Trevor, okay I can see that the scholarship is important for you. Unlike your reviewer I accept Bataille as a surrealist. It makes more sense to me as I slowly read his texts. So we can thankfully displace existentialism into the background.

As usual, I have some concerns. These are about surrealism, the interpretation of Nietzsche and scholarship as a way of life. I will put them on the table. In this post I state my first concern----the implications of surrealism for philosophy--- and leave the other concerns for latter.

To surrealism. As I naively understand it, the European Dada movement before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason. Hence we have a critique of Dada as a purely negating force, and the subsequent desire to seek an alternative, creative force in its place. Thus French surrealism.

The emphasis of surrealism was not on negation per se, but on positive expression. Sure, surrealism was a negation, in that it represented an ongoing reaction against the destruction wrought by the rationalism (instrumental reason, science & progress?), which had guided European culture and politics in the nineteenth century and culminated in the horrors of World War I.

The positive expression in surrealism was its desire to reunite the conscious and unconscious realms of experience so that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world. This joining was a surreality.

From what I understand this Breton kind of surrealism drew on the work of Sigmund Freud. Thus Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination and he defined artistic genius in terms of accessibility to untapped, unconscious subjective realm.
Of course, this surrealism was not psychoanlysis, since Freud's therapeutic aim was to make the unconscious conscious. Freud stood for European rationalism. Surrealism, in contrast, stressed the unconscious or non-rational significance of imagery arrived at by either automatism or the exploitation of chance effects, unexpected juxtapositions, etc.

This understanding of surrealism is that it is a revolt against reason, a liberation from the pathology of social morality and a rejection of moral abnomalities. I sense is a danger here, which lies in the appeal to what is offensive and despicable--a base materialism. The danger is that the subjectivity of the rebellious body, which refuses the inscription of reason in the name of eros, intense emotion and ecstasy, ends up outside reason. There is little room in the visions of excess here for the active critical role of the subject in the interpretative process. Hence we have the image of the headless human being--- the Acephale figure. This is beyond the expression of thought and art; a self-dissolution akin to a river loses itself in the sea.

Now the non-rational maybe an okay place for art, as we can have the interplay of imagery and symbolism from dreams and raw bodily existence. But it is a problematic place for philosophy, which has some connection to a critical interpretative reason that is represented by Nietzsche.

No problem you say. The French surrealists do not understand Nietsche to be a philosopher. He is shrill frenzy in revolt against the prisonhouse of European bourgeois life. Their Nietzsche stands for vital and vigourous instincts. Okay that is the surrealist's interpretation of Nietzsche. But we live in different century and country and we have made contact with Nitzsche through reading the French poststructuralists and Critical Theory, not through Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Our reception of Nietzche's text's in Australia in 2003 is going to be different to the French reception of these texts in the 1930s. We will read these texts in the light of our concerns.

And that brings me to my second concern, the interpretation of Nietzsche's texts. That's another post.