Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality. Footnote 1
Introduction
In 1924, at the age of 28, the French thinker and writer André Breton (1896–1966) published the Manifesto of Surrealism, a key moment in the foundation of surrealism as an artistic and political movement aiming at an absolute or higher reality (‘surreality’) through the juxtaposition of rationalism with the unconscious world of dreams. Drawing from a range of intellectual sources or, rather, sensibilities – radical romanticism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Hegelian dialectics, among others – Breton and his fellow travellers positioned surrealism as a wholesale rejection of rationalism and bourgeois society. Breton’s combative statement that surrealism represented ‘complete nonconformism’ was quickly substantiated by the movement’s broader political engagements.Footnote 2 By 1925, fervent surrealist opposition to the Franco–Spanish War against the indigenous Rif forces in Morocco demonstrated that their subversive intentions extended well beyond revolutionising the field of art and literature: ‘“Transform the world,” Marx said; “change life,” Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us.’Footnote 3
Surrealists aimed to unleash the imagination as a vehicle both for pursuing personal freedom and confronting the logic of utilitarian rationalism, which they held responsible for the carnage of World War One and the pressing issues of their age: imperialism, capitalism, and authoritarianism. Despite experiencing waning influence during and after World War Two, surrealism left an indelible mark on the twentieth century. As the post-Marxist theorist, Guy Debord observed in 1968, ‘there hardly is an aspect of modern life that remains unmarked by surrealism – whether the arts, literature, advertising, or even politics.’Footnote 4 A recent article in The New York Times, prompted by the movement’s centennial, emphasised that surrealism remains ‘a very powerful political weapon today,’ with contemporary scholars stressing its continued relevance in confronting global injustices forged, among others, by global capitalism, racial inequality, technology, and climate change.Footnote 5
This article aligns with these sentiments and seeks to engender a productive dialogue between surrealism and International Relations (IR) theory, claiming that surrealism offers an overlooked yet sophisticated philosophical approach with profound implications for international theorising. This article shows that surrealism, like IR theory itself, emerged as an intellectual response to the tumultuous events defining the twentieth century. As the French writer Gaston Criel articulated in 1952, surrealism represented ‘the expression of a period that rejects the debris of a bankrupt civilisation’ – a civilisation seemingly trapped in a downward cycle of disasters and wars culminating in the atomic bomb.Footnote 6 By drawing parallels between surrealist thought and contemporary international theory – most notably classical realism, whose main proponents were contemporaries of the surrealists – this article shows that the surrealist orientation towards the imagination can enrich the long-standing debate on realism and utopianism in IR.Footnote 7 While it emphasises important intersections and lines of conjunction – a penetrating critique of rationalism, a nuanced approach to utopianism, and a commitment to global transformation – surrealism ultimately challenges reformist understandings of utopia in IR theory, emphasising the critical ability to disrupt reality by making the familiar strange and rendering the invisible visible.
Furthermore, this article demonstrates surrealism’s relevance to the growing body of IR scholarship on the Anthropocene and the question of planetary destruction.Footnote 8 By tracing surrealism’s postwar engagements with the otherworldly – which its proponents located in utopianism, myths, the occult, and indigenous objects – I show how surrealists sought to reenchant postwar modernity and steer it away from its ever-destructive course. Their work fundamentally contested the dominant technological narrative of human mastery over nature and articulated (proto-)ecological principles, presciently anticipating recent developments in feminist and post-humanist scholarship. Its recovery can contribute to a more nuanced, entangled understanding of existence in the emerging context of the Anthropocene.
This article is structured into two main sections. The first one begins with a brief discussion of surrealism’s history and outlines how surrealist conceptualisations of utopia and the imagination intersect with, and can enrich, debates in IR theory. While no single work – let alone, an article – can comprehensively map the global landscape of surrealism as an artistic, cultural, and intellectual phenomenon, my analysis offers a critical but appreciative interpretation of the movement through a close engagement with Breton’s foundational work. By carefully recontextualising Breton’s extensive oeuvre – spanning literary and poetic writings, manifestoes, speeches, pamphlets, exhibitions, and statements – in the inter- and postwar period, I highlight surrealism’s origins as a sophisticated intellectual and political response to international events that is deeply relevant for contemporary IR debates on the utopian imagination. In the following section, I show the continued importance of the surrealist imagination in a time of planetary catastrophe and argue that surrealism’s long-standing critique of technological conformism and resistance to human exceptionalism remain deeply relevant for confronting the challenges associated with the Anthropocene. Surrealism’s approach to radical reimagining opens a third path between hope and despair, offering a way to re-envision futures within our catastrophic present. In the conclusion, I revisit surrealism’s contributions and limitations, emphasise its continued relevance to contemporary critical theory, and highlight its potential as an alternative to the techno-utopian visions dominating today’s political imagination.
