Um dos Pais da Impostura Intelectual Moderna: Walter Benjamin

Curioso, uma Revista boa como a City Journal publicando um retrato relativamente simpático do marxista Walter Benjamin. Benjamin é adorado pelos intelectuais de porta de cadeia da USP pois é um dos pais da tradição moderna de que para fazer sucesso acadêmico o sujeito tem que escrever mal e ter idéias confusas e inacabadas. Tolos pensam que se trata de um esquerdista diferente porque citava Baudelaire e traduzia Proust. Mas não se enganem, Benjamin é um comunista e como todo comunista: For someone so often portrayed as profoundly unworldly, Benjamin could give the impression of real Machiavellian scheming—on occasion, displaying all the two-faced, tortuous politesse of an eighteenth-century courtier. Throughout his life, he maintained a habit of ruthless compartmentalization between various circles of friends—behavior that was scrupulous, verging on paranoid. He might say, as Pessoa has one of his characters confess: “I’m highly sociable, in a highly negative way.” Friends and editors were often angry when they found out the lengths that Benjamin went to in order to keep them in the dark. (On one occasion, he accepted a large advance with no intention of doing the agreed-upon work.) Not that he didn’t have his reasons. Best friend Scholem didn’t like or trust new buddy Bertolt Brecht. Brecht loathed the Surrealists. Benjamin’s wife, Dora, had a whole range of people to dislike and distrust.