Caught between Dream and Awakening: Walter Benjamin’s Reception of Surrealism

Abstract

Few intellectuals of the Weimar Republic have engaged so intensely in French Surrealism as Walter Benjamin. In this movement, the German-Jewish thinker found his own concern reflected: the politicization of art on behalf of social emancipation. Facing a Republic in decline, the intellectual’s task could not be merely contemplative any longer. Benjamin’s concept of a “profane illumination,” put forward on the basis of André Breton’s narration Nadja (1928), can be conceived as a response to the crisis of European intelligence. The present contribution traces his approach to Surrealism starting from the correspondent essay of 1929 until his posthumously published Arcades Project and analyzes its implication for Benjamin’s own work.