First Mani­festo (1988) 

The ped­agogy of the ima­gin­ary: per­spect­ives of late sur­real­ism for legal teaching

Not long ago I took part in an aca­demic selec­tion for the chair of Polit­ical Sci­ence at the Uni­ver­sity of Buenos Aires. The examin­ing board expressed that it could not assess my ped­ago­gic pro­posal for it was too innov­at­ive, its effi­ciency had not yet been attested aca­dem­ic­ally – an example of eru­di­tion try­ing to defeat auda­city. Logics is to the world as the skull to the body… I for­give them, I under­stand them, but I need to betray them. I feel that I have to repay my debt to all silences, which I imposed myself so far, in order to con­quer the com­pet­ence of my dis­course. Now that I have it, I regret it.

I am writ­ing almost auto­mat­ic­ally, and I am not going to proofread what I put down to paper. I want to let it be as it stands. It is a con­fes­sion about the dangers of sur­real­ism and this text.

I

Bind­ing law to poetry is already a sur­real­ist pro­voca­tion. It is the twi­light of the idols of know­ledge. Fall of its rigid masks. Death of leg­al­ist Manichean­ism. A call for desire. A protest against the mediocrity of eru­dite men­tal­ity and, equally, a healthy dis­reg­ard for teach­ing as work [ofí­cio]. That is recre­at­ing man by pro­vok­ing him, so that he seeks to belong fully to him­self, so that he feels a pro­found aver­sion for the infilt­ra­tions of a guiltful-​rationality [racion­al­id­ade culposa] that is mys­tic­ally object­iv­ist. One that is con­ver­ted in gen­darme of cre­ativ­ity, of desire, and of our rela­tions with others.

Poetry empowers him for it. It bears in itself the vis­ceral under­stand­ing of the lim­it­a­tions that we endure, bring­ing to light the arti­fi­cial and deadly order of a cul­ture impreg­nated by pre­sump­tu­ous leg­al­it­ies. She can serve to awaken the senses and sub­merged desires and dis­en­chanted by cen­tur­ies of know­ledge, whose ori­ent­a­tion con­sists in secur­ing all and every sort of immob­il­ity. Prac­ti­cing poetry shall offer us the pos­sib­il­ity to make desire tri­umph over com­mon sense, good sense, and good feel­ings, leav­ing us, thus, ear­less to the so-​called noble and true val­ues, those that sac­ral­ise, with civil­ity, every love for power. That is desire des­troy­ing by a single stroke both Gods and Mas­ters. That is the seed of sub­ver­sion found where one expects the less: the magical torch of desire.

Sur­real­ist poet­ics tries to blow up the marks of a con­form­ist daily life, enslaved by a way of think­ing that is sim­ul­tan­eously pur­itan, con­sumer­ist, and Logo­manic.

It enables also a healthy over­ture toward explor­a­tion and exploit­a­tion of all forms of expres­sion that the dom­in­ant ration­al­ism suc­ceeded in enclos­ing in a reserve called “absurd”. Sur­real­ism claims them as the pla­centas of cre­ativ­ity. A vital reac­tion against inert sens­it­iv­it­ies. A rad­ical manœuvre to cor­rode the mono­poly of a reason that spreads out sub­mis­sion: know­ledge made out of com­mon places and fake treas­ur­ies with which, by for­get­ting our sin­gu­lar­ity, we nat­ur­ally agree.

For the sur­real­ist, the absurd has no pejor­at­ive con­nota­tion: it is rather the form of protest that is opposed to the game of the coher­ent, the logic, the demon­strated – cat­egor­ies employed as incon­tro­vert­ible cri­teria of truth in the great nar­rat­ives that sci­ence pro­duces to ima­gine the world.

In sur­real­ism, the absurd reit­er­ates the neces­sity of mul­tiple com­pre­hen­sions of the world. The sur­real­ist absurd is a spon­tan­eous way out to seek­ing the human voice amidst poets, amidst desires.

Bre­ton states that declar­ing that reason is the essence of man means already divid­ing him in two – what the clas­sical tra­di­tion never failed to do. The lat­ter, he adds, dis­tin­guished in man what is reason, which by vir­tue of this find­ing is truly human, from what is not reason, some­thing that, on these grounds, seems unworthy of man: instincts, sen­ti­ments, and desire. [Such is] a deadly dan­ger­ous and omni­po­tent cleav­age that sur­real­ism intends to sur­prise in its mis­takes, appeal­ing to poetry.

Prais­ing and employ­ing poetry, sur­real­ism dis­plays its firm intent to over­throw [der­rubar] the strict mar­gins of ration­al­ism, shak­ing us at the same time, so that we awake from our delu­sions and rela­tions of depend­ence upon all con­ven­tions in force.

It invokes the dream, the magic of a supra-​real gaze at the world, for the pur­suit of a new order of val­ues, with no patience for erudition.

One can­not speak about supra-​reality, unless as dream. Dreams are always surrealist.

…

The dream (as enchanted poetry) is a space of cre­ativ­ity without cen­sor­ships: ges­tures, images, desires without guards or tyrannies.

…

It is revolu­tion through the autonomy of art. Revolu­tion through the dream trans­formed in ped­ago­gic act that incites micro-​revolutions. Thus, sur­real­ist revolu­tion faces the dream as pos­sib­il­ity of decol­on­ising ima­gin­a­tion. Along­side this, the sur­real­ist declar­a­tion of human rights is sought: the uni­ver­sal declar­a­tion of the rights of desire, the right to cre­ativ­ity, the right to dreaming.

Poetic dream­ing makes revolu­tion out of sen­ti­ment, and thus it sub­verts living-​stupidity – this eva­sion of life that art shall flush out.

…

Back to sur­real­ism. Not as a nos­tal­gic fash­ion that forces the loss of his­tor­ical memory, but as psy­cho­ana­lytic recov­ery of an instant when the ima­gin­a­tion of the world shined with plenty of youth. And it was fire and fun, play­ing with things, desires, and etern­ity. A beau­ti­ful instant of cul­ture when action is led by dream­ing: the radi­ant manor of the nightly [o solar do noturno], the dream that hinders one’s acces­sion to a ready-​made knowledge.

What attracts me most in sur­real­ism is its carnival-​making pro­posal of weld­ing together, through poetry, dreams and life.

With it, I want react­iv­a­tion in times of apo­ca­lyptic reas­on­ing, rethink­ing it as late sur­real­ism, with a post­sur­real­ism that res­ists from within the cul­ture of post-​history.

