André Breton:

The Myth-Men of Murderers

(Paperback)

"Drawing from the intuitionist philosophy of Henri Bergson, the young André Breton in this pre-surrealist essay develops a metaphysics of non-symbolic participation. His theory shows both an influence and a departure from his mentor at this time, Paul Valery, who later said of his soon-to-become surrealist friend: "... he fixed his eyes on the accidents of being, whereas we had closed ours to make ourselves more like its substance..." and "(he has) torn to pieces what we had meant only to dissect". In a significant break from Valery and his ideas of an "absolute poetry", Breton here contrasts intuitive directness and the dynamis of imaginary mediation to conceptual abstraction and analytical science."