HENT DE VRIESBenjamin’s 1929 essay ‘‘Surrealism’’ provides the guiding framework for this argu-
ment, which seeks to elucidate the political-theological dimensions of both Benjaminian
and surrealist thought through an investigation of the temporality of Benjamin’s ‘‘profane
illumination’’ and to demonstrate why surrealism’s central concept of automatism might
best be seen as a strategy for engendering mystical encounters with objects in the everyday
world. With its emphasis on the commingling of reality and imagination and its insistence
on the potential of everyday objects to make manifest a chance encounter with something
magical, surrealism seems not too distantly related to profane illumination, in addition
to Mircea Eliade’s hierophany, a point unwittingly underscored by Paul Ricoeur when he
suggests that the objects imbued with a special significance in the hierophany are ‘‘trans-
formed into something supernatural—or, to avoid using a theological term, we may say
that [they are] transformed into something superreal [sure ́el], in the sense of being super-
efficacious while still remaining a part of common reality’’ (p. 625). It might not be
going too far to suggest that what one finds in the practice of automatism is so many
hierophanies—manifestations of, if not the numinous element of the sacred, then at least
its secular counterpart. Yet far from simply equating surrealism’s irreligious approach and
Eliade’s and, to a lesser extent, Benjamin’s deeply theological philosophies, this essay also
underscores an important point of divergence between these epistemologies, in the form
of the different notions of presence implied by each. The Eliadian hierophany suggests
that the sacred may manifest itself in any object, at any time, without warning. But surre-
alism’s central theory seems to be a step ahead: the numinous element—not God, but at
least the potential for earthly redemption—already exists in every object; what is at stake
is finding a way to experience what is already present.
Beyond investigating the lines of resonance between surrealism and the theological
preoccupations of Benjamin and Eliade, the essay thus pays close attention to surrealism’s
insistence on the disavowal of the sacred in favor of a radically egalitarian immanence.
Looking at the horizontal experience of secular revelation, one is able to recast surrealist
automatism as something of a spiritual exercise, proceeding through the depths of Benja-
minian antireferential linguistic meaning toward a communicative ‘‘politics of equality,’’
in which the experience of the everyday is recast as a site of revolutionary praxis.
What is at stake, then, in attempting to discuss this tenuous relationship between
surrealism and theology—and to do so in apositivesense—is something of a post-secular
via negativa: in seeking to represent ‘‘whole races deprived of life and liberty for the
‘crime’ of not believing man unfit for heaven on earth’’ (p. 619), surrealism’s critical
theory unwittingly provides exactly the negation of religious tropes that is necessary if we
are to begin the process of reaffirming post-secular theology.
Stefanos Geroulanos and Thierry de Duve address two different modalities of interre-
lating the theological with the visual, the mediatic, and the aesthetic. By taking up the
motif of a ‘‘theoscopic’’ regime, Geroulanos connects the religious and theological tradi-
tion in which God’s omniscient gaze is a central if not constitutive characteristic of His
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