Abstract
In March 1935, Breton’s Prague lecture on the “situation of the surrealist object” famously opens by identifying as “the greatest danger threatening Surrealism today [...] the fact that because of its spread throughout the world [...] the word found favour much faster than the idea and all sorts of questionable creations tend to pin the Surrealist label on themselves.” To avoid misunderstandings of this kind, which stem from a certain fetishisation and a certain cultishness, Breton proposes to “determine the exact situation of the Surrealist object today” in order to “reach perfect agreement on the way in which Surrealism represents the object in general.” In addition to the danger for surrealism itself as “object” of theory and practice, “a fundamental crisis of the object is taking place” as the object has “dissolved in objectivity,” from which it needs to be rescued by means of exploring the realm of the oneiric, the phantomic, and the dialectically subjective-objective sur-real.