his is important to say, as this productive movement, this dispossessed life, is what Breton sometimes calls “the rigor of the negative,” the paradoxes of which (between loss and excess, death and life) are unavoidable. 53 In ways reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s “messianic” figures, in Breton the minimal difference indicated by reference to a “void” within the field of the visible may be read as a kind of wink, a slight alteration in appearance that is also an indication that the world of appearances is or could yet be otherwise. Like Benjamin’s messianic time, the revolutionary transvaluation of all values, the changing of everything, is a potential of a minimal, evanescent tweak of appearance. 54 In the thinker’s (and, more aptly, as it is the figure Breton almost always has in mind, the cultural critic’s) openness to the messageless message of the wink, however, a truly excessive being may yet donate what Breton often designates as “that which it neither is nor owns.” To return to the issue of the “peculiar kind of obviousness” that is our more or less prescripted place within a given world, here we see Breton exploring modes of thinking “cross” as that which insinuates—weakly, with a mere wink or even as only a form of dreamy madness—a solicitation to a world in which everything will be changed