The surrealist imagination
What does it afford us to invoke surrealism as an intellectual and political ancestry to international theory? In this section, I argue that the surrealist approach to imagination as creative and radical offers a valuable counterpoint to realism’s more pragmatic balancing of utopianism and realism. Where realists emphasised feasibility, surrealists argued that utopia’s significance lay in its power to activate the imagination. They developed specific tools for cultivating the imagination, particularly through myth-making, to envision alternative futures unconstrained by the status quo. Such surrealist emphasis on myths and futures seems especially relevant in our current moment, which is often defined by a despondent view of the present as a historical dead end.
Surrealism constitutes a crucial moment in the development of the utopian imagination as a critical category for political thought.Footnote 9 Faced with the ruins of World War One, surrealists foregrounded the imagination as necessary for the recovery of ‘the lost potential of human experience’ from a rationalist Enlightenment and its detrimental effects on ‘absolute human liberty.’Footnote 10 ‘Under the pretence of civilisation and progress,’ Breton deplored in the first surrealist manifesto, ‘we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices.’Footnote 11 Given that the early twentieth century was marked by unprecedented devastation – resulting from imperialism, industrialism, and mechanised warfare – the exclusion of such domains as relevant and valid provinces of truth was unwarranted. Yet, all was not lost. To Breton, Freudian psychoanalysis had shown how such repressed elements of reality could again be integrated into the search for truth and freedom. To surrealists, dreams represented ‘the realm of the possible, the non-identical’ and offered a ‘repository of images that, free from the constraints of reified reality, could point in the direction of a more ‘meaningful historical existence.’Footnote 12 ‘The imagination,’ Breton wrote hopefully, ‘is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights.’Footnote 13
Freudian ideas permeated Breton’s early work and were at the heart of the first surrealist manifesto. Breton, who at medical university had specialised in psychiatry, had learned about Freudian psychoanalysis during World War One when he was employed at a neuropsychiatric ward treating shell-shocked soldiers.Footnote 14 His experiences profoundly shaped the direction of surrealism. The uncontrolled way in which such soldiers would speak to him, a condition then understood as trauma-induced male hysteria, inspired Breton to develop automatism, a surrealist technique of writing in which the writer suppresses conscious control over the writing process to allow unmediated access to the unconscious mind. ‘I believe,’ he argued, ‘in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality,’ which, while ‘seemingly contradictory,’ could be merged into an ‘absolute reality.’Footnote 15 Breton’s first novel, Nadja, draws on psychoanalytical ideas about hysteria as a revelatory practice linked to sudden insights. Despite the clear links of such insights to fantasy and delusion, Breton insisted that the ‘imagination alone’ offered ‘some intimation of what can be’ and he positioned it as crucial for arriving at a larger and richer reality that included ‘certain forms of previously neglected associations,’ especially those found in dreams.Footnote 16
Besides its intellectual debt to psychoanalysis, the birth and development of surrealism were deeply intertwined with the political developments of the time.Footnote 17 Initially, in the mid-1920s, this search for freedom led surrealists to ally themselves with the communist movement with whom they shared a deep antipathy for bourgeois life, religion, and imperialism, as well as a desire for the emancipation of the international proletariat. The newly founded surrealist magazine, ‘La Révolution surréaliste,’ which was soon renamed ‘Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution,’ called for nothing less than a ‘new Declaration of the Rights of Man.’Footnote 18 Adamant to prove that their art was not an escape from reality – art for art’s sake, so to say – but instrumental in its revolutionary rearrangement, surrealists boldly proclaimed: ‘We are not utopians, we can conceive this revolution only in a social form.’Footnote 19 In his 1934 lecture ‘What Is Surrealism?,’ Breton explains the purpose of surrealism not only as a dialectic between the conscious and unconscious but also as one between individual liberation and political transformation:
In reality, we are faced with two problems, one of which is the problem raised, at the beginning of the twentieth century, by the discovery of the relations between the conscious and the unconscious … The other problem facing us is that of the social action we should pursue. We maintain that this action has its own method in dialectical materialism, and we can all the less afford to ignore this action when, I repeat, we hold the liberation of man to be the sine qua non of the liberation of the mind, and we can expect this liberation of man to result only from the proletarian revolution.Footnote 20
Despite such confident declarations, an unwavering commitment to freedom of the mind and allegiance to the revolutionary cause proved difficult to square in practice. Relations between surrealists and communists were tension-ridden and remained a constant source of controversy among surrealists. Breton himself joined the French Communist Party in 1927, but party officials nonetheless eyed him and other surrealists with suspicion.Footnote 21 When the promise of a global proletarian revolution receded from the horizon in the 1930s, a development that coincided with the increased nationalisation and Stalinization of the French Communist Party, Breton had seen enough. Describing the revolutionary 1925 declaration signed by surrealists as ‘rather confused ideologically,’ he officially broke ranks with the communist party in the 1935 pamphlet ‘The Time the Surrealists Were Right.’Footnote 22 His separation from the communist party did not signal a retreat from politics, however, and both he and other surrealists continued to speak up about political events, including the development of nuclear weapons, the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the First Indochina War, and the struggle for Algerian independence.Footnote 23 At times, they also forged coalitions with leftish movements and organisations whose objectives aligned with their own.Footnote 24
