1I met Walter Benjamin in 1935 during one of the meetings of Contre-Attaque (Counter-Attack) – as that ephemeral fusion of the groups of André Breton and Georges Bataille was known. Later he was an assiduous audience member of the College of Sociology – an outwards facing offshoot of the secret, closed group, Acéphale – (which had crystallised around Bataille following his rupture with Breton). From that time on, he sometimes attended our private little conclaves.

2Disconcerted by the ambiguity of Acéphale’s a-theology, Walter Benjamin presented to us objections deriving from his analysis of the intellectual evolution of the German bourgeoisie, namely that “raising the metaphysical and political stakes of the incommunicable” (in accordance with the antinomies of industrial capitalist society) would have prepared a psychic terrain favourable to Nazism. From there, he tried to apply his analysis to our own situation. Discretely, he wanted us to resist taking that “plunge”; despite the appearance of an irreducible incompatibility, we risked flirting with nothing less than “prefascist aestheticism”. He clung to this interpretative schemastill strongly influenced by the theories of Lukács, in order to overcome his own discomfort, and he sought to enclose us within this kind of dilemma.