Walter Benjamin is filed with the Frankfurt School and was never comfortably one of them. The Institute paid him a stipend and edited him firmly, Adorno admired him and kept telling him he was insufficiently dialectical, and his actual method — theological, fragmentary, built from quotation — belongs to nobody's program.

What he does, and almost nobody else does, is write criticism that is philosophy. Not philosophy about art: the essay on a photograph or an arcade or a translator arrives somewhere an argument would not have reached.

The artwork essay

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936) is the most-read thing he wrote and the most misread.

The claim: a work of art used to have an aura — a presence tied to being this object, here, with a history, unrepeatable. Photography and film destroy it. A reproduction has no here and no unique history, and once everything is reproducible the aura goes.

The misreading is that he mourns this. He does not. Aura, on his account, has its roots in ritual and carries authority with it, and losing it strips art of a mystique that served power. Reproducibility makes art political — available, arguable, no longer an object of veneration. He is more interested in what that opens than in what it costs.

Which is where the disagreement with Adorno sits. Adorno thought this far too optimistic about mass media, and the exchange between them is the most productive argument either had.

The Angel of History

Theses on the Concept of History was written in early 1940, months before he died, and contains the image everything else of his is now read through.

Klee's painting Angelus Novus shows an angel apparently turning away from something. Benjamin sees an angel facing backward, blown into the future by a storm out of paradise, watching what we call progress as it happens: one single catastrophe, piling wreckage upon wreckage at his feet.

The theses attack the idea of history as improvement — the version held by Social Democrats and Stalinists alike in 1940 — on the ground that it makes the defeated into necessary costs. His alternative is history as something to be redeemed rather than completed: the past makes a claim on the present, and every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism.

He killed himself at the Spanish border in September 1940, trying to escape occupied France with a transit visa that had just been refused.

The Arcades

Das Passagen-Werk occupied him for thirteen years and was never finished. It survives as thousands of quotations and fragments about nineteenth-century Paris — its shopping arcades, its crowds, its collectors and gamblers — sorted into files.

The method is the thesis. Rather than explaining the period, he assembles it from its debris, on the conviction that the truth of an era is in its discarded detail rather than in what it said about itself. Whether the unfinished book is a masterpiece or a gigantic notebook is still argued, and the argument may be undecidable.

Start with the essays instead. Unpacking My Library, The Storyteller, The Task of the Translator, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire — each is short, each is doing philosophy without announcing that it is, and they are the best case for the claim that criticism can think.