In André Breton’s 1933 essay “Picasso in His Element” for the journal Minotaure, the surrealist poet underlines the intertwinement between Picasso’s recent sculptures and his studio environment, which the photographer Brassaï documented in such a way as to reflect Picasso’s everyday habits. Drawing on the philosophy of Hegel and Ravaisson, this chapter explores the preeminence of nature in Breton’s essay in terms of questions of materiality and habit, the latter being a common trait shared by humans and animals. In light of Roger Caillois’s contemporaneous effort to make nature the new paradigm for a revised theory of automatism, it is argued that Breton’s reading of Picasso’s work and environment advances instead a theory of art as self-reflexive nature, which recognizes the material continuity between art and nature without reducing their relationship to one of homology.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the key figures of the Collège de sociologie. It also offers a critical discussion of the Collège’s understanding of the Durkheimian project, as well as the innovations that the group developed out of Durkheim’s theory of the social.

Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author, among other publications, of Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (1997) and Rethinking the Political: The Sacred, Aesthetic Politics, and the Collège de Sociologie (2011).