Surrealism lives on, more vibrant, more tenacious than ever.
—Suzanne Césaire, “1943: Le Surréalisme et nous,” 1943Surrealism is the “invisible ray” which will one day enable us to win out over our opponents.
—Andre Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 1924
Do you sometimes feel the world has turned surreal lately?1 You are not alone. Ms. Rachel, the “Queen of Toddler TV” recently stated as much.2 In 2016, “surreal” was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. Things have only gone downhill from there: In 2026, rogue AI models chat in a “surreal” mix of James Joyce and tech-bro jargon.3 And a rogue US government speaks surreal “weave” while its enemies win the propaganda war with Lego videos in an unprovoked conflict for unclear (rather than nuclear) gain.4 “Surrealism is currently enjoying a modern renaissance,” but not (only) in the artsy sense.5 It’s time for us to reappropriate “surrealism” both as a descriptive category and as a political strategy.6 In this essay, I first show how the category allows us to understand the recent rise of tyranny as maliciously surreal. I then propose a political surrealism that mobilizes euphoria against the current depletion of reason and imagination through AI and brainrot, national protectionism and psychological repression.7 The tech bros’ artificial “superintelligence beyond human capacity” pales beside the infinite force of imagination-powered human minds.8
1. Tyranny
In a recent essay, Naomi Klein writes of the 2025 surrealism show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris:
The showstopper was [Max] Ernst’s 1937 The Angel of Hearth and Home [reproduced above], a monster so vibrant and beautiful it takes a moment to realize that its flailing, stomping limbs form the shape of a swastika. Ernst had been inspired to create this creature during the early days of the Spanish Civil War, when the Popular Front still had a chance. Once Hitler and Mussolini joined the war, the cause was lost, and Ernst gave the painting a new title, The Triumph of Surrealism—irony of the most acrid sort.9
In contrast, I will argue that Ernst’s Triumph of Surrealism really is the unironic triumph of tyranny. To see this, we first need a proper understanding of tyranny:
Socrates: First, he is led to all the kinds of lawlessness that those who are leading him call freedom … And when the … desires … grow as large as possible, they plant the sting of longing in it. Then this leader … adopts madness as its bodyguard and becomes frenzied.
Adeimantus: You’ve perfectly described the evolution of a tyrannical man.10
For Plato, the tyrannical excess of power is but one of many symptoms of a lack of self-control.11 Besides power, this includes an excess of rage, fear, money, and libido. For example, in 2024, a Trump-stacked Supreme Court ruled that a former US president is entitled “to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution” within the purview of presidential powers.12 Accordingly, Trump now thinks: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”13 In 2025, he “reaped an ‘unprecedented’ $2.2bn in … revenues” while federal oversight of his actions waned.14 But excess does not stop at money and power. Tyrants scream and scoff, disdain and break the law. Trump, for instance, has lashed out at several female reporters, calling them “ugly,” “stupid,” and “piggy.”15
He was convicted of thirty four felony counts of falsifying business records connected to payments tied to the 2016 election.16 And he has called supreme court justices who ruled his unilateral tariffs illegal in February 2026 a “disgrace to our nation.”17 Journalist James Kirchick called Trump “outrageous … transgressive … catty, … a narcissist the likes of which we haven’t seen since Alexander the Great.”18 Trump is a tyrant, excessive in all directions. This allows other, minor tyrants to identify with him: “You will never humiliate me again! That’s why I voted for Donald Trump!”19 The minor tyrant lives the Big Tyrant’s excesses by proxy—never mind their own degree of oppression. Today, tyranny is a form of life.Whence tyranny? Plato says: “Our dreams make it clear that there is a dangerous, wild, and lawless form of desire in everyone.”20 Democracies, Plato says, advocate for freedom, which will demand more freedom until there are no guardrails left to repress everybody’s inner tyrant.21 In contrast, the cause of contemporary tyrannies is capitalism. “My barn, my rules!” is the rallying cry of the ideology of private property, understood as a sphere of absence of external interference, or exclusive use.22 Accordingly, capitalistic personalities wish to be exempt from external interference.23 They treat their thoughts, desires, and actions as private property.24 Furthermore, capitalism favors limitless accumulation. The capitalistic personality is thus encouraged to consume, acquire, accumulate more and more. And there we have our tyrant: Insatiable and unaccountable. Capitalism cultivates tyranny.25
As antidote, Plato suggests individual regulation. We should surround ourselves with sophisticated people and feast “on fine arguments and speculations,” consume moderately, and live a mediocre life.26 Yet against tyranny as a collective form of life under capitalism, temperate patterns of individual consumption remain toothless.27 We need a more fundamental, more collective approach.
