Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution

Margaret Cohen’s encounter with Walter Benjamin, one of the 20th century’s most influential cultural and literary critics, has produced a radically new reading of surrealist thought and practice. Benjamin and Andre Breton emerge in her account as important representatives of what Cohen calls Gothic Marxism , whose fascination with the irrational aspects of social processes she highlights in discussions of Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk and Breton’s major prose texts from the 1920s and 1930s. Cohen analyzes the links between Breton’s surrealist fusion of psychoanalysis and Marxism, and Benjamin’s post-Enlightenment challenge to Marxist theory. She also argues that Breton’s surrealist Marxism plays a formative role in shaping post-World War II French intellectual life and is of continued relevance to the contemporary intellectual scene.