Poetics

The Great War, in which a number of future surrealists participated, produced 'this madman who did not believe in the war' as commemorated in the inaugural work of surrealist experience, the proto-surrealist narrative, composed by Andre Breton in 1918, a text and experience which Breton will recall throughout his life. This text also marks the encounter of language and madness in surrealist experience. Breton begins to familiarize himself with Freud as reported in Emmanuel Regis's Precis de psychiatrie and subsequently in Regis and Angelo Hesnard's considerable book La Psychoanalyse des nevroses et des psychoses, and it was precisely the question of what type and model of experience and attention. For Paul Eluard and Breton the philosophical formulation available to them for this anthropology, a formulation which also made available a certain way of thinking, came through Heraclitus but also from Hegel, the Hegel of the Philosophie de l'esprit.