I do not want to dram­at­ize the besieged men­tal­ity, but to trans­form it, eman­cip­at­ing me from it. We have to make out of legal sur­real­ism a locus for over­com­ing and rebel­lion against stifling cul­tures of opu­lence. We have to learn to mod­ule our lives as a work of art. The intro­duc­tion of art in the world is sub­vers­ive. It is to avail one­self of ingenu­ous­ness in order to live, as Oscar Wilde would have it.

…

Life, bod­ies, words, gazes, throbs… everything read, spoken, lived, and seen as intens­it­ies, away from con­cepts, tra­cing abysms in rela­tion to great nar­rat­ives that legit­im­ise truth, either tran­scend­ent­ally or epic­ally and, also, deny­ing the Gods of foresight [Deuses-​Previdência]. Sur­real­ism can thus be dis­en­tangled from the rela­tion Theory-​Praxis, so as to embrace in depth the dreamt up char­ac­ter of theories.

Real­ity and dream, the cleav­ages are not drastic. It is hard to dis­tin­guish without cre­at­ing myths. Sud­denly, sur­real­ism does not dis­tin­guish, it shelves the­or­ies without any book­case, and it pro­poses a sub­stitutive dis­cus­sion: the rela­tion dream-​praxis. Thanks to this sac­ri­lege, sur­real­ists alter the sac­red effects of knowledge.

…

The noc­turnal Bachelard was an innov­ator of the con­cep­tion of ima­gin­a­tion, dis­tant from con­ven­tional aca­demic stand­ards, dis­tant from Sorbonne’s fash­ion. He explored ima­gin­a­tion and day­dream, think­ing nature as mater­ial ima­gin­a­tion. He claimed for know­ledge the cease­less right to return to the ima­gin­ary: the exer­cise of the day­light func­tion of the imaginary.

Think­ing along­side sur­real­ists, Bachelard real­izes the sub­ter­ranean tides of know­ledge, which mani­fest a dif­fer­ent mobil­ity – dif­fer­ent from that that takes place as sur­face of reason: uni­direc­tional, logo­centric, dis­cip­lined, without psy­cho­lo­gical uproars. He dis­cov­ers the ludi­city of math­em­at­ics, the cre­at­ive game, the “esprit de fin­esse”, the poet­ics of intel­li­gence, sci­ence as aes­thet­ics of reason, as Niet­z­sche would have agreed – it means also the body’s com­mit­ment with the con­crete­ness of the world.

…

Ima­gin­a­tion and dream keep up [guar­dam] close ties to demo­cracy, for they pro­voke and call us upon around the new – they put before us the pos­sib­il­ity to think and sense without cen­sor­ship, reveal to us the secrets of sin­gu­lar­ity, the neur­o­lo­gical point of dif­fer­ence: the new man, he whose dreams, whose ima­gin­ary is not cen­sored by insti­tu­tions and who organ­izes his affects without ren­ted desires.

Demo­cracy is the right to dream what is to be wanted [a demo­cra­cia é o direito de son­har o que se quer].

…

I believe that the most strik­ing trait of a demo­cratic men­tal­ity is its inex­haust­ible dis­pos­i­tion to ima­gine the new, to wel­come the unforeseeable.

Hence, poet­ics (in the sense of the arts), it teaches us to embrace an “adamic” atti­tude before all things of the world. A prim­it­ive gaze, abso­lutely essen­tial for the recov­ery of knowledge’s func­tion of tur­bu­lence and singularity.

…

Reason’s return to the time of chil­dren, when/​where the things of the world are seen for the first time.

…

Poetry for Bachelard reveals that man desires an “ought to”, a des­tiny, and a cre­at­ive affectiv­ity. For the philo­sopher of epi­stem­o­lo­gical obstacles, the prim­or­dial func­tion of poetry is to trans­form us. Poet­ics, he pro­claims, is the human oeuvre that trans­forms us most speedily: a poem suf­fices [um poema basta].

…

I dream a sur­real­ism of tender eyes. Storms do not dis­solve cas­tra­tion; storms only incite a refuge away from them­selves. I claim, there­fore, the scan­dal of sweet­ness, a del­ic­ate and tender tor­ment – one com­mit­ted to Eros.

…

Dream and poetry are the coun­ter­fig­ure of formal ima­gin­a­tion. The lat­ter stands out in the basic vocab­u­lary of sci­ence and philo­sophy, serving the con­sti­tu­tion of an ima­gin­a­tion extremely depend­ent on a prin­ciple of pass­ive visibility.

The formal ima­gin­a­tion, groun­ded in an immob­ile and immob­il­ized vis­ion, ful­fils its des­tiny by mov­ing towards form­al­ism. It dis­guises, thus, the mater­i­al­ity of things and of images, so as to think the world through tacit examples and masked images. A pro­posal that does not warn, as Bachelard states, that one does not learn a thought in the void.

In this way, formal ima­gin­a­tion turns mat­ter into an object of vis­ion by see­ing it only as fig­ur­a­tion. It is the ulti­mate res­ult of man’s dis­pos­i­tion as spec­tator of the world, of a pan­or­amic world, put under an idle con­tem­pla­tion. In the end, it means an apo­logy for a depend­ent and lack­ing ima­gin­a­tion. Depend­ent on objects of know­ledge; lack­ing in rela­tion to all new. It is a total­it­arian ima­gin­a­tion: one that presents itself as the eve of concepts.

Formal ima­gin­a­tion is vic­tim of an optic prin­ciple. It mas­ters dis­curs­ive pro­cesses that pro­duce the truth of the social sci­ences, and that turn the sci­ent­ist into a thinker–voyeur: the quiet thinker that Radin bequeathed to us as sym­bol of a whole reflect­ive tra­di­tion, which con­ceives of the image as a mere mirage-​without-​life of a world whose sig­ni­fic­a­tions, for­cibly, must be trans­lated into con­cepts. It is the word “optics” hid­den in con­cepts; it is there to give the illu­sion of being a double of the world.

…

Examin­ing care­fully the dis­curs­ive pro­cess of the social sci­ences, we can notice many marks of an “optic” under­stand­ing of the world. Expres­sions like: see­ing, con­tem­plat­ing, evid­ence, idea (which meant ori­gin­ally vis­ible form), point of view, per­spect­ive etc., show clearly how the dis­course of the social sci­ences is impreg­nated with ele­ments depend­ent on an optic con­cep­tion of the world. Indeed, the very notion of “the­ory” is fruit of the “optic” atti­tude. It is derived from Greek, from the meta­phoric use of the expres­sion “The­orem”. The Greeks used this word to refer to the com­ment­at­ors of the Olympic games. They would stand on the ter­races [arquiban­cada] to give their opin­ion on the games. Curi­ously, these char­ac­ters were the only not to take any act­ive part in the com­pet­i­tions. They would only see them. The “the­orem” had the vice of ocu­lar­ity, which our insti­tuted sci­ent­ists inherited.