With Breton’s estrangement from communism also came a new appreciation for utopian thought and its political potential. He no longer denounced utopia as wishful thinking and instead began to study the writings of the nineteenth-century utopian socialist thinker Charles Fourier, which he first came across while in self-exile in the United States during World War Two. Fourier, who was considered a proto-surrealist by Breton, envisioned a society reorganised into cooperative communities – which he referred to as ‘phalanxes’ – where people would work according to their passions, live in harmony with nature, and share in collective prosperity without private property or coercion. Fourier believed that phalanxes would allow humans to flourish through meaningful work, free love, and gender equality. His philosophy centred on liberating human desires rather than suppressing them. To some, Breton’s turn to Fourier’s wildly speculative thought signalled a nostalgic flight from reality or retreat to wishful thinking, an interpretation that was further strengthened by the fact that Breton had left Europe and thus was at some distance from the war-ridden reality on the ground.Footnote 25 Yet, Breton was no naive utopian. He realised all too well that even after Europe’s liberation from fascism, the prospects for genuine liberty would remain dim.Footnote 26 In a 1947 addendum to Arcanum 17, a book that he wrote in the immediate months after D-Day, he cited the First French Indochina War, the continued importance of nationalism, and the ‘constraints of civilian life in peacetime’ as evidence that postwar France, and Europe more generally, would likely inherit many of the nihilist and destructive tendencies he had already seen at work in the interbellum.Footnote 27
In fact, Breton was less concerned with the contents and details of Fourier’s utopian ideas than with their revolt against traditional societal norms and uncompromising desire for social reinvention. He valued their nonconformist character and ability to drop a ‘bombshell’ on society, simply because ‘they were created completely outside the cultural line of an era.’Footnote 28 Breton, of course, ascribed a similar role to surrealist imagination, which he considered the final bulwark against unfreedom, and which he considered key to the resurrection of Europe after World War Two.Footnote 29 What kind of society, he asked in Arcanum 17, could emerge out of the ruins and ashes from World War Two if the imagination was given free rein? ‘[W]e may hope,’ he argued, ‘that out of the ideological confusion that will make the end of this war will arise a fairly large number of radical propositions formulated outside the existing framework’ of a destructive masculine rationality ‘whose bankruptcy is coming to pass fairly tumultuous today.’Footnote 30 Such proposals should transcend nationalism and instead affirm the essentially universal nature of humankind that, he insisted, continued to exist despite all man-inflicted human suffering.Footnote 31 ‘Civilization,’ he wrote, ‘independent of the not unsolvable conflicts of interest that undermine it, is one.’Footnote 32 While vast, the destruction wrought by World War Two could still prove fertile ground for the renewal or replenishment of human civilisation if the nation-state, which Breton apprehended as a dangerous hybrid of the Freudian id and ego, could give way to a new internationalism. The imagination was central to that goal.
In her 2004 introduction to Arcanum 17, literary critic Anna Balakian suggests that Breton’s response to World War Two critically foreshadowed arguments by other one-world thinkers such as Jonathan Schell, the author of the influential The Fate of the Earth. Footnote 33 Writing at a time of nuclear escalation between the United States and the Soviet Union, Schell argued that only the realisation that humanity inhabited one common world could guarantee its future existence.Footnote 34 In their call for the cultivation of the imagination, Breton and other surrealists certainly captured the prevailing political and cultural mood of the early postwar period. While not couched in the Freudian language of the ‘ego’ and ‘id,’ Lionel Trilling, a leading American literary critic and a staunch anti-communist, came to similar conclusions. Castigating liberalism for its increasingly rationalist character, he decried its creeping embrace of bureaucracy and authoritarianism.Footnote 35 Other mid-twentieth-century intellectuals, such as Günther Anders, C. Wright Mills, and Lewis Mumford, offered similar verdicts. These authors, too, strongly appealed to the imagination and fulminated against the paranoid reality that accompanied the rise of the Cold War national security state.Footnote 36 Within IR theory, E.H. Carr did not sound much different from Breton when he argued that ‘[o]ur task is to explore the ruins of our international order and discover on what fresh foundations we may hope to rebuild it.’Footnote 37 The search for new foundations took on a new urgency with the advent of thermonuclear weapons, a development that led other prominent classical realists, such as John Herz and Hans Morgenthau, to promote the idea of a world state as a solution.Footnote 38 To them, the nuclear threat of extinction illustrated the deep irrationality and moral bankruptcy of postwar modernity. In response, Herz called for the development of a new planetary Gesamtschau and argued that the transformation of the territorial state required first and foremost a ‘revolution of the mind.’Footnote 39
Surrealism sought to provide exactly that. Although I have found no direct evidence that classical realists drew inspiration from their surrealist contemporaries, their appeals to the imagination may well have been influenced, if only indirectly, by surrealism. After all, surrealism permeated cultural discourse during this period and was explicitly discussed by leading intellectuals of the time. Social theorists, including Theodor Adorno, Günther Anders, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, all recognised surrealism’s relevance as a creative practice of social and political transformation.Footnote 40 Lewis Mumford – whose work shared significant parallels with classical realist IR theoryFootnote 41 – endorsed surrealism as a useful tool for the critique of ideology. In his review of the first surrealist exhibition in the United States, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, he argued: ‘[I]t would be absurd to dismiss Surrealism as crazy. Maybe it is our civilisation that is crazy. Has it not used all the powers of rational intellect … to turn whole states into Fascist madhouses?’Footnote 42 Moreover, Anders, who described his philosophical method as explicitly surrealist,Footnote 43 influenced Herz’s analysis of nuclear weapons and technology in international politics. While surrealism’s exact influence on IR theorists remains speculative, surrealists clearly pioneered early- and mid-twentieth-century intellectual efforts – including those within IR theory – to harness the imagination in challenging the constraints of the state and the dominance of technological rationality.
