ABSTRACT
The supreme point, or the sublime point, defined by Breton in the second manifesto as the location at which 'life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions', is the motive point of surrealism. Sebbag ascribes Breton's assumption of the term 'supreme point' to the influence of Michel Carrouges, a Catholic historian with whom Breton had become friendly and who had published his book Andre Breton et les donnees fondamentales du surrealisme in 1950. According to Sebbag, Breton has so far mentioned neither Hegel nor the term 'Supreme Point' in connection with this 'point of coincidence', which emerge directly for the first time only in the course of his 1952 conversations with Andre Parinaud. In emphasizing the Hegelian aspects of the supreme point, Breton himself insisted that surrealism 'can in no way be situated on the mystic plane'.