Sur­real­ism soli­cits a new atti­tude before know­ledge. It shows that know­ledge must no longer be the ter­races of life.

Bachelard prefers to go out and seek another type of ima­gin­a­tion. He calls it mater­ial. This is an ima­gin­a­tion that recov­ers the world as cre­ativ­ity and as res­ist­ance. It asks for the act­ive and eman­cip­at­ory inter­ven­tion of man, decree­ing with this the death of the voyeur–thinker.

Here we are before the pro­posal of a demo­cratic ima­gin­a­tion, invent­ive, full of uncer­tain­ties. An ima­gin­a­tion that never sub­mits itself to the rela­tion knowledge-​power [saber-​poder]. In it, what rules is the rela­tion knowledge-​desire [saber-​desejo].

To wield power one never appeals to an ima­gin­a­tion that reveals the new. Power requires the empire of a nos­tal­gic cre­ativ­ity that begets only the effect of a change – an ima­gin­a­tion that intro­duces alter­a­tions that do not change any­thing. This type of ima­gin­a­tion finds its apex in the cul­ture of post-​modernity.

I am now think­ing about Kelsen. I feel his sin was to employ his ima­gin­a­tion to describe the legal dis­course that was already in place. His ima­gin­a­tion worked as ante­room for con­cepts, and that’s all. No other games have been engendered – just a con­cern for the puri­fic­a­tion of the old, which fed on his con­cepts. His hab­itat was a shroud for the cre­ation of a demo­cratic legal ima­gin­ary. He arrog­ated pur­ity against the oper­at­ing lux­ury of the new.

…

The total­it­arian ima­gin­a­tion works against dif­fer­ences. It is a ster­il­iz­ing ima­gin­a­tion: the orna­mental ima­gin­a­tion of ste­reo­types without space for the great desir­ing dif­fer­ences. It presents silence and blind­ness as tend­ency. We face an ima­gin­a­tion that leaves know­ledge without edge, without a taste for the edge [saber sem sabor]. Barthes remarks that know­ledge [saber] and fla­vour [sabor] have the same root. We need that these two words be kept sig­ni­fic­antly united. For that, we have to accept that the taste for [the edge of] know­ledge lies in the desire to change life: a per­man­ent desire for the new word. This fla­vour has the taste of a dream. Cer­tainly it is not the case that we have to instil the ima­gin­a­tion of power, as in May 1968, but instead a demo­cratic imagination.

…

I am speak­ing of dreams as a ter­rit­ory of encounter that allows our own bet­ter under­stand­ing in the inter­ac­tion with oth­ers. It is the dreams’ dis­course as mani­fest­a­tion of the world of desires.

Con­fron­ted with this pro­posal, we need to recon­sider the teach­ing atti­tudes [atit­udes docen­tes], gen­er­ally stuck to a nar­ciss­istic atti­tude that ends up pla­cing the stu­dent as a mere mir­ror, so that the teacher [pro­fessor] can recog­nize him­self, nar­ciss­ist­ic­ally deny­ing his weak­ness. The ped­ago­gic dream requires the teacher to step down from his navel and join a pro­cess of trans­form­at­ive mutual recognition.

…

Think­ing ideo­logy from the per­spect­ive of sur­real­ism, it can be approached as the ima­gin­a­tion that determ­ines an exter­ior con­trol of rela­tions among men. Avoid­ing the point of view that used to show ideo­logy as falsi­fic­a­tion of con­scious­ness or con­ceal­ment of the world, I present it as a sys­tem of fic­tions that seek to induce rela­tions among men, con­struct­ing a uni­vocal reality.

I am talk­ing about the con­struc­tion of a real­ity where one looses the autonomy of desires for the uni­vocal per­cep­tion of the world.

Before ideo­lo­gical fic­tions, another type of ima­gin­ary real­ity can rise, a magical real­ism that allows room for under­stand­ing the fic­tional real­ity into which we are steeped by means of a fic­tional exer­cise of power.

…

Per­haps nar­ciss­ism is the pro­fes­sional infirm­ity of those who teach…Preaching incon­form­ity yields power over oth­ers, and one does not fail to com­ply with the insti­tu­tion of the uni­ver­sity. We deceive ourselves when we say we are here to try and get things to change. We face now a feel­ing of omni­po­tence that hides other reasons.

…

Most of the time the non-​conformist teacher – the great icon­o­clast – is play­ing God. He sim­u­lates to over­throw all idols with the secret hope to occupy him­self the place of them all. Noth­ing is good enough, only his word: the only fet­ish to be venerated.

As in the word of a God, his word lets one see a glimpse [entre­ver] of the life that ought to be cel­eb­rated. This word is offered, and at the same time denied, con­cealed by the enig­matic mode in which it is hailed for an idle contemplation.

A bit like in ‘swing parties’, every­body looses in these non-​conformed classes.

In the orgies inven­ted by the middle class in late cap­it­al­ism, every­body feels unwell: dirty and rigid. Because these parties are a flight from life that reflects their life. It is an attempt to for­get mono­tony, to falsely flee the lack of com­mu­nic­a­tion and rela­tion. A total fail­ure: the dif­fer­ent mode of not communicating.

The same hap­pens in many classes where one tries to put for­ward a cri­tique of know­ledge. There is no cel­eb­ra­tion of life. Every­one goes on in anonym­ity. They talk about liv­ing in a dif­fer­ent way, but they do not take advant­age of that moment for such a dif­fer­ent liv­ing… and when the party is over each one gets back to one’s nor­mal­ity, as always fren­etic, mech­anic and anonym­ous. Also the crit­ical teacher gets back to his anonym­ity without quite caring for his own words, they are but only his daily inter­val. The break that strengthens.

Sur­real­ism must heed this. The sur­real­ist class should be part of life, and not a flight from it. Magic and dream as part of life, not as a for­get­ting of punishment.

…

It is import­ant to con­sider at this point that, from a ped­ago­gic per­spect­ive, by the route of the fant­astic, one can try to sound out both the lim­its of aca­demic and epi­stem­o­lo­gical codes, estab­lished insti­tu­tion­ally, and the lim­its of the author­it­arian mys­ti­fic­a­tions of tra­di­tional education.

