Paul Nougé

Paul Nougé (1895-1967) was a founding member of both the Belgian Communist Party (1921) and the Belgian Surrealist Group (1924). In the latter, he became the central literary and theoretical figure. For decades, while working as a biochemist, he contributed to local and international Surrealist publications, performances, and polemical disputes, elaborating a peripheral form of the movement’s philosophy that shared with the metropolitan Parisians an interest in the erotic, in surprise, and in transgression, but parted company when it came to the unconscious and the occult. Nougé was more rational. His own writing, much of which wasn’t published in book form until the 1950’s and ’60’s, experimented with form, typography, and, especially, creative plagiarism. He became known for versions of a famous grammar text, pulp pornography, and work by Baudelaire and Maupassant; the Situationist notion of détournement owes a lot to him.