Both classical realists and surrealists, moreover, viewed utopianism as useful for the activation of the imagination. Carr famously asserted that ‘any sound political thought must be based on elements of both utopia and reality.’Footnote 44 His claim that realism and utopianism must be balanced has since been taken up and refined by others, including most notably Ken Booth, who explicitly sought to develop a middle ground under the label of ‘utopian realism.’Footnote 45 Setting the agenda for the critical study of security during the 1990s, Booth’s utopian realism called for a process-oriented approach to utopia that combines the normative and the empirical, seeking ‘benign and reformist steps calculated to make a better world somewhat more probable for future generations.’Footnote 46 In contrast, André Breton’s invocation of utopianism was far more radical. Breton boldly embraced utopian thought at a time when the label had deeply negative connotations and was almost exclusively associated with the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. While he was a strong critic of Soviet-style communism, he refused to believe that his turn to utopian thought would necessarily lead to dangerous or totalitarian outcomes. Instead, he doubled down on its usefulness for confronting the postwar political situation, arguing that ‘routine hatches more distress and death than an imaginary utopia.’Footnote 47 To him, utopia remained a vital tool for activating the imagination:
I can see no harm in throwing open a window onto the most grandiose of utopian landscapes. An epoch such as ours justifies all journeys taken for the sake of the journey itself (as were those of Bergerac and Gulliver), especially if these journeys make up a challenge to conventional modes of thinking whose failures are only too obvious to all.Footnote 48
The more modest, reformist approach to utopianism promoted by classical realists was clearly wasted on Breton, who considered step-by-step progress wholly insufficient to jolt Europe out of its destructive course. The arrival of the Cold War had only reinforced such beliefs. In this fearful and paranoid political climate, the political function of utopianism resided less in developing practical steps than in its capacity to negate or rupture the status quo.
This surrealist idea of utopia as negation resonates with more current theoretical approaches within IR.Footnote 49 In his 2014 E. H. Carr Memorial Lecture, Raymond Geuss, a prominent realist political philosopher, highlighted the importance of utopian thought as concerned with ‘the social construction of “impossibility” in politics, and our ability to undo that construction.’Footnote 50 He invokes the imagination as ‘a crucial variable in determining how much I can see, how much I can understand, and whether I can occupy a position from which radical social criticism is possible.’Footnote 51 While unacknowledged, surrealism provides an important intellectual precedent for such thinking. Indeed, it is striking that subsequent attempts to cultivate the imagination in realist political thought have drawn particular attention to the literary utopias of Ursula Le Guin, an author whose texts incorporate surrealist imagery and themes, including the unconscious, in their exploration of fantastical dream worlds and nightmare planets.Footnote 52 A more explicit engagement with surrealism, I would argue, could offer a significant contribution to IR theory by revealing that the most urgent task is not merely to warn against illusory or hopelessly ambitious attempts to rationally fix, repair or manage reality, but to fundamentally question and re-conceptualise its core social and political dimensions from which other futures could be fashioned. ‘I didn’t lose sight of the fact,’ Breton stated, ‘that it is not with dry legislations, with programs, with plans, with governments that one changes the world.’Footnote 53 At a time when radical political transformation appears increasingly foreclosed, surrealism provides tools for envisioning alternative futures beyond our contemporary frame.
