ABSTRACT
Considerations of the object frequently adopt this relational emphasis: linguistics distinguishes between syntactical objects and subjects, while taxonomy concerns itself with the naming, ordering. An intensified interest in the object from the early 1930s onwards, in critical texts, analytical games, documentary images and above all in a thirst for finding, making and displaying unexpected objects, may partly have been a riposte to those who viewed surrealism as a movement of aesthetes and idealists. In each case, while the actual or potential materiality of the object in surrealism guarantees its pertinence, this object also tends to present an open, mobile category of being, one in process rather than fixed in its meanings: an enigma, a doorway. From the outset, surrealist practice notably automatic writing produced representations of unfamiliar and destabilizing objects belonging to a world of fantastic literature, fairy tales or the bric-a-brac of dreams that retained just enough of an echo of their more tangible everyday cousins to be believable.
