Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist RevolutionMargaret Cohen's encounter with Walter Benjamin, one of the twentieth century's most influential cultural and literary critics, has produced a radically new reading of surrealist thought and practice. Cohen analyzes the links between Breton's surrealist fusion of psychoanalysis and Marxism and Benjamin's post-Enlightenment challenge to Marxist theory. She argues that Breton's surrealist Marxism played a formative role in shaping postwar French intellectual life and is of continued relevance to the contemporary intellectual scene. |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 17 | |
Qui suisje? Nadjas Haunting Subject | 57 |
The Ghosts of Paris | 77 |
The Questions of Modern Materialism | 120 |
The Rencontre Capitale | 154 |
Benjamin Reading the Rencontre | 173 |
Le Diable a Paris Benjamins Phantasmagoria | 217 |
Bibliography | 261 |
Index | 269 |
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Common terms and phrases
Adorno aesthetic allegory Althusser André Breton Aragon arcades project avant-garde Bataille Baudelaire Baudelaire's Benja Benjamin writes Benjamin's interest bohemian bourgeois Breton writes Buck-Morss camera obscura Capital causality century collective collective unconscious commodity Communicating Vessels consciousness critical critique dialectical image discussion dream Eighteenth Brumaire emphasis added encounter Engels Erfahrung essay Etienne Dolet experience flânerie forces French French Communist Party Freud Freudian ghosts haunting ideological transposition jamin Konvolut L'Amour fou Lacan libidinal Mad Love manifestation Marx Marx's Marxism modern materialism modern materialist Nadja nineteenth nineteenth-century notion objective One-Way Street overdetermination Panthéon Paris Parisian production cycle passage Passagen-Werk past phantasmagoria political Porte Saint-Denis praxis processes profane illumination prostitution psychic psychoanalytic reading reality realm representation repressed revolution revolutionary rhetoric Robertson Sigmund Freud social structure suggests sunflower superstructure surrealism surrealist theoretical theory tion transformation translation trouvaille Tuché uncanny unchaining unconscious Walter Benjamin
Popular passages
Page 137 - In the second place, however, history makes itself in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each again has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event.
Page 122 - Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.
Page 108 - Alongside decayed roues with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus* brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French...
Page 47 - Balzac was the first to speak of the ruins of the bourgeoisie. But only Surrealism exposed them to view. The development of the forces of production reduced the wish symbols of the previous century to rubble even before the monuments representing them had crumbled.
Page 23 - The Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and the penal code, the...
Page 205 - Nevertheless the ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is not wholly devoid of truth. By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past
Page 10 - To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was" (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
Page 146 - It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are 'obviousnesses') obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recogni/e and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the 'still, small voice of conscience'): 'That's obvious! That's right! That's true!
Page 20 - ... on Enzian what seems to him an extraordinary understanding. This serpentine slag-heap he is just about to ride into now, this exrefinery, Jamf Olfabriken Werke AG, is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order. Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to be switched on ... modified, precisely, deliberately by bombing that was never hostile, but part of a plan both sides— "sides...
Page 74 - An uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.