Abstract

This dissertation examines how the Western tradition has structured the discourse of freedom as an ontology of power and explores how surrealism has theoretically intervened within this discursive terrain. It begins by demonstrating how Aristotle links the concepts of freedom and power together, while Saint Paul will initiate a challenge, however incomplete, to the position that freedom must be predicated upon the power of the subject. ;In a mode of thinking which Bataille will characterize as "hyperchristian," both Breton and Bataille embark upon a political and aesthetic project of rethinking freedom that radically dissociates the experience of freedom from the subjective exercise of power. Within the Pauline tradition, such an experience is given the name of "grace," and, as the dissertation demonstrates through a series of close readings, both Breton and Bataille deploy a consistent rhetoric of "grace" within their work. In so doing, both men take "grace" as a site of intervention, extending and transforming the Pauline tradition. By reading Breton and Bataille closely alongside Hegel, this dissertation develops a surrealist ontology that clears the way for freedom. According to classical ontology, to be without essence is to be powerless and hence incapable of freedom. It is with this understanding then, that Bataille articulate a conception of "la liberte impuissante." ;The theoretical and political potential of surrealism for the Americas begin to emerge in the final, full chapter. In displacing surrealist thinking to the Americas, Alejo Carpentier uncovers within the American experience a force which resists appropriation by a colonizing logic of power. Through an allegorical reading of the narrator's adventures in The Lost Steps , I argue, with considerable assistance from Karl Marx, that Carpentier's famous "marvelous-real" does not designate an essential character of Latin American reality which can function as the basis for a stable identity, but signals its lack of any determined essence. ;The dissertation concludes with an Epilogue entitled "Political Planomenon and the Secret Thereof," which traces the legacy of this thought of a powerless freedom in the work of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze