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Automatic Theologies Surrealism and the Politics of Equality Kate Khatib To write about surrealism and theology seems an almost heretical act, on both sides of the equation. Like other Romantic and post-Romantic artistic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, surrealism owes a debt to mysticism and the occult that is already widely acknowledged, as is the occurrence of religious symbolism throughout its corpus. Were these works of art equal to the sum total of the surrealist interventions in the theological realm, there would be little more to discuss. A less cursory inspection reveals, however, that the presentation of surrealism as a fleeting moment in the artistic history of the twentieth century fails to capture the full breadth of the critical project that is at stake. Indeed, one would do better to define surrealism as a unique epistemological tradition, one that touches not only the artistic and literary world of 1920s Paris but also the revolutionary political world of 1960s Chicago, insurgent movements in Latin America, and the networked communities of the altermondialisation movement. If we are able to make such a claim, we can do so only on the basis of the shared project at the center of all surrealist praxis: nothing less than the total reenchantment of the world. In fact, surrealism’s central aims and activities have never been entirely devoid of spiritual tendencies; while calling for a total rebellion against the authoritarian structures of church and state, and ultimately against the concept of any singularity—god or sovereign—incarnated as a higher power, surrealist discoveries such as automatism, chance, and the Marvelous share striking aspects with the messianic notion of a return to an all but forgotten unity of the profane and the divine, the actual and the possible, and the real and the imaginary. Thus, the exploration of the relationship between the surrealist tradition and the theological one must deal with a situation far more complex than the 6 17 K AT E K H ATI B equation of a particular moment in the history of artistic practice with a particular set of messianic categories. If lines of resonance appear between elements of the surrealist project and certain theological constructs—revelation, the miracle, and the sacred are all present in various forms in surrealist thought—one must tread lightly in this dangerous territory of making theological claims on behalf of a group of thinkers whose collective intent was the total destruction of all repressive systems, including church and state, and who, in 1925, composed an open letter declaring war on the pope; indeed, in more than seventy years of theoretical development, surrealism’s adherents have never failed to continue the project of scathing theological critique because, following Marx, ‘‘the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.’’1 Exclusionism, authoritarianism, the hierarchically dominant position of the Church—the surrealists have cited all of these as justification for their belief that the greatest enemy of human imagination is organized religion, which centers on a purely phantasmagoric and fundamentally mythical and unreachable central body. ‘‘God is a hallucinatory projection of humankind’s own misery, fear, and loathing,’’ Don LaCoss wrote in 2001, ‘‘refracted back onto ourselves, and incorporated into our individual psyches as well as the larger society.’’2 Yet the surrealists’ position as critics of organized religion should not prevent their inclusion within the field of ‘‘post-secular’’ studies. The surrealists may have set their cause in opposition to the traditional theological arsenal, but they also mined the rhetoric of religious criticism for useful tools, taking bits and pieces and investing them with new significance outside the archaic language of heaven and hell, forging direct links between such lofty concepts as ‘‘revelation’’ or ‘‘the sacred’’ and the concrete understanding of objects in the everyday world. The surrealists reoriented these concepts and their ultimate aims toward something that might best be described as practical truth. In fact, surrealism’s interventions in the theological-political field throughout the first half of the twentieth century foreshadow the rethinking of religion that Hent de Vries seems to have in mind when he writes, in the introduction to Philosophy and the Turn to Religion: as a sociopolitical force and as a theoretical problem . . . the ‘‘return of religion’’ remains inexplicable as long as one continues naı̈vely to oppose religion, not only to critique, autonomy, and self-determination, to the profane and the finite, to the technological and the mechanical, to the modern and the...

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