An intellectual out of the ordinary

The two essays that make up this little book shed light on one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century: Walter Benjamin. Born in Berlin in 1892, the son of assimilated petty-bourgeois Jewish parents, Benjamin became an intellectual out of the ordinary, a kind of prototype of the Mannheimian 'unattached' intellectual, devoid of institutional ties. This unstable situation would be decisive for the development of his fragmented, anti-systematic work par excellence. Together, the two texts, by F. Querido (UNICAMP, Brazil) and Michael Loewy (CNRS, France), reveal some of the most fascinating aspects of his singular work, whose 'surrealist thought', in Ernst Bloch's words about Sens unique, seems to escape framing in the usual currents of modern thought. It is this intellectual 'solitude' that makes Benjamin one of the most seductive figures of the twentieth century, a figure who, not coincidentally, still haunts us in the twenty-first century.