Reflexions sur le surréalisme - Manuscrit autographe complet

Autograph manuscript by the author of 16 octavo pages published in number 8 (August 1945) of L'Arche under the title: Some Reflections on Surrealism.
Complete recto-verso manuscript, with very dense writing, containing numerous deletions, corrections and additions.

Some Reflections on Surrealism forms the first important text that Maurice Blanchot devoted to André Breton's movement. He rehabilitates surrealism which placed at the center of its activity the question of language and experience - aspects that could not leave Blanchot indifferent -, without forgetting to make the following observations: it carries within it a part of failure and its "situation [...] remains ambiguous".
Now increasingly asserting his aesthetic positions, Blanchot fully recognizes the poetic and experimental value of automatic writing, for its very radicalism: "Automatic writing is [...] a war machine against reflection and language. It is destined to humiliate human pride, particularly in the form that traditional culture has given it. But, in reality, it is itself a proud aspiration to a mode of knowledge and it has opened to words a new unlimited credit."
Blanchot continues his reflection and insists on the questionings of surrealist writers and poets regarding discourse: "Surrealism was haunted by this idea: that there was, that there had to be a moment [...] when language was not discourse, but reality itself, without however ceasing to be the proper reality of language [...]. The surrealists drew brilliant literary consequences from this 'discovery,' but for language the effects are more ambiguous and more varied. In this domain, they still seem above all to be destroyers. They are unleashed against discourse; they withdraw from it the right to signify something; as a means of [?] social, of precise designation, they break it ferociously. Language appears somewhat alone annihilated or sacrificed, but humiliated. In reality, it is a matter of something quite different and even the contrary: language disappears as instrument, but that is because it has become subject. Through automatic writing, it has benefited from the highest promotion [...]."
The text would be reprinted in The Work of Fire (1949), not without Blanchot having taken care to attenuate the reservations he expressed in the initial article.

First important monographic study devoted by Maurice Blanchot to the question of surrealist language.