Profanation [Andre Breton on Chess]

- Posted: 24.Jan.2007.

Chess is hand-to-hand combat between two labyrinths.

An integral weakness of chess is that it does not lend itself to divination (there is no checkomancy).

The Christian Church has never banned the game of chess, though it did ban dice and cards.

In oder to be a good chess player, one should not b overtly intelligent – Jean Jacques Rousseau: Diderot did not play very well and readily acknowledge the superiority of Rousseau, who never failed to beat him.

Modern warfare is an advanced form of chess, but most of its pieces are obsolete.

The “queen” in chess is a suspicious character. (cf. Marcel Duchamp, Joueurs d'echecs, 1911.) The real Queen, which we still await – in chess as in elsewhere – is one foreseen by Barthelemy Prosper Enfantin, the head of the Saint-Simonian religion (1796-1864).

The only legitimate game is on that would never allow, for either player, only those combinations of moves that have never been played before.

Philosophical freedom is an illusion. In chess as in all other games, each move is loaded with the indefinite past of the universe.

So as to eschew any sense of greatness in competition, one would do well to acknowledge being a part of a pyramid of monkey heads.

One element of ancient wisdom me might hold in mind is that deprecatory voice that the triumphant general in his chariot kept hearing.

Only inspiration is in control, day and night: All in all, not every calculation is an analysis: a chess player, for instance, does the one very well without doing the other. - Baudelaire

The real Napoleon (the killer) was a mediocre chess player. In Lenin's tomb on the Red Square, you will find a chessboard (is it the beginning of a game or one left unfinished?) and fishing floats. On the other hand (it is only fair to mention it), two great artistic innovators – Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Roussel – brought new solutions to chess problems.

The game of chess is not enough of a game; it is too serious an entertainment – Montaigne.

What must be changed is the game itself, not the pieces.

Andre Breton and Nicolas Calas quoted from “The Imagery of Chess Revisited”