Monthly Archives: September 2007

Avez-vous déjà giflé un mort ?

Un cadavre

Un cadavre

Un cadavre (A corpse) is a 1930 virulent pamphlet against André Breton organised by Robert Desnos  to which dissident surrealists such as Georges Bataille contributed. Its title was based on a 1924 pamphlet by the Surrealists against Anatole France. Read more here.

The quote in the title of this post was taken from the Louis Aragon contribution to the 1924 pamphlet and translates as: “Have you ever slapped a dead person?”

 

Mr. Bataille loves flies, so does Boiffard

Mr. Bataille loves flies. Not we: we love the miters of old evocators, the miters of pure linen to whose front point was affixed a blade of gold and upon which flies did not settle, because they had been purified to keep them away.” -André Breton

The photograph of the Papier colant et mouches is by J.-A. Boiffard, first published in 1930 as an illustration for George Bataille’s article “L’esprit moderne et le jeu des transpositions,” in Documents, 1930. No.8, p. 488.

Via Contact Images by Georges Didi-Huberman

See Bretonian and Bataillean strains of Surrealism and toilet philosophy.

See also this wonderful post by Mark Dery on the big toe.

On this day in history

I stopped doing working on my ephemerides (as the French call it) a while because it’s a very time consuming job, that nonetheless needs to be done if I want to finish version 1.0 of artandpop before April 8, 2008. I just finished September 3. Did I forget anyone or anything?