Waiter Benjamin and surrealism The story of a revolutionary spell Michael Lowy ‘Fascination’ is the only term that does justice to the intensity of the feelings Waiter Benjamin experienced when he discovered surrealism in 1926-27. His very efforts to escape the spell of the movement founded by Andre Breton and his friends are an expression […]
'Surrealism' tag archive
Cornelius Castoriadis
Cornelius Castoriadis An Interview The following interview with Cornelius Castoriadis took place at the University of Essex, in late Feburary 1990. Castoriadis is a leading figure in the thought and politics of the postwar period in France. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s he was a member of the now almost legendary political organization, Socialisme […]
The Situationist International
The Situationist International: A Case of Spectacular Neglect Sadie Plant The recent exhibitions of Situationist art and paraphernalia in London, Paris, and Boston, have given the Situationist International (SI) an unprecedented academic and cultural profile. Even during the movement’s most active period, when many of its ideas and practices were realised in the events in […]
War on latency: On some relations between surrealism and terror
Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer […]
Flux and flurry
Flux and flurry Stillness and hypermovement in animated worlds Esther leslie Animation, as any Wikipedia reader knows, is ‘the optical illusion of movement’, whether achieved through photographing drawings, moving clay models and recording the tweaks frame by frame, drawing directly on film or devising models digitally. But the definition is a weak one, or only […]