adornoble:
“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.*
*I know that these last two sentences are going to delight a certain number of simpletons who have been trying for a long time to catch me up in a contradiction with myself. Thus, am I really saying that ‘the simplest Surrealist act…?’ So what if I am! And while some, with an obvious axe to grind, seize the opportunity to ask me ‘what I’m waiting for,’ others raise a hue and cry about anarchy and try to pretend they have caught me in flagrante delicto committing an act of revolutionary indiscipline. Nothing is easier for me than to deprive these people of the cheap effect they might have. Yes, I am concerned to learn whether or not a person is blessed with violence before asking myself whether, in that person, violence compromises or does not compromise. I believe in the absolute virtue of anything that takes place, spontaneously or not, in the sense of non-acceptance, and no reasons of general efficacity, from which long, pre-revolutionary patience draws its inspiration—reasons to which I defer—will make me deaf to the cry which can be wrenched from us at every moment by the frightful disproportion between what is gained and what is lost, between what is granted and what is suffered. As for the act that I term the simplest: it is clear that my intention is not to recommend it above every other because it is simple, and to try and pick a quarrel with me on this point is tantamount to asking, in bourgeois fashion, any nonconformist why he doesn’t commit suicide, or any revolutionary why he doesn’t pack up and go live in the U.S.S.R. Don’t come to me with such stories! The haste with which certain people would be only too happy to see me disappear, coupled with my own natural tendency to agitation, are in themselves sufficient reason for me not to clear out of here for no good reason.”
- André Breton