Dave Wise pays tribute to Annie Le Brun (15 August 1942 – 29 July 20 French writer, surrealist, poet and literary critic.
Although it could be said that in the 1960s the ideas of the Situationist International on ‘totality’ superseded Surrealism, in practise it didn’t quite work out like that. Although Surrealism had little profile in the near-revolution of May 1968 in France, many latter day surrealists participated in the insurrection with great gusto. They contributed more than a few good slogans, and some ended up in jail for taking to the barricades and other daring provocative acts.
Although by then Surrealism had been eclipsed in France, the movement continued to flourish in Belgium under the influence of Louis Scutenaire, a central figure in the Belgian Surrealist movement, along with René Magritte. Scutenaire also influenced the major Situationist contributor, Raoul Vaneigem and the Chicago Surrealists in the USA. (Sad to say Surrealism in the UK had been pretty lamentable but then gained a bit of latter-day traction in the late 1960s).
Undoubtedly, Surrealism in itself had attained a much greater, more total, coherence. Gone were the days of their in and out relationship with Communist parties – especially the French Communist party – as they honed ‘political’ preferences down to the anarchists who identified with the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39. But it was in the USA that what became known as the Chicago Surrealist Group went beyond ‘classical’ surrealist discourse and emerged as inseparable from the revolts of the late 1960s. The Chicago Surrealists produced a regular baseline mag called Arsenal, Surrealist Subversion, which quickly got their insights out across the globe. Their researches into the labour history and radicalism of earlier 20th century America proved to be original, astounding and brilliantly informed.
The figures of Franklin and Penelope Rosemont were axiomatic in this. Franklin’s huge biography of Joe Hill, The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Working Class Counterculture, is a framework for discussing disparate radical tendencies, rather than a traditional biography. Who else could have placed together radical IWW incidents in New York from 1913 with Picabia’s pre Dada contribution to the Armoury exhibition, together with the first exhibition of Duchamp’s urinal in 1917 and the advent of full-on Dada via the assistance of Man Ray? And who could forget the emphasis on the proposed 1000 mile Wobbly picket line running through America and Canada? I remember the joy I got in discussing this radical new historiography with Loren Goldner in my scruffy flat in Notting Hill around 2017. Loren thought it was too OTT, whilst I felt it more a realization of Lautreamont’s maxim of ‘new tremors running through the atmosphere’ rather than sticking to any specific historical fact. At the same time as both of us were leery of contemporary myth-making, fake news, the plethora of conspiracy theories and misinformation presented on social media via the ubiquitous iphone.
I first became aware of the existence of the Chicago Surrealists whilst hanging out in the late 1960s with Ben Morea and the nascent ‘Motherfuckers’ group on the streets of the Lower East Side, New York. Little did I realise that by then Charlie Radcliffe of the English Situationists was already on good terms with Franklin Rosemont, a friendship which remained constant for many a decade to come.
Penelope Rosemont’s Surrealism and Everyday Life is a mesmeric account of Chicago, capturing the soul of the city’s former blues and jazz experience. It’s therefore hardly surprising that Penelope quickly recognised just how good Annie Le Brun was. In 1998, Penelope edited and introduced Surrealist Women: An International Anthology. Translated into English by Guy Ducornet at the University of Texas, Annie Le Brun’s Lachez Tout is included in the volume. Penelope Rosemont was not alone in her admiration for Le Brun. Guy Debord himself had cause to contact Annie towards the late 1970s, never forgetting that years earlier Guy Debord and Andre Breton would pass each other on the streets of the Latin Quarter in Paris, never exchanging a word of greeting, each knowing full well who the other was. Debord most likely contacted Annie Le Brun because of her books on De Sade.
