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Profane Illumination

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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 practi...
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  • 06 March 1995
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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.
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Price: $31.95
Pages: 271
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Series: Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism
Publication Date: 06 March 1995
ISBN: 9780520201507
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

""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."
Margaret Cohen is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University.
Illustrations 
Abbreviations 
Acknowledgments 
1. Gothic Marxism 
2. Benjamin's Marxisms 
3. Qui suis-je? Nadja's Haunting Subject 
4. The Ghosts of Paris 
5. The Questions of Modern Materialism 
6. The Rencontre Capitale 
7. Benjamin Reading the Rencontre 
8. Le Diable á Paris: Benjamin's Phantasmagoria 
Bibliography 
Index