Dada

This chapter focuses on the role of community in the surrealist enterprise. Community, for surrealism, has a double aspect. It addresses the dynamics of the movement's collective identity, particularly role of imaginative endeavour in the constitution of movement's collective identity. It entails a belief that the repressive structures of society, family, country, religion, can be overthrown and replaced by a new, non-hierarchical mode of sociability. Simone Breton offers the first definition of surrealism as 'a certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather well to the dream state'. Surrealism repeatedly attempted to situate itself beyond art to participate in an aesthetic revolution that would incorporate a concrete political dimension, even if this fell short of direct political action. In a sense reciprocal love, with its valorization of sexual difference, represents a limit to the thought of community in surrealism. The artwork does not reflect the immanent essence of community, but exposes singular beings to the limit of language.