The Phantasmagoria of Surrealism

This chapter attempts to lay bare the historical preconditions of Walter Benjamin’s conception of the surrealist need. Reading Benjamin’s works on Baudelaire and the Paris Arcades alongside his conception of the revolutionary technique of twentieth century surrealism brings to the fore a series of dialectical contradictions that persist or remain unresolved in the present historical moment. More specifically, Benjamin’s conception of the phantasmagoria of capitalism, of the dreams and nightmares, illusions and sobering truths, of commodity production are revealed to be essential to the surrealist aim of disenchanting the enchanted world. Whether it is the link between the obsolete objects of kitsch and rising authoritarianism, the play between the sonorous and optical unconscious, or the heroic rescue of fairy tales, criminality, and adventure stories, a constellation of images are assembled to illuminate, in the spirit of Benjamin’s work, what avenues of expression still remain open to the surrealist need in the era of aestheticized politics.