WALTER Benjamin on Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European ...

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Surrealism, is produced by the difference in intellectual level between France ... descent from Mickiewicz, Milton, Southey, Alfred de Musset, Baudelaire, and.

Waiter Benjamin and surrealism The story of a revolutionary spell 
Michael Lowy  Radical Philosophy 80 (Nov/Dec 1996) 

Surreal Dreamscapes: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades 
Michael Calderbank  BOOK PDF
 Abstract 
This article examines Benjamin’s theoretical writings on the dream as a crucial aspect of his engagement with Surrealism. Given his ambivalence towards Surrealism’s potential for mystical thinking, it addresses Benjamin’s encounter in the Arcades Project with the work of Louis Aragon, and its resonances with the writings of vitalist philosopher Ludwig Klages, whom Benjamin had known in his youth. The article traces the ways in which Benjamin’s dream theory formed part of his understanding of the revolutionary project of Surrealism, only to lose its critical force in his later 1930s work, and it suggests ways in which Benjamin might have developed this project more successfully. Sometimes, on awakening we recall a dream. In this way rare shafts of insight illuminate the ruins of our energies that time has passed by. These lines are typically Benjaminian. In a sense, they might stand as a brief exposition of a critical insight to which he would attempt to give concretion in the Arcades Project. However, they are taken not from Benjamin’s mature work, but rather, from the unpublished early text ‘The Metaphysics of Youth,’1 written in 1914. Appropriately, Benjamin (above all writers) is stubbornly resistant to any smooth, teleologically-driven linear chronology of intellectual development. Likewise, Susan BuckMorss uses the analogy, again peculiarly apposite in Benjamin’s case, of ‘development’ in the sense of photography: ‘Time deepens definition and contrast, but the imprint of the image has been there from the start.’ 2 Hence, I ought to qualify at the outset the sense in which it is possible to speak of Benjamin’s interest in the dream as a ‘legacy’ from Surrealism. The nature of this relationship is not akin to a printer leaving an impression on a passive surface, as though Benjamin uncritically assimilated a series of previously alien positions.