Toe to Head: Magritte and Bataille

One of the first wall labels we encounter at the recent Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) show, Magritte the Mystery of the Ordinary, aligns us upon a certain trajectory for thinking about surrealism's project. The painting, Entr'acte , we are told, viz Magritte, “shows his preoccupation with bodily fragmentation.” And, for sure, there it is scattered all around the galleries of MOMA, a body in pieces: morselized limbs and feet, torsos minus heads, arms as cudgels, as well as orphaned skulls, breasts, legs, and feet. The dates of the works in the show range from the late 1920s, when Magritte was living and working in Paris, and was at his closest to André Breton and the Paris group of surrealist artists and writers, up through the 1930s, when he had returned to the more parochial scene of Brussels. Given those dates, there is no doubt the human and psychological detritus of World War I foreshadowed this “preoccupation” of Magritte's. Unsurprisingly, it was not a lonely preoccupation. Many a contemporary of his on either side of the defunct, but soon to be rehabilitated, Western front would attest in their own work to this same preoccupation. In Germany, Otto Dix cornered the field for rendering “war cripples.” In France, the traumatized body surfaces-merely staying within the surrealist group-in photographs of Brassaï and Jacques-André Boiffard, collages of Max Ernst, and assemblages of Hans Bellmer, to name only the most obvious. This same deformed figuration, or is it re-formed, of the human body executed by many of the most notable of the surrealists, including Magritte, would later adorn the covers of the surrealist journal Minotaure. And importantly, as our concerns will develop here, within said journal we will find essays by a youthful Lacan; especially one on the notorious crime of the Papin sisters, wherein the aforementioned sisters murdered and gruesomely dismembered their employers. Indeed Lacan was attentive to and “inspired” by, as Elizabeth Roudinesco offer