A question of tomorrow: Blanchot, surrealism and the time of the fragment

Abstract

This article offers a close critical reading of Blanchot's essay on Surrealism, 'Tomorrow at Stake', raising a series of questions concerning the time of 'Surrealist experience' and its relation to those temporal structures inscribed within the concepts of modernity, the avant-garde, and (art) history itself. It is argued, through a posited connection to Romantic conceptions of the fragment, that those 'reflexes of the future' which for Surrealism determine the value of the present, may be understood, philosophically, in relation to diverse conceptions of the 'openness' of the question, in turn suggesting a more complex understanding of Surrealism's 'avant-garde' character.