This paper explores Walter Benjamin’s relationship with French Surrealism from sources rarely studied or practically unknown until now. First, I will set out the direct link between the theses on “profane illumination” and the “organization of pessimism” in Der Sürrealismus. Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz, and various texts by Pierre Naville, one of the most active figures in the Surrealist movement between 1925 and 1929. Second, I will consider Benjamin’s commentaries in Pariser Passagen and convolute “S” of the Passagen-Werk (...) about Surrealist writings and Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, flagging up the implications of this confrontation for Benjamin’s ideas of secularization of mysticism and messianism. Lastly, I will seek to refine the meaning of Benjamin’s “anthropological materialism” and its relevance to those sections of the Passagenarbeit that are dedicated to the evolution of social movements since the French Revolution. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the emergent neo-Jamesian perspective concerning the phenomenology of art and aesthetic experience. Starting from the distinction between nucleus and fringe in the stream of thought described by William James, it can be argued that our appreciation of a work of art is guided by a vague and blurred perception of a much more powerful content, of which we are not fully aware. Accordingly, a work of art is seen as a kind of metaphor of our mental (...) life, objectified to be able to reach out to a much larger audience. However, it is a “realistic” theory rooted in evolutionary psychology, which claims that our mind developed within a framework shaped by environmental pressures. The aesthetics illustrated by several novelists develops a paradigm for this theory. The search for the neuronal correlates of stream of consciousness allows to make a comparison with the recent findings of neuroaesthetics and to reject its claim that it is unnecessary to take phenomenology and psychology into account. (shrink)

An attempt to bring Husserl’s phenomenology and psychopathology closer, based on the text of § 49 of the Ideen. What is an experience of annihilation of the world? How is a world undone? We will focus on the examples of the end of the world described in the stories of Gérard de Nerval and in the patients of Wolfgang Blankenburg.