Thirty-five years after his entry into the surrealist movement in 1935, and now a permanent resident of New York, Greek-American technocrat and poet N. Kalas, "practicing diagnostics and warfare," decided it was time for a reassessment of the movement.

Believing that the continuous renewal of surrealism is absolutely necessary, he often expressed the idea that a movement like surrealism should transform and evolve over time to avoid becoming a static, dead phenomenon of history, or merely an object of museums or libraries.

Based on this reasoning, while proposing a new book in 1971, he wrote that "what's missing is a book that revises the movement from the perspective of contemporary society." According to Kalas, surrealism is, like history, constantly "in the making," and for this reason, he never accepted the term "orthodox surrealism."

Kalas wrote criticism that resembled poetry and poetry that was as harsh as criticism, deliberately mixing the pieces of a puzzle that continues to surprise us with its freshness and enlighten us even now.

The volume includes texts such as: "Surrealism and the Creation of History," "The Consciousness of Language," "Myth and Utopia," "The Puppet," "The Surrealist Androgynous," "Surrealism and the Existential Interlude," "The Adventure of Surrealism," and "Wittgenstein and Surrealism."

What kind of poetry would best serve the hidden needs of those who wish to create history? If History in its peak moments is the most poetic of all sciences, Poetry in its deepest moments is the most esoteric of all histories.

Even if it is true that the surrealist movement could have existed without Breton, we know today that Breton's main contribution was that he integrated Surrealism into the Hegelian stream of romantic art.

With Surrealism, Wittgenstein's claim "ethics and aesthetics are one" (Tractatus, 6.421) becomes a reality. During the peak of Existentialism in the 1950s, intellectuals learned to consider others as "things" (in the philosophical sense of the term), thereby paving the way to favorably welcome the abundance of goods brought about by the post-war economic boom. Thus, we transitioned from deification to reification, from mad love to the sexual revolution, from poetry to linguistic games.

– N. KALAS

COVER PHOTO: KAITI TSEKENE, N. Kalas in Paris in 1982.