In his 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism,” André Breton suggests an anti-tyrannical kind of excess instead—opposed to reason, aesthetics, and morality. “All the principal problems of life,” he says, could be solved by a “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express … the actual functioning of thought.”28 Eventually, this would lead to “the future resolution” of dreams and reality, imagination and reason, “into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”29 Surreality is thus the unity of imagination and reason, dreaming and wakefulness.
How does surrealism solve “all the principal problems of life”?30 Surrealism picks up on Freudian psychoanalysis yet points far beyond it. Classically, one would distinguish “reason” from “imagination,” where “reason” is the realm of essence, logic, and truth, while “imagination” handles sense perceptions in the absence of their proximate causes. Thus, you read this sentence today and remember it later. Reading today is sense perception. Remembering later is imagination. So are recombinations of previously apprehended materials into new shapes and forms. This distance from their original causes traditionally situates imaginations closer to illusions and falsities. In the service of truth, one would thus want to minimize the imagination. Yet repression often leads to pathologies: The repressed content resurfaces, is acted out, disturbs us, we don’t know what is up but are driven to overcompensate, etc. It thus seems as if we could either repress, face psychopathologies, and access true knowledge, or else not repress, face our repressed content, and remain confused about knowledge.
Psychoanalysis emancipates the imagination in the service of truth and psychological well-being. The order of appearance of our various daily experiences generates idiosyncratic connections between them. Suppose somebody’s laughter reminded me of you. The similarity of that person’s laughter to my memory of you sparked the connection. But there is no real connection between you and that other person. The connection is purely experiential, not logical or conceptual. Each person’s imagination has its own internal “order” according to the idiosyncratic connection of the imaginations that constitute that person. When we allow ourselves to focus on our immediate associations regarding images, fantasies, feelings, words, and so forth, we can trace these connections within ourselves. And by allowing these imaginary contents to surface, we can process them.31 They then stop nagging us. In dreams, we face our imaginations with barely any external input.32 Through our dreams, we can zoom in on the traces of past experiences associated and recombined within us. Against tradition, we thus reach insights about ourselves through the imagination and not by repressing it.
However, “no means has been designated a priori for carrying out this undertaking.”33 The success of EMDR, art therapy, dance therapy, somatic therapy, and others prove that imaginations and unconscious content can be processed in many ways.34 Yet these practices relegate to individual medical procedures the responsibility to deal with the damages done by political oppression and exploitation. Breton suggests culture instead. “Rather than transform … dreams into symptoms, [surrealists] transform them into artistic creations … [in order to] escape the fate of neurosis and, through this detour, make contact with reality.”35
Insofar as tyrannical excess is a “principal problem of life,” surrealism understands it as an effect of repression accordingly.36 Tyrannical greed, obsession, and violence are symptoms of the repressive systems that tease and discipline people into submission. It is counter-violence, both sheltered and imprisoned by capitalism: thoughts, actions, and desires are commodified into private property. Unhinged urges are masked as expressions of individuality, justified by the capitalist drive to limitless accumulation. Surrealism envisions a culture and an aesthetic practice that would facilitate a sustainable expression of such repressed content, helping to process and thereby manage it. In this way, surrealist excess aims to foreclose the excess of the capitalistic tyrant.
2. Tyranny’s Surrealism
I will now show that tyranny is naturally surreal. Breton suggests free association, automatic writing, and other techniques to help repressed content surface. Upon emergence, this repressed content often exhibits an “extreme degree of immediate absurdity.”37 What Breton doesn’t say is that this “absurdity” is a component of the social contract, hence the conceptual underpinning of constitutional states.38 Other than everyday contractual exchanges, this ‘social contract’ is neither concerned with the exchange of goods nor with voluntary agreement: It is an exchange of submission for protection.39 You submit to the rules and the state or the general public will protect you.40 This happens to be the origin story of constitutional states. For constitutions, basic laws, the UN charter, etc., were explicitly envisioned as social contracts. The US constitution, for instance, begins: “We the People … establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare.”41 Of course, this counts only partially and only for some. But of interest for the current line of argumentation is only the general model.
With Charles Mills, we can extend this logic of “submission for protection” to questions of knowledge: The epistemic contract is “an idealized consensus about cognitive norms … about what counts as a correct, objective interpretation of the world, and for agreeing to this view, one is (‘contractually’) granted full cognitive standing in the polity, the official epistemic community.”42 If you stay within these cognitive norms, so goes the promise, you will be generally protected: People will take you seriously and you can in principle be heard as a respected member of society.
