Abstract: Due to its overall presence in political, economic, medical, social, and cultural discourses, the notion of crisis has been reflected on various thematic and formal levels in the arts. Out of this wide field, two aspects will be stressed in this essay: the presence of emotions when it comes to crisis, and the semantic closeness of crisis and revolution. A central thesis thereby is that both aspects are closely related in avant-garde movements of the 20th and 21st century. They allow for a poetic to be established which is provocatively based on the unleashing of a crisis affecting the productive, material, and receptive dimensions of the works. Up to now, this aesthetic function of crisis has not been of central interest in literary and art studies although an affective poetics of provoking crisis can be considered a pivotal strategy of avant-gardes. Writers and artists take advantage of the highly productive side of strong emotions and the revolutionary gesture of denormalization. After a theoretical introduction and a description of the function of emotions in the aesthetic context, the mise-en-scene of crisis in form of a destruction as construction and as such marked as a critique on social, political and cultural circumstances are demonstrated on selective works of Andre Breton, Marguerite Duras and Sophie Calle.