To mark Annie Le Brun’s death on 29th July 2024, I have translated the introduction that she wrote for the new, augmented edition of Qui vive: Considérations actuelles sur l’inactualité du surréalisme, published by in May this year by Flammarion. Her introductory essay is an important text in this year of so many “pompous Olympiads of Surrealism to commemorate its centenary.”
Annie Le Brun’s passing was a dreadful loss, as she had much more to say and even quite recently was speaking with vigour and eloquence. One can only admire how she has stood firmly by her surrealist principles over the decades, without fanfare or claims upon posterity; someone who resisted all institutionalisation, embodying a radical refusal that has been and ought to be at Surrealism’s core. Her example contrasts sharply with many who claim to speak on its behalf today.
As her friend and one-time fellow member of the French Surrealist Group in the 1960s, François-René Simon, has so eloquently put it in his personal homage to her: “Annie knew how to decipher the world, its horrors, its alienations, its betrayals that she denounced with as much force as she found to celebrate its riches and its beauties, the most obvious as well as the most unsuspected.” (François-René Simon, ‘Lumineuse Annie Le Brun’, En Attendant Nadeau.)
The following translation can be downloaded as a pdf here.
THIRTY-THREE YEARS LATER AND A CENTURY AFTERWARDS: THE GENIUS OF BEGINNINGS
Firstly, there was the lightning bolt. Yes, the lightning bolt that for the first time linked revolt and wonder. But it is also the lightning bolt as the hitherto unthinkable bridge between ‘once upon a time’ and ‘there will be a time’. This may be the most concise way to describe Surrealism. An object found in our night, as if all we had to do was look there for the emergence of the luminous arc of what happens. The landscape has never really been the same since.
Continue reading “Annie Le Brun – Qui vive”
Kenneth Cox 
