Description
Book SynopsisAnalyzes the links between Breton's surrealist fusion of psychoanalysis and Marxism and Walter Benjamin's post-Enlightenment challenge to Marxist theory. This title argues that Breton's surrealist Marxism played a formative role in shaping postwar French intellectual life.
Trade Review""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 *
Table of ContentsIllustrations
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
