was Walter Benjamin a sigma male?

Hannah Arendt's beef with Theodor Adorno, and why it matters

1.
In this paid post, I’ll take a detour from my usual discussion of memes and talk instead on the idea of history. At the bookstore the other day, I picked up Hannah Arendt’s Men in Dark Times — a 1968 collection of essays profiling various figures associated with the “dark times” of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. It’s an odd book, in some ways a work of literary criticism and in other ways a memoir-in-disguise. Maybe the best essay in the book is one on Arendt’s close friend Walter Benjamin.

I’ve talked about Benjamin on this newsletter before, in my posts algorithmic gaze and algorithmic gaze, continued. The first one centered on Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and the second more or less on his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

Most people know Benjamin through that first essay. It shows up in the bibliography of essentially anybody who thinks seriously about film, television, or the internet. The essay is the origin point for a kind of common vocabulary — aura, cult value, exhibition value — and has become the base camp where everybody who wants to climb the mountain of “understanding mass media” starts and diverges from.

But as Arendt points out, Benjamin is a Van Gogh-type figure: during his own lifetime, people didn’t get him. She catalogues all the ways he didn’t fit into the various currents on offer for a German Jewish intellectual of his time. He couldn’t find a place in the university system, he was too “undialectical” for the Marxists to like him, too progressive for the Zionists, very unlucky in life overall, and very inadept at figuring out how to find work, patronage, and support. But he was a genius too. Arendt’s Benjamin was essentially a sigma male.

Her essay from 1968 was the introduction of Illuminations, the most important English-language translation of Benjamin’s work. To extend my metaphor from a paragraph ago, her essay is the base camp everyone sets out from when they try to climb the mountain of “understanding Benjamin,” which in turn leads to that larger mountain of understanding mass media. Even if you haven’t read Arendt’s essay, if you’ve read anything about Benjamin — whether the translations done from handwritten German manuscripts Arendt carried out of Nazi-occupied France in her suitcase, or the Wikipedia article drawing on scholars who draw from her — you’re reading something Arendt sculpted.

Consequently, the most striking thing about the essay is Arendt’s near-total omission of herself personally. Benjamin and Arendt met and became close friends as refugees in France in the 1930s. They both planned to flee to the United States as the Nazis rolled in. Arendt made it across the Atlantic and Benjamin didn’t. He took his own life in 1940 at the Spanish border, rather than be turned over to the Gestapo. Before his death, Benjamin entrusted her with some of his papers, including a then-untitled and now-famous handwritten manuscript which Arendt carried with her as she fled Europe and later titled “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In her essay, there are descriptions of his quirks which only a friend would know—his little notebooks where he stashed funny quotations, the way he felt about his parents, and reflections on the German Jewish experience they shared. Although she never uses “I” in the piece, she is everywhere.

My reason for being so interested in this topic is it’s one of the clearest examples of how the way we tell and preserve history ends up influencing the ways we understand big events in the present. Arendt’s sculpting of Benjamin is also a sculpting of the memory of the Second World War, of 1930s radicalism, and of our stance on media in general. One thing I’ve always wondered is why it seems so difficult for people to see social media as ideological —not just as a vehicle for politics or misinformation, but as the fundamental substance and structure of politics itself. You have to wonder why there’s such a conservative tilt to our discourse about media — whether Neil Postman, Jonathan Haidt, or whoever it might be.

Arendt’s Benjamin, which has largely become our Benjamin, only won out because she emerged victorious from a decades-long beef with Theodor Adorno, who believed he was meant to be Benjamin’s literary executor. We are, for the purposes of this newsletter post, tentatively team Arendt.

But you have to wonder — do we have a less radical and useful Walter Benjamin in 2025 because of Hannah Arendt’s intervention? And, does this trickle down into a constrained political imaginary of what media can be and do?