Annie had a very critical take on contemporary feminism, describing it’s general ambiance in Lachez Tout in 1977 as ‘Stalinism in petticoats’ and ‘the brave new Mao-feminist world’ in which ‘Neo-feminism is organised around the abyss of impossible love’. Instead, she was looking for ‘a sumptuous eroticization of revolt against a background of nothingness’. Essentially, she sees in modern day neo-feminism the ‘de-sexualisation of life’, taken over by individuals who haven’t a clue about real contemporary subversion as represented by the likes of Baudelaire, Wilde, the Dadaists, Vache, Cravan, and Stirner, etc. And like the first edition of the King Mob mag she even references Norman Brown and his Love’s Body. In fact, Annie, noting that previously all Dandies were male’, wants to see female Dandies everywhere.. It isn’t an untruth to say it is written in the style of Andre Breton: dense with far ranging allusions and juxtapositions underscored with a distaste for morality and ‘the clerisy’. In in that sense it’s surrealist to the very core. And like the first edition of the King Mob mag we published in the late-1869s, she even references Norman Brown and his Love’s Body. In fact, Annie, noting that previously all Dandies were male’, wants to see female Dandies everywhere.
Instead of praising Simon de Beauvoir and her book, The Second Sex, she pours scorn on it, which reflects her low opinion of the Existentialists who hogged the limelight in the 1950s. Historically, the women she really hones in on are the feminists of the Paris Commune of 1871 like Annie Leclerc, Louis Michel and Flora Tristan (“Delicious Flora”) often coming up with great quotes from them. More than that, Le Brun’s Lachez Tout is full of invented words which makes it virtually impossible to translate with any accuracy. And behind these notable women of the Paris Commune are the hordes of ‘other’ women whom Annie Le Brun praises to the skies which she refers to as ‘Amazons’, in the old-fashioned sense of the word – wild, women warriors – and not, need it be said, as in Bezos’ neo-feudalism.
Also, and hardly hidden from view behind Annie’s unmasking of neo-feminist intellectuals’ adherence to academia, TV, official exhibitions, etc, in ‘sweetly racist France’. She disdains: the way the main protagonists, desperate for literary fame, become ‘bureaucrats of neo-feminist sensibility’, creating ‘a revolution in costume but nothing more’, supporting police and prisons just like your average Communist party member. Annie looks for ‘original’ weapons, like ‘a knife without a blade that lacks the handle’.
Within the last few years a couple of Annie Le Brun’s books, The Reality Overload and A Sudden Abyss have been published in America; and not before time as the latter is the best reflection on De Sade ever written. However her two most important (and controversial) works, Lachez Tout and Vagit Prop have yet to see the light of day in the English-speaking world. Annie Le Brun’s French is itself legacy of wide-ranging symbolist association. It is difficult a difficult read at the best of times, so don’t get too frustrated with it as you will be rewarded by unmasking hidden depths.
It can be said that Annie Le Brun never really broke away from ‘the ball and chain of art’, eternally hanging around gallery culture. Annie simply couldn’t make the jump away from the ever increasing emptiness of the so called ‘creative industries’ which play such a vital role in the endless 24/7 imaging essential for the reproduction of Suicide Capitalism. Nonetheless, there was an ever increasing sharp edge there, as in later years Annie fulminated against the money madness surrounding all art today, as well as contemporary building cum architecture.
I might add that she was somewhat aware of what my brother Stuart and I were up to as Stuart engaged in some kind of distant emailing replying deploying one of his pseudonyms! Was that the famous Ranter, Lawrence Clarkson of the English revolution of the 1640s? One day I must search more through these emails…….
BPC has published four books by Dave and Stuart Wise:
*Lost Texts Around King Mob
*Dialectical Butterflies: Ecocide, Extinction Rebellion, Greenwash and Rewilding the Commons – an Illustrated Dérive.
*King Mob: The Negation and Transcendence of Art: Malevich, Schwitters, Hirst, Banksy, Mayakovsky, Situationists, Tatlin, Fluxus, Black Mask.
*A Newcastle Dunciad 1966-2008: Recollections of a Musical and Artistic Avant Garde plus Bryan Ferry and the Newcastle Arts Scene
For more information see BPC – books