In more than 20 years of teach­ing, I warned that a teacher needs to be a bit of an illu­sion­ist. Employ­ing a ped­agogy of the ima­gin­ary, show­ing that to change life, it is essen­tial to rein­vent fic­tions. [“It is essen­tial”, É pre­ciso, nor­mally trans­lated as “it is neces­sary”, but it is in fact more than neces­sary, it is pre­cise, exactly what is at stake, cut off upfront – like in the Latin prae/​caedere – from all that is superfluous].

We have to rein­vent lan­guage if we want to develop demo­cracy. Demo­cracy is impossible with ste­reo­typed people [homens]. The slumbered man, without com­mo­tion, is no demo­crat. A ste­reo­type can neither bear uncer­tain­ties, nor accept dif­fer­ences and dif­fer­ent people.

…

Anthro­po­lo­gists talk about magic in a way very dif­fer­ent from the sense I give to it in late sur­real­ism. From prim­it­ive thought, I keep only the pos­sib­il­ity to under­stand magic as a vital prin­ciple. Some­thing that is trans­miss­ible and apt to accu­mu­la­tion, but that can only be acquired in con­tact with others.

The strong qual­ity of this type of rep­res­ent­a­tion would be given by the pos­sib­il­ity to func­tion­ing as a par­ti­cip­at­ory men­tal­ity. A prim­it­ive way of think­ing that sug­gests to reclaim so as to recover the root of the sense of a col­lect­ive life; a col­lect­ive liv­ing that has faded away. This way of liv­ing cre­ates habits very dif­fer­ent from those that shadow West­ern ration­al­ity. The prim­it­ive men­tal­ity seduces me inso­far as I show a way to face its rep­res­ent­a­tions much more by means of emo­tions than by means of thought. Gen­er­al­ity is for the prim­it­ive an affect­ive cat­egory. Emo­tional rep­res­ent­a­tions have in their lives a para­mount role: magic real­ism repla­cing a mys­tical object­ive real­ism. It is magic in place of objectivity.

…

Rational logic tends to oppose rad­ic­ally intel­li­gence and emo­tions. Late sur­real­ism binds them, sum­mon­ing a cer­tain type of magic: vital enchantment.

…

Appeal­ing to the eman­cip­at­ory pos­sib­il­it­ies of magical thought, sur­real­ism seeks to replace this sickened love by the search for the affirm­a­tion of our sin­gu­lar­ity. For that, it tries to sub­vert the watch­ful fig­ures of law, sci­ence, and power, dis­cov­er­ing in them cer­tain marks of cor­rup­tion; it attempts to invent a counter-​image of loved-​objects. A dis­en­chant­ment that allows us to recover our autonomy. Thus, we would no longer ideal­ize these fig­ures, redis­cov­er­ing them in their imper­fec­tions and, there­fore, in their real history.

The con­struc­tion of counter-​images requires the recov­ery of the space of the polit­ical in soci­ety. A desire for sig­ni­fic­a­tion that the masses have lost. Today the masses are apathetic even when con­sum­ing the routines of imposed significations.

…

The theo­logy of power requires one to look at cen­sor­ship and deper­son­al­isa­tions as truths, i.e., given by means of a uni­ver­sal lec­ture­ship, which func­tions toward keep­ing men in a state of sac­red belief.

In insti­tu­tions, as in neur­oses, belief works for the con­struc­tion of fet­ishes. They allow sim­ul­tan­eously pro­du­cing and con­ceal­ing of the pro­ced­ures that point out not only to the manip­u­la­tion of psyche, but also, if not more con­cretely, to attract men effect­ively. This appeal takes place through legit­im­ising dis­courses that make insti­tu­tions speak as irre­place­able voices of abso­lute know­ledge. In this way, they determ­ine man’s rela­tion with dis­course. To gov­ern us, it is neces­sary to appeal to wor­ship, in other words, our sickened love for the mes­sen­ger object.

Ped­ago­gic dis­course is at the centre of this pro­cess. Most of all the teach­ing dis­course of law.

The legal dis­course appears bound to a sci­ence of the sac­red that keeps in silence a hellish zone of pro­duc­tion of know­ledge: a know­ledge that talks about free­dom and justice without know­ing that it is serving the oppress­ive men­tal­ity of a time.

The sci­ences of law cel­eb­rate the pos­sib­il­ity of avail­ing them­selves of dis­courses that set up bonds of wor­ship to the law, war­rant­ing with that the insti­tu­tional pro­duc­tion of sub­jectiv­ity. A know­ledge that makes law over­flow with the sick effects of love.

II.

There is no pur­pose in try­ing to define, with any pre­ci­sion, the mean­ing of sur­real­ism. It would be a semi­olo­gic form of set­ting up an author­it­arian cri­terion of exclu­sion. The acts and pro­jects that could not be framed in the defin­i­tion would be dis­carded from the sur­real­ist move­ment. This is what Bre­ton tried to do, in order to con­trol some­how the pro­jects of sur­real­ism. Defin­ing sur­real­ism is a form of betray­ing the spirit that anim­ates it. It means to attempt to reach the uni­vo­city of the fun­da­mental set of its pro­pos­i­tions, enclos­ing them in con­cepts. We would obtain, in this way, a read­able dis­course of sur­real­ism. Sur­real­ism, how­ever, exists as a cease­less becom­ing write­able of texts that go on in rede­fin­ing their mean­ing and their fate, each time again. Those who are bound to his­tory of these texts add to them other sig­ni­fic­a­tions. The value and the goals of sur­real­ism depend on this ver­tigo of senses. Sur­real­ism is a sin­gu­lar approach to the fant­astic, so that the com­mon con­scious­ness of life may be upheld. In the prox­im­ity to the fant­astic, at this point where human reason looses its con­trol, each sur­real­ist could trans­late, in a magical dis­course, the emo­tions con­tained in the depth of his being.

Thus, sur­real­ism is a dis­curs­ive strategy that awakens, through appeal­ing to the fant­astic, the lat­ent state of our sin­gu­lar desires. It shows the sin­gu­lar sense of each exist­ence in ques­tion­ing the offi­cial forms of cul­ture. Sur­real­ism is in a dir­ect func­tion of the neces­sity that each one of us may exer­cise with autonomy, our own gaze before life.

