Surrealism Against Fascism
December 04, 2025 at 03:13AMA century ago, artists who survived the trenches of World War I captured humanity’s capacity for destruction, but also the collective potential for revolution. Naomi Klein asks what the Surrealists can they teach us about confronting the far-right in a new age of genocide?
To proclaim something surreal in 2025 is to say almost nothing at all. Catchy pop tunes generated by AI are surreal. A heat wave in the Arctic is surreal. A reality show star who becomes president of the United States–twice–is surreal. Generally, what is meant by the term is ‘unreal’: the replacement of organic life with artifice, which is the contemporary condition.
Yet, at its inception, Surrealism reached for the precise opposite: it was a fervent and collective quest for the very essence of life, the more organic the better. As Breton put it, he and his comrades were on a mission to probe existence to find “a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak”. This often meant drawing attention to the various forms of artifice that passed themselves off as realism, whether placid landscapes or happy families.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/12/03/surrealism-against-fascism/
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