ABSTRACT
In theoretical terms surrealism is constituted both as an epistemology and as a set of practices. The surrealist movement, throughout its long history and its many participants, has developed its epistemological means with the aim of provoking revolutionary change in life and in the world. The emphasis on automatism in surrealism's foundation, underlined by Andre Breton in the dictionary definition given in the first manifesto, has tended to overshadow the second, philosophical, part of Breton's definition, that surrealism 'is based on belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations'. Surrealism's sense of unity is thus not the projection of a transcendent absolute or ideal, in either the Hegelian or the Mallarmean sense, but rather a terrain, a space for encounter offering the possibility of a realization of the supreme point at which contradictions are resolved. The fear of contingency in Mallarme's attitude reveals the limitations surrealism would find more generally within Symbolism.