Cer­tainly, sur­real­ism suffered strong influ­ences that went on to feed its roots: psy­cho­ana­lysis, Marx­ism, and aes­thetic tend­en­cies con­verged towards the set­ting up of its gen­esis and evol­u­tion. New ele­ments that have been brought into the sur­real­ist move­ment added know­ledge, sens­it­ive reac­tions, and sug­ges­tions that imprin­ted strong marks onto the gen­eral atti­tude of surrealism.

Sur­real­ists have organ­ized their poetic, moral and polit­ical rebel­lion around sev­eral com­mon ideas. Col­lab­or­at­ors of the magazine The Sur­real­ist Revolu­tion, unan­im­ously, agree about the fol­low­ing issues: the world called Cartesian that revolved around them was an unsus­tain­able, mys­ti­fy­ing, with neither humour nor pas­sion. Against it, all forms of insur­rec­tion were jus­ti­fied. All psy­cho­logy of the under­stand­ing was dis­cussed; they agreed to oppose the exor­bit­ant pre­ten­sions of reason, whereas the lat­ter had to be deprived of the abso­lute power that had been attrib­uted to it for cen­tur­ies. The duties that reason imposed upon man in the moral sphere would loose, for sur­real­ists, all jus­ti­fic­a­tion. Before the laws of the insti­tuted mor­al­ity, sur­real­ists agreed to for­mu­late con­crete reser­va­tions, they inten­ded to lib­er­ate man through poetry, dream, and appeal to the super­nat­ural in order to pro­mote a new order of val­ues. They regarded with con­cern the way in which sci­ence manip­u­lates desire and things, but renounces to inhabit them. Sci­ence for sur­real­ists has always been this thought that is admir­ably act­ive, ingeni­ous, non­chal­ant, which treats all being as a gen­eral object, but ignor­ing the sub­ject of pas­sion. Sci­ence does not recog­nize that the pas­sion­ate sub­ject can also be sub­ject of know­ledge. Hence, it describes affects as one describes the wild­life of a dis­tant coun­try, without real­iz­ing that man is wholly in his pas­sions. That is why sur­real­ists appeal to poetry.

From these con­ver­gences, some diver­gences come up about the means to reach them.

For my part, I wish to reclaim some of the trends opened by the sur­real­ists. I am try­ing, with this mani­festo, to pro­duce my own read­ing of sur­real­ism, put­ting down in it all my ped­ago­gic exper­i­ence. I want to make an exer­cise of adapt­a­tion of the sur­real­ist exper­i­ence, as ped­ago­gic ges­ture, to the teach­ing of law. Cer­tainly, times are dif­fer­ent. Now it is neces­sary to struggle against the sort of sens­it­iv­ity that stead­ily wins over the planet with the defin­it­ive con­sec­ra­tion of late capitalism’s cul­ture. I speak then of late sur­real­ism to show how it can be use­ful to the search to affirm sin­gu­lar­ity within a cul­ture that intends to bind all of our sens­it­iv­ity to the machines that over­flow our daily life. Late sur­real­ism will allow us, then, to uncover the pas­sions inside these very pas­sions, so as to change the qual­ity of affect. In the cul­ture of late cap­it­al­ism, the tend­ency is to present fash­ion in a homo­gen­eous and dif­fuse form so that they can be con­sumed as objects. The mar­ket ration­al­ity that brings in it the logics of sen­ti­ments’ domination.

In the six months that I took to write this mani­festo, a great array of inter­rog­a­tions without responses came up. So long as I moved for­ward with the read­ing of sur­real­ist texts, I felt the neces­sity to research sev­eral themes and authors that made me slip away from those pur­poses that I had ini­tially required of myself. The dif­fer­ent read­ings gave me some­how a cer­tain clar­ity about some ques­tions. It has been a lucid­ity conquered slowly. For this reason, many of my state­ments shall look redund­ant, some­times obsess­ive. I chose not to alter the sequence in which ideas have been expressed, keep­ing with this the strength of its spon­taneity. I am present­ing a sin­cere text and not a set of affirm­a­tions with the inten­tion of truth. It is a work in con­tinu­ous unrav­el­ling. In this way, I am being faith­ful to the spirit that demands a manifesto.

[Sum­mary of pos­i­tions expressed in the first part]

III. [Reflec­tions on total­it­ari­an­ism, with cer­tain par­tic­u­lar­it­ies, from Tokyo to Latin Amer­ica – and demo­cracy as alternative]

Human­ity enters the era of indif­fer­ent fantas­ies. [These are] dreams without com­mit­ment that allow for the found­a­tion of a pen­et­rat­ing sys­tem of con­trol of sub­jectiv­ity, but not openly repress­ive. That is, fantas­ies that enthral without allow­ing our emo­tional involve­ment with them. It is an ima­gin­ary con­struc­ted to neut­ral­iz­ing affects. Dis­ney World is the per­fect example of this realm of imper­sonal fantas­ies, indif­fer­ent aes­thet­ics, and ima­gin­ary without pas­sion. It is the dream of a world that trans­forms itself rad­ic­ally by the force of tech­no­logy. A world where objects are erot­i­cised and people are reified. Our own dream and fantas­ies have not at all influ­enced the charmed world of “Dis­ney World”. Tech­no­logy steals our capa­city of dream­ing. A city of auto­mates that shows how the offi­cial ima­gin­a­tion will be in the begin­ning of the cul­ture of post-​modernity.

…

For now we have a world of con­sumer­ist Fausts who sold their souls, the com­mod­it­ies. A Baroque world of alleg­oric com­mod­it­ies that think for us: the death of thought con­ver­ted in com­mod­ity. Objects, images, and inform­a­tion that we con­sume under the gaze of mel­an­choly, con­ver­ted in pro­fes­sion­als of anguish. Para­lysed, con­demned to hav­ing a desire of non-​desire in the mel­an­cholic desire of con­sump­tion. Under the gaze of mel­an­choly, life dwindles and takes on the aspect of death. The organic takes on the rigid­ity of the inor­ganic. Death usurps the rights of life. Thus, notice an alleg­oric con­tem­pla­tion and assim­il­ated to the commodity-​form so as to erase mankind’s libid­inal capa­city, and its pos­sib­il­ity to loc­al­ize sup­ports of libid­inal investment.

