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M. Robinson’s useful commentary, Heraclitus (1987: 115–6). 10 ‘Beaucoup trop d’emmerdeurs idéalistes’ is Bataille’s response to Breton’s and Aragon’s inquiry, ‘A suivre: petite contribution au dossier de certains intellectuels à tendances révolutionnaires (1929)’ (Pierre 1980). 11 Bataille later revised his position on surrealism, intending this statement positively, in an article published in Combat in 1945. See Bataille, ‘The Surrealist Revolution’ (in 1994: 53). 12 On Cahun’s Trotskyism and her ties to the Brunet group of Trotskyite writers, see especially Löwy 2009: 65–82.

Eburne The surrealist movement was – and remains – resolutely dialectical. In the classical sense of the term, denoting the pursuit of truth through disagreement, surrealist dialectics encompass the argumentative basis of the group’s activities from the early 1920s onward: it points to the meetings, inquiries, investigations, debates, ruptures, and exclusions that characterize surrealism’s aesthetic and political pursuits alike. Such contentiousness extends throughout the movement’s history, from the group’s inaugural rupture with Parisian Dada through its restless engagement with leftist politics; its polemical interactions with Maurice Barrès, Georges Bataille, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other intellectual contemporaries; its militant anti-nationalism and anti-colonialism, and of course, its numerous exclusions.

Written in response to the Aragon affair, Cahun’s tract emerged from her participation in the AEAR, the Association des Écrivains et Heraclitus, Hegel, and dialectical understanding 29 Artistes Révolutionnaires, in 1932 and 1933, an association that galvanized her collaboration with Breton, Crevel, Éluard, and other surrealists. 12 It stressed instead the political significance of understanding poetic language as a medium that negates, misdirects, and disrupts the very relations of communicability or action it purports to enable.