Hans Bellmer > Quotes

“The female body is like an endless sentence that invites us to rearrange it, so that its real meaning becomes clear through a series of endless anagrams.”
― Hans Bellmer

“What is at stake here is a totally new unity of form, meaning and feeling: language-images that cannot simply be thought up or written up … They constitute new, multifaceted objects, resembling polyplanes made of mirrors … As if the illogical was relaxation, as if laughter was permitted while thinking, as if error was a way and chance, a proof of eternity.”
― Hans Bellmer

“For the duration of a spark, the individual and the nonindividual become interchangeable and the terror of the mortal limitation of the ego in time and space appears to be annulled. Nothingness has ceased to exist. It seems only when everything which is not man combines with him, that he can then be himself. He seems to exist, including his most singularly individual elements, independently of himself in the universe. It is at these times of "solution" that a fear shorn of terror can be transformed into a feeling of living at a heightened power; to appear to be one-even beyond birth and death-with the tree, the "other," and fate's necessary strokes of chance, to remain almost "oneself' on the other side. It is to be hoped that with the preceding remarks, the question of the irrational will be safe from any confusion-inducing, religious, para-religious, and mystical speculations. This unknown is restored at the moment that-for the purpose of an impassioned disoccultation within the exact focal point of human behavior-it becomes experimental.”
― Hans Bellmer, Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious: Or, The Anatomy of the Image

“When will and reason strive to correct by force or even to strike out a bad channel of personal evolution- bad probably because it is necessarily so -- "truth" then makes its appearance like an ambassador that is as necessary and incontestable as an object, and unsuspected because there is no "egoistic" intention behind it.
Does this mean that nothing devised by the individual has any credibility? His will is suspect, because it is intentional; geometry and algebra are suspect, because they are the grocer's scales; the reasoning instinct, and utility, are objects of scorn on account of their profound uselessness; and even the unconscious is not to be trusted because it serves as a storage cellar for the conscious mind. What is not confirmed by chance has no validity.
One would like to think a projection screen exists that extends between the ego and the outside world, upon which the subconscious projects the image of its predominant excitation, but which is only visible to the conscious mind (and objectively communicable) in the case where "the other side," the outside world, projects the same image on the screen at the same time, and if these two congruent images are superimposed.
It is in varying percentages of efficacy that intuition on the one hand, and chance from the outside world on the other, share in such examples of convergence. There remains a degree of question of varying magnitude, which can became surprisingly large-as in the case above-if, in this particular instance, the individual's contribution-his part of the interpretation-is reduced to zero. This is when a vertiginous interpretation of the universe seems to be felt as if the universe was a double of the super ego, a superior, thinking entity.”
― Hans Bellmer, Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious: Or, The Anatomy of the Image