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The Surrealist Movement was committed to an affinity group praxis of anti-authoritarianism that challenged oppressive sociopolitical systems with radical art and culture. Examining key episodes in post-1945 transnational surrealism and para-surrealisms in Europe and the Americas, this volume elucidates the contemporary relevance of the ongoing surrealist resistance to domination and totalitarianism, with a focus on anti-Statism. Examining surrealism’s fundamental interaction with anarchism and Marxism, and investigating its forays into self-management and non-hierarchical forms of organization, the volume’s topics range from anti-Algerian War activism, to Mai ’68 and Cuban Revolution organizing, to the Nadaísmo movement in 1960s Colombia, to art strikes and art abolitionism.
Price: $75.00
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Avant-Garde Critical Studies
Publication Date:
20 August 2026
ISBN: 9789004737259
Format: Hardcover
Surrealism, like Marxism and optometry, is an indispensable set of hunches and conclusions that each cohort adjusts to their moment. As Dan Georgakas of the League of Revolutionary Poets put it, “Dada lives, Surrealism returns.” Surrealism and Anti-authoritarianism After 1945 proves that wherever people think and suffer—which is everywhere—surrealism offers them stronger dreams.
--Sasha Frere-Jones
In the Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton declares that the only thing that still excites him is “the mere word ‘liberty.’” Abigail Susik’s brilliant new collection tells the story of the working out of the dialectical consequences of this excitement, this obsession with freedom. We find the surrealists giving worldly flesh to this word by creating a radically libertarian, uncompromisingly anti-authoritarian poetico-political practice. We discover the links between surrealism and the Spanish Revolution, anti-colonial struggles, the May-June 1968 Events in France, the Zapatista movement, and other key moments of the liberatory revolutionary tradition. The chapters of this work depict the struggle to move beyond all statist, centralist revolutions and all hierarchical vanguard parties, and to unveil all the deceptions of capitalism, the state, patriarchy, monotheism, technocracy, colonialism, imperialism, and even human supremacy. In short, it eloquently details the surrealist quest for “écart absolu”—a radical swerve in world history aimed at overturning the entire legacy of domination.
--John Clark, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Loyola University, New Orleans
--Sasha Frere-Jones
In the Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton declares that the only thing that still excites him is “the mere word ‘liberty.’” Abigail Susik’s brilliant new collection tells the story of the working out of the dialectical consequences of this excitement, this obsession with freedom. We find the surrealists giving worldly flesh to this word by creating a radically libertarian, uncompromisingly anti-authoritarian poetico-political practice. We discover the links between surrealism and the Spanish Revolution, anti-colonial struggles, the May-June 1968 Events in France, the Zapatista movement, and other key moments of the liberatory revolutionary tradition. The chapters of this work depict the struggle to move beyond all statist, centralist revolutions and all hierarchical vanguard parties, and to unveil all the deceptions of capitalism, the state, patriarchy, monotheism, technocracy, colonialism, imperialism, and even human supremacy. In short, it eloquently details the surrealist quest for “écart absolu”—a radical swerve in world history aimed at overturning the entire legacy of domination.
--John Clark, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Loyola University, New Orleans
Abigail Susik is Joint Editor of Bloomsbury’s Transnational Surrealism Series and author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester UP, 2021). She is the editor of several books devoted to Surrealism Studies and is a founding Board Member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism.