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On Benjamin Peret's book _Anthologie de l 'amour sublime_

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited Friedrich Engels, Jean-José Marchand, Karl Marx, Benjamin Péret

Description

Manuscript by André Breton dated 26^th December 1956 that would be published in Arts on the subject of L'Anthologie de l'amour sublime by Benjamin Péret.

Here we see the appearance, apropos a remark about cinema, of a figure from the period: B.B. At the end of 1956, Benjamin Péret published his Anthology of Sublime Love, a pendant to the book on black humour published by his friend Breton at the end of the war. At the behest of Arts, Breton comments on the work of ‘Benjamin’ by returning to the social dimension of approaches to love, including Marxist critiques of bourgeois morality; but Péret’s work, and surrealism more generally, are situated beyond this critique, recasting in much more radical terms a vision that is incited to go beyond mere criticism so as to propose and exalt a model whose exemplar was offered by Breton himself in his major texts Nadja and Mad Love.

Signed handwritten manuscript, Paris, 26 December 1956
1 in-4° page with title: manuscript, signed and dated by André Breton in blue ink, with deletions and corrections, of the text published in Arts journal of 8 January 1957 in response to questions from Jean-José Marchand relating to the publication of the Anthology of Sublime Love by Benjamin Péret.
‘Love, love in its highest form, for which Benjamin Péret shows that which has founded and upheld it in luminous manner, transcends […] the “love ideal” […] of those pseudo-accounts organised around resignation or cynicism and thus bearing within them the principle of their own disintegration.’

A press cutting of Breton’s text is also included.

Translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski

Bibliography

André Breton (Édition publiée sous la direction d'Étienne-Alain Hubert avec la collaboration de Philippe Bernier et Marie-Claire Dumas), « [Benjamin : Anthologie sur l'amour sublime] », Perspective cavalière, Œuvres complètes, tome IV, Écrits sur l'art et autres textes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 2008, p.954-956, notice p.1417.