"Let my enemies devour each other"
About this Quote
A motto of strategic detachment and theatrical cruelty, "Let my enemies devour each other" condenses Salvador Dali's flair for turning conflict into spectacle. The phrasing refuses the nobility of combat and prefers the pleasure of watching antagonists consume their own strength. It is both a tactic and a pose: power through patience, dominance through indifference, all staged with a provocateur's taste for violent imagery.
The line sits comfortably within Dali's lifelong performance of self. He cultivated enemies with gusto, feuding with fellow Surrealists and especially Andre Breton, who sneered at him as "Avida Dollars". Dali answered not with reconciliation but with notoriety, presenting himself as the event everyone else could only react to. Allowing rivals to fight among themselves sustained his myth: while the movement fractured, he claimed the marquee, insisting he was Surrealism. Scandal became oxygen, and rivals became unpaid promoters.
The image of devouring is not accidental. Appetite, consumption, and cannibalism recur in Dali's work, most starkly in "Autumnal Cannibalism", painted during the Spanish Civil War, where entangled figures methodically eat one another. That canvas reads as a nation destroying itself, but it also frames conflict as a kind of morbid feast. The phrase echoes that vision: adversaries are joined by their mutual hunger more than divided by their principles, and their own appetites become the agent of their undoing.
There is a psychological edge as well. By inviting enemies to devour each other, the speaker displaces aggression outward while remaining theatrically calm, as if to say that enmity contains its own entropy. It evokes divide-and-rule politics and the cold elegance of letting the dynamics of resentment run their course. For Dali, who loved the paranoiac-critical play of impulses turning upon themselves, the line reads like a surreal strategy: fuel the spectacle, then stand a step away while appetite, vanity, and rivalry do the work.
The line sits comfortably within Dali's lifelong performance of self. He cultivated enemies with gusto, feuding with fellow Surrealists and especially Andre Breton, who sneered at him as "Avida Dollars". Dali answered not with reconciliation but with notoriety, presenting himself as the event everyone else could only react to. Allowing rivals to fight among themselves sustained his myth: while the movement fractured, he claimed the marquee, insisting he was Surrealism. Scandal became oxygen, and rivals became unpaid promoters.
The image of devouring is not accidental. Appetite, consumption, and cannibalism recur in Dali's work, most starkly in "Autumnal Cannibalism", painted during the Spanish Civil War, where entangled figures methodically eat one another. That canvas reads as a nation destroying itself, but it also frames conflict as a kind of morbid feast. The phrase echoes that vision: adversaries are joined by their mutual hunger more than divided by their principles, and their own appetites become the agent of their undoing.
There is a psychological edge as well. By inviting enemies to devour each other, the speaker displaces aggression outward while remaining theatrically calm, as if to say that enmity contains its own entropy. It evokes divide-and-rule politics and the cold elegance of letting the dynamics of resentment run their course. For Dali, who loved the paranoiac-critical play of impulses turning upon themselves, the line reads like a surreal strategy: fuel the spectacle, then stand a step away while appetite, vanity, and rivalry do the work.
Quote Details
| Topic | Savage |
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