ABSTRACT
Libido Liberated and Love Sublime The constellation of experimental art, thought and existential invention known as Surrealism is prophetic for the twentieth-century decipherment of Eros. The Surrealists drew a line under the culture and civilisation that had come to a terminal expression in the First World War. Explosively and publicly, they declared a rebeginning. Theirs was the first movement to incorporate the Freudian discovery of the unconscious and of the world of dream; and the first to link Freudian perspectives and insights with those of Marx and, more implicitly, of Nietzsche, in the triangular matrix of influence that formatively impressed a vast part of France’s intellectual elite throughout the century just closed.
