The Permanent Rebellion of Nicolas Calas: The Trotskyist Time Forgot 
Alan Wald
Against the Current; Detroit Vol. 33, Iss. 4, (Sep/Oct 2018): 27-35.

 Abstract 
Foyers d'incendie, which has never been fully translated into English, involves a reworking of Freud's idea of the pleasure principle (behavior directed toward immediate satisfaction of instinctual drives and reduction of pain) to include a desire to change the future. [...] rather than following Freud in accepting civilization as necessary repression, Calas was adamant in posing a revolutionary alternative: "Since desire cannot simply do as it pleases, it is forced to adopt an attitude toward reality, and to this end it must either try to submit to as many of the demands of its environment as possible, or try to transform as far as possible everything in its environment which seems contrary to its desires. According to Schapiro, Breton chose van Heijenoort and Calas to defend dialectical materialism, while Schapiro arranged for Columbia philosopher of science Ernest Nagel and British logical positivist A. J. Ayer (then working for the British government on assignment in the United States) to raise objections. Exponents such as Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns often drew on advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects to convey an irony accentuating the banal aspects of United States culture. Since Pop Art used a style that was hard-edged and representational, it has been interpreted as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism, the post-World War II anti-figurative aesthetic that emphasizes spontaneous brush strokes or the dripping and splattering of paint. [...]the connection was suggested in the late 1960s by Vivian Gornick's "Pop Goes Homosexual": "It is the homosexual temperament which is guiding the progress of Pop Art."