Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 38 Post-War Surrealism and Anti-authoritarianism 

This discussion brings together Abigail Susik and Michael Löwy to explore the international history of surrealism after 1945, with a focus on its enduring anti-authoritarian spirit. Often misunderstood as an avant-garde movement confined to the interwar years and extinguished by World War II or the death of André Breton, surrealism instead persisted – and continues – as a living, transnational community committed to creative and social transformation. Drawing on their extensive research, which resulted in two special issue of the Journal of Avant-Garde Studies,  Susik and Löwy will discuss how surrealism’s anti-authoritarian investments have manifested across different geographies and political contexts, from postwar Europe to Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and beyond, tracing its presence into the present moment.

Rather than treating surrealism as an art-historical artifact or a closed chapter of modernism, this event examines its longevity and adaptability as a vanguard spirit of resistance, one that connects aesthetic experimentation to struggles against domination. What does it mean to recognize surrealism as both historically situated and epochal — rooted in specific contexts yet animated by an ethos that transcends them? How has its “continuous modus operandi” of linking creative production with anti-authoritarian praxis evolved from the exilic conditions of WWII through the upheavals of 1968, the crises of the neoliberal era, and even into present? Susik and Löwy invite us to reflect on surrealism’s ongoing relevance as a force of imagination and opposition in our own time.

Bio: Abigail Susik is the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, editor of Resurgence! Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism, and the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964–1967, and coeditor of the volumes Surrealism and Film After 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance. Susik is a founding board member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism and joint editor of the Bloomsbury Transnational Surrealism Series. She lives in Portland, OR. 

Michael Löwy is Research Director of Sociology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. His previous books include Redemption and Utopia: Liberation Judaism in Central Europe, Marxism in Latin America and The War of the Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America.

Image from Gee Vaucher’s “A Week of Knots” project.