level of a writing of the self, which were to influence Leiris's work radically.