According to that model, outside these epistemic laws punishment looms. Submission to the epistemic contract is thus a violent process. Breton describes how our otherwise infinite power of imagination is forced to submit: “Threat is piled upon threat, one yields … This imagination which knows no bounds is henceforth allowed to be exercised only in strict accordance with the laws of an arbitrary utility.”43 People are thus violently disciplined into submitting to the epistemic contract and its alleged “utilities”: the instrumentalization of the imagination (or of thought more generally) for external purposes.44 Those who nevertheless “retain a certain lucidity” are open to surrealist creativity, to the emancipation of the imagination, while to others awaits the “lusterless fate” of depression.45 In the words of Ezra Horbury: Mortals “must have the fairies beaten out of [them] … but a fairy is never expected to grow up.”46
That which operates outside the epistemic contract and is yet actually real appears to us as surreal, as simultaneously absurd (like a dream or an imagination) and more real than ordinary reality. It is absurd because, residing outside the epistemic contract, it should not be real. Yet it is more real than usual reality because here, otherwise repressed content actualizes—things which we thought might exist but which we are commonly licensed to ignore. This causes surprise, accompanied by the otherwise repressed or sanctioned feelings—such as shame, anger, guilt, excitement, and entitlement—covered over by ridicule or alienation as an attempt to distance ourselves from the surfaced content. This emotional over-charge brings about the impression of a surplus of reality. Tyranny naturally tends towards the surreal: Its excessiveness generates a political reality beyond the epistemic contract. Consequently, if you feel that things have been going crazy, you are entirely correct. Here are two examples:
1. Return of the repressed: People’s power of imagination is violently disciplined into an epistemic contract. The recovery of repressed content looks absurd or ridiculous. Tyrants are a case in point:47 Hitler’s moustache as well as Trump’s hair and Mar-a-Lago faces indicate this. Accordingly, right-wing rhetoric regularly contains “humor, braggadocio, anecdotes, grievances and grand promises … non sequiturs, fantastical falsehoods and withering attacks on opponents … vulgarities and superlatives,” e.g.:48
a. I can do whatever I want and nobody can stop me—court orders included.
b. Immigrants, Mexicans, Roma, Jews, communists, antifa, “the left,” trans women, and others I have never seen before are conspiring against me. The governments of the world made up a hoax to make fun of us. They are also trying to exchange the population in my country for a different one.
c. I have a micro-bush on my philtrum and everybody is laughing at me.
According to the epistemic contract of liberal democracies, these statements should be illegitimate absurdities that we do not have to take seriously. Until recently, they would have read as dream-like metonymies, idiosyncratic exaggerations, narcissistic fantasies of power (a), a persecution complex (b), and fears of social exclusion (c). Yet today, a) and b) exert actual power.49 Thus merging absurdity and power, dreaming and wakefulness, imagination and reason, such right-wing rhetoric is a malicious surrealism in the service of tyrannical excesses, heavily pushed by online propaganda.50
2. Gaslighting: The epistemic contract allegedly protects us. But it can take on “a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions.”51 Thus, although Black and brown people experience blatant racism, we are asked to pretend that we were living in a general meritocracy with unfortunate exceptions. Hegemonic liberals commonly cultivate the habit of ignoring minoritized realities, gaslighting people into submission to an openly distorted epistemic contract. In so doing, they are complicit in normalizing and perfecting such gaslighting more generally. Akin to Aimé Césaire’s boomerang effect, this toxic epistemology can backfire.52 And it does: Today, people such as Mark Zuckerberg, who fund Trump’s tyrannical regime, claim to defend a “balance of power as the foundation of safety.”53 Those who actively undo the material and legal conditions of democracy and equality operate in the name of democracy and equality.
The epistemic contract of liberal democracies commands that we take each speaker equally seriously. If we disagree, we must argue accordingly. But the tyrannical strategy is to say that tyrants are playing by the rules while they obviously do not play by the rules. In this situation, arguing against them is a waste of time and energy. But if we say so and act accordingly, we are breaking the rules of liberal discourse ourselves: We are then no longer recognizing people like Trump and Zuckerberg as equal participants in liberal-democratic discourse. Consequently, by openly lying, tyrants are breaking the epistemic contract of liberal democracies. And by breaking the contract, they force us to either maintain liberal ideals, argue against them and get caught up in pointless debates, or, inversely, join them in breaking the liberal-epistemic contract by denying them the equality of all speakers (just as they deny us equality as well). If liberals do the former, tyrants win. If liberals do the latter, tyrants perform the tearful damsel of democracy and throw shade at the liberals. For liberals, it’s a lose-lose game.