The goal of a total­it­arian order is the abol­i­tion of all pos­sib­il­ity of libid­inal invest­ment and all pos­sib­il­ity of count­ing on a know­ledge based on the meta­bol­iz­a­tion of the het­ero­gen­eous. In total­it­ari­an­ism, anguish takes hold in sub­jects as death drive [pulsação de morte, in Por­tuguese, the most well accep­ted term for the Freu­dian Trieb or drive is pulsão], as clos­ure of all pos­sib­il­ity of inter­pret­ing anguish. Psychot­ic­ally, men live in anguish without loc­al­iz­a­tions, without rep­res­ent­a­tions. The sense of anguish appar­ently resolved in the subtle mirage of mel­an­cholic con­sump­tion or of some brother, omni­present and face­less. A ghostly instance [instân­cia fant­as­magórica] where one looses the right to have access to col­lect­ive his­tory, the right to fore­shadow a future time and the right to have inter­sub­ject­ive rela­tions, of join­ing up with oth­ers yield­ing affects. A world where one looses also the right to pas­sions. Soon it will see the time when con­sumer­ist Fausts will no longer be neces­sary. Men will be, then, barred from hav­ing ideologies.

…

With regard to total­it­ari­an­ism and to demo­cracy, there is no doubt that we shall help their under­stand­ing by bring­ing about a semi­olo­gic dis­lo­ca­tion. Refrain­ing from attrib­ut­ing them a valu­able sig­ni­fic­ance in itself and show­ing them as mean­ings of a form of soci­ety. It is to be remarked that I am speak­ing about total­it­ari­an­ism and demo­cracy as about a mean­ing [sen­tido], i.e., a sig­ni­fic­a­tion of a social prac­tice. It is a ques­tion of a pro­ced­ural [pro­ces­sual] sig­ni­fic­a­tion that imports a ter­rit­ory of con­front­a­tions that will be insti­tut­ing the modes under which men will replace the real for the sym­bolic. Demo­cracy is part, against total­it­ari­an­ism, in the struggles to define real­ity and who insti­tutes it. In this dir­ec­tion, one can only envis­age the pos­sib­il­it­ies of a demo­cratic con­sti­tu­tion of real­ity when it derives from – in solid­ar­ity and col­lect­ively – from soci­ety itself, as a form of res­ist­ance against the insti­tu­tional impos­i­tion of a total­it­arian ver­sion of the real. For that, it is neces­sary to get back to think­ing that that has been decreed the unthinkable.

Demo­cracy has to be val­ued as a prac­tice, per­man­ently insti­tut­ing a polit­ical space – a space where power is legit­im­ated by being tied to the per­man­ence of con­flicts. Espe­cially so, when it is con­fron­ted with the psychic mech­an­isms that are force­fully inter­n­al­ised by sub­jects so as to attain the object­ive of a soci­ety totally con­formed to the model of an order and irre­vers­ibly totalitarian.

…

What I am going to dis­cuss here is, in short, the pos­sib­il­ity to think demo­cracy as a way to face real­ity attrib­ut­ing to it, col­lect­ively and with solid­ar­ity, its sig­ni­fic­a­tions, res­ist­ing to the sym­bolic insig­ni­fic­ant, that is, facing up real­ity in a way that is heed­ful and unpre­med­it­ated. In this man­ner, demo­cracy appears as a pro­duc­tion of unfore­see­able sig­ni­fic­a­tions, opened to the new and cre­at­ive. I am talk­ing about demo­cracy as cre­at­ive res­ist­ance, as unfore­see­able res­ist­ance against a total­it­arian order, which in turn does not admit the new in history.

…

Think­ing demo­cracy as the sense of a form of soci­ety that gets going to meet its becom­ing, con­struct­ing spaces of res­ist­ances to prac­tices of dis­cip­lin­ary dom­in­a­tion or sup­pres­sion of sub­jectiv­ity – it is then not dif­fi­cult to under­stand the neces­sity of sus­tain­ing the sym­bolic pro­duc­tion of this form of soci­ety in a reason that would not be groun­ded on the priv­ileged fig­ure of the sub­ject, rather in that rela­tion amongst sub­jects, in a com­mu­nic­at­ive and open reason.

Com­mu­nic­at­ive reason is com­mit­ted to the non-​modelled form­a­tion of sub­jectiv­ity, and with spaces of res­ist­ance against the dis­cip­lin­ing ways of pro­duc­tion and sup­pres­sion of sub­jectiv­ity. The words that I pro­nounce meet their mean­ing in my bonds with oth­ers, in the rela­tion between the con­di­tions of pro­duc­tion and recep­tion of messages.

…

Com­mu­nic­at­ive reason as sur­real­ist reason: reason of desire. Reason as res­ist­ance to alienation.

The task of a cri­tique of power and viol­ence can be defined as the present­a­tion of their rela­tions with repress­ive and autonom­ous instances of soci­ety. The sphere of such rela­tions is des­ig­nated by the con­cepts of total­it­ari­an­ism and democracy.

In this line of thought, total­it­ari­an­ism can be exposed as the cul­tural instances where one for­bids think­ing the for­bid­den in order to cre­ate insti­tu­tion­ally a sub­jectiv­ity that slowly but stead­ily becomes evan­es­cent. A cul­tural world much more con­cerned with the abol­i­tion of think­ing than with its ali­en­a­tion. Men without desire who go on con­sum­ing, con­sum­ing, until they con­sume their own lives.

With regard to demo­cracy, I out­line its sig­ni­fic­ant tend­ency of oppos­i­tion to total­it­ari­an­ism. Before such total­it­ari­an­ism, demo­cracy appears to me as the sum of all moments that res­ist it. I see demo­cracy as a prag­mat­ics of res­ist­ance, or if you prefer, dear reader, as a polit­ics of affirm­a­tion of cer­tain instances of autonomy. Repres­sion and autonomy, a dyad that feed­backs into itself, impos­ing recip­rocal lim­its to itself.

Hence, I am try­ing to avoid romantic con­cep­tu­al­isa­tions, ideal­iz­ing and jur­id­i­fy­ing demo­cracy; I try to see it as a dynamic pro­cess that goes on to meet its sig­ni­fic­a­tions, in each moment of his­tory, with the impos­i­tion of cer­tain lim­its to total­it­ari­an­ism. In a more drastic way, I should say that I am sug­gest­ing to reduce the mean­ing of demo­cracy to the ges­ture itself of impos­ing lim­its to totalitarianism.

There are no ideal mean­ings of demo­cracy. There are pro­cesses of affirm­a­tion of autonomy before a cul­tural order that is total­it­arian in a refined manner.

