Romantic, modern and revolutionary: surrealism and the paradoxes of modernity

Abstract

From the contradictions and paradoxes that involve the construction of social and aesthetic modernity, the central aim of this paper is to show the importance of surrealism as one of the most brilliant expressions of the critical current of modernity whose origins refer to the romanticism and the modern prose poem by Baudelaire. It is argued, then then, the tension between “modernity aesthetic-critical” (OEHLER, 1999) and bourgeois modernity, from Baudelaire to Surrealism, with particular emphasis on social and political forms through which the latter was able to build a of the most comprehensive critiques of human social life and in the designs of capitalist civilization. Finally, we seek to question the actuality of the Surrealist critique of capitalist modernity in a context characterized by increased size and inhuman destructive pattern civilizing force.