The Differential Politics of Poetic Experience in Wartime and Postwar Surrealism

Surrealism has always emphasized revelatory experience over abstract theory. The importance of art and poetry to the movement is the relation to the world they enact, as the images themselves are always relational, a rapprochement , and not simply mimetic of the look of things. The 1942 text “Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not” reconceptualizes politics away from the leadership of political parties and toward a time when politics, knowledge, and imagination are brought into and kept in relation to one another, and which are always seen through the prism of relationality: of how we live in the world.