Science & Tech Quote by Andre Breton

Breton’s sentence reads like a cold splash of water on the modern cult of productivity. He’s targeting a mindset that smuggles the logic of commerce into realms that are supposed to resist it: art and science. “Will to industry” isn’t simply hard work; it’s the industrial temperament, the impulse to standardize, extract, and scale. Add “booty” and “possession” and the critique sharpens into something almost piratical: creation becomes plunder, knowledge becomes loot, the artwork becomes a trophy. The line’s sting comes from how it refuses to romanticize ambition. Breton is saying that when desire is rerouted into ownership, it doesn’t intensify; it thins out.

Context matters: as the Surrealist ringleader, Breton built an aesthetic on undoing bourgeois rationality and market sense, championing automatism, dream logic, and the unruly unconscious. In that world, desire is a force that moves sideways - toward revelation, shock, and transformation - not upward toward accumulation. His phrasing “Nothing retains less of desire” is deliberately paradoxical, a reversal of the usual story that possession satisfies. Here, possession is desire’s solvent.

The subtext is also political. Between the wars, “industry” and “science” were increasingly entangled with militarization, propaganda, and technocratic control. Breton’s warning is that once art and science adopt the acquisitive reflex, they don’t just lose purity; they lose their eros, the very energy that makes discovery and invention possible.