Andre Breton

During the 1960s and 1970s, the eruption of theory was presented as an epistemic break, reorganizing the field of questioning both prospectively and retrospectively. In the forefront of this new movement was the influential journal Tel Quel, which both canonized a body of preferred avant-garde texts (both literary and theoretical) and nullified prominent figures from preceding generations. In a broad remapping of French modernism, this book shows how the milieu of Tel Quel transferred myths of the powers of literature inherited from Bataille, Sartre, Valery, and Breton to theory, in the process erasing the traces of these myths and their common ground.

Jean-Michel Rabate, the eminent French Joycean, combines psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts in rereading the history of modernity to give a more precise meaning to the term modernism. Rabate focuses throughout on a single theme, the ghostly nature of modernity. In writing a history of the concept of modernity with the awareness that the radically new has often been subject to the effects of the return of the repressed. Rabate analyzes the notion of loss in various fields: in Freudian aesthetics of color, in literary history, and in philosophy. The postmodernist fascination with a lost object allows a reconsideration of the boundaries of such terms as modernism and postmodernism. The conclusion ties together all these motifs, from Joyce to Barthes, and shows their theoretical basis in Marx's criticism of ideology and in Freud's consideration of mourning. From the analysis of "color" as an unthinkable object of discourse to an aesthetics of the unpresentable, Rabate points to the possibility of an "ethics of mourning", which would seem capable of overcoming the dead end of history whose ending condemns it to eternal repetition.

Surrealism and the Exotic is the story of the obsessive relationship between surrealist and non-western culture. Describing the travels across Africa, Oceania, Mexico and the Caribbean made by wealthy aesthetes, it combines an insight into the mentality of early twentieth century collectors with an overview of the artistic heritage at stake in these adventures. Featuring more than 70 photographs of artefacts, exhibitions and expeditions-in-progress, it brings to life the climate of hedonism enjoyed by Breton, Ernst, Durkheim, and Mauss, It is an unparalleled introduction to the Surrealist movement and to French thought and culture in the 1920s and 1930s.

Circles of Censorship examines the ideas and practice of censorship and of freedom of expression in post-revolutionary French literary culture. Focusing on the fate of the work of writers such as Flaubert and Sade, and on the Freudian-influenced attempts by the Surrealists and the journal Tel Quel to evade censorship, Harrison presents a provocative critique of the ideas on censorship which currently dominate the discourses of human rights, psychoanalysis, and literary culture.