How to think avant-gardes nowadays

Abstract

This critical study deals with the discussion of the relevance of avant-gardes for contemporary asthetics and for Western thought. It takes as starting point three thesis of the last third of the 20th century. First of all, Peter Bürger and Bernd Hüppauf’s controversial thesis on the failure of avantgardes. Secondly, Sylvian Agacinski’s thesis, which states an anachronism of avant-gardes as a result of the distinction between aesthetic form and technical progress. Lastly, the thesis offered by Boris Groys, who has found a Stalinist precedent to criticize avant-garde movements: the coincidence between utopia and totalitarism.
The paper also retakes surrealism to open once again the question about the relevance of avant-gardes nowadays. On the one hand, the contribution of the journal Documents, founded by George Bataille and Carl Einstein in 1929, gives a universal point of view instead of an eurocentric one on considering surrealism. On the other hand, the revision of some aspects of German Romanticism makes possible to rethink the debate on avant-gardes, considering not only their first contributions, but also the overcoming of idealist aesthetics: Bachelard’s notion of surrationalisme presents surrealism as the reason of the irrational, taking surrealism beyond the limits of aesthetics and placing avant-gardes as the reverse side of the conflicts that constitutes the mise en abîme of our Western culture’s premises.