American Religion

American Religion 1, no. 2 (Spring 2020), pp. 98–120 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.1.2.05 Review essay The Task of ✷suRRealism in a Time of TRiumph Jeremy BileS School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA “The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.” —André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1929 “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters. Okay? It’s like incredible.” —Now-President Donald J. Trump, 2016 “It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is that same thing in a deceptive form.” —Georges Bataille, “The Solar Anus,” 1927 PREAMBLE (TERMINAL REFLECTIONS) Nomen est omen. Name is sign, augur, destiny—and membrane, and bowel. JeRemy Biles 99 To disclose the omen within the nomen is one task for us now, today, in this time of triumph (fig. 1).1 ✷ The movement of slugs. The fractional thoughts presented here are one manifestation of a desire for revolt—a rage more silent than the movement of a slug beneath the rain-wetted lineaments of a mythic apparatus.2 ✷ Verbum / Ann(ul)us. I have long been attentive to the rhetoric of the “surreal,” both in my own everyday interactions with others—who tend to attach “surreal” 1 The etymological excerpts appearing in this essay are from etymonline.com. 2 “Revolt—its face distorted by amorous ecstasy—tears from God his naive mask, and thus oppression collapses in the crash of time. Catastrophe is that by which a nocturnal horizon is set ablaze—it is time released from all bonds.” Georges Bataille, “Sacrifices,” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 134. Boldface added. Figure 1: Etymology of “trump.” American Religion 1:2 100 to anything odd, unusual, quirky, out of the ordinary—as well as in news media and popular culture. I was therefore not surprised when, at the close of 2016, Webster’s Dictionary announced that its Word of the Year would be “surreal.” The dictionary’s editors noted the escalation in frequency with which “surreal ” was consulted in the online lexicon following incidents of shock and horror in 2016, citing the terrorist attacks in Brussels and Nice, as well as “the US election in November.” “Surreal,” they explained, is a term “often looked up spontaneously ” in exceptional moments “of both tragedy and surprise, whether or not it is used in speech or writing.”3 ✷ Remarking on Webster’s’ selection of “surreal,” a reporter at Time noted that “modern dictionary makers have the ability to know what humanity is struggling to understand at any given moment, by tracking spikes in the words that are being looked up; we may turn to Google to search for anything, but we turn to the dictionary to search for meaning.”4 By extrapolation, dictionaries’ “words of the year” often index points of confusion and a concomitant desire for sense-making. Thus dictionaries are tools for creating order from chaos, security from surprise , truth from tragedy, meaning from meaninglessness. The Webster’s editors find the impulse to consult the dictionary in times of uncertainty to be “not surprising ,” for “we often search for just the right word to help us bring order to abstract thoughts, emotions, or reactions. Surreal seems to be, for 2016, such a word” (fig. 2).5 Webster’s offers this concise definition of their Word of the Year: Figure 2: Definition of “surreal.” 3 “Word of the Year 2016: ‘Surreal’ is our 2016 Word of the Year,” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 11th ed. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 2003. https://www .merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/woty2016-top-looked-up-words-surreal. 4 Katy Steinmetz, “And Merriam Webster’s Word of the Year for 2016 Is…” December 19, 2016, https://time.com/4605401/merriam-webster-word-of-the-year-2016/. 5 “Word of the Year 2016...