How­ever, I have to warn you that I am not speak­ing of lim­its as a clas­sical jur­ist. It is not the case that we need to impose lim­its, anchor­ing viol­ence in the rules of law. I am not think­ing about any type of mythic mani­fest­a­tion of power. I think of a new paradigm of life, where viol­ence and power do not drift myth­ic­ally towards the determ­in­a­tion of our val­ues and necessity.

When jur­ists equate, fol­low­ing Kelsenian thought, the State to the Law, they sup­press private life, del­eg­at­ing abso­lute power to read the his­tory of jur­idical norms to the bod­ies in charge of pro­du­cing legal sig­ni­fic­a­tion. Thus, the State acquires the mono­poly of jur­idical memory and pro­vokes the puri­fic­a­tion of col­lect­ive memory over the past and the present of norms. Cer­tainly, in con­trolling the past and the present of norms, one con­trols also the past and the future of soci­ety. There­fore, it turns out to be dif­fi­cult to accept that demo­cracy comes about by recog­nising the bod­ies in charge of the pro­duc­tion of jur­idical sig­ni­fic­a­tions, as the only instance apt to rewrit­ing the his­tory of law. A “pure” his­tory, which is always a his­tory engendered by desire to for­get­ting: norms are valid if they belong to sys­tem without memory, which in its total­ity is efficacious.

IV.

I con­sider my book “Legal Sci­ence and her Two Hus­bands” as the embryo of this mani­festo. The centrepiece [carro-​chefe, lit­er­ally in Carnival’s parades: the main float] of this text was the notion of car­ni­val­iz­a­tion. With that, Bahk­tin enriched lit­er­ary cri­tique reveal­ing the dis­curs­ive dis­pos­it­ives more vis­cer­ally com­mit­ted to the sym­bolic dimen­sions of polit­ics. A lan­guage without reserves, pro­foundly erot­i­cised, that makes of lit­er­at­ure a dimen­sion of the pub­lic space. I refer to pub­lic space as a locus of col­lect­ive pro­duc­tion of desire and of sig­ni­fic­a­tions. A locus where the exer­cise of social powers faces up the forces that res­ist it.

…

Car­ni­val­iz­a­tion is a frame of mind, not a lit­er­ary genre. It should indeed be said that it is the trans­gress­ive frame of mind that comes about, as in dreams, through force of desire, so as to pro­voke express­ive dis­lo­ca­tions. Since Descartes every­body knows that one can­not recon­struct any longer where an exper­i­ence of decon­struc­tion has taken place; an exper­i­ence where explor­a­tion of ideas has to be per­formed away from con­sec­rated places and for­mu­las, in the mar­gin­al­ity of genres. They con­sti­tute, con­sequently, strange and vibrant ways of rep­res­ent­ing the things of the world: unex­pec­ted vis­ions burst, with their sen­sorial mean­ings [sen­tido], the com­mon­places that, as buzz­ing of bees, resound in the head of many – includ­ing teach­ers and social scientists.

Car­ni­val is ori­gin­ally a spec­tacle without cat­walks [pas­sarela, where today Car­ni­val is “con­tained”, for instance, in Rio]. There are no sep­ar­a­tions between act­ors and view­ers. Every­one con­verges, in the car­ni­val act, exer­cising the plural of fantasy.

…

Ulti­mately, I am try­ing to claim the import­ance of a car­ni­val­ized lan­guage as this social space does not allow any mean­ing uncovered, ready for con­sump­tion, neither does it allow any sub­ject of enun­ci­ation in the con­di­tion of judge, mas­ter [teacher-​master], con­fessor, or con­sec­rated inter­preter of a real­ity that oppresses and restricts car­ni­val­ized lan­guage. Car­ni­val­iz­a­tion is a prac­tice of language’s autonomy.

The autonomy of car­ni­val­ized texts requires a ludic and erot­i­cised rela­tion amongst all offi­cial dis­courses, be they sci­entific, polit­ical, or poetic. In car­ni­val­ized texts, signs wear fantas­ies as liber­tarian mech­an­isms that dis­place indi­vidu­als out of their usual pos­i­tions amidst the social struc­ture, pro­ject­ing them toward a ludic com­munity that is pre­dis­posed to ques­tion­ing all total­ising norms and stances: a sym­bolic break that appeals to par­ody and to grot­esque real­ism in order to reveal the insens­ible and the absurd of insti­tuted sens­ib­il­ity: a cre­at­ive response to situ­ations of social exclu­sion. In carnaval­ized texts, the con­ver­gence of num­ber­less con­tra­dic­tions springs forth [se dá], extolled as the plural of sense.

Carnaval­ized dis­courses can­not be detained, they can­not be trans­formed in fet­ishes in the shelves of a lib­rary; their con­stitutive move­ment is the jour­ney [traves­sia: it means in Por­tuguese the cross­ing of long dis­tances, of giant spaces like oceans, con­tin­ents, deserts; also a long, des­ol­ate or for­saken path]. The pro­cesses of their mean­ings con­sti­tute their product. The car­ni­val­ized text is not bound to a hier­archy, not even to a simple seg­ment­a­tion of styles. It always implies a cer­tain hope for lim­its that find sub­vers­ive force in its unclas­si­fi­able nature. The carnaval­ized dis­course is always placed on the limit of norms, con­ven­tions and hier­arch­ies; fur­ther­more it is placed on the limit of rules of enun­ci­ation, legib­il­ity, and insti­tuted ration­al­ity. There is no cen­sor­ship in the jour­ney of its senses. The car­ni­val­iz­a­tion of sig­ni­fy­ing pro­cesses hap­pens in the trans­gres­sion of the lim­its and of insti­tuted censorships.

We need the medi­eval fools and jesters so that all fears, everything that in the total­it­arian cul­ture ter­ror­izes us, become grot­esque through car­ni­val­ized ridicul­ing and the sub­vers­ive char­ac­ter of the laugh [riso], the humour of the people in the pub­lic space, oppos­ing the sol­emn and guilt-​imposing tone of the offi­cial cul­ture. Car­ni­val cul­ture per­mits, there­fore, a vis­ion of the world, and of the human rela­tions that work as par­odic and erot­i­cised doubles of the offi­cial sym­bolic field. In a way, we are con­fron­ted with sig­ni­fy­ing doubles that free us from any dog­mat­ism and allow us to bear, through laugh, cul­tural situ­ations unsus­tain­able for the uncon­scious. It is the way to make the loss bear­able and epic. It is the Chinese laugh before the judge­ment of Jiang-​Quing, it is the sense that sus­tains the folk­loric bond the Mex­ic­ans have with death: a laugh that lib­er­ates, a laugh that sorts out in a super­ior level the unbear­able night­mare of Thanatic fears. In the car­ni­val vis­ion of the world, man can laugh (sub­vers­ively) at his own unhappiness.

