“A work which obediently aligns itself with the order of existing facts, society, moral norms, oppressive processes and everyday servitudes, a work which accepts the human condition, in other words, using clear language, the condemnation of man by the world, has not the slightest claim to poetry”
Georges Henein, The Subversive Function of Poetry
It is in the word of the poet that any possible undoing of the world dwells. Subversion dwells in the word and makes it its own home. Georges Henein links together poetry and subversion and thereby lets them arise from out of the same origin. It is in this togetherness that the poetry of surrealism should be read: Poetry placing itself over against the totality of that which is and its order. This placing over against belongs to the surrealist attempt at releasing disorder into the world. Antonin Artaud speaks of this releasing as the unconscious of the age in his article The Social Anarchy of Art.
To the poetry of surrealism belongs an endeavor to release disruption into the world; disruption as refusal and imagining, refusal of the ordered and imagining toward and into elsewhere-ness, the elsewhere of that which is, as difference, otherness, and apartness. Hence, two dreams constantly occur in the poetry of surrealism: future and revolution.
“And the word ‘revolution’ gleams greater and purer deep within the word ‘future’”
Georges Henein, The Subversive Function of Poetry
It is in its constant turning toward the future as an elsewhere that surrealism rediscovers, and attempts to radicalize, the attraction of the revolution. Georges Henein does not only link together “the word revolution” and “the word future”, but renders “the word future” the origin from out of which “the word revolution” arises. Future is the ground in which revolution is grounded.
Revolution belongs to the future and is first made possible by the elsewhere of a future yet to come. Henein’s repeating of the words “the word” makes apparent that it is only in the word of the poet that a future can be glimpsed. This glimpsing is a catching sight of what refuses and disrupts today’s order, oppression, and injustices. Disruption dwells in the poetizing of the poet.
“Poetry, and this is where the whole extent of its role becomes apparent, has the power to transport what was just a way of dreaming into a way of being. Or more precisely – it exalts this power within us”
Georges Henein, The Subversive Function of Poetry
Poetry transports into the elsewhere toward which our dreaming is directed. This transporting is the revolution itself, of which Henein speaks, for transporting means the traversing of a path so that a changing of a place could take place. Poetry makes possible the arising and taking shape of a different place, a different time, a different us.
“Poetry is… an uninterrupted discovery of new human regions”
Georges Henein, The Subversive Function of Poetry