Dali... Dali... Dali... [antikvár]

Paranoiac costume design for ballet, after Salvador Dali. CANNIBALISM AND AESTHETIC Dali in the process of softening and disintegration. From the Paranoiac Cannibalism of Gastro-Aesthetics toward a BIOLOGICAL AESTHETIC Orality, imperial way of access to the Dalinian universe. Megalomaniacal cannibalism : " to eat everything, " meaning cosmic cannibalism through the frenzied mechanisms of the Paranoiac-Critical Method in a biological aesthetic of hard and soft, or softening structures : such seems to us to be the imperial way of access to the most prodigious personality of our time. THE COSMIC DALI. The best guide, the surest and truest, by which to approach the Dalinian universe is still Dali himself. So we will be content to follow and note his own thoughts, comparing them rigorously and systematically, just as Dali always does, to the most specific and pertinent scientific data. Let us therefore follow Dali : " My work is a reflection, one of the innumerable reflections of what I accomplish, write, and think- " All my painting is only a portion of my cosmogony. " Here then is our point of departure : the system of the world, cosmogony and cosmogenesis according to Dali. To approach his secret is to approach the mystery of genius and of madness, of love and death, of art and life, of all that is essential for man : man himself. A " perverse polymorph, " Dali also shows himself to be the most authentic " polymor- phic genius, " a Leonardo da Vinci of the twentieth century. Paradoxically, along with Picasso and like him, Dali, the most renowned and representative man of our time, is the most misunderstood and unknown. His work as a poet, a philos- opher, and an aesthetician has made its mark on our sensi- bility, and still remains to be discovered. Let us therefore try to unveil the secret, then to approach, to use Dali's own expression, " le secret re-secret, " the secret of the secret : the well-hidden secret and re-secret, unknown to himself, in his whole life, his behavior, his works, his conscious and especially his unconscious thought, and very explicitly hidden in The Secret Life of Salvador Dali and in his aesthetic writings and works of the period 1931-36. The royal way of access to this secret is indicated in our " The Cosmic Dali, " the preface to Dali by Dali of 1971 : it is the neuropsychiatric concept of the " Image of the Body, " from which proceeds in Dali a fundamental Platonic nostalgia for the recovery of his lost half, his feminine double, incar- nated in Gala since 1929. The preface to Les Diners de Gala discreetly broached the secret of this secret, what is hidden behind this secret and lies at the origin of Dali's creative genius : the orality of the nursling, the unweaned infant that was Dali. DALI'S SECRET. It was after a long series of tape-recorded interviews made between 1954 and 1958 that we came to discover, and then to reveal to our truly patient " patient" — for neither of us knew where we were going in those four years — the secret : the Dioscuric nature of his personality.