AUTOMATIC THEOLOGIESthe supernatural. Basing their project in reality itself, surrealism’s founders put forth their
collective epistemology as purely immanent, never seeking to transcend the boundaries
of the human mind, only to find a new, more authentic way of experiencing the world.^8
In 1929, Benjamin wrote that ‘‘anyone who has perceived that the writings of [the
surrealist] circle are not literature but something else—demonstrations, watchwords, doc-
uments, bluffs, forgeries if you will, but at any rate, not literature—will also know, for the
same reason, that the writings are concerned literally with experiences, not with theories
and still less with phantasms.’’^9 Benjamin was, in fact, one of the first theorists—perhaps
theonlytheorist—to recognize the philosophical, indeed,revolutionaryimportance of
surrealist praxis, discovering in the movement’s early texts a welcome antidote to the
epistemological disenchantment that plagued the Neo-Kantian paradigm against which
he struggled throughout his career. Surrealism played an integral role in Benjamin’s later
philosophy, providing an unexpected but ideal bridge between his early messianic and
later materialist writings: it filled the gap Benjamin perceived between mystic and Marxist
theories, a gap that had to be bridged if theory was to overcome the ‘‘temporally-limited’’
Kantian epistemology, which remained unable to move past its own time, forever mired
in the ‘‘religious and historical blindness of the Enlightenment.’’^10 In opposition to the
Enlightenment paradigm, Benjamin had in mind a more revolutionary system, a way of
reading history against the grain of traditional temporal boundaries. Surrealism, by plac-
ing the utmost importance upon the collection of individual experiences that defined its
criticaloeuvre, was, for Benjamin, the most radical expression of human freedom that had
graced European thought ‘‘since Bakunin.’’^11
Particularly interesting for Benjamin was the surrealists’ willingness not only to ac-
cept but actually to privilege individual experiences that were not based solely in empirical
fact.^12 ‘‘The loosening of the self by intoxication’’—and not only drug-induced intoxica-
tion, but religious and artistic ecstasies, as well as madness and manic fits—‘‘is, at the
same time, precisely the fruitful, living experience that allowed [the surrealists] to step
outside of the charmed space of intoxication.’’^13 The belief that any individual’s experi-
ence of the world carries within it a grain of truth was surrealism’s great weapon in the
battle for the reenchantment of the world, for a ‘‘new world society in which the imagina-
tion would constitute the only power,’’ as Franklin Rosemont, co-founder of the Chicago
Surrealist Group, wrote in 1973.^14 The politics of equality that defined the movement,
especially in its later, more radical incarnations, dictated that the surrealist experience of
the world—considered the authentic, evenredemptiveexperience of the world—must be
freely accessible and flexible enough to encompass the most far-reaching manifestations
of human freedom. ‘‘Poetry must be made by all. Not by one,’’ reads the dictum of Isidore
Ducasse, Comte de Lautre ́amont and surrealist fellow traveler, a serious statement for a
group of ideologues who were, by their own admission, committed to living the ‘‘poetic
life.’’^15 If Surrealism was to welcome all the disenchanted into its secret bond, then by its
very definition it had to integrate everything with which it came into contact, which
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