Picturing Walter Benjamin

[t]he Benjamin one is left with is the one who tried in his later years to assimilate his earlier esoteric mode of thought to a theoretical framework that was both materialist and exoteric in nature - the Benjamin of "Some Motifs in Baudelaire" and related studies such as the "Theses on the Philosophy of (38)History". This is the Benjamin who refrained from comporting himself one-sidedly as either a Marxist or metaphysical thinker per se, whose thought instead can be located at the forbidden crossroads of these two theoretical poles. This is the Benjamin who conceived of himself as a redeemer of historical Jetztzeiten or now-times, those uncommon images of redeemed life whose traces occasionally grace the continuum of history. (39)

Wolin, Richard. "Benjamin's Materialist Theory of Experience", in Theory and Society, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jan., 1982), pp. 17-42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/657284 accessed, Sep 29th, 2009.