Walter Benjamin “allowed me to survive Heidegger.”

“For whom does the telephone bell toll?”

He was haunted by his memories of destroying a Benedictine monastery.

Media, culture, and ideology are the battleground of the soul.

He called the United States a “moronic inferno,” a phrase that stuck.

A Veblen­esque tartness, under­written by a sincere commit­ment to a better world.

Kirk teaches his drill thrall to kiss

There is a kind of artist whose career makes no sense.

The first man to say “fuck” on the airwaves of the BBC.

His horn rendered a neurotic Scott Fitzgerald beauty in sound.

Ironic bite, elegant judg­mentalism, cut-glass elegance

“Yale Scholar Wrote for Pro-Nazi Newspaper”

Without him there would be no Nashville scene.

He urged an endless, playful agonistics of intellectual engagement.

He analyzed the motives of every act, including the act of analysis.

He ended up a cocoa-butter shell of a man.

Desire seeks the Real but is trapped in the Symbolic order of language and representation.

Theorizing in a style that must be described as cheerful despair.

His was the perfect physiognomy of doomed resistance.

Reason itself becomes the monster.

He tracked the “lines of flight” that ideas can take up against power.

His work, like his life, is a test of moral sensibility.

The only real liberty is the liberty to determine one’s own ends.

Would it be a bad thing if the concrete legacy of English…