Life & Mortality Quote by Andre Breton

Breton is selling a jailbreak, not a metaphor. That long, pendulum sentence stacks binaries the way a manifesto stacks grievances: life/death, real/imagined, past/future. The rhetoric performs its own thesis. By the time you reach “high and low,” you’ve felt the categories start to wobble under repetition, as if the mind itself is being pushed toward a pressure point where distinctions stop holding.

The “certain point of the mind” is classic Surrealist bait: it sounds mystical, almost clinical, and it refuses to name the mechanism outright. That vagueness is strategic. Breton isn’t proposing that contradictions are solved; he’s proposing they can be un-perceived. The subtext is that rational sorting is a cultural habit, not a law of nature, and that habit can be interrupted. In Surrealism’s universe, the goal isn’t clarity but access - to desire, to dream logic, to the unconscious - realms modern life trains you to dismiss as noise.

Context matters: Breton writes in the aftermath of World War I, when “reason” had proved spectacularly compatible with mechanized slaughter. Surrealism answers that crisis by turning away from Enlightenment confidence and toward psychic revolt. The line about the “communicable and the incommunicable” is especially telling: it frames art as an attempted transmission from the private abyss into public language, a gamble that poetry can smuggle what ordinary speech can’t carry.

It’s also an argument about class and taste. Collapsing “high and low” is a declaration of war on gatekeepers, an insistence that the mind’s most vital material ignores museum walls and social rank. Breton makes the mind a borderless state, then invites you to defect.