Surrealism and the re-enchantment of the Anthropocene
Surrealism’s celebration of an unconstrained imagination as a precondition for individual and political transformation led them to consider otherworldly sources, such as dreams, indigenous objects, the occult, magic, and the supernatural – domains existing outside the straitjacket of objective and rational modernity.Footnote 54 Breton’s own philosophical and political project during and after World War Two was defined by his quest for new myths or beginnings that could animate alternative futures to rationalist modernity. He saw myths as imaginative devices that could assist in unsettling the reality of Western civilisation as ontologically given. At the heart of his endeavour was a simple, yet provocative inquiry: ‘What should one think of the postulate that “there is no society without a social myth”? In what measure can we choose or adopt, and impose, a myth fostering the society that we judge to be desirable?’Footnote 55
To Breton and other surrealists, myths constituted a privileged conceptual terrain for interrogating the political and cultural ossification of the postwar period and were instrumental to its re-enchantment. Rallying against a modernity devoid of mystery, they sought to restore a sense of wonder as a way of experiencing the world differently. While Stengers expresses scepticism towards certain aspects of Breton’s surrealism, her call to ‘reclaim’ forms of thought dismissed as irrational by Western modernity shares surrealism’s fundamental challenge to what she calls ‘the sad, monotonous little critical or reflexive voice whispering that we should not accept being mystified.’Footnote 56 Myths, surrealists argued, could create ruptures in habitual ways of seeing and transform dominant perceptions of reality. To them, mythical re-enchantment served not as a return to pre-modern mysticism but could help foster an affective state of wonder that – breaking the spell of technological rationality without falling into simple opposition to it – intensifies feelings of ‘being connected in an affirmative way to existence.’Footnote 57
I argue that the surrealist concern with myths can enrich contemporary engagements with the Anthropocene that have likewise identified the need for new mythmaking. For instance, in their bold intervention – crafted in the manifesto-like style characteristic of Breton’s own theoretical interventions – prominent critical IR scholars have argued that the most pressing task confronting international theory today involves developing planetary imaginaries that ‘transgress academic boundaries’ and generate ‘new practices, new ideas, stories, and myths’ to make sense of – and survive – the Anthropocene.Footnote 58 Surrealism’s simultaneous critique of rationalism and scientism and insistence on the transformative potential of alternative modes of thinking – whether through utopian mythmaking, poetic imagination, occult practices, or magic – emerges as a particularly generative lens on the Anthropocene that can inspire such a search for new planetary imaginaries. In fact, surrealism’s critical juxtapositioning of the organic and artificial, the human and non-human, provides an especially incisive prism for comprehending the Anthropocene’s radical and unexpected ontological transformations. Phenomena like plastiglomerates – geological formations comprising sedimentary grains and natural debris bound together by plastic – exemplify the inherently surrealist nature of our current epoch. Amitav Ghosh compellingly argues that we inhabit an age of derangement where reality has assumed a dream-like character, manifested through meteorological and ecological events that radically exceed our established parameters of normality: unprecedented storms, persistent droughts, sudden landslides, blazing fires, and other weird climatological phenomena that defy rational prediction. Comprehending and navigating the Anthropocene demands a substantive infusion of surrealist imagination.
Surrealism’s emphasis on the illogical juxtapositions of disparate realities especially provides a powerful counterpoint to the pervasive sense of closure that characterises contemporary intellectual engagements with the Anthropocene and other global crises. Within IR theory, numerous perspectives have argued that the advent of the Anthropocene necessitates rethinking global politics from the vantage point of a world-ending catastrophe. Cameron Harrington’s observation that the discipline may need to revisit debates on the moral, political, and technological components of extinction speaks to this trend.Footnote 59 However, an exclusive focus on terminality risks engendering a defeatist nihilism that paralyses transformative potential. While species extinction and planetary habitability are obviously serious and urgent concerns, such an approach threatens to establish an exceptional politics of securitisation – whether of states, ecosystems, or the planet – ultimately foreclosing more creative and generative modes of collective response.Footnote 60 In contrast, surrealism’s approach of foregrounding myths as generative beginnings offers an alternative to the dominant narrative of apocalyptical finality, reimagining possibility where others see only closure.
Prominent representatives of the movement, such as Georges Bataille, Breton, and Max Ernst, were deeply preoccupied with the articulation of new foundational myths for society that could re-enchant modern life and offer alternative beginnings for a Europe struggling – largely unsuccessfully, they believed – to transcend its violent historical trajectory after World War Two.Footnote 61 The pivotal 1947 exhibition, ‘Le Surréalisme en 1947,’ organised by Breton and featuring Bataille’s essay ‘The Absence of Myth,’ emphasised myths’ utopian potential: myths could provide new apertures for collective life in a society that had become fundamentally disconnected from the organic, natural, and spiritual.Footnote 62 This revival of myth was an intellectually and politically challenging endeavour in postwar modernity, which, according to Bataille, was now characterised by an ‘absence of myth,’ with reality reduced to ‘an ontological given that can be located and conquered,’Footnote 63 The only myth allowed was that of its absence, which now functioned as the ‘coldest, the purest, the only true myth.’Footnote 64 Moreover, as existentialism eclipsed surrealism as the dominant philosophical movement – with Jean-Paul Sartre delivering scathing critiques that further marginalised surrealist approaches – it was perhaps no surprise that the surrealist emphasis on myths did not catch on more broadly. If anything, the turn towards mythmaking only reinforced the prevailing sentiment that the surrealist project had become quaint, estranged from postwar social and philosophical realities.