In this way, the liberal-democratic epistemic contract is both real and fictitious: It is real in that it serves as a limit to be broken by tyrants. It is real in that some liberals adhere to it and try to confront right-wing rhetoric at face value. But it is fictitious in that breaking it is easy and encouraged by adherents of the right-wing. It is fictitious also in that it must be broken in order to be defended. The epistemic contract of liberal democracies is thus simultaneously real and fictitious, which is properly surreal: This should not happen, yet it does and both occur simultaneously.
My point is that right-wing actors and rhetorics are properly surreal, and so is their weaponization of the liberal-democratic epistemic contract against itself. I thus disagree with Klein: Max Ernst is entirely correct. The triumph of tyranny is the triumph of a (malicious) surrealism. This partially explains the recent institutional interest in classical surrealisms: Art, ever the seismograph of politics and culture, indicates the political paradigm shift. Meanwhile, withdrawing into “relatable” aesthetics and centrist proposals means ceding political and affective territory to the right.54 “The supreme task of art in our epoch is to take part actively and consciously” in preparing (what Spivak called) “Revolutions That As Yet Have No Model.”55 For twenty-first century tyranny has only just started. Its acrid revolutions have no model as of yet. Now is the time to propose a more audacious, political surrealism that can match the crazy.
3. From Poetic Surrealism to Political Surrealism
Surrealism merges reason and imagination for political and individual emancipation. I will now develop a twenty-first century political surrealism, starting with a critique of Breton:
Firstly: Is surrealism irrational? No. Breton wrongly identified rationality with the submission of reason to an epistemic contract: Under the reign of logic, he says, reason serves an alleged utility and must adhere to accepted practices.56 Imagination is repressed. Such instrumental reason is, however, not the only possible use of reason. Instrumental reason serves ends outside of rationality such as domination, exploitation, socialist utopias, Marxist ideology, the accumulation of capital, and the maintenance of an epistemic community. Following Leonora Carrington, it is just “the petty coagulated nightmare in the mind of the man who rules over our species.”57 Political surrealism envisions another relation between imagination and reason, which includes a reason not opposed to the imagination (on which more later).58
Secondly: Is all imagination good imagination? No. Tyranny is like doomscrolling, the occasional fun factor overshadowed by overall emptiness. Its excess is an infinite transgression of finite limits (laws, morality, resources, etc.) for some(one). It can only ever rejoice in temporary transgression and will immediately be disappointed in meeting the next limit. Tyrants are sad people. The excess of political surrealism, by contrast, experiences its own creative force as powerful:59 This is coming along great! Joy is the experience of an increase of power.60 In this way, creativity promises empowerment and “glowing excitement”61 or “euphoria.” That is why art, science, and politics can be literally empowering and euphoric: In creating, we gain a joyful confidence that can carry on and over elsewhere. It allows for an experience of infinity: We can paint, write, joke, organize on and on ad infinitum, driven from within. Consequently, euphoria is the maximization of the driving force of surrealism: creativity. In this way, political surrealism differs from other practices that tie creativity to external purposes such as public morale, dialectical materialism, or socialist utopianism.62 So then, imaginations that allow for empowerment and euphoria are what we are after.
Thirdly, although Breton drafted a “poetic surrealism,” its goals had always been political.63 It was “a permanent protest or general strike against political compromise, artistic subservience, and authoritarianism,” which at times “opted for the Marxist doctrine in the realm of social problems.”64 Today, surrealism has been commodified into a circumscribed style, a set of people and positions.65 “Surrealist weirdness saturates everything from kids’ TV to commercials and pop videos.”66 I suggest to re-politicize surrealism and apply it to politics creatively: What could labor, political constitutions, political institutions, social relations, progressive architectures, toys, or interior designs look like?67
Today, most people abstain from concrete utopian experiments.68 This renunciation, I claim, originates in a defeatist fear of thinking big. It is a symptom of the repression of the imagination that surrealism set out to undo. Such austerity can barely hope to change the social conditions that nevertheless motivate its aesthetic excess (and success). “This type of revolution is not enough, and it will never be enough.”69 As a result, a profound frustration (or desperation) repeatedly manifests in violent fantasies akin to the tyrannical excesses outlined above.70 This is the case even in some flavors of classical surrealism, such as in Salvador Dalí’s obsession with violence in his “paranoiac-critical method.”71 Instead of diminishing its political aspirations, or submitting to some other political program, the political surrealism I propose applies surrealistic techniques to political questions directly.
