Walter Benjamin: "His own life killed him."

Long and utterly fascinating reading.

Fallen Angel: The tragic life and enduring influence of critic Walter Benjamin, by Ian Penman (City Journal)

... Benjamin lived and worked just on the cusp of the current epoch of inescapable popular culture and omnipresent media. “Criticism,” he observed, “is a matter of correct distancing. It was at home in a world where perspectives and prospects counted and where it was still possible to adopt a standpoint. Now things press too urgently on human society.” This could have been written yesterday; it was published in 1928. The deeply cultured Benjamin found himself observing the slow breakdown of the very same high culture on which he depended for his daily bread. Yet he was also a fan of Hollywood films, detective fiction, and other dreamy, mainstream forms. It was one of destiny’s less congenial jokes that she took Benjamin and left us his friend Theodor Adorno, a man uniquely ill-disposed to figuring out anything of value in popular culture.

As an unashamed intellectual, Benjamin spent large portions of his life reading, writing, editing, and researching. But he was also a devoted traveler (he believed in foreign jaunts as a cure-all for most writerly ills); something of a ladies’ man; a loyal aficionado of plush casinos; and an enthusiastic dabbler in drugs. He was, in short, a logjam of contradictions: part Jewish mystic, part Marxist firebrand; skeptical priest, polite libertine. A line that Jean Cocteau devised for Orson Welles could equally apply to Benjamin: “an active loafer, a wise madman, a solitude surrounded by humanity.”