Freedom and Transgression: Sontag on Artaud and Breton

That Artaud found Breton's thinking shallow - that is, optimistic, aesthetic - follows from the fact that Breton did not have a Gnostic style or sensibility. Breton was attracted by the hope of reconciling the demands of individual freedom with the need to expand and balance the personality through generous, corporate emotions; the anarchist view, formulated in this century with the greatest subtlety and authority by Breton and Paul Goodman, is a form of conservative, humanistic thinking - doggedly sensitive to everything repressive and mean while remaining loyal to the limits that protect human growth and pleasure. The mark of Gnostic thinking is that it is enraged by all limits, even those that save. (Susan Sontag, 'Introduction' to Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings)

Susan Sontag's sensitive portrait of the difference between Artaud and Breton only slightly exaggerates Breton's often unacknowledged sympathy with ideas of human development often located within the more romantic strands of liberalism (Hegel, von Humboldt, to a lesser extent J S Mill). And the question at issue, of whether the ideal of developing one's creative faculties may be in tension with a profound kind of freedom, must seem crucial in our libertarian age.

One way to doubt whether there really is a tension here may be to ask why it seems so appropriate to describe the Gnostic opposition to limits as a matter of rage. Might not such rage, even while it provides the energies required for a transgression of limits, involve experiential limitations of its own, in particular by closing off the pleasures of growth? And granted that a certain kind of fidelity to growth and pleasure also involves intrinsic limitations (and perhaps it is precisely these that particularly enrage the Gnostic Artaud) is it not precisely the function of such loyalty to open up more choices than it closes off?

Bataille wrote that in Surrealism "the accent is placed not on the fact of choosing but on the content of the choice proposed". Although the fact of choosing must remain central to anyone deeply concerned with freedom, the issue between Artaud and Breton may indeed come down to the concrete structure of freedom: not how many limits should be transgressed (for how, in any case, should they be counted) but which limits - and what it is that lies beyond them.