Lautréamont, Anarchism, and the Origins of the Avant-Garde

Abstract

Lautréamont, remarkably, laid down at a young age the template that would characterize the history of the avant-garde: antiaestheticism, montage, and negation. Besides doing justice to his prevailing concern with injustice, derived from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, returning to the origins of the avant-garde also serves a larger purpose in counteracting the scholarly conflation of aestheticism and the avant-garde found in oxymorons like “modernist avant-garde” that date to the Cold War.