Towards an Intellectual History of Possession: Reading "la crise" as a Textual Space in Vodou and Andre Breton's Haitian Lectures and Nadja

This article focuses mainly on what are known as Andre Breton's "Haitian Conferences" (1945-1946) and his 1928 novel Nadja, along with the embedded topic of spirit possession in Haitian Vodou. My proposition is to show how both the vocabulary and the theory that come to be associated with what I will call the "act of possession" in Breton's work engages a reflection that accounts for fragmented notions of identity. I draw on anthropological theories of subjectivity to put the accent on the destabilizing experience of the contemporary, globalized human subject. To do so, I look at two aspects of Breton's writing: first, how both before and during his first contact with Haiti, he was interested in alternative states of being; and second, how these states related to the disintegration of identity. I will also consider possession, and its associated lexica, as an intellectual notion, a trope that appears in the discourse of European intellectuals during and after the World Wars. I compare it to the considerations of possession within the context of a Vodou Weltanschauung.