The indi­vidual, in the car­ni­val­ized ver­sion of the world, takes on a state of erotic ecstasy that is opposed to all uphold­ing, to all per­fect­ing and reg­u­la­tion, point­ing out to a future admit­tedly uncertain.

Carnival’s sym­bolic fields per­mit men to return to them­selves, sus­pend­ing ali­en­a­tion. Car­ni­val senses can be attached to the medi­eval pub­lic space [praça pública, lit­er­ally pub­lic square], where a sym­bolic order would be pro­duced, res­ult of a liv­ing, mater­ial and sens­it­ive con­tact – of a con­tact lib­er­ated from offi­cial norms as their trans­form­at­ive neg­a­tion. In a way, the medi­eval pub­lic space yiel­ded fest­ive moments without restric­tions, sym­bolic moments opposed to all idea of fin­ish­ing and per­fec­tion, and all idea of immut­ab­il­ity of cer­tainty: dynamic sym­bols, mut­able, act­ive, sym­bols impreg­nated with renov­a­tion, ludic con­scious­ness, and a pro­found sen­ti­ment of relativ­ity with regard to truths and author­it­ies in power. Sym­bols also allow for the degrad­a­tion and regen­er­a­tion, through grot­esque real­ism, of what is socially insti­tuted as sub­lime so as to con­ceal the agon­iz­ing world. In a car­ni­val­ized uni­verse, the birth of some­thing new is as import­ant as the death of the old.

In the prac­tices of car­ni­val com­mu­nic­a­tion, the game turns into real life, mark­ing the tri­umph of a tem­por­ary type of autonomy: tem­por­ary delib­er­a­tion of dom­in­at­ing truth and of insti­tuted prac­tices of powers. In other words, the game in the car­ni­val­ized lan­guage is opposed to all uphold­ing, point­ing out to a future neces­sar­ily incom­plete and irre­du­cibly plural.

The games of the car­ni­val­ized lan­guage do not import rules of cen­sor­ship; they coin­cide with a lib­er­a­tion of sym­bolic energy that places us before an infin­ite sig­ni­fic­ant of sig­ni­fi­ers. It is a game that rejects the con­sump­tion of senses. The point is that, in fact, their sig­ni­fi­ers are much more than the mater­ial dwell­ing of the sig­ni­fied; above all they allow the cre­ation of the very plural of senses. Their sig­ni­fi­ers dwell as the place of sign where the sig­ni­fied can be per­man­ently emp­tied to make effect­ive the infin­ite of sense. This infin­ite does not find itself referred to any idea of the inef­fable, of unnamed sig­ni­fied, but the idea of game: the per­petual engen­der­ing of sig­ni­fieds entwined by a web of sig­ni­fi­ers in state of per­man­ent struc­tur­ing. They are organ­ised by respond­ing neither to an organic life of mat­ur­a­tion, nor to a her­men­eutic life of deep­en­ing, rather, accord­ing to a move­ment of serial counter-​levelling, of vari­ations and con­not­at­ive and decentred jux­ta­pos­i­tions, without clos­ure. We are not before a dis­course with sev­eral mean­ings, we are before a semi­olo­gic ter­rit­ory where the very plural of senses actu­al­ises itself: the Barthian text. Accord­ing to my read­ing of Barthes, I would say that the plural of a text has not effect­ively to do with the ambi­gu­ity of mean­ing, but with that that we could call the irre­du­cible mul­tiple, that is, the total­ity of a semi­otic field appre­ci­ated splen­didly in its broad poly­phony, in its exclus­ive inter­tex­tu­al­ity. Thus, before a text, in order to share it, we need to experience/​taste it in a work, incor­por­at­ing it to the game that it pro­poses, but never feel it as an object of consumption.

Pla­cing myself before dom­in­ant legal con­cep­tions, I would like to say that the legal sec­tion of the dis­course of order grounds the power of its enun­ci­at­ing dis­courses and its cor­rob­or­at­ing truths in a mono­logic and fic­ti­tiously legible dis­course. [The legal sec­tion of the dis­course of order] ulti­mately dis­guises the prim­it­ively car­ni­val­ized nature of the dis­course of the law. They are always denied texts to pro­tect a coer­cive force. Before the law, it is neces­sary to con­ceal the irre­du­cible mul­tiple of the senses that actu­al­ise law in an end­less inter­tex­tu­al­ity. Exclus­ively a legible dis­course can speak in the name of repres­sion and the dis­pos­it­ives of sub­mis­sion. The fic­ti­tiously legible char­ac­ter is used to jus­tify the legal exer­cise of power and the power of police of the know­ledge of the law.

Silent voices of this manifesto

Alaugnier – Aragon – Artaud – Bachelard – Bahk­tin – Barthes – Bas­tos Pêpe – Baudril­lard – Bataille – Ben­jamin – Borges – Bréton – Cade­martori – Castori­adis – Chap­lin – Cortazar – Dali – Da Matta – Dostoyevsky – Eco – Fou­cault – Freud – Guat­tari – Kristeva – Lacan – Lautréa­mont – Lefort – Legendre – Lyo­tard – Morin – Orwell – Paz – Picasso – Rou­anet – Woody Allen.

Trans­lated by Pablo S. Ghetti from the Por­tuguese ori­ginal: Luís Alberto Warat, Mani­festo do Sur­real­ismo Jurídico (São Paulo: Acadêm­ica, 1988). The choice for ‘mani­festo of’ rather than the more cur­rent ‘mani­festo for’ has been made to safe­guard the ori­ginal ambi­gu­ity of the gen­it­ive. This means not only that a Mani­festo was writ­ten by Warat for the sake of legal sur­real­ism, but it also means that legal sur­real­ism mani­fests itself in the text. Note, moreover, that some oddit­ies in this trans­la­tion reflect oddit­ies in the Por­tuguese ori­ginal, and some of them reflect the oddity of the work of trans­la­tion itself. This trans­la­tion owes much to dis­cus­sions and meet­ings organ­ized by the Latin Amer­ican Stud­ies read­ing group at Birk­beck, Uni­ver­sity of Lon­don, School of Law (many thanks to all who took part in it). Finally, this awk­ward trans­la­tion would have been unread­able without Vic­toria Ridler’s brave and care­ful copy-​editing.