SOURCE: “René Crevel's Body Algebra,” in Articulations of Difference: Gender Studies and Writing in French, edited by Dominque D. Fisher and Lawrence R. Schehr, Stanford University Press, 1997, pp. 155–66.

In the following essay, Heysel evaluates Crevel's philosophy of desire in Mon corps et moi.

In his preface to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault characterizes the France of the 1920's and 1930's as dreamy and utopian. Certainly these two terms apply to the surrealists. In 1924, Breton himself locates “sur-reality” at the intersection of dreams and reality—an absolute and pure state of reality—a point, for Foucault, at which Freud and Marx meet. Breton's reading of Freud posits great possibilities for desire and the unconscious as a revolutionary mechanism (Breton, Manifestes 24). To unveil unconscious thoughts and desires and perhaps even to act them out was for Breton the ultimate surrealist act. René Crevel, a surrealist writer, at first intimately...