PROFANE ILLUMINATION: WALTER BENJAMIN AND THE PARIS OF SURREALIST REVOLUTION by Margaret Cohen

University of California Press, 1993 First edition, 271 pp., 6 1/4" X 9 1/4" Hardcover Very good 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.