le merveilleux

Art historian Hal Foster argues that the marvellous – ‘a state at once otherworldly, secular, and psychic’ – can also be understood as the phenomenon Freud termed ‘the uncanny’, which Foster regards, from the perspective of Surrealism, as the ‘return of the repressed for disruptive purposes’. By this means, these psychic explorers sought to achieve what Foster calls ‘the re-enchantment of a disenchanted world, of a capitalist society made ruthlessly rational’.