Showing posts with label psychasthenia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychasthenia. Show all posts

27 Mar 2015

Psychasthenia

Cover of the 1930 pamphlet produced by Georges Bataille and others 
in response to André Breton's attack upon them in the 
Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929)


The more I read about that castrated old lion and false revolutionary André Breton, the more I dislike him. Not loving love as a moral absolute and not believing that the marvellous can exist separately from the morbid and the monstrous, means I can't possibly embrace his concept of surrealism either.

Does this mean that I too suffer, like Bataille, from a form of decadence or that which Breton, with his clinical background, delighted in identifying as psychasthenia (a mental disorder characterized by irrational phobias, obsessions, anxieties and, apparently, a love of flies)? 

Maybe. 

But anyone who has read Nietzsche knows that these things are advantageous traits in an artist or philosopher (that whilst strength preserves, only sickness advances). Indeed, better death, as Deleuze says, than the good health we have been given and which is so valued by the bourgeois. 

And better even Bataille's excremental philosophy than Breton's angelic surrealism that is ultimately suited only to mystics, poets, and idealists.