The Surrealism of the Habitual: From Poetic Language to the Prose of Life

This article argues that the later philosophy of Wittgenstein has significant affinities with surrealist approaches to the ordinary. It links the question of ordinary language first to the dilemmas of poetic speech after Mallarmé, then to a current of thought on everyday life that emerges in France in the wake of surrealism (Lefebvre, Blanchot, Certeau). Finally, a reading of prose texts by Breton and Aragon brings together these two lines of argument, demonstrating that surrealism appeals to ordinary language and everyday life as a remedy against the threat of scepticism. Surrealist manipulations of language are less a departure from the real than an attempt both to restore and to renew the human relation with the world. Obscured by its very familiarity, the everyday comes into view as what Cavell calls the ‘surrealism of the habitual’.