Abstract (en) Focuses on Le Viol, Magritte's image for the cover of Breton's pamphlet, Qu'est-
ce que le Surréalisme?(1934); concludes that much of Magritte's challenge to the fascist
ideologies evoked in the pamphlet comes in the manipulation of the reception of the image;
and that Le Viol exposes the fragmentation and disruption of language with regard to
feminine sexuality as it is linked to present social conditions, without offering an alternative.

In 1935, Andre Breton published his speech Qu'est-ce que le Surrealisme? with Rene
Magritte's drawing," Le Viol"(The Rape) on its cover. The image, a view of a woman's head
in which her facial features have been replaced by her torso, was meant to shock the viewer
out of complacent acceptance of present reality into" surreality," that liberated state of being
which would foster revolutionary social change. Because" Le Viol" is such a violently
charged image and because of the claims made for it by Magritte for its revolutionary …