num_pages: 271
description: 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.
language: English
title: Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution
titlecomplete: Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)
genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics
ratings_count: 21
series: Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism
publisher: University of California Press