Surrealists, however, rightly countered that the wholesale denunciation of myths obscured the fact that modern life nonetheless remained fundamentally dependent on unacknowledged mythological origins. Breton especially singled out the myth of human exceptionalism – an idea with deep roots in Christianity – which he held responsible for the profound ontological rift separating humans from nature. The primary challenge confronting humanity, Breton asserted, would be to ‘convince man that he is not necessarily the king of creation that he prides himself on being.’Footnote 65 He would have readily recognised the Anthropocene as the twenty-first-century culmination of a destructive, reckless, and ecologically unsustainable way of life that he had already dissected in the prior millennium. Ascribing the global devastation of World War Two to an excessive belief in rationalism, Breton was profoundly perplexed by the persistent human faith in technological salvation. Despite the catastrophic experiences of total war and the concentration camps, as well as the increased intensity of the Cold War nuclear arms race, people somehow remained invested in technology’s redemptive promise.Footnote 66 Such a belief was wasted on Breton, who certainly would have found any lingering belief in the rational control of spaceship Earth through scientific knowledge or geoengineering as deeply naïve, unwarranted, and ultimately complicit in the problems such practices were supposed to address.
With the explicit aim of subverting such anthropocentric hubris, Breton strategically invoked and reinterpreted myths – ancient, local, and indigenous – to challenge the unsustainable status quo and imagine alternative futures in which the severed connection between humanity and the natural world might be restored or, rather, find a new footing. He even developed his own mythological framework, notably the concept of the ‘Great Invisibles’ – benign beings watching over humans – precisely to urge a radical reconsideration of human centrality. First formulated in 1942, this myth would take centre stage in the 1947 surrealist exhibition. In Arcanum 17, he likewise challenged the anthropocentric assumption that the ‘universe only has meaning for mankind, and that it has none, for instance, for animals,’ invoking legends such as the local French myth of Melusina, who, half woman and half water serpent, exposes the (phallic) fallacy of human supremacy.Footnote 67
While the surrealist re-orientation towards myths and the occult appears as remarkably prescient in its anticipation of the Anthropocene, at the time, it was considered a deeply controversial move, consistently rejected by contemporary intellectuals.Footnote 68 Mythmaking was widely criticised as a conservative practice that reified reality, with its role in legitimating twentieth-century totalitarianism well-documented.Footnote 69 The fascist appropriation of occult imagery did little to ameliorate these concerns. In 1947, the exact same year in which the surrealist exhibition on myth-making took place, Theodor Adorno published his ‘Theses Against Occultism,’ warning that occultism represented a ‘regression of consciousness’ and that transferring social causes to supernatural domains would produce docile subjects passively accepting their social position as fate: ‘The bent little fortune-tellers terrorizing their clients with crystal balls are toy models of the great ones who hold the fate of mankind in their hands.’Footnote 70 The surrealist relationship to indigenous cultures reveals another fundamental contradiction in the movement. While surrealists were ideologically anti-colonialist, they avidly collected objects from the French colonies that colonialism made available to them. They often deployed indigenous objects in ways that ignored their original cultural meanings and contexts, treating them as resources to be mined rather than as living traditions with their own intellectual history and agency. As a result, they sometimes reinforced colonial attitudes even as they challenged European rationalism.Footnote 71
Despite these problematic practices surrounding their use of myths and the occult, surrealists insisted on their critical function and viewed them as necessary for disrupting the hegemony of Western rationalism and scientific progress. Unlike fascists, they were abhorred by the reactionary values embedded in nationalism and religious dogma and it was clear that the purpose of invoking such otherworldly domains was not to celebrate some idealised past or command obedience to an obscure higher power. Rather, taking inspiration from the more radical strands of Romanticism, Breton viewed the mythical reservoir – with its rich symbolism, allegories, human-animal hybrids, and supernatural creatures – as central to the re-enchantment of postwar life and the transformation of reality. The mobilisation of otherworldly sources exposing the limits of science, rationality, and linear progress also engendered a more holistic ecological worldview that decentred humans while emphasising interspecies collaboration.Footnote 72 Breton, claims Balakian, ‘would be the darling of the ecologists if they knew about him.’Footnote 73 Combining ‘naturalistic knowledge, occult nature philosophy, poetry, and creative speculation about the secret workings of nature,’Footnote 74 he and other surrealists imagined animate planets populated by stones, minerals, plants, and animals, revealing intricate links between human creativity, animal behaviour, mythological narratives, and stories of biological, geological, and cosmic transformations.Footnote 75
For Breton, such an animate understanding of the natural world had moved more centre stage during his self-exile in the United States, where prolonged engagement with Native American perspectives profoundly influenced his view that myths and other otherworldly analogies could be utopian forces of a cosmic formation capable of dissolving boundaries between the geological and the civilisational, animals and humans, nature and society. These encounters led him to reject a stringent division between society and nature or humans and animals – a refusal he also identified and admired in Fourier’s work.Footnote 76 Breton’s experiences in the United States catalysed his reimagining of humanity’s relationship with the natural world and gestured towards an existence beyond human exceptionalism and the dominance of technological rationality.
