KATE KHATIBmeant taking intoxication and madness, dreams and delusions, and the most ignoble of
actions in stride, incorporating them into the collective character of the surrealist world
while maintaining each one as pure individuality. To say that the surrealist world was a
world composed of fragments is not altogether untrue, but it is important to realize that
these fragments form a collectivity, a unified multiplicity in which equal importance was
placed upon each instance of surreality, instances that could be widely shared, transmitted
across all boundaries—physical, mental, and otherwise.
The strong Communist tendencies in the surrealist politics of equality are obvious,
and Walter Benjamin was quick to pick up on these glimmers of a political project at
work. At the same time, what most fascinated Benjamin in the surrealist politics of equal-
ity was something more subtle, something that reached back to the problematic opposi-
tion between the divine and the profane that he had written about in his earlier texts.^16 In
taking the traditional figure of the vice and turning it into a methodological principle,
surrealism created a space in which human baseness could stand on an equal footing
with traditional conceptions of goodness. Thinking about Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin—‘‘a
Surrealistavant la lettre’’—Benjamin wrote:
No one else understood, as he did, how naive philistines are when they say that
goodness... is God-inspired, but that evil stems entirely from our spontaneity, and
in it we are independent and self-sufficient beings. No one else saw inspiration, as he
did, in even the most ignoble actions, and precisely in them.... Dostoevsky’s God
created not only heaven and earth and man and beast, but also baseness, vengeance,
cruelty.... That is why all these vices have a pristine vitality... they are perhaps not
‘‘splendid,’’ but eternally new, ‘‘as on the first day.’’^17Not only vice and evil—themes historically associated with the fallen state of man—
played a role in the surrealist epistemology, but so did human imperfection. Breton’s
early interest in the writings of Freud, in theories of madness, and in psychoanalysis led
him to locate moments of enchantment in a variety of conditions that were usually con-
sidered to be abnormal and were certainly not included in the traditional paradigm of
redemption. Surrealism turned the traditional hierarchy of redemption on its head, es-
chewing the blunt distinction between good and evil in favor of a more inclusive paradigm
that saw the possibility of true freedom in all instances of human imperfection.
Yet this narrative of madness and intoxication may be misleading, for it often results
in the perception of Surrealism as nothing more than a kind of dream logic, a psychic
movement entirely divorced from everyday reality, a perception that is far from accurate.
What was at stake in the surrealist explorations of the psyche was a kind of redemption
that ultimately embraced the profane world instead of attempting to transcend it, a re-
demptive system in which the potential for reenchantment was located squarely within
the reality of a base, imperfect, and sometimes even vile everyday world; this is, perhaps,
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