Robert Desnos, “Description d’une révolte prochaine" (image by Georges Rochegrasse)

Having coming from the shadowy East, the men who had been civilized continued the same westward march as Attila, Tamburlaine and so many other famous men. Any man who can be described as “civilized” was once a barbarian. They were, in other words, the bastard sons of the adventurers of the night, or those the enemy (the Romans, the Greeks) had corrupted. Driven away from the shores of the Pacific and the slopes of the Himalayas, and unfaithful to their mission, they now found themselves facing those who drove them out in the not so distant times of invasions. Sons of Kalmouk, grandsons of the Huns, if you just stripped off the robes borrowed from a wardrobe in Athens or Thebes, the breastplates collected in Sparta and Rome, you would look as your fathers looked on their little horses. And you Normans who work the land, who fish for sardines and who drink cider, just get back on those flimsy boats that traced a long wake beyond the Arctic Circle before they reached those damp fields and these woods that teem with game. Mob, recognize your master! You thought you could flee it, flee that Orient that drove you away by vesting you with the right to destroy what you could not preserve, and now that you traveled around the world, you find it snapping at you heels again. I beg you, do not imitate a dog trying to catch its own tail: you will be running after the West forever. Stop. Say something to explain your mission to us, great oriental army, you who have now become The Westerners.

Robert Desnos, “Description d’une révolte prochaine,” La Révolution surréaliste, no.3. April 1925, p.25; reprinted in La Révolution surréaliste(1924-1929) (Paris, 1975 [facsimile edition])

Society Must Be Defended pp. 198-9 Michel Foucault