Benjamin’s usefulness for the writing of “critiques” in the contemporary academy has muted, even eclipsed, the theo-political intensity of this revolutionary anarchism. He has become a kind of Che Guevara for a portion of the intelligentsia that feels it must talk the talk but cannot begin to imagine how to walk the walk. Some are embarrassed by his ardency, by his conviction that Art and Politics and History are One, and that getting them right is about saving the world by ending the one we know. Some grumble that his work is too cryptic. But the truth is that his writing is not hard to understand; it is hard to look at directly. His aphoristic fragments singe like solar flares: “The only way of knowing a person is to love that person without hope.” Who can survive that test? Who today would dare to read Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal or Blanqui’s prison writings on astronomy as serious reports on the state of damnation of the modern world? Who is prepared to say that social media, AI, and robotic automation are not just the products of neoliberalism, “the society of control,” and lack of oversight—but visions of Hell? I’m not saying that Benjamin doesn’t see any redemptive opportunities in culture and technology or that our own speculations on such are not worthwhile—he does and they are. But it is undeniable that the intellectual culture of the present has come to relish that part of Benjamin’s work without committing to, or taking seriously, his anarchist and messianic call for a revolutionary politics. To continue in Benjamin’s terms, if the intellectual classes can stroll up to the precipice, look over, and decide it’s not yet time to leap, then they will not be the ones to bring the light of redemption to the people.