Aesthetic Terrorism – A Political Reading of the Surrealist Synoptic Chart with Germaine Berton

In the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste, published on December 1, 1924, a photographic montage brought together male members of the movement and personalities of importance to them, around the portrait of one woman: Germaine Berton. In 1923, this militant anarchist made headlines by murdering Marius Plateau, a figure from monarchist and nationalist circles.

We’ll come back to the reception of this political crime by the surrealists, who gave Germaine Berton their unconditional support, and by the anarchists themselves, whose position was more ambivalent. By analyzing their divergences and revisiting different interpretations of the “synoptic painting”, we aim to criticize the purely cultic or aesthetic approaches, in order to restore the political dimension of the Surrealist experience and the violent antagonism of the years that saw its birth.

Ana Samardžija Scrivener is a professor of art education and philosophy at the Institut Supérieur des Arts et du Design in Toulouse. After studying philosophy and French literature at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, she went on to study philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. In 2019, under the supervision of Catherine Perret, she is defending a doctoral thesis in aesthetics: Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin: divergences du matérialisme (1929-1939). Writing and translating are practices that structure her relationship with teaching and research. She has published articles on philosophy, texts for artists’ catalogs (notably Edith Dekyndt and Daniel Dezeuze), a preface to a book by Jean-Luc Nancy, translated into Serbian, and a collection of poems in Slovenian. She is the author of a booklet entitled Terrorisme esthétique. Une lecture politique du tableau synoptique surréaliste avec Germaine Berton, published by Éditions Lorelei, collection “Frictions”. She has translated many French authors into Slovenian: Brillat-Savarin, Frontisi-Ducroux, Merleau-Ponty, Rancière. Her translation of Merleau-Ponty’s Visible et invisible was awarded the 2002 Slovenian National Literary Translation Prize. She spent a year in residence at the Akademie Schloß Solitude in Stuttgart.