The interest taken by Surrealists in alchemy has been well known since the late 1940s, but knowledge of their preoccupation with modern science is more recent. This chapter observes the Surrealist penchant for premodern, occultist epistemologies before focusing on their take up of modern physics in the early 1920s. The theory of relativity (1905 and 1915–16) and developments in quantum mechanics (1922–7) were then undergoing popularization. Apart from popular articles in newspapers/journals, this occurred partly through physicists’ own writings and partly through the philosophy of science. This chapter indicates the importance to Surrealism of the writings of the French philosopher of science, Gaston Bachelard. It also features a case study of the work of German physicist Pascual Jordan whose attempt to extend the findings of quantum mechanics to biology was known to Max Ernst and used by the Surrealists to justify the rejection of positivism. So modern physics became a means of retrospectively comprehending the Surrealists’ turn towards automatism and Ernst’s own natural history incursions. His response to Jordan’s writings offers an alternative way of reading his work.

The principle and technique of collage as the juxtaposition of disparate elements is generally considered to be the fundamental model of twentieth-century avant-garde art forms. As structure rather than representation it ranges from Picasso’s cubist works to Rauschenberg’s combines; and within Surrealism, from Joan Miro’s pasted papers to George Hugnet’s “poèmes découpés.” This chapter argues that verbal and visual collage is at the heart of Surrealism’s revolutionary project, the means of contesting the established order, by imaginatively reconfiguring signs to produce new meanings – poetic, erotic, or satirical. Various questions regarding collage are explored. What are its limits? Can the concept embrace Dalí’s assemblages, film montage, Breton’s display of objects, or examples of citation, parody, or pastiche? Can it be defined as an experimental form rather than an aesthetic object, a dynamic process rather than a finished product? If collage is considered a collective activity, can it be identified with intertextuality? Finally, the chapter examines critical interpretations of collage by the surrealists themselves and explores examples of postsurrealist collage.

This chapter critically reevaluates the Surrealist technique of splitting up and rearranging figures and dolls into mythopoetic concoctions, often featuring androgynous and machinic bodies. This tendency continues in contemporary art. At the root of these artistic experiments is a desiring imagination that reaches beyond “normal” bodies. This complements queer theories that aim to deconstruct, and see beyond, everyday heteronormativity. Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizoanalysis” also suggests that this process of splitting up is fundamentally creative and life affirming. Against traditional psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis looks to the example of the schizophrenic, who initiates a spontaneous creativity, splitting and reassembling normative codes and conventions. From the Greek, skhizein (“split”) and phrēn (“mind”), schizophrenia features the splitting of social and mental cohesion. The chapter suggests how it is possible to analyze this Surrealist process of ‘splitting’ using different levels of description: queer, schizoanalytical, and politico-aesthetic.