4. Utopian Surrealisms
Contemporary tech lords operate with “intelligence” as a resource that will allegedly become abundant with artificial general intelligence (AGI): “The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards.”72 Yet as is customary under capitalism, original accumulation strikes again: Big companies swoop up the lion’s share of AI capacities while the material conditions for human imagination, creativity, and hence intellectual progress are slashed by the minute. Just as in industrialization and digitalization, AI will degrade people to extensions of nonhuman actors yet again. The twentieth-century worker served the conveyor. The twenty-first-century nurse feeds the app. According to Zuckerberg, “people will [soon] be able to use superintelligence beyond human capacity.”73 But judging by history and capitalism, alleged “superintelligences” will soon use people beyond human capacities instead.74 We will be what Cory Doctorow calls “reverse centaurs”: organic servants to AI commanders.75 Currently, the wrong utopias are winning out. Against such tyrannical “superintelligences,” we should position a political, materialistic, utopian surrealism.
To the present day, we don’t know what an empowered mind can do.76 To see this, consider that, contra Breton, the emancipation of the imagination is a necessary condition for actual rationality beyond instrumental reason and oppressive contracts, even for arch rationalists like René Descartes. In the famous Meditations, Descartes’s strategy to find truth is akin to finding the needle in a haystack: Your best bet is to burn the hay. Consequently, Descartes decides to mistrust everything that is remotely doubtful, even though some of these things may not be false. Instead of repressing his imagination, he thus decides to escalate it: “I … will … deceive myself, by pretending [hence imagining] … that these former opinions [all of them] are utterly false.”77 He finds that even if and while he does this, his own thinking process as such cannot reasonably be doubted. It’s still Descartes himself who is imagining himself to be deceived about everything. Consequently, in spite of imagining everything to be false, the fact of his existence must be true (the Cogito, or “I think”), at least while he is doubting. An unhinged imagination thus enables reason and is not opposed to it. Later on, Descartes tries to locate that which constitutes him not just as a momentary “I think” in the moment of doubt, but as a continuous being—and lets his imagination roam again. “My mind enjoys wandering off … very well then … let us give it a completely free rein.”78 He then asks what persists across all imaginations. He finds the thinking self (Cogito) as an essence of thought. Again, an unhinged imagination enables hitherto unexplored rational powers. Surprisingly, surrealism is a rationalism (or vice versa). I don’t agree with Descartes’s conclusions (even the doubting mind can doubt itself while doubting, though without success—which makes it still a little more surreal). But I do agree that surreality, the unity of dream and wakefulness, imagination and reason, is a path to rationality (which Descartes, sadly, has left too early)—even for rationalists.
However, an enduring collective exercise of imagination-powered-reason could help solve many of “the principal problems of life”—without burning the planet in AI data centers for the benefits of billionaires.79 Once the human mind is (a little more) unshackled, AI will be much less exciting. We are, however, constantly drained by capitalistic exploitation and propagandistic brainrot. That is why we don’t know what an empowered mind can do. “Each night I rip to shreds all the knots lashed to my heart / and each dawn I find myself on a hill within my cage of obedience.”80 Instead of sacrificing at the altars of power, finance, and future technologies, we should explore the untapped resources of human creativity.
Of course, “we learn to swallow, and not to find bitter, the venom of servitude.”81 The epistemic contract described above is a powerful tool for this purpose. It makes all attempts to end submission and suffering look ridiculous. So if you read this thinking that I am naive and you know better—I think so too sometimes. But then there is Etienne de la Boétie in his treatise On Voluntary Servitude, who argues that the cause for submission to tyranny is the customary refusal to disobey. Many people, he says, “are like handsome race horses who first bite the bit and later like it, and rearing under the saddle a while soon learn to enjoy displaying their harness and prance proudly beneath their trappings.”82 When does learned pessimism toward political creativity become such pride in servitude, fueled by traumatic attachment to the social contract’s harness, saddle, and bit? In any case, the contracts we know are fading fast. Both the call to acquiesce and the call to revolt seem equally reasonable from different points of view. The latter transgresses the contract and must therefore appear surreal, absurd, ridiculous. In this sense, my essay’s alleged naiveté may be a symptom of the vantage point of judgment: From behind the curve, what is around the corner may seem twisted, yet the final call on whose position will have been absurd can only ever be made retroactively. We cannot wait so long when the old world is dying and new worlds are coming into being. This simultaneity is actually surreal. Instead of holding on to the fading rules of the twentieth century, we should insist on emancipation. For as pointed out earlier: The question is not: “Surrealism—yes or no?” The question is: “Which surrealism can defeat the malicious, tyrannical version?” I propose political surrealism. But if you have another idea: All the better! For collective creativity is the most precious human resource. It solves problems, generates opportunities, and causes enjoyable mischief.
