The Brooklyn Rail

Walter Benjamin: Recent Writings

The profession of almost every man, even that of the artist, begins with hypocrisy, ” Nietzsche writes, “with an imitation from without, with a copying of what is most effective.” When I first started graduate school in philosophy, in 1990, I arrived with a headful of Nietzsche and Russell and Quine and Davidson, only to find, to my embarrassment and confusion, that all of the cool kids were reading this fellow I’d never even heard of, Walter Benjamin. Naturally, I copied them.