Margaret 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.
Profane Illumination Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution
Request an Exam or Desk Copy
Recommend to Your Library (PDF)
RightsLink
Rights and Permissions
Read an Excerpt
The pandemic has created major supply chain challenges for publishers, manufacturers, warehousing facilities and shipping companies. Please allow for a minimum of 15 business days to receive your order. If you need your order sooner, consider purchasing from one of our retail partner links in the buying options. Thank you!
About the Book
Reviews
""This challenging, often profound book investigates the 'visual rhetoric of understanding' manifest in surrealism's and Marxism's 'emancipatory vocabularies' and dream imagery. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's and Andre Breton's theoretical, critical, and literary writings, Cohen posits a genre of 'Gothic Marxism, ' which owes much to Freud's psychoanalytic oeuvre. This genre links dialectical thinking, dreaming, and historical awakening with political, cultural, and artistic bricolage. . . . [In addition,] the book contains evocative illustrations."—CHOICE