The surrealist emphasis on the non-human and the organic resonates with emergent ecological paradigms, including recent international theory inspired by animal studies and the more-than-human theoretical turn across the social sciences and humanities.Footnote 77 Like surrealism, these challenge deep-rooted Western mechanistic conceptions of the non-human world and propose alternative ontologies that imbue nature with agency, creativity, intrinsic value, and intelligence.Footnote 78 Echoing earlier surrealist strategies, influential contemporary theorists, such as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, now advocate for mythological reinterpretations that counter purely scientific Anthropocene narratives. Haraway’s feminist reimagining of geological and biological entanglements, particularly her conceptualisation of the Chthulucene, suggests a profound shared intellectual genealogy with Breton’s mythological framework of the ‘Great Invisibles.’Footnote 79 A more explicit and thorough engagement with the surrealist tradition can discover new insights that can enrich and amplify contemporary efforts to the development of new (geo)stories about human-nature relations. In the context of the Anthropocene, the surrealist legacy challenges us to envision collective mythological frameworks that might reconfigure our understanding of ecological entanglements, inviting us to construct alternative (geo)narratives beyond current constraints. At the same time, a nuanced engagement with surrealism necessitates a critical acknowledgment of its internal contradictions. Despite his scathing critique of masculine rationality, Breton’s personal beliefs regarding sex and gender severely limited the reach of his ecological imagination. His writings frequently objectified women, reducing them to passive muses for male hero poets. While problematic in and of itself, female surrealist artists like Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning – who were never part of Breton’s inner circle – have revealed intricate connections between environmental exploitation and gendered oppression, showing that the surrealist imagination can productively interrogate intersectional systems of domination.Footnote 80 Carrington’s foregrounding of cooking as a magical, surrealist practice offers an important yet somewhat overlooked intellectual lineage to contemporary contributions to rethink the boundaries between human and non-human existence from the vantage point of the kitchen.Footnote 81
To IR theorists grappling with the challenges posed by the Anthropocene, the broader relevance of the surrealist legacy resides in its capacity to provoke radical reimaginings of human-nature relations that can point to alternative Anthropocene futures. Surrealist explorations of myth may offer heuristic devices for imaginative revelation. They can defamiliarise familiar conceptions and generate conceptual apertures to the unanticipated and incalculable, evoking what Julia Kristeva calls a ‘“future anterior” that will never take place, never come about as such’ – a radical reimagining that functions that can help bring about an ‘upheaval of present place and meaning.’Footnote 82 Against attempts to rethink the Anthropocene from an apocalyptic vantage point, surrealism helps us imagine building blocks for alternative futures and ways of life.
Conclusion
The catastrophic events during the first half of the twentieth century gave birth to surrealism as a radical intellectual response that remains remarkably relevant to contemporary international theory. By recognising André Breton as a significant political thinker rather than merely an agent provocateur, I argued that his writings, as well as those of other surrealists, offer IR theory a fundamental reconceptualisation of utopian thinking itself. Where E.H. Carr and his successors sought a balanced middle ground between utopia and reality, Breton’s embrace of utopia’s disruptive potential provides a different genealogy of utopian thought from which IR scholars can draw. For surrealists, utopia functioned not as a blueprint for incremental reform but as a tool for rupturing the status quo and unreleasing the revolutionary power of the imagination. By rejecting the subordination of imagination to rationality, surrealism offers other ways of conceiving and thinking about conventional IR approaches to political change, showing how genuine political change begins not with pragmatic compromises between idealism and realism, but with the deliberate cultivation of imaginative practices.
