André Breton

French poet and essayist (1896–1966), founder of Surrealism. In the wiki's context, the source of the "sublime point" concept that Merleau-Ponty adopts as a structural figure for the coincidence of antinomies — the point where "life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, are no longer perceived as contradictions" (Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930).

MP engages seriously with Breton from Sense and Non-Sense (1945) through the 1948 radio lectures and The Prose of the World to the final interviews. He finds in Breton's surrealism not mere destruction but a constructive effort to "restore some profound and radical usage of speech." In Mad Love, Breton writes of the sublime point as a geographic location — a mountain point from which one cannot dwell but which serves as a guide "in the direction of eternal love": "I have never ceased to identify the flesh of the being I love and the snow of the peaks in the rising sun."

MP endorses the "insurrectional" surrealism of desire's omnipotence while warning against its potential drift into "occultism" — away from the sublime point into "petrified Gnosticism." His engagement with Breton also informs the concept of surrection: desire's insurrections and resurrections as the existential dynamic of freedom.

Connections

• provides the sublime point concept to maurice-merleau-ponty's ontology
• his "omnipotence of desire" informs surrection and co-naissance
• is linked by MP with Valéry — both share the "pathos of language" despite stylistic differences
• his "crystallization of desire" prefigures the flesh of the world concept

Johnson (2019) on MP's Engagement with Breton

Johnson (2019, in alloa-chouraqui-kaushik-2019-contemporary-philosophy) provides the most detailed study of MP's engagement with Breton. MP's primary reference was not the Manifestos but Mad Love (L'Amour fou), especially its concepts of "convulsive beauty" ("veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be"), the "sublime point" on the mountain ("never dwelt upon, never lost from sight"), and the "found object" (trouvaille). The sublime point figures the asymptotic structure characteristic of MP's ontology. Against the standard reading of surrealism as automatist, Johnson shows that surrealist aesthetics were "dialogic from the outset" (Breton's Manifesto: "the forms of Surrealist language adapt themselves best to dialogue"), making the confrontation with surrealism an important step toward MP's reconception of intersubjectivity and "the flesh of the political."

Sources

• johnson-carbone-saintaubert-2020-poetic-of-the-world — Ch 2 (de Saint Aubert): "The Quest for the Sublime Point" and "The Omnipotence of Desire" sections; Ch 3 (Johnson): linking Breton with Valéry and Ponge