Sunday 20 January 2013

Paranoia



Millet’s L’Angélus, beautiful like the fortuitous encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.

‘It is quite evident that the “illustrative fact” could not in any way restrain the course of my delirious ideas, but that, on the contrary, it makes them flourish. Therefore, it could not concern me, of course, other than as paranoiac illustrations, and I must excuse myself here for the crude neoplasm that this implies. Indeed, as I have often had the pleasure and patience to explain to my readers, the paranoiac phenomenon is not only one on which are preeminently summed up all the “systematic-associative” factors, but also the one embodying a “psychic-interpretative” illustration that is more “identical.” Paranoia doesn’t limit itself to being always “illustration”; it also constitutes the true and “literal illustration” that we know, that is to say, the “interpretative-delirious illustration” – the identity manifesting itself always a posteriori as a factor following the “interpretative association.”’


Salvador Dali (1938), Millet’s L’Angélus