I also examined the increased surrealist reliance on myths as creative devices through which to disrupt technological rationality and re-enchant reality. Breton’s rejection of human exceptionalism – the myth that animated Western modernity – and his appreciation of human-nature entanglements preceded feminist, queer, and more-than-human approaches by several decades. More importantly, surrealists offered not just critique but also creative and embodied practices for experiencing the world differently.Footnote 83 This practical dimension makes surrealism especially relevant to the Anthropocene. As Anna Leander argues, the irreducible heterogeneity of the Anthropocene calls for methodological approaches that can capture its multiplicity without reducing it to simplified narratives. Her suggestion that collaging offers such an approach directly connects to surrealism’s fundamental practice of creative juxtaposition and chance encounters – placing disconnected or foreign realities alongside each other to generate new insights and possibilities for transformation.Footnote 84
This surrealist method allows us to dwell within the ruins of our earthly condition while finding within its multiple forms of alienation possibilities for renewed connection and meaning. This capacity to hold contradiction – to acknowledge catastrophe without surrendering to it – makes surrealism particularly valuable for confronting planetary crises. Though not necessarily optimistic about the future, surrealists maintained what Adorno called the ‘dialectic of subjective freedom in the state of objective unfreedom,’ a commitment that reaffirms the vital importance of imagination in times of apparent closure.Footnote 85 Against apocalyptic approaches to the Anthropocene that foreclose possibility, surrealism offers what Benjamin might call a ‘dialectical image’ that disrupts progress narratives while opening space for radical reimagining.Footnote 86
At the same time, an uncritical adoption of surrealist methods risks reproducing power inequalities rather than dismantling them. The problematic aspects of the movement’s history demand critical scrutiny and its contradictory character as an anti-colonial tradition that nonetheless perpetuated aspects of the colonial gaze cannot be overlooked. The movement’s appropriation of indigenous objects and stories offers a particularly telling example of this tension and contains a lesson that remains essential for critical theory today: resistance to rationality and technological domination must avoid mystifying or fetishising indigenous or marginalised perspectives as abstract categories to be instrumentally deployed against Western modernity.Footnote 87
Still, when used reflexively, surrealism’s relationship to contemporary Indigenous, Black, queer, feminist, and other transformative movements shows productive alignments that extend beyond these limitations. Though emerging from radically different historical and cultural positions, such movements often incorporate surrealist techniques or methods to speculate about or render visible alternative modes of being.Footnote 88 For instance, the surrealist emphasis on imagination as a political force resonates with José Esteban Muñoz’s ideas about queer utopianism – the insistence that the here and now can be transcended through critical hope and queer world-making.Footnote 89 Similarly, Indigenous futurisms – Grace Dillon’s term for approaches that signify a return to ancestral traditions in navigating post-colonial futures – share surrealism’s fondness for myths and disruption of linear temporality.Footnote 90 The most productive contemporary engagements with surrealism acknowledge its contradictions while harnessing its subversive potential. The intellectual and artistic movement of Afro-surrealism exemplifies this approach. Rather than imitating European surrealism, it draws on postwar Black theory and culture, as well as the Caribbean surrealism developed by Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, to reveal the absurdity of racial capitalism through the strange and fantastical.Footnote 91 Their approach demonstrates how surrealism remains vital not as a singular tradition positioned above others but as a rich historical tradition that continues to animate speculative practices across theoretical and political movements.Footnote 92
Surrealism’s techniques for destabilising reality continue to offer valuable pathways for reimagining possible futures in response to contemporary crises. Although surrealism was invented a century ago, the catastrophes that provoked its birth share striking parallels with our contemporary predicament: democratic erosion, resurgent authoritarianism, intensifying inequalities, and devastating conflicts. The urgency of the surrealist imagination becomes especially evident when contrasted with Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian visions that have infiltrated contemporary political reality. Elon Musk stands as the definitive embodiment of this rationalist and linear utopian vision. Through space colonisation, artificial intelligence, and neural implants, his vision amplifies the fundamental alienation at the heart of technological rationalism – alienation from each other, our bodies, and ultimately our planet itself. His Mars colonisation project represents the ultimate rationalist flight, the belief that planetary crisis demands not a reimagining of our relationship to Earth, but the transplantation of existing patterns of exploitation to other worlds. Musk’s aspiration to transcend Earth’s gravity remains weighed down by precisely what he claims to overcome – a disenchanted worldview that reduces life to calculation and control. For all its spectacular technology, this vision offers only rocket fuel with nowhere genuinely new to land.
Surrealism offers not technological transcendence, but a transformative reimagining. Its techniques of juxtapositioning and mythmaking provide concrete tools for breaking through the calcified categories of reality, revealing possibilities foreclosed by conventional analysis. The surrealist emphasis on imagination as a world-making force reminds us that before we can build different worlds, we must first be able to conceive them. In our current moment of overlapping crises, when established politics seem increasingly incapable of addressing planetary challenges, surrealism offers not an escape from reality but a more profound engagement with it – one that insists, as Breton did, that ‘miracle itself can be within our reach.’Footnote 93 This surrealist conviction that the seemingly impossible can become possible through the act of reimagining offers international theory not just a historical reference point for utopian thought, but a set of creative practices for confronting our catastrophic present.
Acknowledgements
Previous iterations of this manuscript were presented at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) research unit ‘Peace and Violence’ in June 2024, and at the ‘Improvising the Future’ workshop during the European Workshops in International Studies (EWIS) in Istanbul, 3–5 July 2024. I am grateful to the participants at both venues for their comments and suggestions. I wish to express particular thanks to Corine van Emmerik, whose thoughtful feedback throughout the development of this article substantially sharpened the final analysis. The author acknowledges the use of Claude Sonnet 3.7 (Anthropic) for brainstorming, feedback and copy-editing. All AI-generated content was critically evaluated, fact-checked against primary sources, and integrated into the author’s original scholarly framework. Final interpretations, arguments, and conclusions remain entirely the responsibility of the author.
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