I argued earlier that creativity is empowering and empowerment is joy, leading toward euphoria. The objective of a surrealist state must be to foster such collective creativity, be it artistic, political, or scientific. For this purpose, the surrealist state must provide institutions that cover everybody’s material bases, support imaginative playtime, and funnel at least some of the creative outputs (songs, scientific inventions, or legal proposals) into the relevant institutions such as to manifest them on a larger scale (a theater production, a technological gadget, a law). Furthermore, because the ideology of winning is the necessary counterpart to the vast systems of oppression of those who don’t win, surrealist collectivity must be understood as collaborative instead. Fame for all. Rotating leadership. Charisma in vending machines. Flat hierarchies wherever possible. Crowdsourcing science, art, and democracy.
The surrealist state prevents tyranny by prioritizing a culture that encourages imaginations (fears, desires, fantasies) to be processed continuously, instead of being bottled up and repressed. For this purpose, the surrealist state funds fantasy gyms and brainstorming casinos. The utopianism of the surrealist state consists in ongoing collective utopian thinking, hence in steadily increasing the collective forces to constantly regenerate and transform society. It does not envision a particular plan or program. The surrealist state is a creative democracy. Of course, people will find creative ways to harm each other and undermine social cohesion. But much of this is a symptom of repression. For all else, the surrealist state funds insurances, encourages leniency, and thus enables experiments—for experiments go wrong, yet they are the source of progress. And for the rest: Due to their capacity to transform and adjust, creative democracies endure high degrees of internal conflict and deviation.
Some may claim that I am generating a pipe dream for the educated upper class, that “ordinary people” can’t understand political surrealism or won’t be interested. I take this to be a condescending stereotype. The huge success, for example, of fan fiction (which is entirely imaginative) and conspiracy theories (which are really a fusion of imagination and reason gone wrong) proves that a great many people are very interested in creative imaginations and that it allows them a degree of joy. Consequently, the surrealist state is not a luxurious fancy. It is a potential at work in everybody who imagines in order to cope with reality—hence everybody.
“The realization of the [surrealist] theory necessitates a new revolt.”83 Form surrealist cells today! You may gather as friends or strangers. To get to know each other, you can speed date for five to ten minutes. Wrong answers only. Stay inconsistent. Get sidetracked whenever you can. Then draw or write the revolt, plotting surrealist interior architecture or the like through a game of exquisite corpse.84 Once you have that, design its political infrastructure as concretely and feasibly as possible. Then talk. Or dance. Do not follow the rules. Take laughter as your guide, and boredom as an indicator. “All is not lost, since seduction is always about to intervene.”85
This essay can be read as a continuation of Luce deLire, “Critique Is Over, Morality Is Dead, and Surreal Utopias Are Where It’s At,” e-flux journal, no. 163 (May 2026) →. It is the result of many conversations, experiments, and strange encounters. I thank, in alphabetic order: Michelle Alexander, Barto, C. Bain, Callaz, Spencer Compton, Michael Della Rocca, Denise, Farzada, Sofia Gotti, Max Haiven, Marko Illic, Gilah Kletenik, Christian Liclair, Sam Moske, Joyce Rivière, Levent Sagun, Jakob Schillinger, Danny Schwartz, Anna Sinofzig, Peter Sit, Steph, Ali Emir Tapan, Unbehagen NYC, McKenzie Wark, Brian Kuan Wood—and many others.
Sophie McBain, “Ms. Rachel, the Controversial Queen of Toddler TV: ‘My Goal Isn’t to Be the Most Liked. It’s to Help Kids and Speak the Truth.’” The Guardian, September 20, 2026 →.
Timothy Noah, “An Appreciation of ‘The Weave’: Trump’s New Literary Contraption,” The New Republic, October 17, 2024 →.
Kim Willsher, “Surreal: Art’s Weirdest Worldview Bounces Back a Century After Its Birth,” The Guardian, March 7, 2022 →.
By “us” I mean you, dear reader, and me. For whatever else happens, we are in this together.
If one reads Breton’s surrealism as dialectical (which one doesn’t have to), then, analogous to Althusser’s appropriation of Marx, I replace Breton’s Hegel with Spinoza.
Mark Zuckerberg, “The Future Is for Everyone,” Meta News, August 10, 2026 →.
Naomi Klein, “Surrealism Against Fascism,” Equator, November 26, 2025 →.
Plato, Republic, Book IX, 572d–573b.
For a more detailed analysis, see Cinzia Arruzza, A Wolf in the City: Tyranny and the Tyrant in Plato’s Republic (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Trump v. United States →.
Quoted in David E. Sanger et al., “Trump Addresses Venezuela, Greenland and Presidential Power in Wide-Ranging Interview” New York Times, January 8, 2026 →.
Melissa Quinn, “Trump Lashes Out at Female Reporters, Calling Them ‘Ugly,’ ‘Stupid’ and ‘Piggy,’” CBS News, November 28, 2025 →.
See →.
