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KATE KHATIB

mon heritage of which we each have only to claim our share, and which must at all

costs soon cease to be seen as the preserve of the few. Every man and every woman

deserves the personal conviction that they, themselves can, by right, have recourse at

will to this language which is not in any way supernatural, and is the vehicle, for each

and every one of us,of revelation.^45

Perhaps it is the case, as Anne Olsen suggested in 2001, that there is nothing ‘‘sacred’’
in surrealism, that the Marvelous—ostensibly surrealism’s secular version of the sacred—
‘‘expresses all that is beautiful, passionate, and liberating according to each individual’s
imagination... [while] what is deemed ‘sacred’ is sanctified and imposed upon us.’’^46
One cannot, should not, and would never want to link surrealism to the canon of religious
interpretations of profane experience. Yet at the same time it becomes increasingly clear
that there is something theological at work in the automatic moment, however irreligious,
however base and profane, it may be. Perhaps it is going too far to call the surrealist
revelation, the point at which everyday life becomes ‘‘a life worth living,’’ an automatic
theology, in the sense of a new, suddenly emergent redemptive moment, but it is at least,
picking up again on Eliade’s powerful notion, an automatic hierophany, the sudden and
profane manifestation of something more, something ‘‘superreal,’’ in the objects of the
everyday world. Benjamin once again provides interpretive guidance, this time with his
notion of a dialectical time, inspired by his own interpretation of Judaic messianic theory:
every present moment is imbued with a redemptive potential, every second is, famously,
the ‘‘strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.’’^47 Surrealism, however, harbors
no such dreams of gods or messiahs: a total revolution is what is at stake, and at every
moment each individual holds the power to call forth this universal revolt in an encounter
with chance.

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