Les mots et les images: Eine optische Maschine von René Magritte

Abstract

The writer discusses Rene Magritte's Les mots et les images, which was published in the final issue of La revolution surrealiste in 1929. The work, which combines text and images, has been read as a self-referential theoretical work, a kind of metatext relating to Magritte's Paris oeuvre. Commentaries have tended to focus on the work's verbal text and have thus neglected the role of its graphic elements, suggesting that these elements served only to illustrate verbally expressed theoretical positions. The writer disputes this reductive view and likens Magritte's work to an optical machine, as described by Gilles Deleuze, one that paradoxically makes visible the disjunction between seeing an image and reading a sentence.