Aaron Pellish and Gregory Svirnovskiy, “Trump Attacks Supreme Court Justices After He Is Handed a Major Tariff Loss,” Politico, February 20, 2026 →.
Quoted in Shawn McCreesh, “Donald Trump’s Big Gay Government,” New York Times, August 26, 2025 →.
Judith Butler reported this comment during a talk at the New School, New York City, February 2017.
Plato, Republic, Book IX, 572b.
Curiously, the Marquis de Sade agrees with this and hence suggests allowing everybody to be fully tyrannical (sometimes). Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Boudoir: Or, the Immoral Mentors, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (1795; Penguin, 2006), 126.
See →.
See deLire, “Critique Is Over.”
The ideology of managing social relations through “boundaries” runs on the same commodified track.
Of course, excessive personalities can also exist for other reasons. But capitalism turns excess into a form of life.
Plato, Republic, Book IX, 571d. See also Richard Kraut, “Review of A Wolf in the City: Tyranny and the Tyrant in Plato’s Republic,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, March 11, 2019 →.
Of course, Plato also suggests a state ruled by philosopher kings. Yet his vision is overly repressive.
André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (1924; University of Michigan Press, 1969), 26. I interpret this as a means to reach a state of receptivity.
Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 14.
Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 26.
Of course in reality this is more complex. See, for example, Abigail Susik, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester University Press, 2021), 139.
Andre Breton, Communicating Vessels, trans. Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris (University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 71.
Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 10.
This was also partially the idea of schizoanalysis in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 350.
Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, 160.
Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 26.
Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 24.
For a fundamental critique, see Luce deLire, “How Ideal Is Ideal Theory Actually? Rawls, Mills, Reverse Racism and Justice as Failure,” Philosophy Today 67, no. 2 (April 2023).
Here I follow Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Polity, 1988), 58; and an early Monique Wittig Dans l’arène ennemie (Les Éditions de Minuit, 2024), 55, 268. This is one of the few points I disagree with Charles Mills on.
For more on this, see Luce deLire, “The Transsexual Contract” (forthcoming).
My emphasis.
Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), 17–18.
Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 4, my emphasis.
Breton keeps referring to “childhood” as perhaps “closest to one’s ‘real life’” because it is potentially less “botched” by “guides and mentors,” hence by the violent enforcement of the epistemic contract (Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 39–40). This is, of course, a romantic image of childhood: Before the nineteenth century, protected childhood ended much earlier (if it existed at all). In 1920s France, many children were half-orphans and thus had to work (see → and →). In Berlin, lower-class children were at times deemed sexually promiscuous and extortionary (see →). Breton’s pre-contractual epistemic “state of nature” is thus a fiction (just like any other such state). To his credit, he qualifies his statements about “childhood” in conditional tense. The later Manifesto Towards a Free Revolutionary Art (Breton/Rivera/Trotsky, 1938) implicitly acknowledges the material conditions of imagination: “In the contemporary world we must recognize the ever more widespread destruction of those conditions under which intellectual creation is possible.”
Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 4.
Ezra Horbury, “Early Modern Transgender Fairies,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, no. 8 (2021), 79.
This was already known by Etienne de la Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, trans. H. Kurz (1548; Columbia University Press, 1942), 4.
Bill Barrow, “Inside ‘The Weave’: How Donald Trump’s Rhetoric Has Grown Darker and Windier,” Associated Press, October 30, 2024 →.
This is in no way restricted to right-wing discourse. Boris Groys makes a related argument regarding art under Stalin. Here too dreams merge into reason: The philosophy of dialectical materialism merges with the dream of the tyrant-artist. “Socialist realism represents the party-minded, collective surrealism.” Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 1992), 52. Groys extends this argument to the art of Nazi Germany (63), which is especially apparent in the large amount of revue films produced during the Reich. See also Hitler’s Hollywood, a 2017 German documentary directed by Rüdiger Suchsland (Kino Lorber).
See deLire, “Critique Is Over.”
Mills, The Racial Contract, 18.
Dallas Jokic, “Césaire and Fanon on Fascism: The ‘Boomerang Effect’ Beyond the Metropole,” Constellations 4, no. 32 (2025).
Zuckerberg, “The Future Is for Everyone.”
For more on this, see deLire, “Critique Is Over.” and deLire, “Euphorie und digitale Propaganda. Utopien wider den Cis-hetero-Extremismus“ in Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 18, issue 35 (February 2026), 22–35, →.
Breton, Rivera, Trotsky, Manifesto Towards a Free Revolutionary Art; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Revolutions That as Yet Have No Model: Derrida’s Limited Inc,” Diacritics 10 no. 4 (Winter 1980). The latter is the source of this essay’s title.
