KATE KHATIBtogether, suggesting that a redemptive potential could be unleashed if one could manage
to interact with the world of human progress as one interacted with nature. What surreal-
ism privileged in nature was its unpredictability, its close relationship with the world of
chance—a concept that arose time and again in the movement’s theoretical armature.
The figure of the chance encounter defines the automatic experience of the world that is
at the center of all surrealist production, and what is at stake in the chance encounter is
a moment in which something is experienced as radically new, ‘‘eternally new,’’ as Benja-
min describes it in relation to Dostoevsky’s theology of vice and as Breton demonstrates
when, inNadja, he describes how he was suddenly able to experience the city of Paris as
though it were his first encounter, while never losing sight of the historical implications—
the past lives, if one prefers—of the places and objects he encountered. Rosemont cites
this liaison between surrealism and nature, between surrealism and the objects with which
it engages, as the central issue at stake in the surrealist politics of equality:
This is the very basis of surrealism as a revolutionary community: the unity of theory
and practice at the highest point of tension of individual and collective creation....
Such a conception of life and the world, defined by audacity and readiness for change,
is the opposite of all the dominant ideologies of our time.... All here is urgency and
expectation, and the conviction that a poetics of revolt is the only way that might—
just might—lead us all to something at least a little closer to earthly paradise.^21Understanding exactly what takes place in the chance encounter, and exactly what it
means to say that these moments contain a redemptive potential that might lead one
closer to realizing an ‘‘earthly paradise,’’ is a rather perplexing problem. The notion is not
entirely divorced from the logic of the divine manifestation or the articulation of the
numinous element of the sacred in the language of the profane. InThe Sacred and the
Profane, Mircea Eliade introduces the compelling notion of the ‘‘hierophany,’’ a figure
that is perhaps best understood here as the way in which the sacred may be experienced
in the profane world. ‘‘Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows
itself, as something wholly different from the profane.’’^22 For Eliade, this earthly appear-
ance is tinged with the uncanny sensation of having encountered something that seems
not entirely of the everyday world, a ‘‘manifestation of something of a wholly different
order, a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of
our natural ‘profane’ world.’’^23 The notion of the hierophany is bound up with the para-
doxical notion of a convergence between the mystical and the physical body that troubles
classical Christian theology and runs through the work of more loosely theological think-
ers like Benjamin. Surrealism, with its emphasis on the commingling of reality and imagi-
nation, and its insistence on the potential of every object to make manifest a chance
encounter with something magical, seems not too distantly related to Eliade’s notion, a
point underscored by Paul Ricoeur when he suggests that objects imbued with a special
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