Note that Nazis, Silicon Valley, the CIA, and other repressive institutions have made ample use of nonrational, occult, and associative techniques, drugs, etc.
Leonora Carrington quoted in “Editor’s Note,” in Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, ed. Penelope Rosemont (Athlon Press, 1998), 272.
One could think of “imagination” and “reason” as “contradictory” concepts to be overcome in a Hegelian “sublation” towards a new reality. Luckily, Breton is not especially attached to this dialectical surrealism: “It is in quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it” (Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 14). Surreality is not a plan or program to be enacted, but a white rabbit that transforms us and the world while we chase it. To give a rough sketch of an argument against a dialectical surrealism: For one, classically, a “contradiction” is a statement that simultaneously assumes and denies the same thing in the same regard, such as “A and not-A.” Clearly, that is not what Breton and Hegel mean. But what do they mean? Hegel’s terminology of course transforms throughout his “system” because with each “sublation” we find the terms freshly relationally defined. However, if “contradictions” and their sublations are to serve as unifying elements of this “system,” we should expect some kind of consistency across the applications of these terms. Yet I cannot see the common denominator in the relation between the three classic examples “A and non-A,” “reason and imagination,” and “law and crime.” Apparently, “contradiction” requires some kind of inexplicable intuitive understanding. To me, this looks more like an elaborate mythology than a systematic philosophy. Dialecticians may find support in Breton, Communicating Vessels, 47, 72; Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” 123–24, 181; and Breton, “What Is Surrealism?,” in What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont (Pluto Press, 1978), 128.
“This imagination which knows no bounds” (Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 4) “must escape from all constraint” (Breton, Rivera, Trotsky, Manifesto Towards a Free Revolutionary Art) to unfold its “unsparing quality” (Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 4).
Here I agree with Spinoza, E3p11s, see The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume 1 ed. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 501.
Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 39.
For the example of Stalinist socialist realism, see Groys, Total Art of Stalinism, 76.
Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 35; Raymond Spiteri, “Surrealism and the Demand of Politics,” in Surrealism, ed. Natalya Lusty (Cambridge University Press 2021), 63; Abigail Susik, “Introduction: Surrealism, a Community of Anti-authoritarian Affinity Groups: Part I,” Journal of Avant-Garde Studies 4, no. 2 (2024): 175.
Susik, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, 113; Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 159, also 153, 156.
Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, ed. and trans. Michael Richardson (Verso, 1994), 183.
Skye Sherwin, “The Surreal Deal: The Exhibitions Celebrating the Revolutionary, Illogical Art of the Absurd,” The Guardian, November 25, 2024 →.
For historical examples of the political aspirations of classical surrealism, see Susik, Surrealist Sabotage; and Ron Sakolsky, Dreams of Anarchy and the Anarchy of Dreams: Adventures at the Crossroads of Anarchy and Surrealism (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2021).
For some, this happens even in their encounter with utopian theories. See Claire Howard, “Passionate Attraction: Fourier, Feminism, Free Love, and L’Écart absolu,” in Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance, ed. Elliot King and Abigail Susik (Pennsylvania University Press 2022).
Nora Mitrani, “In Defense of Surrealism,” in Surrealist Women, 294.
See exemplarily: “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.” Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” 125. Also Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 44.
Salvador Dalí and Arthur Goldhammer, “The Rotten Ass,” Grand Street, no. 60 (Spring 1997): 12.
Zuckerberg, “The Future Is for Everyone.”
Zuckerberg, “The Future Is for Everyone.”
For an example, see Maggie Harrison Dupré, “Did Someone Wearing Meta Glasses Film You Today? Are You Sure?” The Guardian, August 19, 2026 →.
Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think about Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2026).
For a stronger claim, see Luce deLire, “Spinoza’s Metaphysics of Infinity: From Indeterminacy, Infinity Follows,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 33, no. 5 (February 2025).
Descartes, AT VIII, 22, my emphasis. As is customary, I am using the pagination according to Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, vol. 1–12 (Vrin, 1996) (abbreviated as “AT”—here, the reference is to vol. 8). For a workable translation, see René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Descartes, AT VIII, 29–30.
Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism,” 26.
Olga Orozco, “Twilight (Between Dog and Wolf),” in Surrealist Women, 266.
De la Boétie, Voluntary Servitude, 9.
De la Boétie, Voluntary Servitude, 12.
Judith Reigel, “Points of Departure for a New Revolt,” in Surrealist Women, 258.
The “exquisite corpse” is a collective surrealist creative method. Participants work, for example, on a piece of paper by writing down a word or sentence or by drawing. After each addition, the paper is folded to omit the previous contribution, leaving only an indecipherable fragment for the next person to begin from. Once finished, the paper is unfolded.
Breton, Communicating Vessels, 45.
